Action plan for making your life much much better

Action plan for making your life much much better

Introduction
The art of maximising happiness is in its infancy, has been thrown into utter confusion. Which is good news, because it means we can be much, much happier.
There are a lot of ideas out there about maximising your happiness, and they are why we are in such a gigantic mess. So there are ideas we have, and have had 'forever', which we have to check with our own sense to see whether they are really sound ideas, or are causing the unhappiness we have. We have to have some skepticism about the ideas we have about maximisation of happiness, and check them with our good sense.
When people agree on things, there are often no insurmountable obstacles. People agreed, long, long ago, that having a law against murder was a good idea, and they got that law, and have been happier for it ever since. And the same applies to insurance, and many other things we have and are happy with. Someone thinks of the idea of insurance, people go through a learning process of finding out what it is, and deciding whether they like it.
Here is a new idea, here are many new ideas, about maximising happiness, and it is for us to go through the same old process of finding out what they are, and whether they agree with our good sense, and whether we want to ditch some old ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny by our own good sense.
If we reach the point of everyone agreeing they are good ideas, we will get the thing they recommend.
So this action plan begins with a stage of checking out some new ideas, and rechecking some old ones. Then comes the stage of telling others about them. The natural process that happens when a film is good and the word gets around.
This is not a process of mindlessly adopting someone else's ideas. This is about you taking a fresh look at reality through the thoughts here, and deciding whether you think reality is a bit different from what you have been taught, and then passing on the new ideas you agree with to your friends, to save them and you a heap of grief.
This book is in the form of a manual to make it easy for you to pass on these new ideas to other people, for them to decide whether they like them.
You can use this book on yourself first, and then use it for passing on ideas you like to your friends.
It takes the form of common ideas, and suggestions on how these ideas might be untrue.
Some of these common ideas you may be very fond of, attached to, and inclined to defend them just because you are fond of them. But rejecting the new ideas in opposition to them because you are attached to the old ideas is not sense. We need to judge the new ideas with our good sense, and that alone.
Where to start?
Many of these new ideas interact and intertwine, so it is hard to find a starting point. We just have to start somewhere, and eventually we will have all the ideas and their intertwinings.



For those who think they are reasonably happy and needn't strive for more.
When there is unhappiness that we think is unchangeable, we forget about it, and so we don't think of it when we add up our happiness. And we put unpleasant things out of our mind, so we forget those things when we look at our happiness. When we think we are happy enough, we are looking at the good bits of our life, and have ignored the bad bits. To know how much happier we can be, we have to look at all those bad things, and imagine how much better we will feel when all those things are gone. We can't solve any problems without looking at the problems. We can't be open to solutions to problems until we have acknowledged the problems. So our natural tendency to put unpleasant things and things we think can't be changed out of our mind prevents us looking for solutions. There could be solutions lying around, and we won't see them because we are unconscious of the problems that the solutions solve. And then there is a double bind, because a person can't tell people about a solution, because people have put out of mind the problems, and a person can't remind people about the problems, so he can then tell them about a new solution, because people don't want to hear about problems unless they know there is a solution. So which comes first, reminding people about the problems or talking about the solutions? One has to talk a little about both, as far as one can, so people can slowly open up to the problems and the solutions. We have superoverpay and superunderpay, and this generates all sorts of problems, including superviolence, which generates war, crime, weaponry, and all the miseries of those. Enormous wealth and enormous poverty are both enormous stimuli to war and crime. And violence gets everywhere that people get, because people carry the violence. Violence gets into the richest homes and the poorest homes. All the time there is pay injustice, overpay and underpay, there are grave problems popping up everywhere in one form or another. For the underpaid, trying to pay bills, finding money for healthcare, education, food, and everything. Money buys just about everything, and the underpaid have less of it than they deserve, so the underpaid have problems, worries, anxieties, griefs. Or they just have a lot of things that they have done the work to have, and yet they do not have them. Underpay is underpower too, so the underpaid have all sorts of problems with overpay and overpower, with fighting for a fairshare, with fighting the powerful who are inclined to ignore the problems of the underpaid. Overpaid people have just as many problems. They are generally under attack in some way or other, from both the underpaid and the overpaid, so they have constant worries and labours of security. And they cannot get much happiness out of the overpay, because fairpay satisfies most desires, right down to teeny tiny ones, so there is not much satisfaction for overpay to buy. Fairpay of $300,000 per family per year buys many many things, all the important things, and many many less important things. The desires and needs of the human bodily life are finite, they run out. The rich can wear only one pair of shoes, sit in one chair, eat one meal, sleep in one bed like everyone. And they have to labour at protecting themselves from kidnapping, murder, robbery, treachery, golddigging, divorce settlements, hostile takeovers, being conquered, and so on. To the underpaid, who still have substantial desires left they could satisfy, overpay sounds great. The underpaid have no experience of desires running out. But often the rich work, although they don't need to, because work gives more satisfaction than anything else they can find. When you can travel anywhere, you reach a point of having had enough of it. When you