HAPPINESS PLAN
Calling all people who care about themselves and their loved ones.
Free, costs no money.
Just have the selflove and seriousness to examine, confront and consider the facts the media don't tell you.
Every person can be much happier, much freer from all the nasties of present human life.
THERE IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS GLOBAL EMERGENCY
US$275,000 a year for the average family.
Practical, realistic.
Overpay and underpay, and the consequent violence [war, crime and weaponry], have been growing for 1000s of years.
So we have been 'saving up' happiness for 1000s of years.
Easy to do, just learn it and teach two friends.
Requires thinking caps firmly on, but every assistance to understanding is very happily given.
No group to join, individual action and choice only.
No social struggle involved, education only, realising the immense danger and the immense opportunity.
World peace, world friendliness, world pleasure.
Increases happiness and quality of life, enormously, for absolutely every person.
Compatible with all beliefs.
No big change in societies, just one new law.
Total downside is: checking it out, adjusting your mindset one notch, and telling two friends about it if you like it.
The 'unbelievable' conclusions follow simply from very believable premises.
There is a big problem with this plan: people prejudge that there must be an insurmountable problem with it!
The only real way to stop war and crime, and to avoid human extinction soonish.
Permanently stops arrogant ignoring government, and corruption, exploitation, undemocracy.
Unanimously supported by all history and wisdom, but a new, vital distinction.
Creates the soil for intelligent government.
The teenytiny root mistake that is ruining quality of life for everyone everywhere.
The price of this plan is: Look it over carefully, don't jump to conclusions.
We must turn human life from lead to gold now, or perish forever.
This is correcting a universal human error with your own simple good sense.
This is not setting aside your sense for someone's else's notions.
It is the time for the highest heroism: refining human good sense in the fire of dispassionate discussion.
There are only individuals, only individuals can make a difference.
The human race now needs every bit of human intelligence and responsibility.
Visit happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com and be open to growth through discussion.
Quote: If we want to hardwire a new behaviour, we just need to give our new mental map enough attention over enough time to ensure it becomes embedded in our brain.
Thought: It's no good knitting for the baby when the nursery's on fire. Prioritise for success. Chop the trunk instead of the branches and get far better results with less labour. Many people are tied up solving one problem or another. But most of these problems have a root cause. Attacking the root problem automatically kills all the branch problems.

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.

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-].
happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com

why do people choose unhappiness?

Why do humans choose unhappiness?
Do they choose unhappiness? Few believe that we do. Do we choose unhappiness? Vices exist. Vices cause unhappiness. That is what vices are, things chosen that cause unhappiness. Injustice is a vice. We have super-giga-astronomically extreme pay injustice, pay of US$30 BILLION for a year's work, to pay of US$30 for a year's work. Women do 70% of the work and get 10% of the pay. 1% of people get 90% of world income, while doing less than 1% of the work. 99% of people get underpaid, that is, they do more work than they get paid for. If world pay was a swimming pool one metre deep with just pay, our swimming pool water is 90% up in a needle of water going up a million metres, a thousand kilometres, leaving the depth of 99% of the pool between one metre deep and a thousandth of a metre deep, 90% of the pool between a tenth and a thousandth of a metre deep, 50% of the pool between a hundredth and a thousandth of a metre deep. And money is a joker good, the joker good, good for almost all good things, so the misdistribution of it is the misdistribution of almost everything. So the misdistribution of it causes violence. And this violence is evergrowing, as people try to prevail, some to keep, others to get. And yet we are not even talking about this reality, this most glaring reality of our lives, this maximal producer of misery in our lives. We have a situation which robs 100% of people of 99.99% of natural birthright levels of peace, and we are not even talking about it, let alone doing anything about it. When the subject is raised, we let the subject drop. We are in avoidance of the subject. We are in thrall to a miserymaker. Money is also power, political power, so pay injustice is undemocracy, tyranny, slavery. We have super-giga-astronomically extreme undemocracy, tyranny, slavery, corruption. And yet we are not even talking about it. We are not even interested in it. Something within us, which is an enemy to us, tells us not to think about it, and we obey without question. Virtually everyone has absolute faith in or commmitment to the present reality of super-giga-astronomical pay injustice. Or is not examining, doubting, questioning this status quo. And can hardly be roused to think about it by the super-giga-astronomical facts. We are pursuing goals that result in super-giga-astronomical unhappiness and we are not looking at it. We are not naming it. We are not admitting it. We have thousands of years of history of increasing pay injustice, undemocracy, tyranny and slavery, violence, war and weaponry, we have in the last fifty years increased our destructive power from being able to kill 100,000 to being able to kill 6,000,000,000, 60 times over, and we are, generally, not at all alarmed by this super-acceleration of our selfdestructive power. There is not even a body of discussion of this situation among the learned, the educated, or even among the foremost, most mature thinkers. And yet this super-giga-astronomical pay injustice and consequent super-giga-astronomical, unnecessary, escalating violence and misery could be easily and gently [not wavemakingly] removed in three generations by universal distribution of large deceased estates, which would be entirely just since the private heirs have done nothing to earn that wealth, and everyone has done everything to earn that wealth. There are in history no examples of survival of individuals, nations and empires built on injustice. There are many examples of nations built on relative pay justice that have been strong and growing. The early condition of all empires have always been relative pay justice and growth. The later condition of all empires has been pay injustice and decline and fall, with accelerating violence at all levels of society. The unjust impoverishment of Germany by the Versailles Treaty caused the second world war. The relative justice of the Marshall Plan after the second world war prevented another global depression and world war. MacArthur's acts of justice in Japan, through land reforms, caused Japan to go from defeated nation with 87 firebombed cities to top nation in just fifty years. The American dream of freedom from tyranny was built on prevention of wealth concentration, which is necessarily unjust, and since that time of wisdom nothing has been done in America to prevent concentration of wealth and political power in ever-fewer hands. The emergence of gross over-wealth in the new world has been greeted with celebration. Everyone can see that, if a government causes extreme pay injustice, by, say, taking 90% of income off 90% of people and giving all that to 1%, that act will cause a very dramatic increase of violence, problems, troubles, fears, unsafety, danger, anxieties and griefs. So everyone can see the connection between pay injustice and violence. Yet everyone chooses unhappiness. Why? People know that money is power, and yet they sit by while a few accumulate unlimited power and use that power to foment war. People think of themselves as patriotic while they allow unlimited accumulation of pay injustice which always destroys states. 