My personal situation

My personal situation
I believe I know a way every human can be enormously happier. Naturally, I am very excited about this. Happiness is everyone's everything, right? The thing we are aiming at all the time. Naturally, I could always be wrong, but I don't see any way I could be, it looks like a cert to me, so this is exciting to me. Naturally, I am keen to share this idea. I have tried for years without success. This is very mysterious to me, and I am fascinated to discover the cause of the holdup on this very very good thing, as I think it. I believe I can prove the claim to anyone's satisfaction in a paragraph. Naturally this is very exciting to me. It is a big claim, but I think I can convince anyone in a few words. I have tried it on some people, and it doesn't work. It is not that they find something incorrect in the logic, it is something else, mysterious. Naturally I am very disappointed. But I keep trying to find the mysterious blockage. Perhaps you are thinking that there is just no way there could be a way to an enormous increase in happiness lying around that no one has seen for thousands of years. I indicate some ways in which that could nonetheless be true. For example, that evolution has given us a mindset that is disastrous in society. Maybe people are thinking that there must be some catch, that it costs money, that it involves doing something that people don't really want to do, that there is trouble involved, that there is hard work in it, that there is years of commitment needed with little real hope of success, that it involves working with other people that you don't really want to associate with. So I tell people: no, nothing of that. The only cost is learning something to your extreme advantage and doing things you want to do when you learn it. If there is anything you don't want to do, there is no pressure whatsoever to do it. Because this idea is really about your happiness, things you really want to do. If you are not convinced you want to do them when you hear the explanation, no problem. There is no group involved in this, it is entirely based on individual freedom. All it does is invite you to check out certain things, to establish whether they do bring you to the point of thinking that there is something good in it for you. And then you pursue that good on your own, or in company with people you choose, just as you like. In short, I think there is nothing in this idea that people won't like. I still can't see anything bad about it, I still think the advantages are enormous, the disadvantages teenytiny. The sum total of the disadvantages are reading something, chewing it over and spitting out or swallowing, as you decide. The advantages are enormous, world peace and US$275,000 for every family in the world who is working average hard. Okay, you straightaway think that is totally impossible. I explain how it is very possible. So this is my situation, I think I have an idea of enormous benefit to every human being, and I am up against a mysterious blockage in convincing anyone. I try and I try and I try. It is like insurance, when people understand it, they like it or they don't and then they do it if they want. There can be ideas that come along that are good, and that people find out about, and then like them. This idea is one of those. I am trying to describe my personal situation, but the easiest way to describe my personal situation is to describe the idea. Rather than talk about the idea in vague generalities, which might give the wrong idea somehow, it is easier just to begin to describe the idea.
How could it possibly come about that the average-working family was on US$275,000 a year and world peace? Here it is in a nutshell: Justice produces happiness, we have super-extreme pay injustice, so we can be super-extremely happier. Super-extreme pay injustice causes millions of troubles, sufferings, dangers etc to every single human being, so getting rid of it increases the happiness of every single human being enormously. When everyone sees this, everyone will, with perfect voluntariness, make the little changes that bring the improvement. Just like insurance, or any of the other things we have that we like. If we have pay justice, the average-sized family working average hard will be on US$275,000 a year. We have pay way above this and we have pay way below this, and the average pay happens to be US$275,000. Like a sea. If the waves are very rough, the water is way above average and way below average. If the sea calms, all the water is at average level. And I strive to explain how it is true that pay injustice, our financial seas, are in a 'perfect storm' situation and that this is sickening and dangerous to all. I strive to show that pay injustice hurts everyone enormously, and that therefore pay justice helps everyone enormously. I'm guessing that US$275,000 is way above what people imagine is the average. This is because almost everyone is below the average. In fact, 99% of people are below the average. But it only takes a few numbers going way above average to 'pull' the average up. And we have pay going up to a million times the average. Yes we do. It is like a pot of honey, or some imaginary thick liquid that won't break when you pull it, however far you pull it. Obviously if you pull it up to a million times the beginning-depth of the liquid, most of the liquid level will fall below the average. Pulling it up a million times the original depth will practically empty the pot. That is the financial situation we have, and people are not aware how extreme it is. And so they are not aware of how far most of us have fallen below the average. People have no idea how high the depth of the liquid will be if we let all the honey fall back in the pot. The pot has been nearly empty for so long, we have no idea of how full it would be without super-overpay. Very few people are super-overpaid, but those few take most of the honey. Well, now you are naturally thinking: Well, they are not about to give it back. Well, I think I can prove, very very convincingly, that overpay must always make a person very very unhappy. Money is good, it buys just about everything, but overpay, for certain reasons, is very very bad. You say, Well, you'll have a hard job convincing anyone of that. In fact, you'll have a totally impossible job of convincing anyone of that. This is the crux of the matter. If overpay is bad, not good, as we imagine, and since it is true that underpay is bad, as we all know, then it follows that getting rid of overpay and underpay will help everyone. And of course we can easily do that by letting the honey fall back in the pot, by destroying the overpay with the underpay and vice versa. Money is good, and this has led us to think that more money is always better. In this we are very wrong. And so I think that if we can come to see this, we can avoid a giant heap of problems, we can be enormously happier. Thinking that more money is always better causes super-extreme overpay and underpay, which causes most of our problems. Coming to see why overpay is bad not good will therefore solve millions of problems.
How could more money be bad, when it is true that money is good? The money a person earns by work is limited, not unlimited. A person can only do so much work. A person can add to the pool of wealth only so much. When a person takes out more than they put in, others have to get out less than they put in. That is, theft has occurred. Some of these thefts are legal thefts. I show that there are many wideopen legal thefts, as well as the successful illegal thefts. There are many legal thefts because everyone thinks that more money is always better. Theft makes people angry. They try to get it back. The person, knowingly or unknowingly with more than he or she has added to the pool of wealth, tries to hold on to it. A tug of war begins, and gets hotter and hotter and angrier and angrier. And people throw bigger and bigger 'stones' at each other, with more and more injuries and destruction, and more and more labour of fighting. For everyone. Bad, not good. Any advantage in the overpay gets swallowed up in the fighting, which is necessarily endless and ever-escalating. People think that there are religious, ideological and racial wars. But all these wars are really economic wars, wars of pay injustice, wars of overpay and underpay, of overpower and underpower. Why do I think that? Because wherever there are religious, racial or ideological differences without overpay and underpay, without theft, without pay injustice, there are no wars. There are places where there is low inequality with religious, racial and ideological variety, and they are more peaceful. The violence [war and crime] is always proportional to overpay and underpay. Ideologies are in essence philosophies of distributing money, wealth, the products of work, the good things. Sometimes the economic disparities are along racial or religious lines, and so it looks like a religous or racial war. One race or religion has got a better grip on the money and power. As the protestants in Northern Ireland, the whites in South Africa, one or other Muslim sect in the Middle East. Pay injustice is the cause of war, or 99% of it. And this violence gets to everyone. It is not avoidable. Violence gets wherever people get. War and crime are localised, and so appear to be avoidable. There is some time delay in its getting around, but it gets everywhere in time. One or other part of the rough sea may be calm for a time, but crests and troughs are always rising and falling. Violence is getting around. The overpaid who fall often don't get into the history books. They pass from history as they pass from power and wealth. So we underestimate the number of overpaid who fall. We imagine the overpaid sitting up there, happy. We do not think of them sitting on financial crests which streak up and plummet down. There has not been one heap of wealth, whether individual or national, that has not fallen, and that has not spent all its energies all the time trying to preserve itself. It stands to reason: overpay implies underpay, and the underpaid, those stolen from, get busy. They chip away at the overpay in every way there is. If an empire plunders and gets rich, it is like honey to bees, drawing in everyone around. The overpay, however great, is finite, but naturally the attacks on it are endless, and in limitless variety, so the costs, in time, toil, lives and money, of defending it are endless, so it must fall in time. And it can for a limited time be preserved only with enormous constant labour, trouble and danger. There is no rest for the wicked, because the wicked have stolen, and they are plagued by those they have robbed. And there is no rest for those stolen from, for they must labour to get their earnings back. No heap of wealth has lasted. That is not a good record for anyone contemplating pursuing overpay, theft, taking out more than they have put in. No heap of wealth can last, because finite wealth cannot fight off infinite attack forever. The energy and power of the underpaid is as inexhaustible as life. This is what conquerors overlook. The underpaid have lost many a battle, they have never lost a war. The conqueror looks to his superior weaponry and thinks he is safe. He conquers, but then is conquered. What did the whites get in South Africa but a century of trouble capped with failure? They had to expend enormous amounts of energy spying, torturing, terrorising, brutalising, and it is impossible that they could succeed. And so it is everywhere, and so it must be, in communist Russia, in Europe under the 'Holy Roman empire', in the USA. The conqueror may feel: Well, I will get away with it for a time, anyway. But he will get away with it for a time, only with enormous labour to preserve it. Cardinal Wolsey worked his way up from working man's son to be alter rex, the other king, but he had to spend his life pulling at the legs of those above him and kicking in the heads of those below him, and end up getting kicked in the head. The Roman emperors who spent their lives in the field, fighting the endless hordes of underpaid. The Roman emperors who fought and fell at home, fighting the others who sought the power and wealth. How many lives are wasted toiling to preserve the American overpay? The whole military-industrial complex, the CIA, etc, etc, toiling, toiling. When overpay disappears, underpay disappears, and there is no attraction to any spot more than another. Then the motivation of underpay to steal back its earnings is minimal, the motivation of the attraction of overpay is minimal, because the overpay and underpay are minimal. Peace for all instead of labour for all. If everyone tries to get everything, everyone must be fighting everyone else forever. Unnecessarily. There is plenty for all without any labour of stealing and holding on. None enjoy unless all enjoy. If all enjoy, fighting is at a minimum. If there are 100 children with 1000 sweets, they each can try to get all, and so fight and fight everyone forever, or they can have 10 sweets each, and have no fight at all, but playing together. Liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness]. Money is power, so inequality, pay injustice, is tyranny and slavery, is unliberty, is undemocracy, is none enjoying. The tyrant slaves too. Stalin toiling toiling all his life, saving his life but losing his life in toil trying to preserve. It is not just the underpaid that attack overpay, the overpaid seek greater wealth and power too. So Stalin is paranoid, trusting no one, purging his associates. He must purge them, or succumb to them, but purging them only intensifies the opposition to him. He must make his associates strong to defend him, and he must make them weak to save himself. An impossible situation, a double bind, a hopeless situation, extremely stressful, and doomed. And so it must be in every corporate boardroom, in every heap of overpay everywhere always. So that is one reason that overpay is bad not good. I think it is convincing, don't you? The only thing that keeps people thinking that overpay is good is the fascination of the overpay, the fact that the fascination blinds to the necessary reality of it. The carrot of wealth leads people over the cliff. I think that many people grasp this more or less. And so they avoid wealth. But this only makes it easier for others still fascinated, still foolish, to attain wealth and disturb the peace, ruffle the seas of human life. It is as dangerous to let others have overpay as to pursue it oneself.
