It is argued that although third world people may work physically as hard, their production is lower, so the world cannot afford to pay more than it does.  When you think of it, it is impossible for two people to work equally hard and be unequal in production.  Production difference between first and third world is because of machines.  The benefits of that greater productivity, after the company has taken the costs of those machines, might be as fairly shared out to the whole world as to the owners and workers of those machines.  It is argued that if a new company president comes in and turns the company around from loss to profit, that that president deserves at least a part of the difference he/she alone made.  That seems reasonable.  The only difference is the new boss.  Any difference in profits belongs to the new boss.  Except that the boss has not done it alone.  Send the boss out into the desert and see what he/she produces.  From that point of view, it look like the company deserves most of the credit.  What if more of the difference was due to the badness of the old boss rather than to the brilliance of the new boss? 
     Why is the boss of Disney paid $338 million a year?  Presumably because the directors believe that that person and that person alone makes a difference of at least that much in the profits.  The directors are entitled to decide what they like.  They may be forced to pay that or lose the CEO and billions of profits.  Or it may be that there is an element of profit sharing among the richest old boys network.  How is it that profit striving companies have so little to give workers and so much to give directors?  The fact that they have so much to give directors vitiates the argument that workers cannot be paid more lest profits suffer.  The real reason for the distinction in treatment is an us-and-them belligerent mentality, the mentality that draws a circle around an in-circle within which there is the kind of loyalty and mutual support there is among thieves instead of around the human race or indeed the whole interdependent world.  Lines are dangerous, deadly.  A person who serves one country may injure all other countries without feeling a twinge.  A politician who spends time and energy (money) caring what effect her decisions will have on the people of other countries will be felt to be not serving her or his own country.  
    The fact remains that if business wants to or is forced to pay fabulous salaries, there is no economic reason why the people should not tax that salary down to a more reasonable level, or even to an entirely reasonable level, in the name of justice, peace and freedom from terror.
    There will always be a degree of uncertainty about the amount of the figure for the most a person can earn in a lifetime.  It does not matter if the figure is set at $1m, $2m, $3m or $10m.  If an individual feels it is set too low, they can stop working beyond that level.  The dangerousness of wealth is proportional to its size, so wealth at the top level is much more significant than the cut-off point at the bottom.  The higher the cut-off point is set, the fewer there will be who will oppose it, although those fewer will be the most industrious and least scrupulous opponents.  Although the superrich are numerically few, their influence is proportional to their wealth not their numbers.  Politically, it would be expedient to bring in a limitation of fortunes law with a very high cutoff point and gradually bring it down to a figure equal to 100 times the world average annual income.  (Annual income x 50 years x 2 for possibly working twice as hard as the average.) Of course, the other half of the law is that the money raised by the anti-wealth law should be directed to the bottom of the economic ‘tack’, so that a system which is always sucking money upwards can be thoroughly refreshed.  (Trickle-down theory will be true when the rich get poorer and the poor get richer.)  If this is done, empires will no longer strangle themselves to death.

7)     ‘Lost to humanity must that person be, who can view without emotion the complicated distress of this injured land.  Evil tidings molest our habitations, and wound our peace.  Oh, my brother! Oppression is enough to make a wise people mad.’ Elizabeth Peabody. 