99% of people are net losers by pay injustice. And yet they do nothing to limit fortunes to justice. They know that individual contribution to the social pool of wealth is necessarily limited, and yet they allow unlimited fortunes. They know that payment for having studied is double payment for the work of studying, for which the students have been paid while studying [students do not live on air], and they know that this payment for having studied makes many costs greater for them, but they do nothing to limit pay to justice. They know that paying people for having natural gifts is paying the person for things that nature has done, that the person has not done, but they allow it, although they must pay for this payment for nothing the person has done. People know that in general everyone works, more or less equally, and that, on the other hand, pay per unit of work is super-extreme, and causes super-extreme and escalating violence, and yet they do not seek means of advancing justice, peace, safety, freedom. Do people love slavery, danger, death, sadness, anxiety, grief, labour of rebuilding what is destroyed by war and crime, the labour of fighting for justice in the courts against the great tide of injustice, of super-inequality of power? People know that overpay cannot add to happiness, because they know that fairpay satisfies all but the teenytiniest of desires, they know that fairpay satisfies all needs, all desires right down to doll's furniture for a child. People know that, however great the house or boat, the rich can only sit in one chair, sleep in one bed, eat one meal per mealtime, drink as much, make love as often, love their children as much, as the fairpaid. People know that overpay adds greatly to danger, because they know that the attacks on piles of wealth are proportional to the size of the pile, and they know the vast numbers of the wealthy and powerful who have struggled desperately all their lives to maintain their position, and the vast numbers of the wealthy and powerful who have fallen to attacks, by conquest, assassination, takeovers, backstabbing, golddigging, etc. They know that every plutocracy in history has been destroyed. They know that there are many wideopen legal thefts in our social systems. They know that there is no limitation of profits to fairpay for owners' labour. They know that it is the easiest thing in the world for a company to get $11 for something containing $10 of labour in the making and providing. They know that the workinput value of two things exchanged cannnot be equal and so transaction must produce an endlessly stretching bell curve of overpayment and underpayment, of transference of wealth from earners to nonearners. They know that sellers puff prices and shrink costs, and that this is necessarily theft. They know that there are many situations of payment for scarcity, which is payment for absence. They know that new technology is a situation of large demand and small supply, allowing prices to freely exceed total costs. They know that capital gains are payment to stockowners and landowners of the infrastructure labour of the whole community, in proportion to the size of their holdings. They know that no one can work more than about 50% longer hours than the average. They know that about 50% of people even in the first world have net negative estates. They know that revolutions happen when the middle class are impoverished. They know that people generally retaliate injury. They know underpay is the greatest injury, the joker-injury, the biggest no-joke injury. They know that if you have 1000 sweets and 100 children and a gamerule to grab from the pool and from each other, you will have scratched faces and tears, and no end to grabbing and being grabbed from, and an end to friendship. They know that if one person grabs the possessions of a thousand that the thousand will be unhappier and the one will be unhappier, with merely more goods than he can use, and with a thousand enemies. They know that there are people increasing their fortune by up to US$100 million per day. They know that 1% of working people are starving to death each year. They know that another 1% of humanity is being killed by violence each year, and another 5% being seriously injured by violence each year. They know that one million girls are being sold into sexual slavery each year, and that this causes profound bitterness and hatred. They know that two million people are going blind for lack of 4c of vitamin a per year, which is reducing productivity, and increasing the workburden on others. They know that people resent underpay and slavery. They know that Sicilian poverty created a powerful will to rise and conquer that now dominates America. They know that every poverty is creating personalities to conquer their way to the top of the heap. They know that every family working average hard earns and would be paid US$100,000 a year with justice, and that this would mean ten times as many scientists, ten times as fast progress, a hundredth of the violence and trouble. They know that egalitarian Scandinavia has 2% defense costs and a relatively stable happy safe society, and that Middle East has superpoverty and wealth, and spends around 50% of GNP on defense. So why do people not save themselves from the miseries of overpay and of underpay? Why are they unalarmed, and why do they just watch, or not watch, without comment or thought, as pay injustice, violence and misery accelerate freely from the present super-giga-astronomical levels to infinity or nuclear winter? Is there a profound and overriding resentment of physical existence? Is there at bottom of human nature a yearning to return to formless being, a longing to be 'blown to fook'? Or are people fundamentally driven by a desire to be super-punished? Is there an immense yet hidden selfhate that refuses to allow the self to have happiness? Or is it that people are being manipulated by powerful internal forces that seek everyone's destruction, that cut people off from their own sense, that plant confusion and misconception in human minds? No one is even contemplating this super-giga-astronomical conundrum of human nature. There is not even a small body of philosophers engaged in the study of this mightiest of questions, this question that super-giga-astronomically screams over everything human.

why do ppl choose unhappiness?

We humans at present have pay per unit of work from a thousandth of world average to a million times world average. From US$30,000,000,000 to US$30 for a year's work. Super-extreme pay injustice, aka theft. The society built on injustice cannot stand. We wish society to stand, to survive.
Something will have to be done.