The above is plenty sufficient reason that overpay is very very bad not good, but there is another reason why overpay is not good. The overpaid do not get value for money. They can get almost nothing for the overpay. We have needs and desires, but our needs and desires are limited. The body is limited, it can occupy only so much bed space, chair space, room space, it has only finite not infinite libido, the stomach is finite not infinite. So there is a point at which the power of money to add satisfaction falls off rapidly. Fairpay of US$275,000 a year for average-hard work by an average-sized family, and more or less for harder or less hard work, for larger or smaller families, satisfies all but the very smallest of desires. It buys doll furniture, it buys toys and hairpins. The efficiency of the added dollar to add pleasure falls off steeply once all but the tiniest desires are satisfied. The person cannot occupy more bedspace, more chairs, more rooms, eat more food, travel more, have more sex or drugs or rock and roll. Overpaid people engage in a desperate, hopeless, sad struggle to find more desires, more things to buy that add significant satisfaction. People induce vomiting so they can eat more. They pursue more expensive foods, and try to convince themselves that the added pleasure is proportional to the expense. If you realistically compare the pleasures of a $4000 plate of truffles and a good meatball, are the truffles even slightly better or are they perhaps even less good? The underpaid seek food, the overpaid seek an appetite. Hunger is the best sauce. So the upside of overpay is very severely limited, the downside is vast, the net gain is very negative. The environment of the overpaid is underpay, which is disease, ignorance and eternal enmity. Our environment is other people. Far and away the greatest pollution is violence-pollution, war and crime. The rich rob the poor and the poor rob each other. And the rich rob the rich and the poor rob the rich. Is this better than plenty and peace for all? With equality, pay justice, nontheft, there would be ten times as many scientists, ten times as fast progress. And then of the 10% of the possible scientists and other brains we have, 90% are tied up in violence, in war and crime, in the military-industrial complex, the courts, the hospitals, the government, the diplomacy, the spying, the oppressing, the rebuilding of infrastructure and bodies damaged and destroyed by war, riot, revolt, revolution. 80% of medical researchers are tied up merely looking for generics to get around patents. So scientific progress would go ahead at about 100 times the pace. 100 times the pace! Is that ridiculous? But we have 90% of scientists too poor to go to university and 90% of the rest slaving at war and crime, which is proportional to pay injustice, which is super-super-extreme. Pay for a year's work is from US$30 to US$30 billion. A pay injustice, violence and unhappiness factor of one billion. A potential increase of happiness factor of one billion. We have strangled the golden goose, strangled capitalism, commerce, spending, learning, health and jobs by having 90% of people on between a tenth and a thousandth of world average pay per hour. Maximal inequality would be one person with everything, and we are about 10% away from that, with 1% of people getting 90%, 1% getting US$250 trillion a year. [Annual world income is based on Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp238-256, compounded with annual global inflation figures since 1987, which rose over 30% in the early 1990s and have since declined to 4%.]
In short, we are 100 children trying to get 1000 sweets each, and consequently fighting ourselves into hamburger meat. Pay injustice, wealth and poverty, overpay and underpay, have been growing steadily, relentlessly for thousands of years. And weaponry has been growing steadily, relentlessly for thousands of years. We have been making a mistake. We have been thinking that more money is always better, because money is good, and so we have been trying to get as much as we can, instead of getting out of the social pool of wealth as much as we put in. We have been thieves, not regarding how much is ours but how much we can get, and fascinated into blindness to the vast misery we have been causing ourselves, with overpay as well as underpay. We keep trying to get just more, and we keep getting 1% overpay and 99% underpay, evergrowing war and weaponry, and I think we have enough smarts to look up, look around and see the reality. We have been pursuing our self-interest with a big error in our calculations, deceived by a blinding fascination. We can easily begin to see our self-interest better, and so make a vast difference in our quality of life. Justice is a virtue, the virtues are what cause happiness, we have super-extreme pay injustice, so we can be super-extremely happier. Pay injustice is theft, theft causes anger, causes violence, violence is ever-escalative, it has been escalating for thousands of years, so we can be super-extremely happier. We have had millions of years to get into the habit of grabbing. Grabbing from mother nature is fine, is excellent, is absolutely harmless, totally good. Grabbing from each other is totally ruinous, because we all grab back. Injury ricochets as tirelessly as atoms. And, unlike atoms, injury accelerates. The 'enemy' send back bigger rockets. And in the past fifty years, our weaponry has increased 60,000 fold, from power to kill 100,000 in one day [Dresden, Hiroshima] to power to kill 6 billion, to snowball the planet, to put up 60 times enough smoke to drop the world temperature 25 degrees, three times colder than an iceage. Do we underestimate, do we fail to grasp the power of the atomic bomb? C squared is 900 trillion. Are we in a global emergency? Are we on the brink of global death? Yes, we are. Are we unrealistic, do we avoid thinking of unpleasant realities, do we put our heads in the sand until we are convinced certain unpleasant realities don't exist? Yes, we do. One can easily think that we are not on he brink of global death, but only by unrealism, only by pretending. Even if all the atom bombs became inoperative tomorrow, the growing injustice would continue to drive the growth of weaponry. But no need for gloom. We can be much happier! And all we have to do is aim for US$275,000 instead of for infinity. It is perhaps hard to begin to understand that we have enormously impoverished ourselves by trying to get richer. How could that be? But it is simple. Freedom for ourselves to get limitlessly richer is freedom for others to get limitlessly richer. Freedom to lift the honey limitlessly high empties the pot. Our sea of wealth has ebbed terribly, but we can bring it back. And the allconsuming violence is proportional to the distance from highest to lowest level of honey, bringing extreme unhappiness [the real poverty] to both overpaid and underpaid. Everyone has thought that happiness was up, but happiness is up for the underpaid and down for the overpaid. Up and down to US$275,000, the level sea.
It is very simple, that you can make utterly miserable a community, in which everyone works and produces plenty for all, by giving all the wealth, the work products to one. If one steals all from 1000, that one is also miserable by having merely more than he can use and 1000 extreme enemies. Or are we too deeply embedded in the game of all against all, all grab all, to see this? Other animals don't suffer from this disability. Lions eat and then lie around and slap their tails in the dust.
The super-extreme pay injustice we have, pay from a million times to a thousandth of average, can be destroyed in two generations, simply, by making every human being equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heirs have done nothing for that wealth, everyone has done everything for that wealth, so such a law is just, and therefore maximises peace. The vast wealth stored with the overpaid would rain down gently, relieving the overpaid and the underpaid of the super-poverty of omnipresent, escalating, extreme, and soon-cidal violence.
Maybe it is the Aquarian Age, maybe it is time we had a break from blood, sweat, toil and tears. Maybe it is halftime in the footy game, time to suck on oranges, rehydrate and get our breath. Maybe we deserve a golden age. Maybe we are tired and sad and deserve something very very good to happen.
You might be asking: How could we possibly have missed something so simple for so long? Well, we are handicapped by having 99% chimpanzee brains, for a start. And we are handicapped by hunter-gatherer tunnel vision, preventing us seeing the big picture, however simple. No fault of ours. Mother nature is doing her best. And it was only 500 years ago that we untied the Ptolemaic tangle and found out what the planets were doing. [And all they were doing was going round and round.] And it was only in the 19th C we noticed evolution [if it exists]. And it was only at the beginning of the 20th C that we started systematically to learn the ways of the unconscious. There is a time for everything. There has to be a time before discoveries are made. You may say that we have had a Ptolemaic economics up to now. And we have been very busy with the millions of problems that pay injustice throws up, like repelling invaders and killing kings. Everyone fighting everyone takes up time and thought-space. And a simple thing has to be deduced from a trillion data. We are presented with life like a tree seen from above, we have to see the simple trunk through a billion leaves. Not easy.
Should I stop trying to communicate because I have not succeeded in 20 years? I cannot but think that I have something valuable to say. If anyone can convince me that I am wrong in my thinking, I would be most grateful, because I am so convinced this is right that I cannot give up trying. I would love to know that I am wrong, that I have overlooked something, so that I can give this up. Who wants to crank the handle and the car never starting? Not me. But it should start. The spark plugs are clean, the fuel is getting through, everything says go. And if it goes!
