Reality check [world]

Reality check
Are we humans making a mistake, a mistake that is costing us 99+% of the happiness easily available to us? Are we humans programmed by nature to make a certain simple mistake that is driving us to self-destruction with eyes wide shut? If we can conquer this mistake, can we be much much happier? Is this mistake so deeply rooted in our reptilian cerebellic atavistic chimpanzee brains that it will take mental effort and courage to root out? Does this deep reptile-brain prejudice distort much of our thinking away from our own simple good sense? Is it possible that we are being destroyed by natural instincts in our reptile-mammal-cortical brains that are good survival strategies in nature which are disastrous in society? I think so.
Denial, psychological denial, is a reality. Putting one's head in the sand is not just a cute saying, it is a universal phenomenon among us humans. Pleasure principle [if it isn't pleasant, or is thought to be unpleasant, it doesn't exist], as opposed to the reality principle [the true pleasure principle], exists in all of us, dominates all of us. Other animals don't seem to suffer from pleasure principle, they seem to be totally practical and realistic. The imagination that has enabled the human technological revolution perhaps also has enabled living in denial, in fantasy. Are you game for a fight with your brain? Are you up for putting the natural automatic prejudices of millions of years of survival up for examination by your cortical wits, to check whether they are leading you to destruction in society?
Heraclitus says that only the people who see the big picture are awake. The jigsaw puzzle pieces just tipped out of the box are the sum of parts, but they are not the whole picture, they are not the picture at all. Our hunter-gatherer heritage has given us tunnel vision, a prejudice in favour of the part of the picture, a confidence and a habit of not seeking the big picture. We are not awake at all, and we are million-year confident that we don't need to be. But our technology has made the world our backyard. 200 years ago, a day away was 50 miles. Today, a day away is anywhere in the world. Is our mindset uptodate? Do we think of India, the Middle East, Dallas, China, Africa as 50 miles away? Can a hypothetical superperson succeed in solving many major world problems and thereby nevertheless cause the destruction of everything? Yes. If the tree of problems is growing faster than a superperson can cut the branches, if that superperson lacks the big picture and so cannot see the root problem and put her energy there, and bring down the whole tree. If all the good sincere people are busy saving the whales, fighting particular abuses of human rights, poverty, crime, pharmaceutical companies, etc etc, knitting lovingly for the baby while the nursery is on fire. We have invented the microscope, we have not invented the macroscope, we are still blind there.
Vices exist. Vices are causes of unhappiness. If some people have a vice, the others can tell them about it. What of a vice, a cause of unhappiness, that everyone has? Is there a cause of unhappiness that everyone has? Are we confident we are right because everyone agrees with us, because the voice of our own simple good sense has so few listeners? Hitler had a vice. He chose conquering the world as a happiness strategy. He was wrong. He underestimated human resistance to being robbed, and this error destroyed him. Do we underestimate the human resistance to being injured? We have 90% of people in slavery, 90% of people on between a tenth and a thousandth of world average pay per hour. How angry would you be to be on 100th of world average pay per hour? Multiply by 5 billion. Can all the money and power in the world defend against that amount of righteous anger? Are we being practical, realistic? Are we pursuing our selfinterest, or are we slitting our own throats in an hallucination more powerful than LSD?
Money is an artificial barter item, with the advantages of divisibility, portability and nonperishability, so it is used in most transactions. Money is a joker-good. It is good for just about everything. So the theft of it is the greatest injury. The theft of money is the theft of just about everything. Not only necessities and desires, but also social power, status, position, strength, visibility. We have super-super-extreme pay injustice, theft of money, overpay and underpay. Every family in the world that is working average hard would be on US$275,000 a year with pay justice. Peace and plenty for all. Ten times as many scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors. Technological progress ten times as fast. Capitalism for all. Ten times as many small businesses. One hundredth of the tyranny, undemocracy, corruption and warmongering. A hundred times more freedom of the media. All our social systems are unlimited-fortunes systems, because we believe that freedom to have unlimited fortune is a good thing. Is it? Or is it really freedom to destroy ourselves? Contribution by work is limited. Each person adds a limited amount to the social pool of wealth. So unlimited fortunes are necessarily theft, overpay, which means underpay, which is theft of just about everything, the greatest injury, which people cannot tolerate, and do not tolerate. The thing that activates our denial, our pleasure principle, our million-year prejudices most powerfully is in defense of unlimitation of fortune, which we think is good, based on the argument that money is good [it is], therefore more money is always better. If we can bring ourselves to, if we can bear to, bring this belief up onto the examination table of our own simple good sense, we can be much much happier, we can end our self-destruction.