One method of reducing the pay injustice is by making every human the equal heirs of large deceased estates. This is just, for the private heirs do nothing to earn that money, and everyone does everything to earn that money. This is easy to administer. It is low-impact, gently respreading unjust overfortune back to the earners and true owners over a period of two or three generations. It requires very little change to society. It allows limitless overfortune in a person's lifetime while utterly preventing the endless concentration of unjust overfortune and political power over time. It is approximate justice, but it is sufficient to prevent 99% of the troubles suffered by humans.
In the past and at the present, people are approving and supportive of limitless wealth. But the social pool of wealth is finite. It may grow or shrink, as people do more or less work, but it is always finite. The social pool of wealth is formed by work, and work is finite. The number of people who work is not fixed but it is always finite, the hours they work are finite, so the pool of wealth is finite. So if some take out of the social pool of wealth more than they put in, others take out less than they put in. If some get money without work, others have to get work without money. That is, theft, slavery, less than a fair share of political power, causing war, crime, riots and revolutions. Limitless overfortune and overpower means limitless underfortune and underpower. Money is a joker good, good for almost all good things. So underpay, underpower is very bad in itself, and also it causes violence, as everyone tries to get more. Underpay is caused by overpay. People are supportive of limitless wealth, because they do not yet see that it means limitless poverty, and limitless poverty or underpay causes limitless violence [war and crime] and limitless escalation of violence, as both sides try to prevail. Hence pay injustice causes universal misery. Violence reaches everyone, from most overpaid to most underpaid. The pressure caused by the extreme overpay and underpay in Rumania caused the assassination of Ceausescu, although he had the secret police of an entire country to protect him. The pressure was greater than the extreme protection. And so it is with every situation of overpay and underpay everywhere, in every time. Like honey in a pot, the higher that honey is pulled above the level, the further the level drops. We have pulled the honey up to a million times the original horizontal level of equal pay for equal work, and thus 99% of people are underpaid per unit of work, 90% of people are paid between a tenth and a thousandth of what they contribute to the honey pool by their work. At present, 1% of people get 90% of world income. US$70,000,000,000,000 a year. Which is US$70,000 average of earnings stolen from every family in the world. Between 99.9% of US$75,000 per year and 0% of US$75,000 per year stolen from 99% of world workers. Every family working average hard would be getting all they earn, which is US$75,000 a year, if there was no overpay. And every family would have a fair share of economic and political power, that is, they would have democracy and freedom from tyranny, from the overpower of the overpaid. Violence would be minimal. People think that the richer the richest person is, the richer we all are. Whereas the truth is that the richer the richest person is, the poorer we all are. Even the richest person is also far poorer. Not in money, but in safety and happiness, for the attacks on the rich person and rich countries are proportional to the underpay surrounding the rich person. Every plutocracy, every empire in history has been brought to dust by the underpaid surrounding them. Every concentration of overpay has had to spend itself to protect itself. The attacks on overpay are ceaseless, so the costs of defending overpay are ceaseless, whereas the overfortune, however great, is finite, and so is in time exhausted. So overpay does not pay in the long run. It does not pay in the short run, either, since the overpaid must spend all their time defending themselves. Also overpay can add virtually nothing to pleasure, since fairpay satisfies all but the very smallest of desires. The overpaid can have bigger houses, flasher cars, more travel, but they cannot consume much more than the fairpaid. They cannot eat more food, drink more wine, sit in more seats, have more saunas and spas, see more sights, have more sex than the fairpaid can. So overpay and underpay only reduces the net satisfaction of humanity in proportion to the underpay. Plus add the violence, which is proportional to the ratio between overpaid and underpaid, and which consumes overpaid and underpaid equally. Although 1% are overpaid, the 1% who are overpaid are constantly changing. The sea of overpay and underpay is constantly on the move, with crests plunging to troughs and troughs climbing to crests. History pays little attention to the ones who fall, for what can be said about the activities of the dead, or about those thrust from the stage? So history gives us the impression that the overpaid, the powerful often survive. But the numbers of the fallen great are far greater than the numbers of those who remain. And those who remain on the stage of history spend their lives in extreme struggle. The costs of defense force the overpaid to make further raids on the underpaid, which aggravates the opposition to them. The powerful are forced to attack and kill their associates who might take their place, and so again they increase the opposition to them. The more the overpaid empower their defenders, the more they empower their defenders to attack them. So overpay causes a vicious accelerating circle leading towards their fall.
So pay injustice hurts everyone. So pay justice will help everyone. So, if humans can attack and defeat their prejudice in favour of overpay, they can be much happier.
We have super-extreme overpay. So we can be super-extremely happier. We can move from an extremely rough sea for everyone to a smooth sea for everyone. We do not need to make a one-by-one attack on all the ways that overpay and underpay are caused. We can allow all those ways to remain in our social systems. All we need to do is to stop wealth and power concentration from going on endlessly, generation after generation, making the sea of human society ever-rougher, by redistributing the consequences of all the ways that overpay occurs. The private heirs can have the first US$1 million of deceased estates, as a compassionate gift from everyone, and the rest can be returned to the earners of it. It is not necessary to distinguish the overpaid from the underpaid in the just redistribution, because the overpaid are going to be trimmed at death anyway, and because 99% are underpaid, and because it saves the enormous bureaucratic labour and waste of money of assessing everyone's fortunes to see whether they fall among the 99% or not. It is far cheaper to give an equal share of the large deceased estates to the 1% overpaid as well, than to assess everyone's fortunes. Over two or three generations, it will all even out. The overpaid will be freed from attack, from the danger, immense labour and intense psychological pressure of selfdefense, freed from isolation from the human community, from distrust of everyone, from a life living over an abyss. The overpaid will have very very slightly diminished pleasure [no solid gold taps], the underpaid will have very very greatly increased pleasure. Everyone's pleasure will increase enormously. Ten times as many people will be able to get a university education, technological progress will go ahead ten times faster. Army, police, war, crime, legal, lawmaking, government, hospital, rebuilding and corruption costs will diminish dramatically.