are thirsty, water is wonderful, but when thirst is satisfied, drinking water is repulsive. So what seems wonderful to the underpaid and unsatisfied, is nothing to the poor rich. Solid gold taps sound terribly exciting to the people who don't have them, but when you have them they are just taps. A $2,000,000 diamond ring becomes just something you put on your finger, or keep in a vault. Many rich people are people who were recently underpaid, like the Mafias and Triads, and so they have no background of experience that overpay is powerless to give pleasure. And every heap of overpay, of overwealth, is under constant attack in many, many ways from the overpaid and the underpaid. Empires, kingdoms, nations, governments, crime gangs fall. And everyone is caught up in one way or another in the endless fighting. World wars, genocide, organised crime, theft, robbery, home invasion, torture, secret police, corrupt officials, arrogant ignoring unserving government, hijacking, riots, skyjacking, carjacking, murder, rape, and the fear of those things, and the gloomy depressing influence of those things. We have had these things for so long, we forget them, and we think they are permanent, unpreventable. But these things have a cause, and that cause is wrong ideas of what gives happiness, and these ideas can be investigated, examined, and overthrown in our heads. If it is true that both overpay and underpay are bad, not good, and bad for everyone, rich and poor, and if we can learn these things, then there is a universal human will to get rid of both overpay and underpay, and where there is a will there is an easy way. Injustice produces violence, because it is theft, theft of money, the joker good, and violence gets to everyone, which produces unhappiness, which no one wants. We have super-super-extreme pay injustice, overpay up to 100,000 times the average, and underpay down to 10,000th of the average, therefore we have super-super-extreme violence, and we can be super-super-extremely happier. Just by realising something. Just by chucking out an old, wrong idea, and putting in its place a new, good idea. And then doing the easy part of acting on it. A law making everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates would bring down overpay and bring up underpay to justice in two generations. The private heir has done nothing for that money, everyone in the world has done everything to make that money, everyone in the world has done the work that makes the goods that the money buys, so such a law would be just. It just takes getting used to the idea. It just takes studying the relevant facts until it is all clear to us. Digging out of the brain the old beliefs and putting in their place the new ideas that make for happiness. We have to really look at reality and see if we really can believe with our own good sense that the new ideas are true, and the old ideas are false. Violence tends to be localized and rare, although terrible when it comes, and so we just hope it won't come to us. But it is coming to people just like us, and could come to us just as easily. So we all live in fear instead of freedom and laughter, in caution, isolation, defensiveness and suspicion, all the time. There is great equality among the severely underpaid, and so great is the effect of equality on happiness, that poor people often have much happiness richer people don't. There is much singing and laughing and social enjoyment of the human tribe. Equality without severe underpay would of course be even happier. The underpaid are so vulnerable to attack from the more powerful. How happy could you be if everyone else was either much more wealthy or much poorer than you? You would feel terribly alone, cut off from humanity. so equality is a great source of happiness. And we have almost infinite inequality. So we can be almost infinitely happier. Unfortunately, coming into a world with super-extreme inequality, we all just try to get more. Everyone just trying to get more without limit, regardless of how much we put in to the pool of wealth by our work, means a few get most and most get very little. Everyone trying to get just more increases inequality. If we instead aim to get out as much as we put in, equality and happiness will arise. Everyone trying to get just more is like a heap of humans beings, all trying to get higher in the heap. The lower in the heap, the more weight pressing down on us, the higher in the heap, the more people pulling down on us. With equality, everyone stands on the ground, with no one being crushed or being pulled down. In the heap, everyone is forced to keep the people below from rising to a position where they can be crushing us, and everyone is forces to go higher to try to get less weight on them. But getting higher just means everyone below pulling down on us. The saying, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer suggests that the rich are stable, but they are being thrown off the heap all the time, by the people rising up in the heap. the poor get hard, and the rich get soft, and the strongest of the poor are constantly rising up and throwing the rich off the heap. For example, the communist leaders throwing the Russian monarchy off, the leaders of the French revolution guillotining Marie Antoinette and the rest of the French plutocracy and monarchy, and then Robespierre guillotining leaders of the French revolution. And the Mafia rising up from Sicilian poverty and replacing the American wealthy at the top, only to be increasingly invaded by the South American druglords coming up from their poverty and oppression. So the rich get richer, and they get very suddenly very much poorer, like Ceausescu of Rumania, Hitler, Napoleon, Charles I and Richard III of England, Caesar. And millions of others. So I think that there really is an enormous opportunity for everyone to be much much happier, unimaginably happier, quite easily. To move from the heap of inequality, with all the horrors and terrors of human history in the last 3000 years or so, to the standing on the ground of equality, as we did for millions of years before that. And we can then have all the benefits of equality and all the benefits of technology. And be free of the vast, millions-murderous, warmongering destructiveness of the overpaid. And free of the poverty of environment caused by having most people terribly underpaid. We just have to work hard with our minds to see through the illusion that the way we are on is the path of maximal sense and happiness. And I think that I, thanks to my teachers, have covered all the points that need to be covered so that people can clear the way in their minds to seeing the way to far greater happiness.

For people who think that we cannot be 100 times happier.
