Church of practical truth - catechism [satirish]

Church of Practical Truth

Catechism

What is the practical truth?
That a few people have stolen almost all the world.

How do we know this?
Pay per year ranges from 10,000th of global average to 100,000 times gl. av. 90% receive less than 100th of gl.av. 99% receive less than gl. av. Draw the graph, and you can see that 1% have well over 90% of world income.

How has this happened?
There is a natural range of acquisitiveness in human nature.

What has this theft done?
Money is the joker good, good for virtually everything , so it has stolen virtually everything, including social power. The theft of virtually everything causes near-maximal suffering. It has caused violence proportional to the extremity of the theft. Money is power, inequality of power is tyranny-slavery. The violence is ever-growing as both sides try to prevail, and they create ever-bigger weaponry to prevail. It has brought us to 60 times PDC [planet death capability].

Can anything be done to cure this situation?
No. The more acquisitive are always more acq. than the less acq. More alert, quick, cunning, resourceful, eager, energetic, desirous, ingenious, calculating, demanding, presumptuous, keen, brutal, indecent, senseless, shameless, self-righteous.

Will this situation lead to universal extinction soon?
Yes. The ever-growing violence is like a boiler with relief valve stuck and the pressure gauge well into the red and rising.

Would a cure have been possible if some parts of reality were different?
Yes. If people had been alive enough to grasp the maximal danger of the situation and the super-extreme benefits of change, the super-extreme inequality and violence could have been undone without social disturbance by making everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased overfortunes and by making everyone equal beneficiaries of a 1%-a-month money supply increase. If everyone who heard these data had told just two people, every adult would have learned them in just 31 times the time to tell two people, by word of mouth alone.

Would this re-distribution have been just?
Yes. The private heir has done nothing to make that fortune, and everyone has done everything to make the goods which that fortune represents and buys.

Would this have required a great bureaucracy?
No. The first part required only the settling up of the estate and electronic distribution. The second part required only the electronic distribution.

Would the second part have caused inflation?
Yes. This would have reduced the overfortunes without needing to measure private fortunes. Both the 1% overpaid and the 99% underpaid would have received the equal share, only to save the enormous bureaucracy required to distinguish the two. The combination of the inflation effect and the equal share would have steadily, gently reduced overfortune and lifted underfortune. Inflation is not bad when the underpaid are fully compensated for it. Regular inflation is not troublesome, as irregular inflation is.

Is pay justice good?
Yes. It benefits overpaid and underpaid. If one person has the goods of 1000, he has merely 1000 times more than he can use, and has lost 1000 friends and gained 1000 enemies. A society in which everyone works and produces abundance can be made extremely unhappy by extreme misdistribution.

Does human society produce abundance?
Yes. The global average pay per hour is now [2007] US$40, paying housewives and students as well. All the work equals all the workproducts, equals all the money. The annual global income divided by the global number of hours worked is the world-average pay per hour, and that is the amount of wealth produced by one person in one hour. The effect of money on happiness declines to zero below US$100,000 per year per family, and the world-average pay per family per year is double that.

Why is there not enough sense to enjoy pay justice?
The power of imagination is not great enough to break through the spell cast by custom and convention. Overfortune fascinates and compels admiration instead of dismay. People do not have the distinction between self-earned fortune, which is always good, and other-earned fortune, which is always bad. Individual contribution is limited, so unlimited fortune is necessarily overpay, other-earned, theft. It is the love of other-earned fortune which is the root of all evils. When there is a range of fortune, there is no visible level of pay justice to aim for. The overpaid aim for more because of the demands of self-defence, which are proportional to overfortune. The underpaid aim for more to reduce their underpay. People ignore the connection of overpay-underpay and violence. The overpaid automatically and unconsciously generate and spread every misconception to support their overpay. People inherited limited mental vision from nature, which serves them ill in society, where technological connections run round the world. Global data is in its infancy. There is inherited deference to alpha males, and to father figures. People project their own level of acquisitiveness on others. The underpaid underestimate the acquisitiveness of the overpaid, the overpaid overestimate the acquisitiveness of the underpaid. Technology has raised the level of production above the level at which most people rest content, which leaves wealth free to be picked up by the highly acquisitive, and then that overpay gives overpower to steal ever-more. People assume that an idealistic idea must be unrealistic. People will not move from unreal happiness to real happiness via real misery. All of the people can be fooled most of the time. We are 98% identical to chimpanzees. The rational brain is a tiny fraction of the brain. Thinking is hard work. Pursuit of real happiness is totally dependent on pursuit of reality, reality is in the big picture, and people are in the very partial picture. People are paralysed by the inhumanity. There is aversion to the implication of learning: that we don't know everything.

Is war human nature?
No. War has increased over 1000s of years, human nature has remained the same. Noncorrelation proves noncausality. [Correlation doesn't prove causality.]