So far history has been a scene of everyone with absolute faith that limitless wealth, taking as much as one can with no regard for how much belongs to one by right of having created it by one's own work, is good. This has resulted in ever more desperate misery for everyone. It is not hard to see the error in this belief. Therefore everyone will free themselves from it. History has no examples of injustice being good for anyone. History has no examples of justice being bad for anyone. Every society has prospered with pay justice and crumbled with pay injustice. Every overpay has been attacked and demolished by the underpay around it. No overpaid person has been able to wrest any more pleasure from overpay than from fairpay. Reading of history and biography will give example after example of the impotence, the tragedy and suffering of overpay. History gives no example of the superjoy of superoverpay. Overpay gives the sour empty pseudo-joy of: I am considerably richer than you, I'm the king of the castle and you're the dirty rascal.
At the moment, thinking of justice gives people a sinking feeling. They see in their mind's eye that superb needle of superwealth falling. They don't see the level in the honeypot rising, they don't see the meter needle on violence falling out of the red danger zone and back into the black and into the small figures. Taking enlivens and excites the spirit. Giving back depresses the spirit. It seems that we remember grabbing the toy and having to give it back, we do not remember having the toy grabbed from us and getting it back, we do not remember the cessation of hostility and the restoration of friendship by sharing. All the violence and suffering in the world has not made the human spirit hesitate in its devotion to the mania of building a taller heap of wealth. The growth, for thousands of years, of violence, of war and weaponry, with all its torture and amputations and deaths, has not damaged the faith in growing the pillar of wealth. The jump of weaponry power in the last fifty years from being able to destroy a city to being able to freeze a planet, from being able to kill 100,000 to being able to kill 6,000,000,000, has not planted a seed of hesitation in the heart of humanity. It is a mania that goes beyond selfishness. It is a mania with no regard for selfinterest, for personal safety and happiness. And the brain seems to be under an interdiction against thinking about it, an interdiction which it unfortunately obeys without question or thought.
Because we have the greatest pay injustice in history, we have the greatest opportunity for increase of happiness in history.
People have a great faith that things cannot be greatly improved, that large improvement is unrealistic. We have had thousands of years of experience of things not getting dramatically better. We have had thousands of years of experience of new ideas not making things better. But this forgets that a small action and error can have large consequences. A little carelessness with the steering wheel and the family can die. Everyone wanting to be just a little richer than the next person means that the heap of humans gets ever taller. If every drop in the ocean wanted to be just a little higher than the next drop, the ocean would climb and climb into the sky. If some people are just a little more ambitious and aggressive than others in getting richer, with no social limitation of wealth to what has been earned by the individual, wealth and power concentration, overpay and underpay, tyranny, slavery and violence, will go on increasing forever. And while the error has small effects in a day or a year, this error has been persisted in for thousands of years. One may say that we have been saving happiness for thousands of years. We have been building up unhappiness for thousands of years. One drop does not hurt the house, but one drop per second for 20 years rots the house. So there is no reason to think that large improvement is unrealistic. In fact, what is unrealistic is that we cannot make large improvement in our situation after thousands of years of accumulating the effects of our drop of error. Since we are hitting ourselves on the head so hard with the hammer of limitless unjust fortune, we can be very much happier. We have to destroy the habit of thinking our present super-miserable situation is happiness.
People fatalistically think that war is natural, human nature. But the amount of war that is natural to human nature is the amount of war we had before inequality started growing, the amount of war we had for millions of years before the thousands of years of growth of pay injustice and its consequent violence.
Universal inheritance of large deceased estates is in one sense a radical change. But if we can allow ourselves to consider it, and come to see the reasons for having it, it is no more difficult to get than to get insurance set up in society, and then that happiness which we have saved up for thousands of years will shower down on us over the next two or three generations, and its very good effects will remain with us forevermore, like the good effects of insurance. At present, a person with a billion dollars can hire a million soldiers for a thousand days at $1 a day. We have warmongering by the overpaid and cannonfoddering of the underpaid. 50 million violence deaths each year. That is 1% of humanity murdered by violence each year. With equal pay for equal work, with no one getting out more than they put in, and no one getting out less than they put in, one person will be hard put to hire one soldier. If the social pool of wealth was a swimming pool one metre deep, our water is 90% up in a narrow needle going up a million metres, a thousand kilometres, and 90% of the swimming pool is between a tenth and a thousandth of a metre deep. With universal seasick violence, proportional to the distance from the lowest to the highest point, to the distance from the top of the highest crest to the bottom of the lowest trough. With our swimming pool so terribly drained and so dangerously overhigh, and all of it in such violent commotion, we can be very greatly happier in our swimming. And all we need to do is to tax the dead.
If everyone who encountered this idea used the facilities available to them [talking, photocopying, letters, internet, newspapers, books, tv, film, etc] to allow others to consider it, this idea would reach everyone in the world in a month. If everyone who encountered this idea only passed it on to just two people, everyone in the world would hear of it in just 31 times the time it takes to tell two people.
The difficulty is getting it through people's mental barriers. These mental barriers are invisible. The psychology of these mental barriers is largely unknown.