8)     It might seem easy to control such small numbers of the superrich to win justice and peace for all people.  But their influence controls the people below them, the influence of the people below than controls the people below them and so on.  It is not until income figures get below the world average that there is any financial reason to rock the boat, and by that stage power is small, good information is hard to get, and numbers are so large that organisation is hard to develop.  Revolutions are initiated by middleclasses with sufficient funds to organise the oppressed.  They are quickly hijacked by people who want to take the places of the superrich.  The leisurely banditry of the old superrich will seem very desirable to the people suffering the barbarities of the new superrich impressing their claim by demonstrations of their will by arbitrary arrest, terror, torture, summary executions (Russia, China, South America.)
    Here is an example of the way the influence (influence is power in pinstripe) of the superrich subtly and unconsciously penetrates economics.  Benham’s Economics, 9th ed, 1973, p.33.  
    ‘What is not often realised, however, is that the ‘rich’ are very few compared with the ‘poor’ and therefore a redistribution of wealth would not help the poor very much.  For example, if we take the rich in the UK as people with over £2000 a year in 1967 there were only 1,860,000 of them.  Their total income was £6130 million.  Suppose we leave them with £2000 a year each, but no more.  The excess was £2410 million.  They already paid £1649 million in income tax and surtax.  The remainder £761 million would not go far if divided among the rest of the population; it would represent less then 25p a week extra per head.  The case against great inequality is very strong.  On the other hand, few people would favour complete equality.  They would not agree that the wastrel and slacker should get as much as the hard and efficient worker.  Some would argue that a certain degree of inequality lends colour and variety to life; others have urged that a well-to-do class with a fair amount of leisure, is necessary for the development of art in all its forms.  The practical problem, therefore is how far to go in reducing inequality at the cost of weakening incentives to work and invest and thereby lowering standards of living’.     
    ‘What is often not realised’.  The word ‘realised’ begs the question that is addressed.  The phrase is patronising.  It sets up a suggestion that concurring in the arguments to follow will enter the reader in the lists of an elite, the few who do realise.  It sets up an attitude so that the students of economics will feel that if anyone ever disagrees with them on questions of economics it is probably because they did not have the benefit of such enlightening texts as Benham’s.  Why quote marks around rich and poor?  Are they not really rich, really poor?  Is some arcane knowledge hinted here, in which one will ‘realise’ rich and poor are crude terms which hide the true picture?  Or is it that Benham is too mealymouthed to say rich, poor.  The rich are ‘very few’.  There is ‘only’ 1,860,000 of them.  And yet that is nearly 2 million out of 60 million, or 1 in 30, 3%.  And the top 1% own a third of the UK, the top 3% own around two-thirds.  The top 10% own 90% of the UK.  Benham takes them down to incomes of £2000, then takes the full tax on their full real income out of the tax that he took off them theoretically, that is to say, out of the money that is going to be redistributed to the ‘poor’.  He makes the maximum income 2000 pounds but makes it tax-free.  After, for arguments sake, cutting off their willies of wealth, he quietly without telling his reader applies the balm of tax-free status, and makes the ‘poor’ bear the whole tax burden.  By adjusting the level at which you suppose, so that the gross sum is not too big and yet so the tax is still big enough, you can reduce the difference between the tax on the full amount and the remainder for redistribution to almost anything.  You can’t reduce it to nothing or people would suspect the argument.
    They ‘already paid’ £1649 in tax.  They so kindly paid the tax before they had their wealth cut off, so that the ‘poor’ could have the money tax-free.  But Benham makes their remainder tax-free and takes the ‘already paid’ tax out of the ‘poors’ share.  
    It would represent less than 25p a week extra per head.  Why ‘would’?  It would if we really did such a foolish thing?  Why ‘represent’?  Why not ‘amount to’?  Why ‘less than’?  Why not ‘more than 20p’?  Why ‘a week’ and ‘per head’.  Figures up to now have been annual.  25p a week is £13 a year.  £13 is a sum someone could think they’d like to have, in preference to having the cosy feeling that somewhere the rich are using that 25p to generate art and colour and variety.  Very quietly, figures so far have been per family, the 1,860,000 of the ‘rich’ have all been earners, that is, heads of households of average size perhaps five, and therefore really ‘representing’ 10 million or 15% of the population.  But now, with the poor, suddenly Katey, poor, 13 years old, has her head pulled out of the clothesrack to be a ‘head’.  Multiply by, say, five, for an average size family, and the 25p is up to £65.  But the 25p is based on the tax-squeezed remainder.  The £2000 left to the castrated rich is equivalent to £2739 pretax.  The real income average of the rich is only a little higher, 6+ billion divided by 2 million rich, around £3300 pounds.