Consider the example of a government, say, committing the extreme injustice and theft of taking 90% of aftertax imcome off 90% of the people and giving it all to 1%. Straightaway, there would be a loss of 81% of national happiness, just from the taking of 81% of national earnings from people. Then, on top of that, there would be all the miseries caused by the extreme violence that would erupt between the 90% and the 1%, between the 90% and the 9%, the 9% and the 1%. On top of that would be the crime and murder that would greatly increase among the 90%, as some people weakened by the theft would strive to compensate themselves by robbing the others similarly robbed. The 1% and the 9% would be in a position of power relative to the 90% and some would exploit, oppress and murder among the 90%. the 1% would get no happiness benefit from the overpay, and would also be in a far worse security position, now having to defend themselves against the extreme, energetic, endless and righteous anger of the 90%. The overpaid would be desperate for funds to finance the selfprotection, and would seek to rob from the 1%, the 9% and the 90%. There would be the added labour and cost to the nation of all the violence, destruction and waste. All these factors would I think raise the loss of happiness to 95% or 99%. Now this is only an injustice factor of 820. The 1% would be getting 820 times as much as the 90%. We in the real world have an injustice factor of one billion. The ratio of highest pay for a year's work to the lowest pay for a year's work is one billion. Range of pay for a year's work ranges from $30 to $30 billion. In the example, 90% get 10% of the average. In our real world, 90% get less than 1% of the world-average pay per year. They get between 1% and 0.01% of world-average pay. Highest pay is not just 82 times the average, but 100,000 times the average. So I think that we can really be literally 100 times happier. Every family in the world working average hard on $300,000 a year, goodness. Some nations, like the Middle East, will save 50% of national income by not having internal conflict of overpaid and underpaid. The least inegalitarian countries spend only 2% of national income on defense, and these countries could be considerably more egalitarian and spend even less on defense. The world economy is strangled nearly to death by having 1% of people getting 98% of world income. There would be far more money getting around and about, watering the lives of all, making far more businesses possible, making economies far more stable and crisis-free. There would be 100 times more scientists, driving progress 100 times faster, than we have now, with 90% of the scientists we have tied up working for defense and repair, in the military-industrial complex, the courts, the hospitals, the police, and with 90% of scientists that we could have, too poor to become scientists.

For those who think it is alright to tackle smaller problems.
It makes sense to spend one's time and energies in always first tackling the thing that can make the biggest increase in happiness, that can solve the largest number of problems in one go. If you have a troublesome tree or vine, you can attack it by climbing up and picking off leaves, or cutting off branches. The tree or vine may grow faster than you can remove leaves or branches, and then you have the problem forever, and getting worse. Or you can chop at the trunk, and thus be chopping all the branches, all the leaves in one go. And bringing the tree or vine down forever. It takes discipline to resist putting one's energies at the visible end of the problem, and instead tracing the vine back to its exit from the ground, but when you do, you have the satisfaction of seeing the whole vine die, even tendrils you could not reach and didn't even know about, and having the sense of power and control in knowing that you need only keep an eye on the root to see when it sprouts again, and cut it again. Everyone is tackling some problem, and is therefore too busy to tackle the root. But we don't have the luxury of tackling the vine or tree at leaf or branch level any more when we are so close to self-extinction, thanks to e=mc2.

For those who think that the project is too big.
There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their resources and energies. The sum total of the work needed per person is just really convincing just two people, two friends. In ten times the time it takes to convince two people, there will be 2000 convinced. One will teach two, two will teach 4, 4 will teach 8 - 16, 32, 64, 125, 250, 500, 1000 - plus the 1, 2, 4, 8, etc who taught, adding up to 2000. In twenty times the time to convince two people, there will be 2,000,000 convinced. In just 30 times the time to convince two people, 2,000,000,000 will be convinced. Once you are convinced, all you have to do is cross your fingers that other people are about as smart and as open to thinking as you are, that other people will be convinced on average in about the same time as you were. so do an experiment. Read it, forget about it for a few days, giving it time to spread through the brain, come back to it, read again, look at it from all angles, forget about it again, and if you are convinced it is really true after one month, you can be confident that the whole world will know it in 31 months. Then there is the herd effect. Once, say, 10% know about it, more and more will take in on trust. They will be hearing about it in a number of places, it will be popping up here and there in their lives, more and more people around them will be excited about it, and they will take it more or less on trust. The tendency to distrust a new idea works against us at first, but as time goes on, it works more and more for us. And there is also possibly the 100th monkey effect. It starts to communicate 'through the air'. It just starts to be in the air, and people find they know it without receiving any thought or words at all. We must not assume to know how much mental resistance and how much mental easiness there is out there. It may just be the time in human history in which people finally get it, in which the penny drops, in which we hear what history has been telling us. After all, reality is there and everyone is exposed to it all the time. There has to be a time in which people get things. There was a time people got the idea of agriculture, the idea of fire, the idea of the arch, the idea of the bow and arrow, the idea of the screw, the idea of insurance. The brain is constantly ruminating on reality, putting elements together and coming up with ideas. The very fact that this idea is now on paper is evidence that probably people are getting the idea independently all over the world, since brains have a high degree of similarity.
If someone thinks that ethics is about following rules of right and wrong laid down by others.
Obedience is a virtue for little children, who don't have minds, who don't have much knowledge of the world. If mummy says don't run in the road, or don't go into the woods, it may be a good idea to obey when you have no idea what roads and woods contain. But obedience is essentially mindless. It is abdicating from making decisions yourself, from taking your shots at your happiness, from being an ethically functioning creature. So it is the worst thing you can do. It is sabotaging your pursuit of happiness right at the start. Consider that, if you think you are not smart enough to take a shot at happiness, how can you know that another person is better at taking a shot at hitting your happiness? Obedience is giving your body like a robot to the purposes of another, and that other may be anybody. To be ethical, you have to know the person you obey is good and wise and cares about you. And if you can know all this, you can take a good shot at your happiness for yourself. You know far more about yourself than any other can know.
