why do ppl choose unhappiness?

We humans at present have pay per unit of work from a thousandth of world average to a million times world average. From US$30,000,000,000 to US$30 for a year's work. Super-extreme pay injustice, aka theft. The society built on injustice cannot stand. We wish society to stand, to survive.
Something will have to be done.
One method of reducing the pay injustice is by making every human the equal heirs of large deceased estates. This is just, for the private heirs do nothing to earn that money, and everyone does everything to earn that money. This is easy to administer. It is low-impact, gently respreading unjust overfortune back to the earners and true owners over a period of two or three generations. It requires very little change to society. It allows limitless overfortune in a person's lifetime while utterly preventing the endless concentration of unjust overfortune and political power over time. It is approximate justice, but it is sufficient to prevent 99% of the troubles suffered by humans.
In the past and at the present, people are approving and supportive of limitless wealth. But the social pool of wealth is finite. It may grow or shrink, as people do more or less work, but it is always finite. The social pool of wealth is formed by work, and work is finite. The number of people who work is not fixed but it is always finite, the hours they work are finite, so the pool of wealth is finite. So if some take out of the social pool of wealth more than they put in, others take out less than they put in. If some get money without work, others have to get work without money. That is, theft, slavery, less than a fair share of political power, causing war, crime, riots and revolutions. Limitless overfortune and overpower means limitless underfortune and underpower. Money is a joker good, good for almost all good things. So underpay, underpower is very bad in itself, and also it causes violence, as everyone tries to get more. Underpay is caused by overpay. People are supportive of limitless wealth, because they do not yet see that it means limitless poverty, and limitless poverty or underpay causes limitless violence [war and crime] and limitless escalation of violence, as both sides try to prevail. Hence pay injustice causes universal misery. Violence reaches everyone, from most overpaid to most underpaid. The pressure caused by the extreme overpay and underpay in Rumania caused the assassination of Ceausescu, although he had the secret police of an entire country to protect him. The pressure was greater than the extreme protection. And so it is with every situation of overpay and underpay everywhere, in every time. Like honey in a pot, the higher that honey is pulled above the level, the further the level drops. We have pulled the honey up to a million times the original horizontal level of equal pay for equal work, and thus 99% of people are underpaid per unit of work, 90% of people are paid between a tenth and a thousandth of what they contribute to the honey pool by their work. At present, 1% of people get 90% of world income. US$70,000,000,000,000 a year. Which is US$70,000 average of earnings stolen from every family in the world. Between 99.9% of US$75,000 per year and 0% of US$75,000 per year stolen from 99% of world workers. Every family working average hard would be getting all they earn, which is US$75,000 a year, if there was no overpay. And every family would have a fair share of economic and political power, that is, they would have democracy and freedom from tyranny, from the overpower of the overpaid. Violence would be minimal. People think that the richer the richest person is, the richer we all are. Whereas the truth is that the richer the richest person is, the poorer we all are. Even the richest person is also far poorer. Not in money, but in safety and happiness, for the attacks on the rich person and rich countries are proportional to the underpay surrounding the rich person. Every plutocracy, every empire in history has been brought to dust by the underpaid surrounding them. Every concentration of overpay has had to spend itself to protect itself. The attacks on overpay are ceaseless, so the costs of defending overpay are ceaseless, whereas the overfortune, however great, is finite, and so is in time exhausted. So overpay does not pay in the long run. It does not pay in the short run, either, since the overpaid must spend all their time defending themselves. Also overpay can add virtually nothing to pleasure, since fairpay satisfies all but the very smallest of desires. The overpaid can have bigger houses, flasher cars, more travel, but they cannot consume much more than the fairpaid. They cannot eat more food, drink more wine, sit in more seats, have more saunas and spas, see more sights, have more sex than the fairpaid can. So overpay and underpay only reduces the net satisfaction of humanity in proportion to the underpay. Plus add the violence, which is proportional to the ratio between overpaid and underpaid, and which consumes overpaid and underpaid equally. Although 1% are overpaid, the 1% who are overpaid are constantly changing. The sea of overpay and underpay is constantly on the move, with crests plunging to troughs and troughs climbing to crests. History pays little attention to the ones who fall, for what can be said about the activities of the dead, or about those thrust from the stage? So history gives us the impression that the overpaid, the powerful often survive. But the numbers of the fallen great are far greater than the numbers of those who remain. And those who remain on the stage of history spend their lives in extreme struggle. The costs of defense force the overpaid to make further raids on the underpaid, which aggravates the opposition to them. The powerful are forced to attack and kill their associates who might take their place, and so again they increase the opposition to them. The more the overpaid empower their defenders, the more they empower their defenders to attack them. So overpay causes a vicious accelerating circle leading towards their fall.