    If we leave the rich to pay their tax out of their generous £2000 (generous especially as they are with a fair amount of leisure patriotically generating art ‘in all its forms’ and colour and variety, without being ‘wastrels and slackers’ of course and not hunting tax breaks and peasants as supposed by those who do not often realise), then the excess of £2410 million is over three times the 25p bringing the £65 to around £200 pretax per family per year.  This is one tenth of the minimum income of the top 3%, so is a sizeable amount, a significant boost to the small business economy, the grassroots economy.  1967 £2000 is somewhere about 1995 $100,000, and the 25p is about 1995 $10,000 gross per family per annum.  It would represent less than 25p a week extra per head! So all my foolish ranting about the rich comes down to 25p!  What a silly-billy I am!  The rich are only 25p better off.  Gosh, I can afford to throw away 25p a week to keep the rich in Rolls Royces and paintbrushes.  (The rich are very into the art, you know.  There’s nothing better they like to see than their eldest sons going off to art school.)  
    They would not agree that the wastrel and slacker should get as much as the hard and efficient worker.  This exploits the decent workingman’s hatred for the slacker (it means more work for the decent workingman) and it exploits the workingman’s pride in working well (in his hobby shed). There is no hint here that the rich may not work, although everyone knows wealth is freedom from work.  You just don’t call the rich ‘wastrels’ and ‘slackers’.  The spell is too strong that the wealthy are good.  We do not see them as thieves, so we see them as successful workers.  We give them the credit owed to someone who earned as much, although 50,000 could not earn as much.  If money makes money, the person did not, therefore someone else made the money, so the superrich are thieves, technically and really, though not picturesquely.     Benham argues we don’t want to pay the slacker as much, so inequality is good, equality not good.  The argument is poor.  It depends on the assumption that the inequality we have is matched with hardness of work.  If it was, I would have nothing to say here.  There is some truth in the assumption: slackers do not make money, people who make money have worked hard or at least smart.  But there are billions who work harder than their earnings, up to more than 100 times more work than their earnings, and many who get richer without doing anything except spend.  If you like, I am all for inequality.  I am for the inequality that matches the inequality of work.  There is a hyperbola line of wealth and poverty, and a rising jitter-line of work.  The equality I seek is the equality between work and money.  Equal pay for equal work.  The equality of everyone being paid the same hour-rate is an inequity that is a million times closer to equity than the wealth poverty hyperbola inequity.  ‘Incentives to work and invest’.  What incentive to work is there in the prospect of being underpaid by a factor of up to 100 times and more?  What opportunity to invest in being underpaid?  The amount that can be invested is a constant: the amount that people work beyond their present needs and desires.  The question is who shall invest, the many real owners of the surplus or the few into whose hands it accumulates?   
    The rich are very few.  I know at least one Finance Minister who bought this argument, from Benham or his ilk, who forgot to multiply the fewness of the rich by the muchness of the assets and income in their hands.  Benham ignores the global picture, although he writes from within an ex-empire.  After ransacking Africa and Asia and America for centuries, an empire ignores the results.  By destroying the colonies, Britain destroyed its empire.  It destroyed the goose that lays the golden eggs.  A master is as strong as his slaves.  And the ‘West’ or the ‘North’ as a whole is doing the same today. 
    There is another subtlety of rhetoric I nearly missed.  Not worth taxing the rich because they are very few.  As if the only issue is money.  This begs the question of whether the superrich are bad, their power a corruption, their influence totalitarian.  Not worth punishing genocidal maniacs like Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Hitler because they are so few.  We are deceived by this rhetoric the more easily because we have already swallowed the assumptions on which it is based.  It is hard to say wealth is bad when money is good.  Money is good like a glass of water.  Wealth is bad like a riverflood.  What are genocidal maniacs but the front-men of wealth/power interests?  The tip of a tack of accumulation.  Would not possibly the second world war have been postponed if not cancelled if the monomaniacs financing Hitler had been assassinated?     
    ‘Reducing output and lowering standards of living.  The uncritical reader swallows inequality along with the fear of a lower standard of living.  Who produces more, ten women working for food and family, or one woman whipping nine women along?  Which group has the higher standard of living?  One person whipping nine along is our present global state, the state of most of our history.  The master has been as bad as the slaves, instead of the slaves being as good as the master.  We have pushed others down to increase our safety and we have been down with them.