Science tells us that the human body developed from apes by retaining infantile characteristics into adulthood, like the big head. Maybe it is similarly also true that we have retained infantile obedience into adulthood. And so maybe this is why we are ethical infants, not functioning as beings pursuing our own happiness, but too inclined to make a virtue of obedience instead of making a virtue of functioning as an ethical being, constantly making decisions about what will make us happy, about what errors we have made in our pursuit of happiness, keeping an ear out for new ideas on increasing happiness, and so on. The pursuit of happiness is the great adventure, the great game. It enlivens us, it is life. And obedience is the sabotage of it. There are other reasons why obedience is promoted as a virtue, as a means to happiness. There are people who think they will be happiest if other people obey them, look up to them, follow them, serve them, work for them unquestioningly. We have perhaps been taken in by such people because of our psychological inclination to infantile obedience long after the days of mindless infancy are past. These people have put out a whole false ethics, around obedience. But the illogic of it is apparent. If people are to obey, who are they to obey? If some are to obey and others to be obeyed, how are these two types of people to be distinguished? Who is to say who should be obeyed? Who is there to say who goes into each group? Certain people have arrogated to themselves the position of being obeyed, and other people have been awed and impressed by them, or threatened by them, into obedience.

If someone thinks that disobedience is good.
Disobedience is no better than obedience, for the same reason, that it is mindless. It is just obedience with a minus sign in front of it. Someone says do X, so I will do -X. The whole of ethics, the whole of duty, is pursuit of your happiness. And that requires maximum mind. Pursuit of happiness is largely pursuit of reality.

If someone thinks that pursuit of your happiness is not the whole of ethics, because there is also thinking of others.
Thinking of others is a major part of pursuing your own happiness. When a person is wholly awake to pursuit of his own happiness, one of the biggest things on his mind is how this will act on others and how they will react. What has undermined thinking of others has been taking away pursuit of one's own happiness. It is only when you are really thinking of your own happiness that you grasp that injuring others is no sensible part of pursuing your own happiness. Because of the simple fact that injuring others causes a reaction back onto yourself. People do not take injury lying down. The person who is 100% devoted to his own happiness is thinking of others all the time, is being careful to avoid accidentally injuring others, which will bring injury back to him. The people who have tried to build ethics on obedience have been unable to give any solid reason for thinking of others. And so people, divorced from their pursuit of their own happiness by the false ethics of obedience, have not in general grasped the concept of not injuring others, the concept of being as nice to others as possible for one's own sake. Pursuing one's own happiness as the whole of ethics is logical, for the very simple and very solid reason that I am me. And on this solid basis, people will be devoted to avoiding injuring others, as part of pursuit of their own happiness. The false ethics that has undermined pursuing one's own happiness has undermined thinking of others. The people who have undermined pursuit of own's own happiness have done it because they want people to be mindless robots of their aims. And they have undermined rationality itself. For what is more rational than pursuing your own happiness? Every animal does it. And who else is going to do it? So the foundations of life have been attacked and overturned. There is always happiness in the very pursuit of happiness, for, whatever happens, misfortune, bad luck, or evil, the great game of pursuing increase of happiness can always be played. And these people have undermined love, for pursuit of one's own happiness is the root of love. Cut off from pursuit of happiness is cut off from loving oneself. And cut off from that, how can there be love of others, or love of love? How can one feel that one is loved when you are expected to drop your happiness, which is your everything, your life, your joy, your excitement, the meaningfulness and beauty of life? False ethics has made us feel ashamed of pursuit of our own happiness. What loving person is going to tell us to give up our pursuit of happiness? A loving person is working to assist us in our pursuit of our happiness. The feeling that we are entitled to pursue our own happiness is the root of feeling loved. And the game of pursuing happiness with our limited powers is an exciting challenge, the great game, in which, and only in which, we feel alive, only in which can we feel meaning and value in life. In that, and only in that, are we alive, functioning, doing, active, busy doing what we are meant to be doing. We think we are pursuing our happiness when we are very much just following accepted ideas of what brings happiness, ideas which are often the product of unthinking, unwisdom and unlove. Not really looking hard for ourselves, to pierce the veil to see reality plain and true. As simple is it to understand that injuring others will in general bring equal or greater injury upon us, we are so divorced from real individual free independent 100% ardent unabashed pursuit of our own happiness, that we cannot notice this simple connection.

If someone thinks that money is no part of pursuit of happiness, that money is not good, that money cannot buy happiness, that money is unspiritual.