Is this idea sound? It is not hard to see that you can make a community in which everyone works, more or less equally, and producing plenty for all, extremely miserable and unsafe just by extremely unjust distribution. We are producing US$75,000 worth of goods per family per year. We are producing US$75 trillion worth of goods per year, and we have about one billion families. And we are giving US$70 trillion a year to 1%. It is not hard to see that we must have extreme injustice, extreme overpay for work when we have people increasing their fortune by up to US$100 million for one day's work. That is, when we give a person a license to take out US$100 million worth of goods and of political power from the social pool of wealth in return for putting in to the social pool of wealth the products of one day's work. Obviously, it must be very very true that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is, that the everchanging 1% get ever more and more pay per unit of work and the everchanging 99% get ever less and less per unit of work. It is impossible to imagine that anyone would choose to live in a place where they had a 100% chance of being embroiled in extreme and escalating violence and danger, close to extinction, and closing, rather than in a place where they had a 100% chance of being surrounded by people working and eating in perpetual peace. At the moment, the world is like a boiler with the pressure needle in the red and climbing. Some people will think: Well, I'm all right now. But what is the use of that when the winds will carry the atomic smoke to every part of the globe, and destroy all food everywhere? What is the use of that when violence is as mobile as people are, gets everywhere that people get to? And it is a pity that 20% of people don't believe in reincarnation, because it enables them to think: What does it matter when I'm dead? What if the 80% of people who believe in reincarnation are right? What if the Byzantine emperor who removed reincarnation from Christianity was wrong? And anyway, it would be nice to give our descendents a future and happiness.
We humans have super-extreme pay injustice and consequent super-extreme unnecessary violence and misery, which has torn human society terribly for thousands of years, and is continuing to do so, with great acceleration, thanks to e=mc squared. Something must be done.










We humans can be much happier.
This idea is:
Free.
Easy to do, little work involved, just educating three people.
Requires no big change to society, just a few new laws that concern only large deceased estates, but helps everyone.
Requires no conflict in society to have it adopted, because it is like insurance or icecream, it benefits everyone.
Involves no organisation, no group, no leader, no ideology; it is based entirely on individual responsibility, individual private action.
All that is needed to make us much much happier is a law distributing large deceased estates equally to everyone. The private heir has done nothing to make that wealth. That wealth has been made by everyone and it belongs to everyone. This one law would stop the endless concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands, which is the cause of 99% of our troubles.
This idea means:
Every family working at world-average hardness being paid all they earn, around US$100,000.
Avoidance of nuclear winter, universal extinction, artificial super-iceage.
Disappearance of 99% of violence [war and crime].
Far greater democracy, freedom, justice, peace, scientific progress, smooth functioning of society, friendship, international harmony, trust, safety.
Far less anxiety, fear, terror, grief, pain, conflict, struggles, suffering, hardship, crisis, change of fortune, problems, waste, destruction, need for fighting for rights, tyranny and slavery.
There is no difficulty in getting the points of the idea to people. The points are simple to understand, not highly technical or such. Every adult in the world can learn this idea, just by word of mouth, in just 31 times the time it takes to pass it on to two people. And then there are all the communication media. There are 4 billion adults to reach, but there are 4 billion adults to reach them. It is easy to get the idea to people's doors.
The difficulty is getting the idea into people's heads. There are mental barriers to understanding it which have to be overcome, barriers which can only be overcome by mental effort.
We have to modify a profound natural instinct, which works well in nature, but has been disastrous in society. We have to teach this profound natural instinct that it is not always good for us in society. In nature, it has served us well for millions of years, and should continue to do so forever. In society, grabbing from other people has brought us from happiness to vast unnecessary suffering and danger in a few thousand years.
Nature has provided us with a profound instinct which I will call grabbing. In nature, we, so to say, line up on one side of nature's tables, on which nature piles all her super-abundance, and we grab stuff. This is fine, and increases the store of goods in the human realm. And this is fine in society too. Indeed, it is essential for survival.
But in society, with the congregation in cities that our technology has made possible, it often happens that one's neighbour's goods are closer than nature's goods. Nature is happy for us to grab from her; here grabbing serves a good purpose, of increasing the goods in the human domain. But grabbing from other people does not increase the store of goods in the human domain. While people are grabbing from each other, they are not grabbing from mother nature. And grabbing from each other can tie people up forever, grabbing and being grabbed from, back and forth. Further, the grabbing and regrabbing often results in damage to the goods. And further still, the grabbing and regrabbing escalates endlessly, as both sides try bigger and bigger weapons to try to prevail. Like people fighting at a department store sale, they may tear the boxer shorts or whatever that they are fighting over, and they may go on to tearing each other up. Perhaps every bit of land in the world has been grabbed and regrabbed thousands of times, with zero gain, and great loss of life, time and labour.
Grabbing from nature is good, because nature doesn't grab back. Grabbing from other people is disastrous, because they do. Every individual and family and state and empire has been plundered to death. Honey attracts bears. A pile of goods attracts grabbers.
Billions of meals over millions of years have convinced us very deeply that grabbing, hunting and gathering, is perfectly good for our happiness. But only grabbing from nature is good, while grabbing from other people is very bad for our happiness. If we can discriminate the two, if we can stop thinking that grabbing is always good, and see when it is bad for us, we can stop hurting ourselves as we have been doing for thousands of years.
So profound is the conviction in our deepest senses that grabbing is good, that we have many forms of grabbing which are legal in our social systems. We will describe some of the major examples of these. This conviction, the deepest of our convictions, has made us approve of things which have actually impoverished everyone enormously, has made us approve of things which have decimated our happiness. We forget that a free license for us to grab is also a free license to others to grab from us. 100% of people are embroiled in the endless violence and misery and sufferings of the endless grabbing and being grabbed from; and the violence is escalative, rising to a crescendo of destruction. And 99% of people [a changing 99%] have less wealth than they would have if they had never approved of these forms of grabbing from each other.
We only need to come to see this, for the pain to end. We need to understand that our minds are telling us that grabbing is always good, and we are automatically trusting that, when in fact grabbing is good only when grabbing from nature. We are trusting that voice that is telling us that grabbing is always good, whereas we need to look at the reality and check the truth of that with our sense, and understand when it is not true. It is natural that we trust that voice, because nature has made us that way, but it is not always correct, not in society.