    Benham says the arguments for equality are very strong, and says no more on that.
    Numbers also constitute a rhetoric: the mind tends to bleep over detailed numbers.  This makes it easier to deceive.  Let us convert the numbers into round figures to review what Benham did.  The rich 2 million have an income of £6 billion.  He gave 4 billion tax-free to the rich, paid 1.5 billion tax out of the remainder, leaving 0.5 billion, which he divided among the non-rich, say 50 million, giving 10 pounds, and dividing by weeks, gave 20p.  Or, again, the rich had 3000 income; of this he have the rich 2000 tax-free, paid the tax, 750, out of the remainder, leaving 250 per rich person to share among the ‘poor’.  250 x 2 million = 0.5 billion.  Benham talked of 6000 million, then of 2000, which made it seem that he was docking them two-thirds.  But by having a rich population around 2 million, it gave a 2 factor to play with.  Writing of giving the rich 4 billion out of the 6 would not look like trying very hard to get dollars.  Out of a gross average income of 3,300 Bertram gave the rich about 2,700.  ‘Suppose we leave them with 2,000, but no more’.
    The argument is debilitatingly materialistic.  Justice would be increased if the ‘poor’ gained no money at all.  The argument has lost all sight of justice itself.  ‘The central government, national insurance funds and local authorities together spend over 7,500 million in a year in ways which help mainly ‘the poor’ - education, public health, retirement pensions’.  How giving!  How generous!  But how much do ‘the poor’ give towards this?  After all, the rich only pay in tax about twice what the poor would get if the rich were knocked back to 2000 pounds.  Twice 25p a week, in largesse from the rich to each ‘poor’.  The rich pay 1.6 billion, at a tax rate of 27%, out of 7.5 billion and reap how much in government subsidies to business and subsidies to private schools and the universities?  How much goes to salaries of middle class bureaucrats?  According to Milton Friedman, the poor subsidize the rich in education in the US; and the lower class get only 20% of state aid.  I wonder if this ‘classic textbook’, this ‘best British general textbook for the level of its exposition’, this work of ‘remarkable authority and value’ was used at Eton and Harrow? 
    ‘If anyone could have whatever he was powerful enough to seize, output would be very limited.  A man (person) would hesitate to sow for someone else to reap, or to build a house which might be taken from him.  Hence it is generally agreed that law and order is desirable, rather than the law of the jungle’. (Benham, p.47.) The message is: inequality is fair and useful, we have law and order and it is good, our truths are so obvious only a savage would disagree.  And yet the cities are concrete jungles, law and order legitimates the law of the concrete jungle and is blind to the most extreme injustices and blinds all, more or less, to this most extreme fiscal injustice, and most people daily work, hesitatingly, for someone else to reap.  Milton Friedman is famous for the economic buzzphrase: there is no free lunch.  And yet the few enjoy (and suffer) the most extreme free lunch imaginable.  Though it is killing us all, none speak of it.  And note Benham supports, unwittingly, my argument that underpay is a disincentive.  We do have precisely the situation where people are forced to sow for someone else to reap, to build a house and have it taken from him. 
    What are we to think of Benham’s tricks?  It is like watching the three card trick or cup-and-ball.  Magically, the money isn’t there!  On the one hand, one feels it is innocent.  On the other, it looks like carefully planned cunning.  It seems that many ways are provided automatically by the subconscious once the will - in this case a misguided one - is there.  The enemy is our own subconscious.  We are all players - parts assigned at random - in a play constructed by a foolish subconscious.  The consciousness of power - the consciousness that the author is not going to help his chances of being published by stating anything unpleasing to the opinions of the establishment - is sufficient to totally corrupt this (and every other) text.  Because society says nothing about inequity, it is invisible to people’s thought, and humanity is unable, socially, to realise it as the cause of violence and disturbance.  People being paid 10,000,000 times as much as others for the same amount of work!  
    One of the functions of this book is to state the facts, the point of view that is energetically, almost universally drowned by right-wing ideals, which are often enough swallowed and regurgitated even by left-wingers, as we shall occasionally see.  We hear of Nazi propaganda and imagine that we don’t have that  now.  But Mammon and Might did not cease with Nazism, and I write with the understanding that I will get a marginal publisher, get marginal reviews in marginal magazines and make a tiny dent in world consciousness.  I am  wielding my hammer as hard as I can, but white knights are losers in worlds where Mammon has a majority.  How many would notice Benham was propaganda?  When Might fights with words Right loses before it even knows there was a battle.  Virtually all humanity is in a state of extreme slavery and we are not even free to know it.  How can we be free as long as there is someone more powerful?  Someone more powerful can take away our freedom the minute they want to.   