Money is an artificial barter item, with the convenience of portability, divisibility and relative nonperishability. It is good for all the goods that can be bought. Money is as good as the goods it can buy. It can buy necessities and desires. Satisfaction of bodily needs and desires, purchase of worldly goods, is a very major part of happiness. Spirituality is part of pursuit of happiness, or else it is nothing, since maximisation of happiness is everything. And money, the joker good, is a major part of happiness. When people say money is not good, not spiritual, what they mean is that sometimes money does not deliver happiness, that sometimes money delivers unhappiness. People who say money is not good, not important, not spiritual, do not have no wallets, do not fail to pick up their paychecks, so it is strange that they say it at all. It has been said that love of money is the root of all evil, but what is true is that love of other-earned money, love of overpay, love of getting money or other forms of wealth without proportionate work is the root of virtually all our unnecessary unhappiness. Love of getting out of the social pool of wealth more than you put in by your own work. Greed. Theft. Because overpay is theft and theft is injury, and injury produces a reaction, equal or greater. If the injury does not come back to you immediately and directly, it ricochets arround in your environment and takes its toll on your quality of life. Putting twice as much in and taking twice as much out, putting half as much in and taking out half as much, are perfectly harmless to yourself, is not theft, not injury. In nature, before we developed job specialisation, division of labour, for the efficiency benefits, overpay is hardly possible. You do your own work and consume the products of your work. But with job specialisation comes pooling of products of work. And then taking out more than you put in becomes all too easy. And it is hard for others to see when it happens. Until, by the accumulation of overpays, it becomes visible to all, with some having far more than others who have worked equally hard. Visible theft, visible injustice, visible wrong, visible injury. So it is not love of self-earned money that is bad, but love of other-earned money that is bad, selfharming and unspiritual. The distinction between self-earned money and other-earned money seems never to have been made before. People go for just more, without effort, and without seeing the value of making the effort, to take out as much as they put in. Society does not condemn getting out more than you put in. It admires people in proportion to their success in getting money out, quite regardless of whether this exceeds what they put in. We are taught that it is fine to aim at getting out as much as we can, by all legal means. But it is clear, or ought to be, that unlimited fortunes when the contribution of any individual has to be limited, has to be theft, injury, injustice. Society teaches us injustice in pay. Society says: Everyone, go for as much as you can, and whoever gets more will be admired more. There are many wide-open legal thefts in our social systems, and these are invisible as theft. We pooled the products of work because with everyone doing specialised work, the products have to be mixed. One person does nothing but make shoes, but he has to have many things. His shoes are turned into money, and he takes the money to the pool of work products, the shops, and takes out what he wants. Hopefully a sum of products that contain as much work as he put into his shoes. But, with the pool of wealth, of work products, it seems everyone went mad, seeing all the goods of all the people, and started grabbing all they could. It was hard to determine exactly the workvalue in things, so we in effect said, okay everyone, just try to get as much as you can, and we will see how that goes. And it has put so much wealth and power in so few hands, who then strived to undermine other people's pursuit of happiness, to get them to work for them, that very few people are any longer closely in touch with their independent pursuit of happiness, and so no one has identified pay injustice as the enemy of humanity. The people who said that love of money was the root of all evil stated a truth so imprecisely that people saw no sense in it, and ignored it. People know that money is good, for they are prepared to work for it. And some people are aware that there is something wrong about money, and so they say that money is not good, without giving up money. If you have 100 children with 1000 sweets, and say to them, get as many as you can, grabbing from each other too, you are going to have endless fighting, accelerating, as the children get madder and madder, and as inequality increases. The more sweets one child has, the more children will be after him, and the less fun it wil be for him, and the sooner he will lose his store. But no one will be free from being grabbed from, everyone will be perpetually involved in grabbing and being grabbed from, and amity will continuously decrease. And this is human history since job specialisation, trade and money. Theft, injury, is built in to trade, because it is impossible to measure work exactly, so that we can aim at justice. There are many legal thefts in our system, and there is an inability to see them. We are blinded to justice, to noninjury in money matters, by the great pool of goods. It seems to each of us that our taking out as much as we can get cannot hurt the pool, it is so big compared to the individual. But we have ended up with the most extreme pay injustice, and somehow everyone unable to see it, or guess its importance to our individual happinesses. Pay for a family's year's work ranging from $30 to $30,000,000,000 around the average of $300,000. With the average higher than the pay of 99% of us. With 99.9% of us getting less than double the average. With 90% of us getting less than 100th of the average. With pay down to 10,000th of average. And still fighting. And the fighting having grown for 1000s of years, polluting the happiness of everyone. Driving the invention of ever-bigger weaponry. The pool of wealth is limited, limited to the amount of work done and to nature's bounty. The pool can grow or shrink, with more or less work, with machines and computers, but it is always going to be finite. So freedom to get out unlimited amounts drains the pool. If the social pool of wealth was a swimming pool one metre deep, our pool is now 98% drained. 98% of wealth, the products of work, are up in a very thin, terribly tall needle going up 100 kilometres. 1% of people get US$250 trillion a year, and 99% get US$25 trillion. 90% of the pool is less than 1 cm deep. And yet people work roughly equally hard. And the poorest work hardest. And in 5000 years of this lolly-scramble approach to distribution from the pooled products of specialised work, with ever-growing inequality and consequent ever-growing violence and weaponry all that time, we have not noticed that the lolly-scramble approach is not working, is an unmitigated disaster. So, no, love of money is not the root of all evil. Love of getting out of the pool more than you put in is the root of all our vast unnecessary evils. For money is good, the joker good, and therefore the theft of it is the greatest injury, and injury ricochets as untiringly as atoms, and, unlike atoms, increases in speed. Bombs beget bigger bombs.

For those who think that having more money than you have earned, having lots of money and little work, would be good, or is good.
Money is good, and our disastrous last 5000 years has been caused by falsely concluding from that truth that more money is going to be better. To the 99% who are getting out less than they put in, more money is good, for they still have needs and substantial desires unsatisfied, and more money would satisfy them. But remaining unsatisfied desires get smaller and smaller and have dwindled to very tiny ones at the point of fairpay. Fairpay of $300,000 a year satisfies almost all desires, right down to teeny tiny ones. There just is very little overpay can satisfy. The overpaid can spend big, but they cannot be satisfied any bigger. The body is finite and its desires are finite also. They can buy more rooms but they cannot occupy more room. They can buy more food, but they cannot fill more stomachs. Fairpay buys a very comfortable chair. Overpay can own a skyscraper, but there is no way to consume a skyscraper, to extract out of it any more than another person. So the benefits are tiny. And on the other side, the disadvantages are enormous, are proportional to the size of the fortune. Since money is good, since overpay means underpay for others, since the underpaid still have substantial needs and desires left unsatisfied, the overpay is under attack. Whether the overpay is nations, empires or individuals. However large the overfortune, it must be finite, but the attacks are endless, so the attacks must erode the fortune in finite time. And all the time before the complete erosion of the overfortune, the overpaid must be under seige, must be defending themselves at cost of time, labour, money, health and life. Under attack, not just from the underpaid, but from the overpaid too. Honey attracts bears. Since overpay is always under attack, at cost, it must ever seek more money, which must exacerbate the underpay that surrounds it, driving a vicious circle of collapse. The overpaid are isolated, even from their equals in wealth. Fellowship with other humans is one of the greatest causes of happiness. If one person steals the goods of 1000, that person will be worse off, with 1000 enemies and no friends. And his environment is wretchedness. Ignorance, disease, disorder, crime, war, crisis, betrayal, suspicion, hostility, hatred, waste, destruction. His garden, other people, is blasted. History has no examples in contradiction to this.