If you are excited, there are more points covered at happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com. This blogspot has the latest writing. If that isn't enough for you, there is a lot of older stuff, rougher but good, at www.globalhappiness.org [not an org].

VVIP

Very important points. Very very important points. Crucial points. Lifesaving points. None-more-important-in-the-world points. [Check it out if you don't believe me. Suspend your prejudgement. The truth becomes stranger and stranger as people drift carelessly further and further away from it. Check the logic.]

Violence [war, crime and weaponry] have been growing for thousands of years.
We now have 60 times PDC [planet death capability].
All happiness is real happiness, there is no happiness in unreality. Pursuit of happiness depends totally on pursuit of reality.
Money is a joker good, good for almost all good things.
Therefore theft of money is the greatest injury, the joker injury, the injury in almost everything.
Justice is equal pay for equal work.
We have pay from US$30,000,000,000 for a year's work to US$30 for a year's work.
Pay injustice, theft of everything, all needs, all wants, political power, status, standing, causes the greatest anger and violence.
Violence is endlessly escalative, as both sides try to prevail, and so use everbigger weaponry.
World income is around US$300 trillion [=US$300,000 billion] and there are about one billion families.
That is, US$300,000 per average-sized family working average hard.
In other words, the average family is making US$300,000 of wealth, of goods each year.
99% of people are underpaid, getting down to 10,000th of the wealth they make.
1% are overpaid, getting up to 100,000 times the wealth they make.
We have super-extreme theft, causing super-extreme violence, causing super-extreme unhappiness.
Therefore we can be super-extremely happier.
No one wants extinction.
Everyone wants maximal happiness.
Fairpay of US$300,000 a year satisfies all needs and all but the teenytiniest of desires.
So desires left unsatisfied by fairpay are all teenytiny.
So overpay cannot add much satisfaction, the added happiness of overwealth is very tiny.
Money is good, but desires get smaller and smaller as desires are satisfied.
So money reaches a point where it runs out of power to add satisfaction.
Fairpay buys very comfortable chairs, beds, rooms, very good food, drink, sex, cars, holidays, education, medicine, everything.
Overpay implies underpay. If someone takes out more than they put in by their own work, others have to take out less than they put in.
Overpay is theft, injustice. Overpay is money for no work, causing work for no money for others, causing resentment.
The overpaid are surrounded by the underpaid, who resent the theft, and try to get it back, in millions of ways.
So the danger of overpay is proportional to the size of the overpay.
Through all history, the overpaid have always in time been brought down by the underpaid.
The erosion of overpay is naturally constant, relentless.
Overpay, however large it is, is finite, whereas the erosion by the underpaid and overpaid is endless, so the overpaid always fall.
So overpay adds little satisfaction, and adds great and always fatal danger.
So overpay is net very bad, not net good, for anyone.
Underpay, theft, is obviously not good for anyone.
So removal of overpay and underpay is good for everyone.
That is, pay justice is good for everyone and bad for no one.
Pay injustice is good for no one and bad for everyone.
We have super-extreme pay injustice, so we can all be super-extremely happier.
By thinking our way from our one error to reality.
Self-earned money is always good.
Working twice as hard and getting twice as much is perfectly good.
Putting in twice as much and taking out twice as much is no theft, no injury, causes no anger.
Other-earned money, overpay, theft is very bad, because it comes with an angry person permanently attached.
For underpaid people, more money is still good, because it is their own earnings, and because they still have sizeable desires unsatisfied.
So underpaid people have no experience of money changing from being good to being bad.
Money changes from being perfectly good to being perfectly bad at the border between underpay and overpay.
At the point when all but very small desires are satisfied and money becomes overpay, theft, causing danger and violence.
The highest pay per year's work is a billion times the lowest pay per year's work.
So we can say that the pay injustice factor at the present time in history has grown to one billion.
And the violence factor and the unhappiness factor are the same, one billion.
And so the factor for potential increase of happiness is also one billion.
That is, we can be very extremely happier, because we now have very extreme injustice, violence and unhappiness.
We are in a very bad place, so we can be very much happier, if we can get out of it.
It is not extremely hard to understand and come to see that overpay and underpay are bad, are in no one's interest.
So people can be taught it.
When people know how they can all be much happier, there is no one to stop them.
When people understood insurance, they knew they liked it, and so they soon got it.
And so on for many things we have got for ourselves.
People have always known that money is good.
They have made the mistake of thinking that, since money is good, more money must be proportionately better.
Forgetting that self-earning is limited, so more money starts to be theft, causing violence, causing unhappiness.
And that desires are not infinite, but get smaller and smaller, meaning that money stops having power to add happiness.
So everyone has pursued getting limitless money, causing limitless theft, violence and thus unhappiness.
Violence is not limited.
Violence grows even if pay injustice is not growing, because both sides try to prevail, and so make ever-bigger weaponry, as we see from history.
And pay injustice is always growing, because money makes money, and no money makes no money.
And money is power, power to steal and conquer and plunder and enslave.
Power to make laws that favour the moneymaking of the overpaid in power.
So pay injustice, violence and misery always grow and grow.
So we have, with one little error, got into a very bad place after 1000s of years in which pay injustice has grown.
It seems harmless enough to strive to get as much as you can for your work.
But some have been extremely successful at getting overpaid, so 99% have been unlucky, and have got underpaid.
And 90% have been very unlucky and got very underpaid.
They are working very hard for very little, are having very little power, and are suffering very much.
Although everyone is working hard and every family working average hard is making US$300,000 of wealth every year.
So that there is super-plenty for everyone.
But everyone is very unhappy.
The overpaid are very unhappy because they have very little more satisfaction and an enormously greater danger and the enormous constant toil of trying to protect themselves.
The underpaid are unhappy because money is a joker good and buys millions of good things, and they can't buy them, although they have done the work that has made them.
And everyone is very unhappy because the violence has grown and grown to a very dangerous level for everyone.
Our weapons can fill every sky with permanent clouds, blocking out the sun, dropping the world temperature 25 degrees, which will stop every plant growing or living, and thus kill every living thing on the planet.
It is like leaving a tap leaking, and coming back to the house a year later and finding it rotting to the ground.
But we can reverse our little error.
We can start aiming to get out as much as we put in, and then no one will be overpaid and no one underpaid, and there will be no violence and no unhappiness.
Well, almost all violence and unhappiness will be gone.
The overpaid will get the same amount of satisfaction, and will be freed from the terrible, extreme danger of having large surplus amounts of money, useless to them, which buys millions of good things, and so attracts others constantly endlessly to try to grab it.
The underpaid will get far more satisfaction, by having all the money they have earned, and will be free from being enslaved and abused by the overpaid and overpowerful, and free from the endless war of trying to get their earnings, a fairshare.
Everyone will be free from the killing of all planet life.
Life can go on, and life can be far happier for everyone.
Everyone will have far greater trust of everyone, because the drive to theft will be minimal, because everyone will have plenty.
Everyone will be far closer.
Because everyone has thought that more money was always good, people have not done a very good job of stopping the ways in which people can get overpaid.
In fact, the more underpaid they were, the more they have been inclined to support the ways people can get overpaid.
And the overpaid have generally been in power in government, and have left open many ways that they can get more overpaid.
So no one has been trying to stop overpay, to stop ways of taking out more than you have put in by your own work.
When everyone sees that overpay is bad not good, for overpaid and underpaid, they will take steps to stop it.
It is easy to think that, since money is good, more money is better.
It takes a little more effort to realise that more money starts to be bad when it becomes overpay.
When overpay is possible, a few people get richer and richer and most people get poorer and poorer.
This then reaches a stage when it is obvious that there is pay injustice, and then people get angry, and then violence starts evergrowing and things just get ever-worse.
Violence gets everywhere that people can get, it gets into palace and slum.
But in a way it is good news that things have got so bad, because it means that things can be so much better.
People get used to the way things are, and then they think that things can't be much better.
But when you are in a very bad situation, things can be much better.
Things can be much better than people can imagine things can be better.
Because it has been such a long time since things were that much better, they have no memory of it.
They imagine things have always been this bad, and that things must always be this bad.
People see how badly people behave now, and they assume that people will always act this bad.
But if you remove the cause of them acting so badly, they won't act so badly.
And that cause is extreme overpay and underpay, and the constant extreme fighting caused by the extreme overpay and underpay.
If you have two children with two lunchboxes, and one child has both lunchboxes, the child with nothing will fight the other, and the other will fight back.
But as soon as both children have one lunchbox each, they will stop fighting and start becoming friends again.
And that is how it has been through all human history.
People are just going for all they can get hold of, and consequently fighting and fighting.
Everyone loves getting money for no work.
Everyone thinks that getting money for no work is good, is great.
Everyone thinks: The more I can get for less work, the better it will be for me.
Where are they wrong?
Well, money is a license to take out good things from the social pool of wealth, of good things.
But all those good things are made by work.
If not your work, other people's work.
Taking out more than you put in by your work, means others have to put in more than they get out.
Theft has occurred.
Slavery has occurred.
Slavery is getting out less than you put in.
Which makes for anger, violence.
And violence escalates endlessly, with everbigger weapons.
Getting money for no work doesn't seem like theft to people.
It doesn't seem as if anyone gets hurt.
It just seems like good luck.
But it causes all the violence, all the wars and crime and all the endless growth of war, crime and weaponry.
