Travel diary. Day 138 Planet 'Earth'

Travel diary - Planet 'Earth'
Well, diary, this has been the most interesting time of this trip. In fact, of any trip I have made. Maybe it would be the most amazing time of anybody's trips. Just unbelievable. How can I begin to describe it? Where to start? There is just no word for it. The people of this planet have no grip on reality. Can you imagine it? I doubt it. You really have to see it to believe it. No grip on reality! Who would have thought it was possible? I mean, reality is staring you in the face, right? Yet, somehow, these people don't see it. Oh, they see physical reality fine, they can see and hear physical things. But they add it up all wrong. They are making themselves very unhappy and they are unaware of it! Their situation could hardly be worse, and yet they do not see it. They bleep out unpleasant things, so they cannot solve their problems. They can see small problems, but they can't see the biggest problem, and so they can't see the solution. It's the weirdest thing in the universe. It is just so amazing, so inexplicable. Naturally, wealth is limited. The pool of social wealth is limited to nature's bounty and people's work. They have enough for everyone, they have plenty for everyone. It is a prolific planet. It is not like some I have seen, where everyone has to work like blazes just to survive. And they have recently passed into the stage of machines and computers, so their production is terrific. And yet they have totally screwed this up, and made themselves utterly miserable, multiplied natural trouble thousandfold, and they are not even concerned, they are not even aware of the situation. They carry on as if everything was on track and as good as it can be! I don't think I can begin to enable anyone to understand how it is on this planet. It is just so weird, so fantastically odd. I have never seen or heard of anything even slightly like it in all my life. As I was saying, naturally wealth is limited. Everyone knows that. I mean, a planet is limited in size, there are a limited number of people. Not unlimited. But these people allow unlimited fortunes! How can I explain this? They are all trying to get unlimited fortunes out of a limited wealth base! They don't think: Well, naturally my work is limited, so I should have a limited fortune in proper proportion to my limited work. No, they are all just going for unlimited fortunes! They have no idea of working out the fairshare for everyone. It is just everyone grabbing as much as they can. So naturally, some have enormous wealth and some have none! And everyone is fighting everyone all the time to get more. You can't imagine it. You can't imagine how silly it is. They are fighting each other to get more when there is plenty for all. And getting madder and madder at each other because most of them have little. They have been busy inventing bigger and bigger weapons for thousands of years! If they get hold of some wealth, they hold onto it, however much it is! I hesitate to write down how extreme this is. You just won't be able to believe it. You are going to think I have been pulling your leg all along. You are going to think that I was making it up and now I am going to go so ridiculous in my claims to show that I was pulling your leg. But I swear to you this is truth. As weird as it is, it is the truth. I am not pulling your leg. They have pay per unit of work up to ONE MILLION TIMES the planet average. And they look up to the person getting this super-ridiculous amount. I tell the truth, though I can hardly believe it as I write it. It makes my head swirl. You see, they believe absolutely in unlimited fortunes. They totally don't get it that work is limited, that the social pool of wealth is limited, so they totally think that it is okay for someone to have unlimited fortune, for someone to get a million times the planet average pay per hour's work. They think it is good! They think it means that everyone can be that overpaid. They don't call it overpay, they don't know it is overpay, they have no idea of overpay. How can I begin to explain something so strange? They think it is freedom to be free to have unlimited fortunes. They think of it as loss of a freedom if they have to have limited fortunes, although they know that the contribution by any individual is necessarily limited. They surely must know that if anyone takes out more than they put in, everyone else gets to take out less than they put in. But I don't really know what they know and what they don't know. They cannot articulate on this subject. They are intelligent and articulate about many things, but somehow there is a block on their thinking and talking about this one thing, the thing that is at the root of all their problems. There is just this inexplicable giant blindness and dumbness about the biggest thing happening in their world. You ask them about it and you get all sorts of incomprehensible answers. The problems this causes! Naturally, with someone taking out a million times more than they put in, most people here get out very little. 99% of them are getting out less than average. 90% of them are getting out less than a tenth of what they put in. 50% of them are getting out less than 100th of what they put in. Everyone is trying to get more, even the one who is getting out a million times what he has put in. You can't imagine it. Some of the ones who get out a lot give some of it away, but obviously not much of the overpay overall. Naturally, the people getting out less are annoyed, and fighting to get more. Everyone just keeps fighting everyone for more, and the fighting has been getting bigger and bigger for thousands of years. I did a little experiment to try and find out what these people are thinking. I got together 100 people and set them a game of trying to get as many sweets as they could out of a tub of 1000 sweets, and they could grab from each other too. After a few hours of this game, I stopped them and asked them how they liked the game. They liked it fine! They are playing this game on their planet, with every bit of wealth, including their necessities, and apparently they like it fine. Again, I hesitate to tell you because you will think I am going beyond the truth, but this game they are playing, with every bit of wealth, food and all, kills 2% of them every year, from the fighting and the starvation of those with least, to say nothing of the injuries. And they are not stopping the game! There is a little talk about stopping the game, but they are not stopping the game. There is still a great attachment to overfortunes. Even the ones who have the underfortunes are not keen to stop the game, are not keen to have limitation of fortunes for what is necessarily limited contribution. Even the ones with the underfortunes think they will be losers if they limit fortunes to the most a person can earn in a lifetime. I pointed out to them how in the game with the sweets, the people with most sweets got most grabbed from, and soonest lost their sweets. I pointed out how much effort was involved for