How much happier? Everyone will agree [using their simple good sense] that, if a government, say, committed the extreme theft, pay injustice, of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of people, and giving all that to 1% of people, that injustice would cause a multiplication of violence and unhappiness by some factor like 20 or a 100. Rioting and massacre have occurred for far less. The police and army would have to be greatly strengthened. Everyone can see that, if the government mad enough to do this were to stop doing this, violence and unhappiness of many sorts would die down in time by an equal factor. We humans in this world today have worse pay injustice than this. Therefore everyone who submits to simple good sense will have to agree that we can be 20 or a 100 times happier. Everyone is still going after unlimited fortunes for limited contribution, theft of money, without making the connection with violence. This can only be possible with a large contribution by denial, by pleasure principle, by unexamining devotion to a self-destructive position.
The social pool of wealth, the sum of the products of people's work, is limited. It can grow or shrink, but it is always going to be finite. Number of workers and number of hours worked are finite. Wherever someone takes out more than they put in by their own work [not by the work of mother nature in giving people natural gifts, not by payment for scarcity, for high demand and low supply as in new technology, not by capital gains from the 99%'s infrastructure labour, not by the pre-emption of everyone's birthright equal share of nature's bounty by the pre-ownership of everything, and other legal thefts], others have to take out less, there has to be theft, which has to produce anger and violence. This violence has to ever-grow, as both sides try to prevail. Money makes money. A billion dollars takes out of the social pool of work 50 million dollars of work products every year without any work at a modest 5% return. Some are taking out US$100 million in return for a day's work. 1% are getting 90% of world income, while doing less than 1% of the work. That is US$250 trillion per year. The biggest theft, the macroscopic theft, which people cannot see. That is US$250,000 average stolen from every family in the world. There is plenty for everyone. The size of the theft is the size of the denial. Who would fight the denial is a hero indeed. Justice causes happiness. We have giant pay injustice. Therefore we can be giantly happier.
A community in which everyone works, in which the work produces plenty, can be made unhappy by maldistribution. If one person takes all or most of the goods of 1000 people, that person is unhappier too, having merely more goods than he can use, having lost the support, company and fraternity with the 1000, having acquired a hair-raising security problem, namely, financing a defense against infinite attack with finite resources. Which has been the situation of every plundering empire in the world. Every empire has plundered. Every empire, every plutocracy has fallen. Every empire has underestimated the energy and power released by theft of money, theft of necessities and almost all desires.
On this one error, this one great faith, that more money is always better, we have built thousands of years of accelerating unhappiness, as both sides invent bigger weaponry to try to prevail. The unanimous lesson of history has not been learned in thousands of years. Even the huge jump [60,000 times] in power of weaponry in the past fifty years, from power to kill 100,000 people in a day [Dresden, 87 firebombed cities of Japan] to being able to kill 6,000,000,000+ people, 60 times over, ten different ways, has not jolted us out of our complacency, our agelong nonsensical faith. We still don't see the simple big picture. There are a 1000 striking at the branches of the tree of problems for every one that is striking at the trunk. Time is short. We need the realism, the efficiency of striking at the trunk of 99% of our problems. We need a return to the Jeffersonian wisdom of democracy, liberty and justice for all, by avoidance of unjust wealth concentration, by more effective methods than Jefferson was able to think of and to apply.
If pay justice was a swimming pool one metre deep, we have 90% of our water [income] up in a thin needle going up 1000 KILOMETRES. The highest pay per year's work is a BILLION TIMES the lowest pay per year's work. Pay, increase of fortune, is from US$30 billion to US$30 a year. 90% of people get between a tenth and a thousandth of the average. The swimability of our social pool can be restored in two generations by making everyone the heirs of large deceased estates. The private heirs have done nothing to make that money, while everyone has done everything to make that money. There is no need for the huge bureaucratic cost of distinguishing the 1% overpaid from the 99% underpaid, all can receive an equal share of the unjust large deceased estates, because the 1% are being trimmed by the new law anyway.