It means 99% of people get poorer and poorer and poorer and poorer, and more insecure.
And 1% of people get richer and richer and richer and richer, and more insecure.
And everyone is forced to fight harder and harder and harder.
And meaner and meaner and meaner.
Everyone likes getting money for no work.
Everyone is sure that it is good for them, that it increases their happiness.
Consequently, there are many ways in human societies in which one can perfectly legally get money for no work.
Inheritance, lotteries, unlimited profits, capital gains, and many other ways.
1% gain financially from these ways, and 99% lose financially from these ways, and everyone loses by the evergrowing violence caused by it.
1% end up with more money than work, 99% end up with more work than money.
But everyone loves money for no work, because they do not see the downside, and they do not see that money can add no satisfaction or happiness above fairpay.
For every money for no work, others have to do some work for no pay.
But people think that the money for no work that comes to them comes from - well, they don't think where it comes from.
If you think about it, it has to come from someone else's work.
The things you buy with money for no work, where do they come from?
Who makes them?
Somebody.
If you find a gold nugget, who do you steal from?
You are not stealing from anyone, the gold nugget is just lying there, belonging to no one, it seems.
But then you change it into money and buy things.
You have done little work, and yet you get things that people have worked to make.
You have put in less than you have taken out.
If you found enough gold, you could buy everything that everyone had ever made.
Everyone would be your slave.
Clearly that would not be right.
Clearly that would annoy people.
And quite rightly.
Why should everyone be your slave just because you find something?
It doesn't seem bad if you just find one gold nugget, or a gold mine, it then isn't noticeable that you are robbing anyone.
But you take out more than you put in, so you add something to the store of injustice and violence.
The gold belongs to Mother nature, not to you.
Mother nature made it, not you.
But Mother Nature doesn't get mad if you take from her.
But since everyone has equal right to Mother Nature's gifts, since no one has a greater right to nature's gifts than another person, you take it from everyone else.
If everyone finds the same amount of gold, it doesn't matter, justice is not disturbed.
But you are really finding everyone's gold, and appropriating it.
You are making a right to the gold just from your luck, just from the accident of it being you finding it.
Which is not a rational basis for a claim on it.
The only rational basis for taking out products of work is putting in products of work, not luck.
Have you added to the store of wealth?
No, Mother Nature has done almost all the work.
And her gifts belong to no one person more than another person.
But people say: I will let him get money for no work, because then I will be free to get money for no work.
Forgetting that they are also making themselves free to get work for no money.
In fact, giving themselves a 99% chance of getting more work than money, and giving themselves a 100% chance of getting evergrowing violence.
Evergrowing war, crime and weaponry, which is now so close to killing us all, and closing.
If people come to see the gigantic downside of money for no work, they will shun it.
If a god had said to humanity: Okay, humanity, you can have money for no work, but you will also have to have the evergrowing miseries of overpay 1% of the time, the evergrowing miseries of underpay 99% of the time, and evergrowing violence for everyone 100% of the time, culminating in extinction in the 21st century, humanity would have said no thanks.
It is fairly simple to understand that overpay will always be under endless attack from everyone, overpaid and underpaid.
This will necessitate constant vigilance, constant labour, constant care and alertness, no freedom from exertion to keep.
And history shows that this is indeed what has happened.
Overpay will always be finite, however great, and the attacks on overpay will be endless, from every direction, in every way, so it is clear that every heap of overwealth, individual, national and imperial, must fall in finite time.
And history shows that this has indeed always happened.
It is like trying to keep half a lake at a higher level than the other half.
It is just a huge effort and expense for no benefit.
The easiest way to keep water at a certain level is to surround it with water at the same level.
It saves building and maintaining a huge dam.
The Palestinians have about 20th the income per unit of work as the Israelis.
Consequently the two are firing rockets at each other, and will continue to do so till doomsday [maybe 30 years off].
Ever bigger rockets, causing ever greater misery.
Many lives tied up toiling in maintaining, and trying to tear down, a dam in the middle of a lake.
Toiling forever, and getting nowhere, at enormous, endless cost in lives, money, suffering, troubles, labour and time.
It would be far, far cheaper to give the Palestinians equal pay per unit of work.
Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are extremely poor, in safety, leisure, happiness, trust, amity, pleasure, freedom, laughter, fun, dance, song, lightheartedness, ease.
They are extremely rich in suffering, horror, brutality, danger, labour, expenses, griefs, struggles, losses, crises, terror, pain, cruelty.
Blood, sweat, toil and tears.
And so it is everywhere in the world, between every overpay and underpay.
When everyone sees that money for no work doesn't pay, costs everything, they will quickly find and adopt a way to get rid of it.
All it would take is a law making everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates.
The private heir has done nothing for that fortune.
Everyone has done everything to make the goods that that fortune represents and buys.
So such a law is just.
And pay justice destroys violence and extinction.
All the super-overpay built up over thousands of years would rain down on everyone in two generations.
All the super-crests of our super-extremely stormy sea would fill all the troughs.
Calm.
$300,000 a year income for the average-sized family working average hard.
Proportionately more or less for bigger or smaller families, and for families working harder or less hard than average.
Unimaginable peace and plenty, laughter and good cheer.
It would not be necessary to identify and find all the legal and illegal thefts and root them out one by one.
It would not be necessary even to prevent anyone building up a great overfortune in a lifetime.
All the overfortune of one lifetime's accumulation would be returned to its earners by making a law making everyone the heirs of large deceased estates.
Overfortunes would be prevented from growing endlessly over time.
With that one law, inequality would never become extreme enough to cause 100th the present violence.
The endless drift of wealth from earners to non-earners would be effectively countered by that one law.
If people wished, they could also limit fortunes to the maximum that one person can earn in a lifetime by his own work.
Not others' work, not Mother Nature's work.
Which is certainly less than US$10 million.
100 hours x 50 weeks x 50 years x US$40.
But that would be a refinement, a tiny addition to the peace.
Inequality, theft, is built right into transaction itself.
The two things exchanged cannot be equal in the work gone into them.
The work value of the two things must be x and x+y.
One must contain more work than the other.
Every transaction must be a fair-exchange-no-robbery [the x's] plus a theft [the y], a transference of some work from one to the other.
The merchant buys cheap, sells dear.
Companies strive to lower costs and raise prices.
That is, to reduce the workvalue going in to the product and maximise the workvalue in the price.
It is the easiest thing in the world for a company to charge $11 for something that has had $10 of work gone into it by all concerned.
Whenever a company comes out of the year with a 10% profit after paying the owners fairly for their work, that 10% has to belong to underpaid workers and overcharged customers.
This follows necessarily from the premise that the owners have been fairpaid for their work.
In a nonprofit organisation without volunteers, everyone gets paid, so what are profits?
Clearly profits are the difference between total costs, including fairpay for owners or bosses, and prices.
Between incomes and outgoes.
And the outgoes are payments for work.
The outgoes stand for all the work gone into the product, the work done by workers and owners or runners of the company.
10% profit may not seem too bad, but in just 100 years that theft will compound to 16,000 times the capital.
Money for no work.
Money of course makes money.
And that has to mean that the person did not make the money.
A billion dollars will 'make' $50 million a year for no work at a modest 5%.
And sometimes people can get 40%, 100%.
That is, it will rake $50 million from other people's pockets.
Money rakes money.
The $50 million will buy $50 million of other people's work products.
In situations of scarcity, of high demand and low supply, the price may be able to be 40% above costs including the fair cost of owners' work.
That will multiply the capital by 10,000 times in less than 30 years.
As it did for Bill Gates.
In new technology, we have built-in scarcity.
Everyone wants one, and supply is still gearing up.
That is the major reason that Bill Gates 'made' $50 billion out of $5 million in less than 30 years.
There is nothing in our systems to prevent price being above total costs.
Everyone loves it, though, as it seems that money has been made out of thin air.
Everyone believes in this impossibility because they want to.
Anyone who makes a profit is happy.
The little error that caused the global disaster.
But we are not suggesting getting rid of profits, or any of the other legal thefts, as this would be too invasive, disruptive and expensive.
We suggest something that corrects the accumulation of legal theft, overwealth, that is growing the violence, without being disruptive.
A moment's reflection reminds us that the profit-money comes, not out of thin air, but over the counter from people's pockets.
Companies make legal theft profits on the back of trade.
Ideally, the customers give up an amount of work equal to the amount of work in the product.
Profit seems innocent enough.
Who gets hurt?
The customer doesn't know that he has put more work into paying the price than has gone into the product.
The customer doesn't know that he has donated money to the company, on top of a fair trade of equal work for equal work.
The workers may not guess that they have donated work to the company.
Workers are more suspicious that they have donated than customers are.
Customers just think: I have the money, I want the product.
Customers pursue the best deal they can get, but they cannot determine the exact workvalue of a product.
They rarely have the opportunity to buy from a nonprofit company, a company that aims to make price equal to total costs.
A nonprofit company raises and lowers prices to break even, with everyone who contributed to the product paid.
It seems no one gets hurt by profits, until we look at the 99% of people underpaid, the 90% of people paid less than a 100th of the value their work adds, the 50% of people paid less than a 1000th of the value their work adds, and the ever-escalating war and crime this generates, to everyone's extreme cost.
We have an attitude of 'everyone free to grab all they can and the devil take the losers'.
But the devil takes everyone.
Everyone gets swallowed up in violence, which is ever-growing, which is now extreme.
The theft built in to every transaction accumulates over the trillions of transactions.
Causes the evergrowing spread of overpay and underpay, the evergrowing increase in war, crime and weaponry.