So pay injustice hurts everyone. So pay justice will help everyone. So, if humans can attack and defeat their prejudice in favour of overpay, they can be much happier.
We have super-extreme overpay. So we can be super-extremely happier. We can move from an extremely rough sea for everyone to a smooth sea for everyone. We do not need to make a one-by-one attack on all the ways that overpay and underpay are caused. We can allow all those ways to remain in our social systems. All we need to do is to stop wealth and power concentration from going on endlessly, generation after generation, making the sea of human society ever-rougher, by redistributing the consequences of all the ways that overpay occurs. The private heirs can have the first US$1 million of deceased estates, as a compassionate gift from everyone, and the rest can be returned to the earners of it. It is not necessary to distinguish the overpaid from the underpaid in the just redistribution, because the overpaid are going to be trimmed at death anyway, and because 99% are underpaid, and because it saves the enormous bureaucratic labour and waste of money of assessing everyone's fortunes to see whether they fall among the 99% or not. It is far cheaper to give an equal share of the large deceased estates to the 1% overpaid as well, than to assess everyone's fortunes. Over two or three generations, it will all even out. The overpaid will be freed from attack, from the danger, immense labour and intense psychological pressure of selfdefense, freed from isolation from the human community, from distrust of everyone, from a life living over an abyss. The overpaid will have very very slightly diminished pleasure [no solid gold taps], the underpaid will have very very greatly increased pleasure. Everyone's pleasure will increase enormously. Ten times as many people will be able to get a university education, technological progress will go ahead ten times faster. Army, police, war, crime, legal, lawmaking, government, hospital, rebuilding and corruption costs will diminish dramatically.
So far history has been a scene of everyone with absolute faith that limitless wealth, taking as much as one can with no regard for how much belongs to one by right of having created it by one's own work, is good. This has resulted in ever more desperate misery for everyone. It is not hard to see the error in this belief. Therefore everyone will free themselves from it. History has no examples of injustice being good for anyone. History has no examples of justice being bad for anyone. Every society has prospered with pay justice and crumbled with pay injustice. Every overpay has been attacked and demolished by the underpay around it. No overpaid person has been able to wrest any more pleasure from overpay than from fairpay. Reading of history and biography will give example after example of the impotence, the tragedy and suffering of overpay. History gives no example of the superjoy of superoverpay. Overpay gives the sour empty pseudo-joy of: I am considerably richer than you, I'm the king of the castle and you're the dirty rascal.
At the moment, thinking of justice gives people a sinking feeling. They see in their mind's eye that superb needle of superwealth falling. They don't see the level in the honeypot rising, they don't see the meter needle on violence falling out of the red danger zone and back into the black and into the small figures. Taking enlivens and excites the spirit. Giving back depresses the spirit. It seems that we remember grabbing the toy and having to give it back, we do not remember having the toy grabbed from us and getting it back, we do not remember the cessation of hostility and the restoration of friendship by sharing. All the violence and suffering in the world has not made the human spirit hesitate in its devotion to the mania of building a taller heap of wealth. The growth, for thousands of years, of violence, of war and weaponry, with all its torture and amputations and deaths, has not damaged the faith in growing the pillar of wealth. The jump of weaponry power in the last fifty years from being able to destroy a city to being able to freeze a planet, from being able to kill 100,000 to being able to kill 6,000,000,000, has not planted a seed of hesitation in the heart of humanity. It is a mania that goes beyond selfishness. It is a mania with no regard for selfinterest, for personal safety and happiness. And the brain seems to be under an interdiction against thinking about it, an interdiction which it unfortunately obeys without question or thought.
Because we have the greatest pay injustice in history, we have the greatest opportunity for increase of happiness in history.