For those who think that there are no legal thefts, only illegal ones.
Justice is equal pay for equal work. Work is sacrifice of something, time and energy, and needs to be compensated by an amount of pay that buys workproducts with as much work in them as the working person did. A person works in some specialised work, and should get as much pay as his work produced wealth in the form of goods. Pay for anything but work is pay for no work, overpay, which causes work for no pay, underpay, a greater or lesser degree of slavery, for others, for 99% of others, which then causes ever-growing violence, war, crime and weaponry, which has now reached 60 times PDC [planet death capability], which is as bad as it gets. Unhappiness, not happiness. We allow pay for many things besides work. Students should be paid for studying, because study is work. Societies should pay for this work because it is the whole of society that benefits from the learning of students. Instead, we have parents, scholarships or the students themselves paying for studying, and then we pay people for having studied. There is no work in having studied. 99% of us have to finance this pay for no work, and 100% of us have to pay in the ever-growing violence engendered by the ever-growing overpay and underpay, caused by 99% funding overpay. Violence gets everywhere people get. The overpaid are not on the receiving end of less violence. They are on the receiving end of as much violence, or more. Think French aristocracy guillotined, Ceausescu, Caesar. And a million kings conquered. Hostile takeovers, corporate infighting. It is a funny thing that it is organised crime that has sometimes learned to share, rather than fight each other into hamburger meat. With organised crime, the effects of all-grab-all are more dramatic and immediate, and so it is easier to see the pattern, and thus come to sharing. We pay people for merit. Now merit is largely mother nature's gifts. Again, not work by the person paid. Paying people for having received gifts from mother nature is as absurd as paying people for receiving gifts from other people. But so powerful is the spell cast by accepted ideas and customs, that it is hard for us to see the simple absurdity of it. People with merits and talents should be paid for every bit of work they do developing their talents, like practising the cello, or studying, but not a bit for work that nature not them has done. Again, 99% of us have to finance this overpay, and 100% of us have to pay in the ever-growing violence engendered, which is now so near the destruction of every lifeform on the planet. Our power to destroy has increased by a factor of 60,000 in the last fifty years, to power to kill 6,000,000,000+, 'thanks' to e=mc2. Our technology, transport and computers, have effectively shrunk the planet by a factor of 250 in the last 200 years, compressing the violence, like compressing a gas, raising the temperature. We pay people for scarcity, again not work, not sacrifice of time or energy by the overpaid. Whenever demand is higher than supply, prices take a hike upwards, so profits go beyond fairpay for the work of the owners. Because we pay for scarcity, we get more of it. people who want profits produce scarcity. Big farms are far less efficient than small to medium farms. Russia moved to big farms and had to start importing grain. The agricultural efficiency [production per acre] of the USA is 30th of the Sudan and of China. See World book of rankings. The overpaid worldwide are forcing people off small farms and converting to big farms, to decrease food supply and increase proftis. Overpay, controlling government, is causing subidies [at public expense] to farmers not to produce. New technology has built-in scarcity, because demand is high and the factories are still being set up to meet demand. So it was with computers, and so it was when electricity replaced gas. When machines came in, people could buy the same goods for less, so demand was high. But the price was still higher than the cost of producing the goods on machines. The company owners were being paid for work the machines were doing. And customers, though they thought they were getting a bargain, were overpaying, which means working to fund overpay. So during the 19th century, and still today, workers were being sucked unaware, and getting poorer, when machines were taking over a lot of work, and humanity could have had more leisure or more pay. Patents, which accompany new technology, are monopolies, and monopolies are a license to overprice. Monopoly profits are so extreme, that governments stepped in to moderate monopoly, but how powerful is government against the power of overpay, which often gets into government? And how can government root out every speck of monopoly in the economy? It can find the most glaring examples, but it has a harder and harder job finding the ever-subtler and ever more numerous examples, even if they were not hobbled by the undue influence of the overpaid. We pay people for owning land and owning stocks. Every worker, down to the children helping their parents on the farm or in the shop, are building up the infrastructure of the world, making it more valuable. This steady increase in value, in bridges, hospitals, roads, buildings, soil, is reflected in the longterm steady rise in value of land and stocks. So while everyone sows, only the owners of land and stocks get paid for this. And the owners of land and stocks get paid in proportion to their holdings, to their wealth. The most overpaid get most and so on. A person can buy a piece of land, the whole community of workers can increase the value of that land from practically nothing to billions, by building a city around it, and the owner gets the added value without having to do anything. In this way, many fortunes have been made. The world is steadily growing in value, as more cities and other infrastructure are built, and only the landowners and stockholders are reaping. The purpose of government is justice, because no state built on injustice can stand, but governments are in the hands or under the hands of the overpaid, and they are not doing anything about it, nor telling the people what is going on. And most people are stuck in a trust in their governments, victims of a nature-given reliance on parents, reluctant to leave the nest and face the fact that parents have faults and that you have to be the one who takes responsibility for