A few people will come out of all their transactions with neither more nor less than their own money.
But most will come out with more or less.
A few will come out with large net gain, many will come out with smaller net gain.
A few will come out with large net loss, many will come out with smaller net loss.
Inevitably, because no one can precisely determine workvalue of things exchanged, transacted.
And then there are all the other legal thefts.
And the successful illegal thefts.
Making pay injustice, violence and extinction.
Which no one wants.
People see profits.
But the reality is profits-theft-violence-unhappiness-extinction.
Like pulling at a lump of gold and having the mine collapse on you.
Not seeing the connection.
But what about Donald Trump, say. He's doing all right, and he's not in any great danger, is he?
He can buy whatever he wants, he can go wherever he wants when he wants, he can look at a skyscraper and say: I own this.
And he doesn't have to do very much to maintain his safety, does he?
But in what way is the skyscraper his?
He didn't build it.
He has legal ownership, a piece of paper.
He stands in a lift, like anyone else.
He sits in a chair like anyone else.
He can buy expensive things, but he cannot consume more than a fairpaid person.
He can say, this is an expensive wine, an expensive chair, an expensive suit, an expensive car, but he cannot get any more pleasure from them.
He pays 10 times as much to get 1% more satisfaction, if that.
How much pleasure do solid gold taps give, really?
We throw a glamourising stardust over our imagination of wealth, but with a little clear seeing, this stardust vanishes.
And what is the cost of this overpay to him?
His environment is underpay.
The world is our garden, we look on it, we live in it.
And what is our pleasure if our garden is full of stinking black swamps, is this what gardeners aim at?
Genocide, starvation, slavery, sex slavery, violence, crime, war, concentration camps, death camps, conflicts, hate, anger, disease, suffering, massacre, riot, revolt, revolution, assassination, kidnapping, ignorance, illiteracy, innumeracy, waste, destruction, bombs, bullets, fear, danger, bad news, crises, troubles, corruption, theft, battles, protests, secret police, torture, disappearances, terror, suicide bombers, the perfect-storm society, blindness, victimisation, power struggles, environmental poisoning, pollution, lies, fraud, trickery, driveby shootings, unrest, skyjackings, treachery, murder, suppression of technologies, of cancer cures, better cars, etc, etc.
Scientific progress, medical progress would be 100 times present progress, if 90% of people were not too poor to go to university, if 90% of the scientists we have were not tied up in the consequences of overpay-underpay, in the courts, hospitals, prisons, police, army, military-industrial complex, diplomacy, politics, universities.
In one way or another, this stinking environment will 'get on the clothes' of the overpaid.
No one thinks that having maximal pay injustice, one person having everything, would be anything but maximally bad.
So no one can really think that the present reality, with 1% getting 98% of world wealth, is anything but near-maximally bad.
Legal and illegal theft has resulted in 1% getting overpaid US$250 trillion a year.
Earning 1% and getting 98%.
The 99% getting 2% instead of 99%, getting what they get instead of US$300,000 a year per average-sized family working average hard.
90% getting less than US$3,000, 50% getting less than US$300.
A person who steals everything from 1000 people has gained merely more than he can use, and lost everything.
Lost community with the human tribe, lost trust, fellowship, friendship, closeness, protection, company, support.
Belonging to a community is one of the single most important perquisites to happiness.
The poorer everyone else gets relatively, the more isolated the rich become.
Superrich wives are effectively unemployed, and so have the same mental health issues as the poor unemployed.
Superrich children suffer psychologically from absent parents.
The unrich person spends her money on her family, the rich person spends his family on his money.
When everyone tries to get just more out of finite store of wealth, the products of work, everyone is against everyone.
The fighting is endless and useless.
The more you get, the more people are trying to grab from you.
However little you have, people are grabbing from you.
Forever.
Children fighting to get all the birthday cake and spending all their time fighting for cake forever.
And destroying most of the cake.
And surrounded by enemies, and filled with fear or hate towards all.
With no leisure, no cake, no friends, no play, no happy party.
When we sell to a friend, we strive to make the transaction as equable as possible.
We wish to avoid enmity, theft.
But when it is not a friend, we indulge in unfairness.
We imagine this stranger will go off and leave us alone.
But that offence, that act of unfriendliness, is an act of poisoning our environment.
We have injected a malice into society, which is our own atmosphere.
And that malice travels about freely, knocking its way around.
And everyone gets hit by a share of all the malice injected.
And every hit increases heat, increases injurying.
Injury ricochets as untiringly as atoms.
And unlike atoms, injury accelerates.
If you spit in someone's face, they don't spit in your face, they knock you down.
Why do we imagine that we can make enemies and not get hurt?
Why do we imagine that they people we defraud just go away and never hurt us?
Technology has brought us all much closer together.
200 years ago, a day away was 50 miles.
Today, a day away is 12,500 miles.
The world is in effect contracted to 50 miles radius.
A 250-fold compaction.
The person you injure is in effect no more than 50 miles away.
When you concentrate atoms in a gas by pressure, you increase temperature.
The atoms hit more often, faster, closer together.
The same amount of heat is compacted in smaller space.
The same amount of injury is ricocheting in 250th of the space.
A person may not be able to detect the injury from one transaction, but he can detect it when multiplied by millions of transactions.
When he can see that he is working equally hard and getting far less.
And money is power, so extreme overpay-underpay is extreme overpower-underpower.
Tyranny, fascism, communism, dictatorship, undemocracy, warmongering, slavery, wage slavery, cannonfoddering, persecution, murder, massacre, genocide, concentration camps, death camps, sex slavery, injustice, war crimes, sexual inequality.
The most democratic countries of today are very far from being perfectly democratic.
Undemocracy is proportional to pay injustice, overpay and underpay.
And all this unhappiness can be destroyed by making everyone heirs of large deceased estates.
Every human being with an account into which an equal share of all large deceased estates is paid.
No need for the huge bureaucratic cost of distinguishing the overpaid and underpaid.
For simplicity, costsaving and laboursaving, the overpaid can also receive an equal share, as they are being trimmed at death anyway.
The private heir has done nothing to make that money, everyone has done everything to make that money.
That money has been raked from everyone.
Clearly the deceased has not made that money.
The deceased has clearly not done enough work to make the goods that the money can buy.
A person with one billion would have to have done as much work as in making one thousand $1 million houses.
One $1 million house every 18 days for 50 years.
From nothing but the planet and his body.
And a person with US$18 billion would have to to make a $1 million house every day for 50 years.
Produce $1 million worth of goods every day.
And each billion brings in $50 million a year for no work at all.
Interest arises from profits.
Everyone loves interest.
It is one bit of good news in a world of overlabour and underpay.
A bit of free money, a bit of relief from the struggle, a bonus, money for no work.
It seems good when you are underpaid anyway.
But allowing interest allows the super-overpaid super-interest.
You get a little straw to suck the milkshake but a few get a huge straw.
The bigger the fortune, the bigger the straw.
The smaller the fortune, the smaller the straw.
The bigger fortune has more leisure, more facilities to get information and act on it faster.
They get the plums.
They hire people to hunt them out.
They get higher interest rates, and lower risk.
They do insider trading because they are the insiders.
The net effect is that 99% of people lose more than they gain.
99% of people would have more money if they didn't allow interest.
They would have all they earn, they wouldn't be underpaid.
And no one would be super-overpaid and super-overpowered to control, enslave, cannonfodder and rob everyone else.
There would be no one sucking on the milkshake with a huge straw.
No billionaires getting $50 million, every year, for every billion they have, for no work at all, for others' work.
But we are not saying get rid of interest, although it is legal theft.
We are saying, correct for all the legal and illegal thefts, past present and future, by returning overpay to its true earners, its true heirs, by making everyone heirs of the large deceased estates.
There are many legal thefts, and it would be impossible to root them all out, even with enormous labour and expense.
Another legal theft: every creature gets an equal share in nature's bounty on birth, except humans.
Every creature has free access to fish, fruit, leaves, grass, worms, whatever they eat.
Every creature has a place they can make a home, a burrow, a cave, a nest.
But humans have stolen this birthright from the new generation, by having ownership of all the land and everything on it and in it.
The new humans have no free food, no free place to stand or lie.
This right is taken from them by ownership.
It is difficult for people even to grasp this right, this theft, it is so unfamiliar, so far in the past.
This right is restored, without prohibiting private property, by making everyone heirs of deceased overfortunes.
And the evergrowing overpay-underpay misery is averted too.
There are capital gains.
A person buys land, it goes up in value [because others build a city around it, increase the infrastructure around it] making the land more valuable.
Again, everyone loves the idea, money for nothing, a relief from having to earn and over-earn every dollar.
But the rewards are in proportion to the fortune.
The most overpaid get most of it.
They have more spare cash, more time to investigate, to find the plums, the high returns with low risk.
Leaving the low returns and higher risk to the small players.
And leaving nothing to the 99% who have no land or shares.
The whole community adds the value to the land and shares, by building the infrastructure [bridges, hospitals, schools, shops, houses, roads etc].
The landowners and stockholders get all the added value.
And in proportion to the size of their holdings.
The most overpaid get most, the less overpaid get less, the underpaid get least or nothing, and yet everyone puts in roughly equal work.
Unfairness increases, violence increases, war increases, crime increases, weaponry increases, extinction [maximal violence] gets closer.
People are paid for natural gifts, and, again, everyone loves this, thinking that this is a way to make money.
But natural gifts are nature's work, not the person's work.
They are gifts, not work.
And someone has to pay for pay without work by work without pay.