People have a great faith that things cannot be greatly improved, that large improvement is unrealistic. We have had thousands of years of experience of things not getting dramatically better. We have had thousands of years of experience of new ideas not making things better. But this forgets that a small action and error can have large consequences. A little carelessness with the steering wheel and the family can die. Everyone wanting to be just a little richer than the next person means that the heap of humans gets ever taller. If every drop in the ocean wanted to be just a little higher than the next drop, the ocean would climb and climb into the sky. If some people are just a little more ambitious and aggressive than others in getting richer, with no social limitation of wealth to what has been earned by the individual, wealth and power concentration, overpay and underpay, tyranny, slavery and violence, will go on increasing forever. And while the error has small effects in a day or a year, this error has been persisted in for thousands of years. One may say that we have been saving happiness for thousands of years. We have been building up unhappiness for thousands of years. One drop does not hurt the house, but one drop per second for 20 years rots the house. So there is no reason to think that large improvement is unrealistic. In fact, what is unrealistic is that we cannot make large improvement in our situation after thousands of years of accumulating the effects of our drop of error. Since we are hitting ourselves on the head so hard with the hammer of limitless unjust fortune, we can be very much happier. We have to destroy the habit of thinking our present super-miserable situation is happiness.
People fatalistically think that war is natural, human nature. But the amount of war that is natural to human nature is the amount of war we had before inequality started growing, the amount of war we had for millions of years before the thousands of years of growth of pay injustice and its consequent violence.
Universal inheritance of large deceased estates is in one sense a radical change. But if we can allow ourselves to consider it, and come to see the reasons for having it, it is no more difficult to get than to get insurance set up in society, and then that happiness which we have saved up for thousands of years will shower down on us over the next two or three generations, and its very good effects will remain with us forevermore, like the good effects of insurance. At present, a person with a billion dollars can hire a million soldiers for a thousand days at $1 a day. We have warmongering by the overpaid and cannonfoddering of the underpaid. 50 million violence deaths each year. That is 1% of humanity murdered by violence each year. With equal pay for equal work, with no one getting out more than they put in, and no one getting out less than they put in, one person will be hard put to hire one soldier. If the social pool of wealth was a swimming pool one metre deep, our water is 90% up in a narrow needle going up a million metres, a thousand kilometres, and 90% of the swimming pool is between a tenth and a thousandth of a metre deep. With universal seasick violence, proportional to the distance from the lowest to the highest point, to the distance from the top of the highest crest to the bottom of the lowest trough. With our swimming pool so terribly drained and so dangerously overhigh, and all of it in such violent commotion, we can be very greatly happier in our swimming. And all we need to do is to tax the dead.
If everyone who encountered this idea used the facilities available to them [talking, photocopying, letters, internet, newspapers, books, tv, film, etc] to allow others to consider it, this idea would reach everyone in the world in a month. If everyone who encountered this idea only passed it on to just two people, everyone in the world would hear of it in just 31 times the time it takes to tell two people.
The difficulty is getting it through people's mental barriers. These mental barriers are invisible. The psychology of these mental barriers is largely unknown.
Is this idea sound? It is not hard to see that you can make a community in which everyone works, more or less equally, and producing plenty for all, extremely miserable and unsafe just by extremely unjust distribution. We are producing US$75,000 worth of goods per family per year. We are producing US$75 trillion worth of goods per year, and we have about one billion families. And we are giving US$70 trillion a year to 1%. It is not hard to see that we must have extreme injustice, extreme overpay for work when we have people increasing their fortune by up to US$100 million for one day's work. That is, when we give a person a license to take out US$100 million worth of goods and of political power from the social pool of wealth in return for putting in to the social pool of wealth the products of one day's work. Obviously, it must be very very true that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is, that the everchanging 1% get ever more and more pay per unit of work and the everchanging 99% get ever less and less per unit of work. It is impossible to imagine that anyone would choose to live in a place where they had a 100% chance of being embroiled in extreme and escalating violence and danger, close to extinction, and closing, rather than in a place where they had a 100% chance of being surrounded by people working and eating in perpetual peace. At the moment, the world is like a boiler with the pressure needle in the red and climbing. Some people will think: Well, I'm all right now. But what is the use of that when the winds will carry the atomic smoke to every part of the globe, and destroy all food everywhere? What is the use of that when violence is as mobile as people are, gets everywhere that people get to? And it is a pity that 20% of people don't believe in reincarnation, because it enables them to think: What does it matter when I'm dead? What if the 80% of people who believe in reincarnation are right? What if the Byzantine emperor who removed reincarnation from Christianity was wrong? And anyway, it would be nice to give our descendents a future and happiness.