Grabbing from each other has resulted in extreme overpay and underpay, which is in fact very bad for both overpaid and underpaid. We will explain how that is true for the 1% overpaid as well as for the 99% underpaid. Bad for everyone. Stopping doing it will be good for everyone. Extremely good for everyone. So the effort is entirely in getting people to look at the reality and see the very simple truth. So there is no need for social conflict. There is only need for looking and seeing, and helping others to look and to see. We have first to look and see for ourselves, and, if we agree that it is true, second to help just two other people to see.
There may be a difficulty in explaining the point in that the parts of the point are interdependent, so that you have to have all the parts of the point before it all fits together, and everything is explained. It may be that each part can be explained only with some help from the other parts, so you have to wait until all the parts are described and you can fit them together and see the full explanation.
We will show how overpay and underpay happens, so you can see that there is pay injustice. Then we can understand that we ought to redistribute fortunes, that fortunes are not always all earned by the legal owner. And we will show why it makes sense that pay injustice is very bad for everyone. At the moment, people are thinking that what is in fact injustice is justice, and that what is in fact justice is injustice. So they don't agree with redistribution. They think that redistribution will be unfair and that it will be bad. Although we have had increasing pay injustice and increasing violence for thousands of years, people think, understandably but incorrectly, that grabbing is always good, because it has been good in nature for millions of years. The voice inside us that says that grabbing is always good does not know about society, it only knows about nature. We have to re-educate that voice to understand that in society grabbing is good only sometimes, and to understand when grabbing is good and when it is bad. The battle we have to undertake is to bring ourselves to seeing that that strong deep voice, in which we automatically have immediate total faith, which is always correct when we are in nature, is sometimes wrong when we are in society. Millions of years of living successfully in nature has convinced us that that voice is always correct and that we don't have to listen to any other voice. But we have to change that inside ourselves, and let the voice of our own simple good sense be listened to on the issue of grabbing. We have to say to that voice: Okay, maybe you are right, but it can't hurt to check; we are not going to just automatically believe you, we are going to look at the matter for ourselves. It takes only very simple good sense to see that grabbing from each other is not increasing the store of goods in the human domain. Grabbing from nature increases the store of goods in the human domain when we move goods from nature's domain to our domain, but grabbing from each other within the human domain does not. And it does not difficult to see that everyone can spend some of their time grabbing from each other, and so be grabbing from nature that much less. And it is not difficult to see that grabbing and regrabbing from each other can tie people up forever. Waste of time. Impoverishment. And it is not difficult to see that in the process of grabbing from each other, there will be damage to goods and to people. And it is not difficult to see that two groups grabbing back and forth will escalate the violence of grabbing in the hope of prevailing.
Driven by this unexamined faith in grabbing, we humans have been impoverishing ourselves by grabbing from each other for thousands of years, and escalating pay injustice, violence and misery for thousands of years Beginning to examine this faith in grabbing, and learning when it is good and when bad, will end this escalating, now-extreme misery. In the last fifty years, we have gone from being able to destroy a city to being able to destroy the whole planet's life, gone from killing 100,000 people to being able to freeze 6,000,000,000 people, a multiplication of our power to destroy by 60,000 in just the last fifty years. And with the continuing escalation of violence, driven by the extreme and increasing injustice, we must in finite time reach the point of violence of using those bombs. little by little, more and more. You cannot keep increasing the pressure in a boiler without the boiler exploding.
It is not hard to see that pay injustice causes violence. Money is a joker good, it is good for most good things, including all necessities and almost all desires. So the theft of it cannot ever be an unimportant matter. The theft of it is the greatest injury, a joker injury. People cannot afford to ignore such an injury, to swallow such a totally devastating injury. It is impossible to imagine anyone arguing that committing the enormous injustice of permanently taking 90% of income off 90% of people and giving all that to 1% would not cause a very dramatic increase in violence. All religious, ideological and racial wars have an economic cause. In all the places where there are religious, ideological and racial differences without any economic injustice [which is also power injustice], there is no conflict.

why do ppl choose unhappiness?

how we humans conned ourselves out of almost everything

How we conned ourselves out of almost everything
We have global communication, global finance, global transportation, global commerce, global war, global weaponry.
In 1998, Bill Gates increased his fortune by US$18 billion. In Burundi, the average income is US$100. In a world where 90% get less than a tenth of the world-average pay per hour, where 50% get less than a hundredth of the world-average pay per hour, it is easy to see that the lowest Burundi pay would be less than US$18 a year. Therefore the global payrange is by a factor of one billion. A pay injustice factor of one billion.
To put it in visual terms. If pay justice was a swimming pool one metre deep, what we have is the water from that pool sucked up in a needle of water going up one million metres, 1000 kilometres. So that 90% of the water is in the thin needle of water, 90% of the water in the pool is drained, and 90% of the depth of the pool is between 10 centimetres and one millimetre.
Someone getting 10% more for the same work would be unjust. Someone getting twice as much for the same work would be very unjust. If someone working beside you doing the same work was getting twice as much, you would be very unhappy. We have people getting a billion times as much, a billionth as much.
All countries have departments of justice. Philosophy has known for millenia that justice is a cause of happiness. James Madison said bluntly that the purpose of government is justice. The saying that no state built on injustice can stand, is at least as old as the Romans. And indeed history knows of no state or empire built on injustice that has survived. Every empire has in the end been built on pay injustice and has fallen. Yet we have conned ourselves into pay injustice with a present factor of one billion.
Which is also an unhappiness factor of one billion. So we have the greatest opportunity for increase of happiness in the history of the world. The opportunity-for-happiness-increase factor is also one billion. As bad as the present reality is, that is how much better it can be.
Pay injustice is theft. Pay injustice is theft of the thing that is most important in people's lives. Pay injustice is theft of the stuff that is good for exchange into millions of good things, including all necessities. So pay injustice generates the most violence. Which causes the unhappiness. Thus we have also a violence factor of one billion. Pay injustice, violence and unhappiness have been growing for millenia.