This payment for gifts has to be paid for.
It is paid for by 99% of us, in work without pay, in wage slavery and full slavery.
It is paid for by 100% of us, in evergrowing violence and extinction.
We think it would be nice, to have a gift, brains, beauty, brawn, music, and get paid a lot for it.
We also get paid in violence and extinction, in nasties, in the overpower and underpower that makes sadism, torture, arrogant government, brutality, war, crime, danger.
We think: I will just take the money and try to avoid the violence.
We think: The money will give me enough power to avoid the violence.
But the anger, the violence can get everywhere that humans can get.
And it is most attracted, naturally, to the biggest heaps of wealth.
The biggest heaps are most attacked, soonest eroded.
Plenty of people have maintained big heaps of overpay for a lifetime, but plenty more have not.
But you rarely hear about those, they disappear from history as their fortune disappears, so we underestimate their huge numbers.
And history is full of the falls of the very overpaid.
Being paid for gifts! So odd. Yet universally accepted, without thinking.
Jenny gets a gift, so she is entitled to demand a payment from those who didn't receive a gift? Just completely odd. Completely nonsensical.
And why should the ungifted be obliged to pay?
And yet we do.
It would make little sense, but it would make more sense, if the gifted had to compensate the ungifted.
It is a complete mystery how we got hold of this nonsensical idea of paying people for receiving gifts.
It is a complete mystery how it happens that we have never suspected the nonsense of this.
We say: He is gifted, he deserves more money.
We think the person is giving us this gift they have.
But it is mother nature who is giving us this gift.
The gifted person should be paid for all their work, developing their gift, and not at all for 'their' gift, for which they of course did no work.
The gifted person can be paid for their no-work in having the gift, only by other people working for no pay.
By 99% working for no pay some of the time, working for no pay up to 99.99% of the time.
Paying people for having a gift is handing over money, which is a license to take workproducts from the pool of social wealth.
We seem to exert ourselves mightily to find even nonsensical excuses to make someone else rich.
People say: Bill Gates is a genius.
But how do we measure his genius?
By how much money he 'made'.
So it seems to us precisely just that he should have every penny he 'made', because that is how big his genius is.
We don't know how big his genius is, we can't measure size of genius, and we can't put a dollar figure on how much a unit of genius should be paid.
And we can't pay people for having been given gifts, without others working for no pay, which causes evergrowing violence.
We pay people for experience, yet the experience is a gift obtained without effort during paid work.
We pay people for 'responsibility', and yet lower-echelon jobs are not done irresponsibly.
We pay people for business risk, although the risk is in risking a sprat to catch a mackerel for himself.
We don't feel an impulse to pay a fisherman for trying to catch a fish for himself.
And we don't pay people for worker risk, which is greater.
Far more workers are killed at work than rich people.
We should be paying students for studying, because it is society that benefits.
Instead, the parents, scholarships or the students themselves pay for studying.
And then we pay them forever after for having studied, although there is no work in having studied.
Justice is equal pay for equal work.
Paying for no work means others working for no pay.
And yet we are allowing all these payments for no work.
Which causes evergrowing pay injustice, which is causing super-extreme unnecessary sufferings of millions of kinds, and has driven us to the edge of self-annihilation.
It has caused such great suffering and danger that we literally actually cannot bear to think about them.
And so we cannot hear the solution, because we cannot face the problem.
The problem is simple, we have pay for equal work [one year's work] from US$30 million to US$30, instead of averaage-family pay of US$300,000 for average hardness of working.
Money, wealth, has drifted from all workers to few, like sand piling up against a wall.
Money, the joker good, good for almost all good things, including necessities and most desires, has drained away from most.
Money injustice, which is injustice in all necessities and desires, all happiness.
Obviously, if a malicious imp takes all the goods of the whole community and heaps them outside the door of one, the thing to do is return the goods.
We have this malicious imp, without a doubt.
If the overpaid keep the goods, they come under violent attack, which we see all around us today, in the most extreme forms, and in all history.
So neither the overpaid nor the underpaid benefit from the deed of the imp.
Both the overpaid and the underpaid are hurt extremely by the deed of the imp.
Instead of the overpaid being in the swim of a functional society, a respected and equally entitled member in a fully functional society, the overpaid is surrounded by his human tribe in extreme dysfunction and disarray.
His garden, other people, is ruined, his roses blasted, his trees fallen and rotted. An ugly mess. Starvation, ignorance, brutality, destruction.
His life consists of trying to get more good out of a surplus of goods than out of a plenty of goods, wading through the filth of other people in distress, trying and failing to stay clean.
If pay justice were a swimming pool one metre deep, 90% of our pool water is up in a thin needle going up 1000 kilometres, the pool 90% drained.
And in endless extreme commotion, crests falling fast to troughs, troughs rising to crests.
No one can swim.
90% are trying to get by in water less than 1 cm deep.
10% are trying to swim up the slope and the needle.
And the needle is in rapid rise and fall.
Yet everyone is working, more or less equally.
Virtually all people are supervised, slackers get noticed and warned or fired.
The hardest worker cannot work more than 10% harder than the average in the same time period.
Everyone who works an hour sacrifices an hour of their life.
The swimming pool of work is level, with little wavelets.
You look out the window, it doesn't look bad, everything looks fine and functional.
Most places in most cities are peaceful and functional.
But if you bring up all the things you have put out of sight and out of mind, because they are not so goodlooking, your garden is most unpleasant, most unsatisfying.
The city goes along peacefully for years, and then suddenly, strangely, the city has to cough up a generation to go somewhere and murder and be murdered.
To stand around amid bullets and bombs for five years.
The way to remember the dead is to labour earnestly to understand how such things can be prevented permanently.
The gift to the dead is to labour sincerely to give humanity back a future, and a happy decent one.
To care for yourself with maximal earnestness.
Happiness is everyone's everything. Happiness is entirely dependent on reality, on realism.
To care for yourself, to love yourself, you have to commit to realism.
The intensity, the excitement, the pleasure, the love with which we live is in proportion to the intensity with which we strive to find and face reality and hence to pursue our happiness.
Those who pursue their happiness most ardently live most satisfyingly, most gladly, most knowingly, most calmly.
Every one is happy, more or less.
But only with a very large dose, a very stiff drink, of fantasy, pretend.
And reality is heartless, and one day turns up and demands that we pay our backdues in full.
And every one of our fantasies, our selfdeceptions, our pleasant illusions is broken before our eyes.
So is there something that people can learn that is very greatly to their advantage?
I think there is.
Try as hard as I can, I can't see any way it could be untrue.
We have to be patient with new ideas, we have to let them sink in, we have to forget them and come back to them, we have to give them time to soak through our brains.
We come back to them and find some of the strangeness has worn away, and familiarity has increased.
We doubt the unfamiliar, and gain in confidence as a new thing becomes familiar.
Once upon a time, the idea of the earth orbiting in space was just plain disturbing. Earth is supposed to be solid, dammit. But now we love our ball floating in space.
Once upon a time, insurance was unfamiliar.
Once upon a long long time ago, having a law against murder was the newfangled ridiculous impractical idea of some idiot.

Stealing $250 trillion a year [unbelievable]

If it was possible, and someone or some group stole US$270 trillion a year, we would take it back and punish the person or group.
After all, world annual income is only US$275 trillion, so it would be stealing 98% of human wealth, stealing an average of US$270,000 a year from every family in the world.
If the person or group were stealing different amounts from families, they might be stealing virtually all the earnings of some families, which would deprive those families of means to survive. It would be killing people. It would be mass-murder.
We would certainly take it back and punish them.
We have 1% of people taking US$270 trillion a year, 98% of human wealth, killing 1% of humanity, 50 million people, every year, from starvation, and another 1% of humanity every year from the violence [war and crime] engendered by the theft. Causing the deaths of one in fifty human beings every year. And causing a growth of violence [war, crime and weaponry] to the present point of 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and evergrowing violence, which must reach the point where we will use these bombs, killing 6+ billion people. If you turn the kettle on, and the temperature rises to nearly boiling, it will soon boil, if you don't turn it off.
Without this theft, every average-sized family in the world working average hard would be on US$275,000 a year. And larger and smaller sized families, and families working above and below average, would be on proportionately more or less. Instead we have 99% of families on less than US$275,000, 80% of families on less than a 100th of US$275,000. The pool of human wealth, the products of human work, almost completely drained. 1% getting between the world average pay of US$275,000 and 100,000 times that, US$27,500,000,000 a year, and 99% getting between the world average pay and 10,000th of that, US$27.5 a year.
If someone were going around killing one in fifty people every year, we would do something about it. If someone were doing something that was endangering the lives of 6+ billion people, we would do something about it. What greater crime could there be? Stealing virtually everything and endangering everyone including themselves.
Why do we not take the money back and punish the takers?
We don't take it back and punish the takers because we somehow believe they have earned it, have a right to it.
What if this is sheer delusion, sheer error?
Is it?
Even if it was true that they had earned it and had a right to it, would we let them keep it, when it was soon going to extinguish the human race?
Are we under a massive illusion? Are we under a suicidal spell?
Or is it that we just don't know the facts?
Or is it that we know the facts, but we think that nothing can be done about it, because money is power, and so people with 100,000 times the average income per year are 100,000 times more powerful than the average, and 1,000,000,000 times more powerful than the most underpaid, the most robbed?