Are there religious and racial wars?
No. So-called religious and racial wars are pay-injustice wars, social power wars, along religious or racial lines. Wherever there are religious or racial differences without pay injustice, there are no wars. Noncorrelation again. Money is the joker good, so money is the practical issue.

Should people be paid the same per hour?
Yes. Provided students are paid, there are no reasons for higher-than-average hourly pay. All of the reasons given and received for higher-than-average pay per hour are false. The underpaid support them, because they hope to decrease their underpay by them, but people benefit by them in proportion to their pay, so allowing those false reasons increases overpay-underpay. There are thus many wide-open legal thefts in society, supported by everyone, destructive of everyone.

What are these legal thefts?
Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, no pay for nonwork things, pay only for work, pay only for sacrifice of time and energy by the person receiving payment. There is payment for scarcity, for high demand relative to supply, as in new technology. There is underpayment of work wherever labour is in surplus. There is artificial creation of oversupply of labour by theft of land. There is payment for owning land, when others' work building a city or other infrastructure increases the value of the land. There is payment only to landowners and stockholders of all nature's bounty, which every living person has a birthright equal share of. There is the theft built in to every transaction. The two things in a transaction cannot have equal workvalue, so every transaction contains a drop of inequality, which grows with every transaction. Therefore those who engage in more transactions often accumulate the effect of many transactions. Society rewards natural gifts, which are work by nature, not by the person. People are paid for having studied, although there is no work in having studied. Students are paid for studying by parents, scholarships or the students, when it is society that benefits. Inflation subtracts wealth, and then this is lent back to people at excessive rates. Managers set their own rate of pay. Profits are in excess of owner's work. There is conquering and enslaving, which are not yet illegal. Power to extract wealth is proportional to wealth. The overpaid control governments, the legal system, the army and police, and are therefore free to warmonger and cannonfodder at will. War brings great profits because the products are quickly destroyed.

Who is more powerful, the overpaid or the underpaid?
The underpaid. Every empire, every plutocracy in history has been destroyed by the underpaid. The overpaid have proportional overpower, but the forces against them are proportional to the overpay. The greatest overpay is finite, and the erosive forces against them exist as long as the overpay exists. Every injury produces attack as long as the injury continues. Injury energises. The sense of justice in people is indestructible. The overpaid are attacked by underpaid and overpaid.

How much happier could we have been, if we had chosen pay justice?
Compared to the zero of extinction racing towards us, infinitely, for any finite is infinitely larger than zero. Apart from that, very conservatively, literally, 100 times happier. Inequality violence misery has been growing since trade began, with its built-in inequality, and since wealth became storable and nonperishable. Happiness has been declining imperceptibly slowly for about 3000 years. We cannot imagine the level of happiness we had 3000 years ago, although 3000 years of peace, and multiroom houses for everyone, in the Cretan empire gives a clue. If a government took 90% of income off 90% of people and gave it to 1%, violence misery would increase enormously. There would be the loss of 81% of happiness in the loss of 81% of national income, plus the enormous increase in violence, plus the loss of productivity in the violence and disorder, and in the severe weakening of productivity of the 90%, plus the waste of wealth in the destruction of property and people, plus the disinformation confusion caused by the war. The 1% would lose greatly, because means would merely exceed desires, they would lose fraternity, and gain intense danger. These additional factors would raise the loss of happiness from 81% to something like 99%. So such a state would be 100 times happier with an end to the policy. Yet this imaginary situation has an inequality violence misery factor of only 820. The real global inequality violence misery factor is 1,000,000,000, rising. Therefore we would be, very conservatively, literally, 100 times happier. As unbelievable as 100 times is to us, that number is very conservative, but we cannot imagine. For instance, technological progress would be 100 times faster, because now 90% of brains are tied up in the consequences of the super-extreme inequality violence misery, in government, business, military-industrial-prison complex, hospitals, legal system, and 90% of brains are too poor to become scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, etc. How happy can a body be with most blood in the brain? How well can a machine run with all the oil in one part? A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day, can hire 100,000 soldiers for 1000 days at $10 a day. With pay justice, one person would be hard-put to hire one soldier. Warmongering and cannonfoddering would be reduced to near zero.

Could all this be achieved without force or violence?
Yes, because such a high percentage would prefer life to death and 100fold happiness to the miseries of overpay and underpay, that the incorrigible among the overpaid would have no muscle to oppose it.

Is there hope?
Yes. There is one hope in a billion. An uprising of the will to survive, to be real, to be happy. If people found just the eagerness to learn and teach these overview points to just two friends, there would be, in just 31 times the time to teach two, a near-unanimous global human consciousness of how bad it is and how good it can be, and the simple changes would be made and would be sufficiently supported to prevail over the dumping of the whole human race.