your happiness and your view of reality. Animals seem to make the transition much more easily. I suppose our spending much longer with parents greatly reinforces the habit of relying on others. Again, nature's bounty is great, but landowners and stockholders get all this bounty. Animals automatically get an equal share in nature's bounty as soon as born. All the fish, fruit, leaves, seeds, grass, land, meat and milk is theirs. Animals automatically lose all control over nature's bounty when they die, and their share automatically reverts to the common pool. Theft of nature's bounty from all newborns is built in to private property. Not that private property should be got rid of, but there is legal theft built in to it, which contributes to inequality, violence, misery, danger and extinction for all humans. Job specialisation created the need for trade, transaction, and unfortunately legal theft is built in to transaction itself. The two things exchanged, in buying, selling or barter, cannot be exactly equal in value, in the work gone into them. Their workvalue must be x and x+y. So every transaction must be a fair-exchange-no-robbery [the x's] and a robbery, the y. Over trillions of transactions, just from statistics alone, inequality will evergrow. A few will, just by luck alone, come out with large net gain. A few will come out with large net loss. Many will come out wth smaller net gain and loss. Almost no one will come out with justice, neither losing or gaining from transaction. Add to this the fact that virtually everyone is trying to maximise the size of y, and you only have an aggravation of the inequality built in to transaction. It is hard for a beggar to get $1 for nothing, but very easy for a company to get $11 for something that contains $10 of work. No one can exactly measure the workvalue in the product. The customer does $11 of work, the company does $10 of work. In a nonprofit company without volunteers, everyone gets paid for their work, so what are profits? Clearly not work. Profits are reflected in interest payments on deposits. Clearly the person who puts money in the bank and gets paid interest does no work. Everyone loves interest and profits, because they hope to gain from them, forgetting that opening up the pandora's box of people getting unlimited money for nothing means that 1% get up to 100,000 times what they earn, and 99% get down to 10,000th of what they earn, and everyone without exception is embroiled in endless escalating violence and is facing extinction. But this plan does not propose to try to get rid of profits and interest, just to note at this stage that they are legal theft. Which means that the superrich have not earned the money they have. There is a much easier way to get pay justice and thus destroy war, crime and extinction than interfering with profits and interest, or with any of the other legal thefts. We justify and allow, because we think we will profit from them, unlimited pay for business risk, 'responsibility', experience, natural gifts. But business risk is risking a sprat to catch a mackerel for oneself. And everyone risks, and workers risk up to and including their lives. And the sprat risked may be, most often is, overpay, other-earned. And, if there were reason to pay for risk, there is no way of measuring risk, or of setting a fairpay per unit of risk if we could measure it. So no one is being paid for risk, because no one can be paid for risk, because we can't measure it. People in lower-echelon jobs are not irresponsible or less responsible. The person in a 'reponsible' position is just doing his job with what nature gave him. Experience is gained in paid work at no cost to the person, so no work is involved in having experience. So there are many wide-open legal thefts. When the little people approved of profits and interest, captial gains, pay for natural gifts, experience, business risk, 'responsibility', etc, because they hoped to gain from them, they gave themselves a little straw and the overpaid a big straw to suck on the milkshake of wealth. Giving up the little straw will have the effect of getting rid of the big straws, and saving us all from extreme violence and the nearness of extinction. People saw freedom to get limitlessly rich as a good thing, and people see prohibition of freedom to get limitlessly rich as bad. Freedom to get limitlessly rich is only good if you have the biggest straw, and if desires that can be satisfied do not get smaller and smaller as more desires are satisfied, and if no one objects to you having a bigger straw.

For those who think that redistribution of wealth, just or not, is impossible, because the rich would never go along with it.
Money is power, a great power, but it is not the only power, and not the greatest power. Every heap of overpay in history, individual, national and imperial, has been overturned. That the state built on injustice cannot stand is a very old saying. No state built on injustice has survived. Being robbed, being enslaved, releases an energy far greater. The underpaid can only throw grains of sand, but winddriven sand erodes rock. The underpaid go on and on forever, whereas the greatest heap of wealth and power is only finite. The underpaid have lost many battles, they have never lost a war. Injustice energises. 99% are underpaid. Can 99 people make one person do what is good for the 100? About 99.9% are paid less than double fairpay. Can 999 make one person behave to reverse the destruction of 99% of natural levels of happiness of 1000, and annihilation of 1000? What percentage of the overpaid will not be able to come to thinking that fairpay, survival, peace and world amity, a beautiful garden of other people, through which you can move freely and fearlessly, is better than extinction, a life of most intense, exhausting, unwinnable labour and stress of selfdefense, without more satisfaction of desires than fairpay? And imagine a new state of things where the underpaid, reactivated in pursuit of their own happiness, liberated from thinking obedience is virtue, are perfectly clear that overpay is other-earned, is theft, is the cause of the starvation of 1% of humanity every year, and the death of millions every year from violence, is soon very likely to be the cause of extinction of all planet life, is the root cause of torture, brutality of regimes, genocide, hiroshimas, world wars, crime, terrorism, all the worst things in present human life?