Yet every heap of wealth, national and private, in history has been brought down by the underpaid. The state built on injustice cannot stand, is an old saying, and all history confirms it. Every empire has been built on injustice and every empire has fallen. So while the overpaid have money-power, the underpaid have a greater power. However great a fortune is, it is limited in size. But the power of the underpaid goes on eroding overpay ceaselessly, so every heap of overpay has to fall in time. And while the overpaid still have the heap, they have to labour mightily, stressfully and ceaselessly to try to preserve the heap. If one person steals the goods of 1000 people, that person has to labour mightily to keep it all. And has lost the company, the trust, the belonging with the 1000. Belonging, being part of the human tribe, is the greatest fun in the world to a human. Being an outcast is the worst punishment, often driving mad.
Is overpay good? The overpaid have a ceaseless extreme struggle, have lost the company and friendship with the human tribe, and they can get no added pleasure from the overpay, because fairpay, US$275,000, satisfies all needs, all major and minor desires, down to the teenytiniest, like bobby pins, doll's furniture, a 10th toy for the pet. Fairpay buys all necessities, buys very comfortable chairs, beds, beautiful furniture, rooms, cars, wonderful holidays, health care [and would buy even better health care if some health professionals were not overpaid], education and everything. The overpaid can only sit in one chair, can only fill the same area in a bed, occupy one room at a time, drink and eat as much as the fairpaid. And the overpaid have the underpaid after them constantly in a fight they can win only for a time, in a fight they have always lost in time, and they are isolated, cut off from human community, friendship and protection.
Do we think the overpaid have earned the overwealth?
Have they?
We know the overpaid do not work up to 100,000 times as many hours as the average. The average work over 50 hours a week, no one can work more than 100 hours a week longterm. Housewives work long hours, up to 90+ hours a week. Most overpaid do not work harder than average. The severely underpaid work longest hours. In any case, there is no measuring of how hard a person works, so no one is being paid for working harder. No one knows if the overpaid work longer hours. So overpay has nothing to do with working harder.
Do the overpaid work harder per unit of time? Do they pack more work into the hour? They certainly do not pack up to 100,000 times as much work into an hour. Can a CEO work harder per hour than the average CEO? Can he chair a meeting faster, read, talk, think, decide, walk harder? Slackers get noticed, warned and fired. There are very few jobs, if any, that are not supervised in some way. So most people are close to the average. You can't work more than, say, 10% harder than the average per hour. Or not even that. Can one driver drive harder than the average driver? Can one person play the piano harder than another? The range of hardness of work per hour is very small, perhaps 10%.
There are a number of 'reasons' for higher-than-average pay that have been put forward by the overpaid and have been swallowed by the underpaid. The underpaid like these reasons and support them because it means for them some compensation for underpay. So everyone supports them. But unfortunately, while it has meant a bit more for the underpaid, it has meant a lot more, limitlessly more, for the overpaid. It has opened the gates to the vandals. It has meant that 99% come out with less, even if they have sometimes made a bit from higher-than-average pay per hour of work, and 1% have run away with 98% of world wealth, causing astronomical suffering and problems, to themselves and all others, run away with world peace, with the entire human future.
It is because of allowing these 'reasons' for higher-than-average pay per hour of work that we have got into this astronomical pickle. It is because of these that we are sitting around while 1% steal 98% of world wealth, world peace and world future, when otherwise we would take the stolen labour, wealth, workproducts, off the overpaid and punish them. We have conned ourselves out of almost everything, soon everything.
With every family working average hard on US$275,000, we would have 10 times as many scientists, and of the scientists we have, 90% of them would be freed from being tied up in the consequences of violence, in the military-industrial complex, in the courts, hospitals, governments and universities. So progress would go 100 times faster. would have gone 100 times faster for the 1000s of years we have been allowing unlimited pay for what must be limited contribution by work.
The state built on injustice cannot stand, has never stood. Justice is equal pay for equal work, equal compensation for equal sacrifice. But what have we done to preserve our nations from injustice? It is not even sure that we are aware how unjust our societies are. We have not aimed at justice. We have not diligently pursued equal pay for equal work. We have let in many pays for no work, which someone has to pay for by work for no pay. We do not even know that 99% of us are coming out with less than fairpay. Highest income per year's work has gone higher and higher for 1000s of years, and lowest pay per year's work has gone lower and lower. And the consequent violence has grown bigger and bigger for all that time. And has arrived at the brink of extinction, has arrived at 60 times PDC, without us enquiring whether we are doing the right thing, or making a mistake.
If you pay anyone for anything but work, you force others to work for no pay. Every bit of pay for no work has to be paid for by work with no pay. And we have allowed these 'reasons' for higher-than-average pay per hour's work to justify, not just a certain amount, but to justify limitless overpay. And it turns out, these 'reasons' for higher-than-average hourly pay are all false. In reason, they are no reasons. Pay is a license to take out from the pool of wealth, of the products of work. And the only thing that can in reason justify taking out is having put an equal amount in by your work. If we apply our reason to these 'reasons' for higher-than-average pay per hour's work, we find they are no reasons. We have supported them, thinking to benefit from them, and not seeing that 99% of us have to fund them by some work for no pay, and 100% of us have to fund them by sacrificing peace, happiness and, soon, existence. The combination of 60 times PDC and extreme and ever-growing violence, driven by the ever-growing and super-extreme overpay and underpay, is not a happy one, is a fatal one.
We seem to be mad to pay people for no work. We shovel millions and billions at people for no work. And every now and then have a revolution and fight and kill the overpaid to get it back. And constantly try by every possible means to 'steal' it back.
We pay people for owning land. A person buys a bit of land, others make that land valuable by building infrastructure, cities, around it, and the landowner gets the added value, without doing a lick of work. So the community is working and giving the products of that work to the landowners. Very generous! The ceaseless growth of infrastructure, by the labour of the whole community, is reflected in the very steady longterm growth of the value of the stockmarket. And only the stockholders get this pay for this work. And they get paid in proportion to how much overpay they have, the most overpaid getting most. We seem to be keen to obey the rule that those who have will get more, and those who have little will get that little taken away.
Then there is everyone's natural birthright equal share in nature's bounty. All the fruit, grass, leaves, worms, seeds, fish belong to the creatures alive. Every creature on earth gets this equal birthright share on birth, and every creature that dies loses their birthright share to the living. But with humans, this birthright share goes to owners and sticks with them when they die, in the form of private inheritance. The newcomers have to buy their birthright share from the owners by work. Instead of all the wealth of the world automatically transfering to the next generation as the older generation dies, as it does in nature, humans have it stolen from them. The first arrivals at a new bit of land get it all, and the latercomers get nothing, have to work for the first arrivals. The overpaid buy up all the land in the world that is increasing fastest in value, because of the infrastructure labour of others, and reap where they did not sow. Wherever people are building cities fastest, there the overpaid, with much cash to spare, are buying. The most overpaid get most of the 'free' plums. Free until they have to pay for them in violence and extinction.
We pay people for absence, when we pay people for scarcity. Wherever demand is high and supply is low, the price is high, higher than costs. The costs are the payment for work. So in scarcity, people are overpaying for the work gone into the products. In a time of shortage of food, prices go high, although the work in the food that there is, is not greater, is less because there is less food. In new technology, supply is low because the industry is still gearing up. Yet everyone wants it. So people pay for the scarcity, the shortage of the new thing. Prices need only be 40% higher than costs to compound a fortune to 10,000 in 30 years, as it did for Bill Gates. Scarcity seems to be a dream come true. You supply less of it, and get more money. You have lower costs, and higher pay. Until the pay injustice brings retribution in the form of violence, danger, war, crime, revolution, assassination, kidnapping, overthrow and extinction. Because we pay for scarcity, we get more of it. People manufacture scarcity. Governments prevent import of grain in famine times. Governments provide subsidies [at public expense] to stop farmers growing. People make big farms, which are far less efficient at producing food than small to medium farms. The agricultural efficiency of the Sudan and of China are 30 times the agricultural efficiency of the USA. See World book of rankings. Russia converted to big farms, and had to start importing grain. We are being ruled by people devoted to the 'dream nightmare' of scarcity. The hunger and starvation fuel the anger.
We pay people for having received gifts from mother nature, at no work to themselves. They should be paid for every bit of work they do developing their gifts, but not a penny for having received a gift. Paying for natural gifts is as mad as paying for birthday gifts. But we think it makes sense. Obviously, mother nature has done the work, not the person. We think, if a person gets rich, that they must have had a great gift, and therefore they deserve whatever they have. We assume, however much a person has, that they deserve it, that there must be some good reason for them having it. We look up to them, because we assume they deserve it. Yet we cannot and do not measure this gift, this cause of the deserving, and we do not and cannot say how much pay this cause deserves. We should certainly give gifted people the 'higher' positions, but there is no reason to pay them more. The genuinely superior person does not wish to be paid more for being superior in brains, wisdom, intelligence, impartiality, or whatever. The genuinely superior person wishes to be among others, not above them, looking down on them.
We pay people for experience. But the experience is obtained in paid work without effort by the person.
We pay for 'responsibility'. Yet people in lower-echelon jobs are not irresponsible, and we do not, because we cannot, measure 'responsibility', and we cannot determine how much a person should be paid per unit of 'responsibility' if we could measure it. We just assume that, if a person is being paid for 'responsibility', they deserve it. We make no attempt to determine if the person is being responsible or not. Does the person in a 'responsible' job use up more calories, somehow sacrifice more per hour of work? No, they just do their job according to their nature.
We pay people for having studied. We should pay people for studying, instead of getting the parents, scholarships or the students themselves to pay for it, for it is society as a whole that benefits from educated people. But it is paying for nothing to pay people for having studied. And 99% of us have to fund this pay for nothing. And 100% of us have to pay in the violence, war, crime and extinction.