How have we conned ourselves into so much unhappiness?
For thousands of years, we have been making an error. And many things in our nature buttress this error. If we can conquer this very deeply rooted, very well buttressed error, we can have happiness increase by a factor of one billion.
What are we doing, that is growing such super-astronomical pay injustice, violence and unhappiness?
Everyone is going after more. More money. No one is going after getting out no more than they put in by their work. If money comes our way, if money can be made to come our way, we accept it, with no regard for how much we have contributed to the making of that money by our work creating wealth. The pool of wealth is the sum of the wealth creation by work. If anyone, by any means, takes out more wealth than they put in, others end up getting out less than they put in. If we get a billion dollars, by lottery, inheritance, profit, or whatever, we all accept it. A billion dollars is a license to take out from the pool of wealth a billion dollars of the products of work. Where we have not put in a billion dollars of wealth by our own work, others have put it in, and do not get to take it out. Theft, violence, unhappiness.
Violence will grow even if pay injustice is not growing. The two sides will throw ever more powerful weaponry at each other trying to prevail. And pay injustice is evergrowing. Because money is power to make money. At a modest 5% interest, a billion dollars is extracting $50 million of workproducts every year for no work at all.
The ideal that everyone is thoughtlessly aiming at is maximum money for minimum work. We are grabbing as much of the cake as we can get. This is the socially acceptable norm. This is the socially admirable norm. This is the game in town. It might produce happiness if the 99% of people who end up with less than they put in would take losing gracefully. If the 90% who end up with between a tenth and a thousandth of what they put in would laugh about it. If the 50% of people who end up with between a hundredth and a thousandth of what they put in would be happy about it. But they are also playing the game, which is to get more. Everyone is aiming to get all of the cake, all of the products of work. Which means that everyone else is the enemy of our aim. Having no limit to our goal means having no limit to our warring.
We play the game with a range of intensity and energy. Some of us, nearly all of us, play the game to an extent, and then depart to the sidelines to enjoy the cake we have got hold of. But we all allow the game. And the game can spill over into the sidelines. The violence is ever-increasing, the violence is as mobile as people, the violence gets into wherever people get to. In the last 50 years, we have gone from being able to destroy a city, a dot on the globe, to being able to destroy all planet life. 60 times over. We see the game, of getting as much as you can, and we see the violence, getting close to the planetary limit, and we do not connect the two. If we can connect the two, we can decide whether we want to stop play.
We can decide whether we want to start trying to play a new game, the game of grabbing all that we have earned, of working out, as well as we can, the amount we have put into the pool and taking out the same. 99% of people would be getting between one and a thousand times as much out. Power would be far more equally distributed, and so democracy and freedom would be near-maximal. Every family working average hard puts in about US$75,000 a year by their work, so every family working average hard would be getting out about US$75,000 a year. Which would mean a far more vigorous economy, far more spending, far more employment, far more successful businesses, far more scientists, far faster progress, far less waste on war and crime, far greater stability, far fewer problems, a human environment far more free of violence pollution.
Do we want to change the game? Some people like going to war, for the booty, for the chance of winning, for killing. A lot of people like the cut and thrust of the game of grab-all, grab-as-much-as-you-can, and can avoid connecting the game to the violence. If they connect the game and the violence, they can put their hopes in avoiding the violence. Most of us find it easy to disbelieve in global extinction by nuclear winter. Most of us believe in the localisation of war, the avoidability of war and other violence. The hostage-killing won't happen when we are visiting the embassy, won't happen in our bank, on our flight. The suicide bomber won't visit our cafe, our bus, our street. Even people in Beirut can believe this. If we want to change the game, we will. If we don't want to, we won't.
If we want to change the game, it is easy to do so. Increasing the money supply by 1% a month and putting the increase equally into all accounts will gently decrease the overfortunes and increase the underfortunes. Will lessen the pressure of the strangulation of the economy. Will start to lift the global extreme fiscal depression. Making inheritance public instead of private will mean the 90% of world income that is now up the needle will shower down on everyone, over the next few generations, putting out the fires of starvation, terrorism and war. It will reverse the endless concentration of wealth which spells the destruction of all states. It will restore the dream of freedom from tyranny and warmongering. The swimming pool will fill again, and everyone can get on with playing happily together again. Super-giga-astronomical unhappiness will change to super-giggle-astronomical happiness. If we want it.
Wanting it requires unlearning all we 'know' in the present game. We have a whole library of beliefs which keeps us believing in the present game. The present game puts out a constant propaganda on what is truth, and we have been listening to this for thousands of years, so that the real truth, the truth that agrees with our own good sense, seems nonsense.
Our own good sense tells us that paying people for the gifts that mother nature has given them is paying people for nothing they have done. But for thousands of years we have listened to the voice of the game which says that getting paid for nature's gifts is one way to play the game of grab-all. And the fact that the net result is that 99% of people are financing this pay to individuals for nothing they have done is hardly allowed to be heard by us. Almost all of us are keen to exploit any gift we have, although only 1% benefit financially from this error, and although 100% of us are embroiled in infinitely mobile, super-penetrating violence, on the brink of atomic extinction, from this and other errors.
In business, we strive to maximise the gap between costs and price. The costs are the work efforts that go into the products. The price is the license to take out of the pool of workproducts. In other words, we try to be as unfair as possible, to grab as much as we can. We sometimes deplore others' great success at doing this, but we do it ourselves. Again, the fact that the net effect is that 99% lose financially, and 100% are embroiled in violence which is now approaching its planetary limit, does not deter us.
A person can legally buy land, wait while others build a city around it, or increase the infrastructure around it, making the land more valuable, and then collect the workproducts of others via the increase of value of the land, and, although our own good sense can see that this is money for nothing for the landowners, meaning nothing for work for others, meaning growing violence and unhappiness for all, we support or do not oppose this, for we are playing the game and hope to profit from that form of grabbing too.