What if the 99.9%, reinvigorated in ardent unabashed independent individualist pursuit of their own happiness, had cogitated, chewed, pondered new ideas and had become perfectly clear that there was legal theft, pay injustice, and that pay injustice was the real cause of violence? What if they knew that scientific progress would go ahead 100 times faster with justice? At the moment we have 90% of the scientists we have tied up in the deadsea fruits of inequality, in the governments, courts, hospitals, military-industrial complexes, and we have 90% of scientists [and inventors and entrepreneurs] gifted enough but too poor to become scientists. People could come to be certain that we are on the brink of extinction and on the brink of a golden age. Not all the superrich and overpaid are without sense, and without spirit of justice. Philanthropists realise, more or less, that they have been overpaid. Someone said: Why shouldn't I give half my money to people?, they gave it all to me. Another rich man said: Business is just selling for more than you paid for it. Not all overpaid people are greedy, unable to see straight, just saying in their hearts: Me, me, me, not them, not them, mine, mine, mine, like a child with a big chunk of birthday cake, attacking all forms of sense inimical to their selfdestructive will. Insanity like Hitler's, thinking that he could steal Europe, thinking that he was stronger than Europe and America, is very rare. The most arrogant, megalomaniac dictator cannot walk around naked, because people are too sure it is wrong. What if people were as certain that overpay is wrong? The confidence of the overpaid would wilt into the ground. Respect for them would have vanished. They would give up a losing battle, even if they had no atom of sense of justice. If there was ever anyone against insurance, they gave up the unequal battle. Also, with 99% conscious that pay justice means more pay for them, means world peace, means survival, means an end to warmongering and cannonfoddering of the people, much of the muscle of the superrich will be against them. Ideas are the root of all action. Changing ideas changes everything. Permanently. Without a fight. Like the coming of insurance. You judge. It seems to me that the arguments are very strong, and that people will see them if they look the ideas hard in the face, while ignoring the voice of accepted ideas, the voice of custom, which has got where we are.

For those who think that not all wars are pay-justice wars.
It seems that there are religious wars and racial wars. But take overpay and underpay out of the situation, will you have war left? There are places where there are religious differences, racial differences, with low inequality of wealth and power, with little violence. South Africa was clearly an economic war along racial lines, not a racial war. Northern Ireland is an inequality war along religious lines, the Catholics being kept poor and out of power. Rwanda was a war for monopoly of power and hence wealth. In the Middle East, there are vast disparities of wealth, 10-20% absolute poverty with oil-rich shieks. Egalitarian Scandinavia spends 2% of wealth on defense, the Middle East spends around 50%. Average Israeli income is 20 times Palestinian income. For some reason, the newspapers always present these as religious or racial wars, never as justice wars. Perhaps newspaper owners do not like to think about pay justice. The top twenty countries on the peace index and the equality index have ten names in common, although peacefulness of a country is partly dependent on interference from outside.

For those who think that extinction is not going to happen, even if we do nothing to correct pay theft.
Inequality, violence, war, crime and weaponry have grown for 3000 years or more. Clearly they will continue to grow, if we do nothing appropriate. We are at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] now. Power to destroy has increased by a factor of 60,000 in the last fifty years, from power to kill 100,000 in one day [Dresden, Hiroshima, 87 firebombed Japanese cities] to power to put up enough smoke, above the rain washout level, to block out the sun permanently and lower world temperature 25 degrees, which is three times colder than an ice-age, and to irradiate the earth for a million years. Advance in transport technology in the last 200 years has effectively shrunk the planet by a factor of 250, concentrating the violence, like pressurizing a gas, raising the temperature, bringing the opponents 250 times closer together, like bringing electric poles closer together. 200 years ago, a day away was 50 miles away, today a day away is 12,500 miles away. The rich get soft and drained by defense and the poor get busy. Third-world share of wealth is climbing by 10% every 30 years, and accelerating. By 2100, if we get there, the third world will have 98% of population and 98% of wealth. Meanwhile topsoil loss is 1% a year, 100% a century, which means vast billions fighting over dwindling remnants of topsoil. Then there is oil. The reduction of oil will put a brake on transport, therefore on 'warability', but people will fight over the remaining stores of oil. We have already dumped 600 tonnes of depleted uranium, so we [super-unequal humanity, humanity in the hands of the megalomaniacs] don't seem to be shy of using radiation. We are less likely to have an all-at-once nuclear war, but we will have a bomb here, a bomb there, here a bomb, there a bomb, making irreversible inroads on sunlight, without which, nothing. I think there is better than a 1% chance of extinction, and that means a better than 1% chance of a bomb in your house. Global means local. Every local. Global extinction is a local issue. People think that big issues are for big people, leaders. But the leaders we have with super-extreme inequality are the most rapacious, the most mindlessly more-for-me people, busy in a very intense fight with all the other most rapacious and mindless. They are giants in fierce battle with giants. How much time do you think giants spend, can spend, want to spend, thinking about the welfare of ants? Think Katrina. They are the ones with least sense of the practical benefits of the golden rule. They are like Shakespeare's Richard III, killing all around him, to get and hold power, till he is left alone, defenseless. Like Hitler. Like Stalin. Like Cardinal Wolsey, pulling down those above him and pushing down those below him, climbing to be alter rex, the other king, and then getting pushed out. Every rapacious person born is heading up to the top, and battling it out with the softer, older, more exhausted top people. If a good, or half-good person reaches the top, they are disposed of. Only the people can save us. Many people sense the wrongness of overwealth and avoid it. Governments in unequal societies, which most are, are the least responsible, the least able to respond to reality.