We pay people for business risk, or we allow unlimited fortunes on the 'reason' of risk, although the risk is just to rake overpay for himself, although there is no measurement of risk, no power to determine fairpay per unit of risk if we could measure it, although business risk is far smaller than worker risk, who risk up to and including their lives, although businesspeople minimise risk, although the greatest gains are often with small risk, and the lesser gains with greater risk, although we feel no impulse to pay the fisherman risking bait, the farmer risking seed, or the small businessperson risking, although risk means risk of losing and so loses its meaning if rewarded.
So all these things, which our own good sense easily sees are senseless, we feel are sensible. And seeing the simple explanation of their senselessness, and the devastating catastrophic consequences, will not shift our mindset. Seeing the sense has no impact on our attitudes. The acid of sense is powerless to eat away our senselessness. Where do these fatal attitudes come from? How is senselessness created? And why are we so devoted to it, even to extinction? Why does sense, even when seen, have no impact on our mindset? Since we have come to think that paying people for mother nature's gifts is sense, why have we not come to think that paying people for birthday gifts is sense?
Why do we support the overpaid, and then wake up briefly in revolutions and get mad, and then let the equality slide away? Where has liberty, equality and fraternity gone in France? The American dream of liberty and justice for all, of eternal freedom from tyranny, was sensibly founded on prevention of overpay, for overpay is overpower. No tyranny without overwealth. But this is hardly known, not even in America, not even among the brightest, and the students of American history.
A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for a 1000 days at a dollar a day. There are a billion people on less than a $1 a day. So overpay is warmongering and cannonfoddering of the many. Unlimited fortunes is unlimited power of those who have them over those who fund the overfortunes.
A person is deemed mad when others decide they are mad. But are there madnesses that we all have, so there is no one to tell us we are all mad? Can we, with heroic effort, force our little bit of sense to overcome and control our senselessness?
Why are the 99% underpaid totally unstirred to keenness to have US$275,000 a year, peace, freedom from warmongering and tyranny, and a future for themselves and their children? Why are the 1% overpaid totally unstirred to keenness to have no less satisfaction, to have freedom from danger, great labour of defense, and inevitable fall, to have fellowship with the human tribe, so important to all humans, and to have a future?
Or did love of being alive and happy, pursuit of our selfinterest, die?







You know the saying 'the rich get richer and the poor get poorer'.
But did you ever think that this is just plain theft?
That it means that the overpaid get evermore dollars for each bit of work they do, and the underpaid get everless?
And did you ever think that this has been going on for thousands of years and so has gone very far indeed?
Can you believe, we now have yearly pay from a low of $30 to a high of $30,000,000,000.
And have you thought that this is theft of the thing which is a joker good, good for just about everything, all necessities and desires?
And that this theft therefore makes people very angry and desperate, and makes people fight?
And that this is why violence [war, crime and weaponry] have been increasing for those same thousands of years?
From sticks and stones to ICBMs and world wars.
To the present point of 60 times PDC [planet death capability]?
So we really want to do something about it if we can?
Have you wondered how many people get less than fairpay?
At the present stage of things, 99% of people get less than fairpay.
have you ever wondered what you'd get if you weren't underpaid?
The average-sized family working average-hard would be on $300,000 a year, if 99% of us hadn't been slipping lower and lower for 1000s of years.
Of course 99% are getting below-average pay!
If you pull taffy up out of a pot, the higher you pull, the lower the taffy in the pot gets.
If a malicious imp takes everyone's things and leaves them outside the door of one person, the obvious thing is to give them back.
If the person outside whose house the things get left tries to keep them, there will be trouble.
Everyone else will be worse off, and that one person will be worse off, having a huge fight on his hands.
Can 1 person keep the property of 99 people?
Can it do him any good to do so?
He will have gained a lot of surplus things, and lost all position and respect in the community.
Have to work day and night to hold onto the things.
Can 1% keep the property of 99% of people?
Through all history they have tried, and through all history they have eventually lost.
Through all history they have had to labour mightily all their lives to hold on to it.
And always in the end failed and been clobbered.
And the two fighting sides have invented everbigger weaponry, to the danger of all.
What is the use of overwealth?
After necessities, major desires and minor desires are satisfied, right down to the littlest things, what can more money add to happiness?
Fairpay [$300,000] satisfies every need, all major desires and millions of smaller and smaller desires, down to children's toys and bobbypins.
So overpay can add only the satisfaction of the teenytiniest desires.
You can spend more, but you can't get much out of it anymore.
Except a heap of fighting, danger, labour and cost hanging on to it.
So if both overpay and underpay are bad, why have we got so much of it?
Are we missing something?
Even if desires were infinite, and the overpaid were happy in proportion to their overpay, would that be any reason to steal happiness from 99%?
Have you ever thought that money is power, so extreme overpay-underpay is extreme overpower-underpower?
Which means the less powerful being bossed around by the more powerful?
And means the more powerful doing whatever they like, which is usually not pleasant for the underpowered?
And then the underpaid getting mad and clobbering them?
And all this conflict and weaponry is rushing to a climax in destruction of everything, thanks to e=mc2.
Have you heard that the bombs we have will block out the sun with the smoke, lowering the planet temperature 25 degrees, which is three times colder than an iceage?
With the rich still getting richer and the fighting still getting intenser, can we avoid arriving at using those bombs, if we keep going the way we are?
With the weapons, and the super-extreme overpay and underpay generating everincreasing violence, how can extinction not arrive?
Maybe not this century, maybe this century, maybe tomorrow, maybe this afternoon.
Probably not all at once, probably here a bomb, there a bomb, a little more, a little more.
They have already used depleted uranium.
Can we do better?
Do the overpaid want to become extinct?
Are the overpaid free from trouble?
All heaps of wealth [kings, emperors, empires] in history have been levelled in time.
However great the overfortune, it is still limited in size.
But the attacks on it by the robbed are endless, so every heap of overwealth falls.
Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them.
Bigger heaps of honey attract more bears.
And desires get teenytiny above fairpay of $300,000 a year.
Who benefits from overpay and underpay?
The overpaid get no more pleasure, a lot more danger and labour, and extinction as the cherry on top.
The underpaid get nonsatisfaction of minor and mjor desires, of needs, constant labour of fighting for rights and fairshare, and extinction.
Not exactly a bargain for anyone.
How does money drift from all the workers to a few?
Who or what is the malicious imp who has been moving goods from everyone to few and so got everyone into this almighty mother of all pickles?
Whenever you buy or sell anything, the two things exchanged are never exactly equal in value.
So there is a little hidden theft in every transaction.
One person gives more than they receive.
Over trillions of transactions, this little drop of theft grows into the ocean of overpay and underpay.
Over many transactions, a few people will break even.
But most will gain or lose.
A few will gain big, a few will lose big.
If you toss a coin millions of times you won't of course get heads tails heads tails all the way.
You'll get strings of heads, strings of tails.
There will be lots of strings of two.
The longer the strings of heads or tails, the rarer they will be.
But they will occur.
In the same way, most will lose or gain from lots of transactions.
And the more transactions go on, the greater the gain or loss will be.
Anyone can go from gaining to losing, or the other way, at any time.
But over everyone, underpay and overpay will ever-increase.
And then this growth is accelerated by everyone trying to get as much and give as little as possible.
And then money 'makes' money.
A pile of money, once got, will start pulling in more money.
A billion pulls in $50 million, every year, for no work by them, at a modest 5% interest.
And sometimes there are far higher returns than 5%.
But they can buy things with the money they get for no work.
Things which have been made by work.
So they sometimes get products of work for no work. Overpay.
So others sometimes get work for no money. Underpay.
Leading to fighting and extinction for all.
Like a boiler getting hotter and hotter till it explodes.
A little tiny theft in every transaction, and the world is going to blow.
We can correct for this by making everyone heirs of large deceased estates.
The private heir has done nothing, everyone has done everything for this money, so such a law is just.
And justice in pay makes peace.
The country or planet built on injustice cannot stand.
The purpose of government is justice.
And governments are not powerful enough to give it to us.
Only we are powerful enough to give it to us.
Money drifts from all to few, so we drift it back from few to all.
Money will continue constantly to drift from all to few with every transaction, but we can make it constantly drift back again.
The accumulated overpay of thousands of years will rain down on humanity in two generations.
90% of world income, US$250 trillion a year, or US$250,000 per family, is up in a very very high thin needle of overpay.
The honey will be lowered back into the pot, raising the level, stopping the evergrowing overpay-underpay violence.
How to interest people in doing this?
There are plenty of extremely good reasons for both the overpaid and underpaid people to do this, but people need to know first that everyone else is keen to do it.
No one will take one step forward until everyone else does.
Which is quite sensible because people laugh if you step out of line, if you wear a hat when no one else is, or don't wear a hat when everyone else is.
But we can talk about it with our friends, and then it will in time reach a point where everyone will know that everyone knows about it, and then it won't be so hard to step forward one step.
Then someone wil get excited with the idea of being the first, and then step forward, and then others will be sorry not to have been first, and will step forward to be second, and then more and more will take the step, and then we can laugh at the last ones to step forward.
This laughter is not mean. We have survived by being a herd, and this laughter is a reminder not to wander off from the herd and get killed.
Don't rely on politicians or academics to lead the way. They are either overpay, or bought and sold by overpay, or they are busy studying some tiny corner of the big big world, drowned in so much information that they have lost their common sense, their overview, their perspective.