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].