9)     ‘All have contributed to our downfall; the reformers  have urged it like mad people, and others through ambition; for the wildest Jacobin seeks wealth and office, and the mob is eager for plunder.  There is not one real patriot among all this infamous horde.  The emigrant party have their intrigues and schemes; foreigners seek to profit by the dissensions of France; everyone has a share in our misfortunes’,  Marie-Antoinette.

10)       Balanced Diet
PM dies in gun attack   
40,000 starve 
Hearts go out to tot
40,000 more deaths 
Democrats ask leader to miss pay rise
40,000 dead
Theft nets thousands
40,000 end fast 
Jewels, birds ….  And jail   
40,000 killed in worldwide disaster  
Price of newspaper to rise 
40,000 dead again   
Pioneer jogger dies at 73  
40,000 lost 
Doctor’s child charges bothering MP  
40,000 die daily; food missing
Pop group raises roof  
40,000
Plane crash probe stalls 
Murder by sitting, man says
Outpatients attack leads to deportation 
Deaths unnecessary
‘Super’ welcome in English south
Sitting billions' savage attack 
Islands unsold 
Tragedy in paradise  
Tragedy in paradise  

11)        ‘In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, where famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance,’ Barbara Tuchman.

12)       GRIM REAPER  
    In California, people are flying four-feet-long remote-control helicopters upside down in competitions, while in the Sudan and other places people can’t eat while in Brussels are huge warehouses of oranges and cauliflowers to be destroyed to keep the price up.  I refer to the enormity of paying two and a half thousand dollars for a r/c helicopter when two and a half thousand would feed and clothe and cure 25 people for a year.   
    If one is nothing without love, then education is nothing without teaching love.
    The woman flying the helicopter upside-down is smiling.  She is having fun.  She has forgotten her troubles.

13)       ‘As the lifestyle of the space age grows more interdisciplinary, it will be harder for the one-track mind to survive. ….I see simultaneous intake, multiple awareness, and synthesized comprehension as inevitable…’ Barbara Morgan.  This book has been designed in this approach.

14)       The rich don’t feed the poor  

The city council ignores the people 
And the rich don’t feed the poor  
   
The world’s a hill made of humans
The city council ignores the people 
And the rich don’t feed the poor  

They do a great job making a magazine 
The world's a hill of humans
The city council ignores the people 
And the rich don’t feed the poor. 

You can fly to Buenos Aires to buy your leather gear    
They do a great job on Metro magazine 
The world’s a heavy hill of humans
The city ignores the people 
And the rich don’t feed the poor. 

We go to pictures in the evening when we’re bored  
You can fly to Buenos Aires for the weekend
They do a great job on Metro magazine 
The world’s a heavy hill of humans
City councils ignore everybody when they can  
And the rich don’t feed the poor. 

Schoolboy turns $200 of shares into $30,000 in 3 years
We go to pictures when we want fun  
You fly to Buenos Aires for some leather gear
They do a great job on Metro 
The world’s a heavy hill of humans
City councils ignore everybody when they can  
And the rich don’t feed the poor. 

The rich don’t feed the poor - ’cause -
They haven’t any money in the suburbs!

15)       ‘The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting,’  Simone Weil.

16)       SAY WHEN
The shoplady in the museum souvenir shop rang up some factory - and asked if they had any more of the glass kiwis in pink.  Glass kiwis in pink.  In front of me at the traffic lights three young people in a yellow mini were enjoying a joke.  The driver, telling the story, was a girl you might call a card.  She was giving all the expressions of all the faces in the story.  The other two were laughing like mad.  Yellow mini laughing.   
    If the families on more than $50,000 gave back 1% every year, the people starving could get on their feet.  Funny to think the whole difference between here and the Sudan is just rain.
    In a specialty shop in the shopping village you can buy a special board for cutting French bread at the right angle.  
    And all this culture, refinement and luxury is due to rain.  I want to have a photo exhibition with photos of concentration camp victims mixed with photos of people starving today.  I want to have an exhibition of huge blowups of pages of bridal magazines with photos of poverty victims collaged in.  One in fifty Germans was a Gestapo spy; we just have to write a cheque.     
    In the western world it rains dishonour.  Glass kiwis, yellow laughter, special breadboards, relationship problems and dishonour.