We humans have super-extreme pay injustice and consequent super-extreme unnecessary violence and misery, which has torn human society terribly for thousands of years, and is continuing to do so, with great acceleration, thanks to e=mc squared. Something must be done.










We humans can be much happier.
This idea is:
Free.
Easy to do, little work involved, just educating three people.
Requires no big change to society, just a few new laws that concern only large deceased estates, but helps everyone.
Requires no conflict in society to have it adopted, because it is like insurance or icecream, it benefits everyone.
Involves no organisation, no group, no leader, no ideology; it is based entirely on individual responsibility, individual private action.
All that is needed to make us much much happier is a law distributing large deceased estates equally to everyone. The private heir has done nothing to make that wealth. That wealth has been made by everyone and it belongs to everyone. This one law would stop the endless concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands, which is the cause of 99% of our troubles.
This idea means:
Every family working at world-average hardness being paid all they earn, around US$100,000.
Avoidance of nuclear winter, universal extinction, artificial super-iceage.
Disappearance of 99% of violence [war and crime].
Far greater democracy, freedom, justice, peace, scientific progress, smooth functioning of society, friendship, international harmony, trust, safety.
Far less anxiety, fear, terror, grief, pain, conflict, struggles, suffering, hardship, crisis, change of fortune, problems, waste, destruction, need for fighting for rights, tyranny and slavery.
There is no difficulty in getting the points of the idea to people. The points are simple to understand, not highly technical or such. Every adult in the world can learn this idea, just by word of mouth, in just 31 times the time it takes to pass it on to two people. And then there are all the communication media. There are 4 billion adults to reach, but there are 4 billion adults to reach them. It is easy to get the idea to people's doors.
The difficulty is getting the idea into people's heads. There are mental barriers to understanding it which have to be overcome, barriers which can only be overcome by mental effort.
We have to modify a profound natural instinct, which works well in nature, but has been disastrous in society. We have to teach this profound natural instinct that it is not always good for us in society. In nature, it has served us well for millions of years, and should continue to do so forever. In society, grabbing from other people has brought us from happiness to vast unnecessary suffering and danger in a few thousand years.
Nature has provided us with a profound instinct which I will call grabbing. In nature, we, so to say, line up on one side of nature's tables, on which nature piles all her super-abundance, and we grab stuff. This is fine, and increases the store of goods in the human realm. And this is fine in society too. Indeed, it is essential for survival.
But in society, with the congregation in cities that our technology has made possible, it often happens that one's neighbour's goods are closer than nature's goods. Nature is happy for us to grab from her; here grabbing serves a good purpose, of increasing the goods in the human domain. But grabbing from other people does not increase the store of goods in the human domain. While people are grabbing from each other, they are not grabbing from mother nature. And grabbing from each other can tie people up forever, grabbing and being grabbed from, back and forth. Further, the grabbing and regrabbing often results in damage to the goods. And further still, the grabbing and regrabbing escalates endlessly, as both sides try bigger and bigger weapons to try to prevail. Like people fighting at a department store sale, they may tear the boxer shorts or whatever that they are fighting over, and they may go on to tearing each other up. Perhaps every bit of land in the world has been grabbed and regrabbed thousands of times, with zero gain, and great loss of life, time and labour.
Grabbing from nature is good, because nature doesn't grab back. Grabbing from other people is disastrous, because they do. Every individual and family and state and empire has been plundered to death. Honey attracts bears. A pile of goods attracts grabbers.
Billions of meals over millions of years have convinced us very deeply that grabbing, hunting and gathering, is perfectly good for our happiness. But only grabbing from nature is good, while grabbing from other people is very bad for our happiness. If we can discriminate the two, if we can stop thinking that grabbing is always good, and see when it is bad for us, we can stop hurting ourselves as we have been doing for thousands of years.
So profound is the conviction in our deepest senses that grabbing is good, that we have many forms of grabbing which are legal in our social systems. We will describe some of the major examples of these. This conviction, the deepest of our convictions, has made us approve of things which have actually impoverished everyone enormously, has made us approve of things which have decimated our happiness. We forget that a free license for us to grab is also a free license to others to grab from us. 100% of people are embroiled in the endless violence and misery and sufferings of the endless grabbing and being grabbed from; and the violence is escalative, rising to a crescendo of destruction. And 99% of people [a changing 99%] have less wealth than they would have if they had never approved of these forms of grabbing from each other.