That is how simple it is, if only we can all be brought to use our own good sense, quite detached from our automatic prejudice for unlimited fortunes for limited contribution. People forgot that freedom of unlimited fortunes for themselves means freedom of unlimited fortunes for others. The foregoing of the freedom to be overpaid and overpowered is the foregoing of the freedom to be underpaid and underpowered, and the foregoing of the freedom, for both overpaid and underpaid, to be embroiled in universal violence growing to extinction. And money is power, as Edmund Burke and common sense tell us. A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for a 1000 days at $1 a day. What better product for profits than war materiel that gets blown up? Overpay is overpower for any psychopath to kill millions or billions. Pay injustice means warmongering and cannonfoddering. Haven't we had enough of that? Are we all Valhalla-ites, keen to die on the battlefield to get to Valhalla? Peacemakers are thought of as troublemakers!, but we dance in the streets when a world war is over. Who are we? Have we enough nobility, that is, selflove, pursuit of happiness, to examine without prejudice?
Is overpay good? Fairpay satisfies all but the teenytiniest of desires. There is a rapid fall-off in the size of unsatisfied desires above fairpay of US$275,000. The overpaid can buy bigger things, but they cannot eat more, drink more, consume drugs and movies and satisfy the libido more, than the fairpaid. Fairpay buys a very very comfortable chair. Overpay can do very little more. The [99%] underpaid have no idea of this rapid fall-off, because they still have substantial desires left unsatisfied. More money can still do them good. Meanwhile overpay suffers attack in direct proportion to the ratio of the overpay to the underpay, which is up to one billion. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. The overpay, however great, is finite, and the attacks, from both underpaid and overpaid, are endless, so every overpay must labour mightily to retain, and must succumb to exhaustion of funds and energy in finite time. The 1% needle of super-overpay is always rapidly changing personel. Stalin, Hitler, Ceausescu, Marie Antoinette, the USA, the British, Spanish, Dutch empires, and every empire in history, past and future. Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown. So the net benefits of overpay are very negative: insignificantly more satisfaction, infinitely more danger, toil and suffering. Overpay means sadism, torture, genocide. The state built on injustice cannot stand, is a very old saying. But we are still trying to defy it. How silly is that? It is silly to the highest pitch. An old Readers' Digest article [!] praises the Swedes for having learned the lesson: None enjoy unless all enjoy. A Bogart movie, The treasures of the Sierra Madre, makes the negative points thoroughly.
The entirely hallucinatory nonexistent upside of inequality, of all-grab-all, obliterates the reality of 99% underpay and of the omnipresence of escalative extreme violence. People believe in the localisation and avoidability of violence, although every second movie says the opposite. The mirage keeps people addicted to unlimited fortunes systems, in the same way that people are driven to pour their wealth into pokie machines. The many wideopen legal thefts in our systems have zero disapproval, because people are thinking of it as freedom to get overpaid [and thinking of overpay as good], not as freedom to have universal extreme poverty of happiness, escalating extreme violence and no future.
For millions of years, we have survived by grabbing from mother nature. Grabbing from mother nature is fine, excellent. Grabbing from other people is fatal. Can we get our cortex to drum the distinction into the cerebellum in time? Are we too beaten down by the daily grind, too soul-destroyed by unfree work, too demoralised by our crimes against humanity to pursue our sanity, our welfare, this greatest-ever opportunity to increase our happiness 20-fold or 100-fold? The factor for the present potential for increase of happiness is the same as the present pay injustice factor, one billion.
Can words make wits? It is late in the day, the planet is a bomb ticking, with lots of zeros on the left hand side of the clock, but we could start thinking about the big picture.
Note: Annual global income is based on Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp238-256, [US$25 trillion, 1987, in PPP figures] compounded with the annual global inflation figures since 1987 [15% 1987-1989, 30% 1990-1995, 8% 1996-1999, 4% 2000-].
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