everyone to be grabbing and trying to hold on to their sweets perpetually, when none of the fighting was necessary, when they could all have ten sweets [plenty for everyone] and save all the fighting, and play instead. This didn't seem to make any impression. Do they like fighting? It is hard to tell. They dance in the streets when one of their wars is over, but they love watching movies of fighting. Maybe they only like to have a break from fighting now and then, but they mostly do like fighting. They don't like losing or being killed, but apparently they like the game more than they dislike the losing and being slaves and being killed. They think that overpay is good, although of course the overpaid are most being grabbed from, and have the busiest time trying to hold on to the overpay, and are in the greatest danger, and soonest get killed. Their weaponry has recently advanced from being able to kill 100,000 in one day to being able to kill them all, 60 times over, 10 different ways, turning the planet into a snowball, and they are STILL unconcerned, they are STILL not thinking the game is going too far. They are acting as though they are immortal, and yet they believe that they are mortal. I truly am not kidding you. It is the weirdest thing in the universe. If they get a sudden big increase in their fortune, they are very happy, and never stop to think whether this is getting out more than they put in, and therefore causing others to be slaves, and therefore angry. It never occurs to them that money is a license to take out of the social pool of wealth and is therefore robbery if it is more than they have put in by their work. In short, they are all thieves, with no regard for justice, and seemingly they never stop and think whether all this unnecessary endless evergrowing fighting is worth it. I am not sure they have made the connection between the unlimited fortunes, necessarily unlimited theft, and the violence! Although they all get angry if someone steals from them! I can't figure it out. These people don't make any sense. Occasionally they call for liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness], a few grumble about the super-extreme inequality and the tremendous human cost of it, but mostly they play the suicidal game. Some thefts they have made illegal, but many thefts are legal! For instance, a person with a billion has a legal right to take out 50 million or more every year for no work at all! When a person dies, someone has a legal right to take over ownership of their fortune for no work at all! When someone invents something new, they have a legal right to charge any price they can get, regardless of how much work has gone into the invention! The price might be $140 although the cost of making the thing might be only $100! In other words, the customer does $140 worth of work and gets only $100 worth of work. The customer earns $40 and hands it over in return for nothing! No one is checking how much work went into the thing sold. No one is making sure there is no overpricing! Everyone living has of course a birthright equal share in the free goods of nature, the land and the valuable things of nature. But they don't get the equal share! And no one notices this theft! Everyone's work produces the infrastructure gains, and yet only the landowners and stockholders get the wealth of this work! A person can buy a bit of land, do nothing while others build a city around it, making the land valuable, and the landowner gets the wealth of it! And no one is interested in countering this theft! There were a few people who were interested in countering this theft for a while, but nothing was done, interest in the idea faded away! I tell you you would die laughing. People will read this letter out at parties to have a good laugh. How can people be so uninterested in having their fairshare of wealth? How can people be so uninterested in having all the wealth they create? Legal thefts! It is like a bear catches a fish, another bear grabs it, and the first bear isn't bothered! These people have an enormous tolerance for theft. Occasionally they get so poor that they object, and get mad, but for long periods they just get robbed and robbed and just keep on working! They pay people for having natural gifts! Mother nature gives them a gift and they pay the person for having that gift! It doesn't bother them that the person has done nothing to have that gift. It doesn't bother them that 99% of people have to fund this mad payment to the gifted. Imagine paying people for having received a birthday present! They seem to like the idea of paying people for gifts because they imagine themselves being paid for having gifts, and they don't see who pays for this paying for gifts - themselves! And so it is with all the other legal thefts, they seem to be so simpleminded that they imagine themselves benefitting from the payment, and don't imagine who has to pay for this paying for gifts, which is 99% of them. You can explain it to them, but it makes no impression, it doesn't sink in, they just can't get it. Instead of working out how many tertiary-educated people they need and want, and paying them for studying, they have the parents or the students themselves pay for the study and then pay them a market-variable premium ever after for having studied. Everyone paying for this premium of course. Of course, the extreme misdistribution means that only about 10% of the bright people can go to university, so they are holding back their technological progress to a tenth of what it could be. This doesn't bother them, I don't think they have even noticed, although they love technological advance! Most of their technology money and talent goes on the wars the pay injustice produces! If they didn't have the pay injustice, I suppose technology would go ahead 100 times faster. They would also save all the money they spend rebuilding after wars, to say nothing of the extra labour rebuilding. I don't need to go into the sickening brutality that such a super-extreme range of power causes. Let's just say that there is nothing imaginable or unimaginable that they haven't done to one another. And done it plenty. On a planet so plentiful that a family working average hard produces US$275,000 worth of goods each year. Of a beautiful sunshine life they have made a starless endless night. Self-extinction may be only 30 years away. Turning the planet into a forever-silent snowball will punish all the perpetrators and release all the victims. Alas, or good, I'm not sure which. They have technological smarts but when it comes to pursuit of happiness, they have no brains at all. Perhaps a plug in their brains fell out. All the other creatures on this planet have ethical, pursuit-of-happiness smarts and no technology. Weird. I pointed out to them that all this super-overpay would shower down on them over fifty years and put an end to poverty and war if they just made everyone the heirs of large deceased estates. But NO ONE WAS INTERESTED. I truly am not pulling your leg. Go see for yourself. Weirdest thing in the universe.