We only need to come to see this, for the pain to end. We need to understand that our minds are telling us that grabbing is always good, and we are automatically trusting that, when in fact grabbing is good only when grabbing from nature. We are trusting that voice that is telling us that grabbing is always good, whereas we need to look at the reality and check the truth of that with our sense, and understand when it is not true. It is natural that we trust that voice, because nature has made us that way, but it is not always correct, not in society.
Grabbing from each other has resulted in extreme overpay and underpay, which is in fact very bad for both overpaid and underpaid. We will explain how that is true for the 1% overpaid as well as for the 99% underpaid. Bad for everyone. Stopping doing it will be good for everyone. Extremely good for everyone. So the effort is entirely in getting people to look at the reality and see the very simple truth. So there is no need for social conflict. There is only need for looking and seeing, and helping others to look and to see. We have first to look and see for ourselves, and, if we agree that it is true, second to help just two other people to see.
There may be a difficulty in explaining the point in that the parts of the point are interdependent, so that you have to have all the parts of the point before it all fits together, and everything is explained. It may be that each part can be explained only with some help from the other parts, so you have to wait until all the parts are described and you can fit them together and see the full explanation.
We will show how overpay and underpay happens, so you can see that there is pay injustice. Then we can understand that we ought to redistribute fortunes, that fortunes are not always all earned by the legal owner. And we will show why it makes sense that pay injustice is very bad for everyone. At the moment, people are thinking that what is in fact injustice is justice, and that what is in fact justice is injustice. So they don't agree with redistribution. They think that redistribution will be unfair and that it will be bad. Although we have had increasing pay injustice and increasing violence for thousands of years, people think, understandably but incorrectly, that grabbing is always good, because it has been good in nature for millions of years. The voice inside us that says that grabbing is always good does not know about society, it only knows about nature. We have to re-educate that voice to understand that in society grabbing is good only sometimes, and to understand when grabbing is good and when it is bad. The battle we have to undertake is to bring ourselves to seeing that that strong deep voice, in which we automatically have immediate total faith, which is always correct when we are in nature, is sometimes wrong when we are in society. Millions of years of living successfully in nature has convinced us that that voice is always correct and that we don't have to listen to any other voice. But we have to change that inside ourselves, and let the voice of our own simple good sense be listened to on the issue of grabbing. We have to say to that voice: Okay, maybe you are right, but it can't hurt to check; we are not going to just automatically believe you, we are going to look at the matter for ourselves. It takes only very simple good sense to see that grabbing from each other is not increasing the store of goods in the human domain. Grabbing from nature increases the store of goods in the human domain when we move goods from nature's domain to our domain, but grabbing from each other within the human domain does not. And it does not difficult to see that everyone can spend some of their time grabbing from each other, and so be grabbing from nature that much less. And it is not difficult to see that grabbing and regrabbing from each other can tie people up forever. Waste of time. Impoverishment. And it is not difficult to see that in the process of grabbing from each other, there will be damage to goods and to people. And it is not difficult to see that two groups grabbing back and forth will escalate the violence of grabbing in the hope of prevailing.
Driven by this unexamined faith in grabbing, we humans have been impoverishing ourselves by grabbing from each other for thousands of years, and escalating pay injustice, violence and misery for thousands of years Beginning to examine this faith in grabbing, and learning when it is good and when bad, will end this escalating, now-extreme misery. In the last fifty years, we have gone from being able to destroy a city to being able to destroy the whole planet's life, gone from killing 100,000 people to being able to freeze 6,000,000,000 people, a multiplication of our power to destroy by 60,000 in just the last fifty years. And with the continuing escalation of violence, driven by the extreme and increasing injustice, we must in finite time reach the point of violence of using those bombs. little by little, more and more. You cannot keep increasing the pressure in a boiler without the boiler exploding.
It is not hard to see that pay injustice causes violence. Money is a joker good, it is good for most good things, including all necessities and almost all desires. So the theft of it cannot ever be an unimportant matter. The theft of it is the greatest injury, a joker injury. People cannot afford to ignore such an injury, to swallow such a totally devastating injury. It is impossible to imagine anyone arguing that committing the enormous injustice of permanently taking 90% of income off 90% of people and giving all that to 1% would not cause a very dramatic increase in violence. All religious, ideological and racial wars have an economic cause. In all the places where there are religious, ideological and racial differences without any economic injustice [which is also power injustice], there is no conflict.