The longterm, very steady increase of value of the stockmarket, which is a reflection of the constant growth of social infrastructure, which is produced by the whole body of workers, is netted by the 10% or so who have shares, and is netted in proportion to the amount of shares people have, and yet we do not oppose this legal theft and injustice, for we are playing the game too.
We feel a kind of justice in everyone's equal right to grab as much as they can, and so we bear the super-extreme injustice, violence and unhappiness fruits of this.
We know individuals are netting up to US$100 million per day, and this only excites us and spurs us to try to do the same. The less some have, and the more others have, both these things spur us to ambition and grab-all. The game is exciting, the game draws us in, the game is inherently self-accelerating. As for some football fans, the game becomes life, and they are excited to the point of killing. When football fans reach this stage, they are reined in, and perhaps spend their lives in jail. But the raid-the-money-pool game is too big for the police to control. The money game is all over the human race. The landlords oppress the peasants, may I be a landlord, is the universal cry. Is there enough will, enough sanity, enough lack of excitement to madness, to rein in the money game? For thousands of years, there has not been enough will. And now the game has accelerated itself to the highest degree of excitement to madness. And now weaponry can freeze everything.
There is payment for scarcity in our system. The banana crop fails in Australia, imports are forbidden, to protect the industry, and prices go through the roof. Payment for absence of bananas. Licenses to take from the pool of workproducts in return for absence of bananas. The grain crop fails, imports are refused, license to take out for not putting in. Subsidies are paid to farmers to not grow, in order to raise prices relative to the work done. The coffee crop in Brazil fails, and Brazil reaps a bonus. The rich close the country, grab up the rural land, force off the poor, the poor are forced into the cities, making labour cheap, making the poor put in far more than they take out. New technology is at first scarce, and so the owners take out billions in return for the scarcity of supply. They do not, as some people think, take out so much because they gave so much. What they take out is the difference between what they put in and what they take out. The price of computers comes down as more firms enter the field, and as supply meets demand, and this shows that the costs are low. If the early high price of new technology was because of development costs, there would be no big profits, there would be no IT millionaires and billionaires.
People are convinced that people should be paid for having qualifications. And many get qualifications in order to reap the legal right to take out more. But once a person is paid for studying, there is no reason in sense to pay them more for having studied. And all students are paid, for they do not live on air. Once students are fully and fairly paid for studying, there is no more reason, in sense, to pay them for having studied than there is reason to pay anyone more for having worked before. But people will be convinced that this sense is nonsense simply on the non-sensical basis that such sense is not the social norm. But then happiness is not the social norm either. We cannot assume that what we have been doing is sense. The argument in everyone's mind is that they have suffered studying, and they intend to be compensated for it as well as they can be, without limit. Without regard for the reality that taking out more than they put in means universal violence, accelerating. Means a 99% chance of being underpaid. Means a 1% chance of being immersed in an environment of 99% underpaid.
There are many reasons given to justify higher-than-average pay per unit of work. Gifts of nature, business risk, responsibility, experience, skill, qualifications, and so on. And these reasons are supported by everyone because everyone thinks they will profit from them. And the perfect unsoundness of these reasons is very hard for people to hear, to listen to and take in. Instead, 99% lose financially by them, and the 1% who gain financially lose by loss of environment. Everyone loses where it counts, in happiness. Obviously, you can make a community in which everyone works miserable simply by giving all the workproducts to one person. Everyone knows that maximal inequality, one person having everything, would be miserable, and yet we have 1% with 90% of world income, and no one can see what that means, and it is very hard for people to see it. The game blinds.
We want to pay people for experience, but experience is gained on the job, at no cost. But the weight of sense is a feather in the wind of the super-excitement of the game. We refuse to take in any sense that contradicts the game.
We accept the limitless payment of people for business risk, but business risk is risking a sprat to catch a mackerel for himself. There is no more sense in it than in paying the fisherman for risking his bait. And there is no way of measuring risk, nor of determining the proper payment per unit of risk if we could measure it. And we would have to start paying everyone for their risks.
So we are drowned in senseless beliefs, and senseless acts, thanks to the game. We have lost all respect for sense, and we have been so long divorced from sense, that sense is so strange to us that we cannot believe it can be true when we meet it. We judge sense by familiarity, as though the familiar has never been wrong.
Everyone knows the connection between pay injustice and violence, because everyone knows that violence and unhappiness would increase massively if a government committed the super-extreme injustice of taking 90% of income permanently off 90% of the population and giving it all to 1%. And everyone knows that violence and unhappiness would decrease equally massively if the government stopped doing this.
We have far greater pay injustice than this.
Would it be a bad thing if all the wealth in the world were redistributed equally among all? It would not be perfectly just, but it would be very, very good for every human being. Everyone's environment would be hugely better. Everyone's future would be hugely brighter. The swimming pool would be fun for all. Humanity would be united. Could love itself again. And humanity is perfectly free to do it. Where there is a will, there is a way. And yet, it seems unlikely that we will do it. It seems we will have contempt for anyone who tries to make us disloyal to the game.
What if the rich started confessing that wealth is useless for happiness, that wealth is bad for happiness? Fairpay buys all necessities, all major desires, and millions of smaller and smaller desires. There just isn't very much desire left for wealth to satisfy. There are only the very smallest, most marginal desires left to satisfy. And meanwhile, the danger of being wealthy amid poverty is extreme, and often fatal. The spots on the earth where you feel safe are very tiny. The Rockefellers behind electric fences, the queen in her palace, special secret places in the Bahamas, Stalin in his room in the Kremlin, penthouses with private lifts, limousines with bombproof floors, command centres deep in mountains. Ceausescu, Caesar, Hitler, Charles I, Marie Antoinette.
What do we want? What is our will?