17)       ‘Neither patriotism nor religion should be justification for the suppression of reason,’  Sarah McCarthy.

18)       I’ve got a lovely  

It is my implacable will 
To go to a    
Santa Parade - tons of traffic,   
thousands of streaming kids,
adults in sungear; prams, 
floats, crowds,
t-shirts - 
While thousands die  
I am the will of the western world. 
It is my implacable will 
To educate children in the  
geography of Wales, in ecology,   
in quadratics, in hydrogen sulphide  
and in flax weaving.  
While humans starve 
I am the will of the western world  
It is my implacable will to have fun at barbecues, build   
pergolas, watch Rambo films,  
eat at McDonalds, 
window-shop for clothes  
While people burn with hunger.

19)       By keeping a closed mind, you don’t stay yourself, you stay other people.  ‘On close scrutiny the beast within us looks suspiciously like a sheep,’  Sarah McCarthy.  ‘Restrained by custom, and the ridiculous prejudices of the world, we go with the crowd, and it is late in life before we dare to think,’  Frances Brooke.  ‘What you priests tell us is sheer nonsense.  I don’t believe a single word of it,’  Ninon de Lenclos. 
    Let us try to think.  To think it is necessary to have thoughts; to have only thoughts; not to have any feelings, and not to have any reactions, like pride, and not to listen to non-rational things, like custom and authority.  To be sane, it is not enough to have no insane thoughts; it is not enough to have sane thoughts.  It is necessary to have the thoughts that are relevant to the case, to the situation, to the reality, and to keep on having the thoughts that are vital to reality as it is at each time.
    All religions are failures, because they have been hypnotised away from the thoughts which are their lifeblood, their reason for being, their being, to thoughts that are sane but are not connected to their lifeblood thoughts, not connected to love, to educating people in the art of living, the art of maximising happiness.
    Schools are almost always failures, because they forget their purpose, to assist people in maximising enjoyment/pleasure/happiness in this accidental and careless world.  And always the error that distracts us from our real pursuit of life-activity, is the idea that we as individuals can get ahead alone, that we can add to ourselves by and while subtracting from others, by exploiting, stealing from and enslaving - that we can be happier by making enemies! That my negative action will not produce an equal and opposite reaction.  (Newton’s first law of ethics!)
    Let us think about starvation.  No reactions.  No solutions.  It is good (useful) to let lie before one, and (thus) take to heart, what is.  But starvation is too abstract, too diffuse.  Let’s sharpen it up.  Just you, and one person who will starve to death, age 10, or 20, or 30, or 40.  Just you, and one starving person, for the rest of your life.  Don’t attach any thoughts to it, and don’t entertain so many other thoughts that it can quite slip out of mind.  Reaction says: I won’t think about this, I may suffer, I may lose.  Reaction doesn’t think: I may gain, I may suffer less by thinking of this (from which we can deduce that reaction is the assumption that all change is downhill, that reaction is the silence of the hope of better.)  
    Custom says: It is okay, normal, fine that there is starvation within my ken (and kin) and in a world where there are superabundant means to relieve it.  Authority says the same, or nearly the same.  It is legal, it is unavoidable; send the words ‘foreign aid’ without the substance.   
    But what does reason say?  Who formulates what reason says and listens to that?   
    Custom, authority, and reaction, because they are not reason, are mad; they are mad even when they coincide with reason, because not derived from and related to reason; and everyone listens to them, and obeys them, without any reservations about submission to them.   
    The phrase ‘foreign aid’ makes you forget that the ‘aid’ is ‘in the form of’ loans.  If I borrow $30,000 and pay the bank $90,000 over time in repayments, who is helping whom?  Who is the richer, who is poorer?  It looks like the three-card trick again.  
    Logic demands that we be selfish.  Because we are ourselves, not others.  But reality shows us that our self is not bounded by our skin.  One day, the right leg worked out a way to get the blood for the left leg to go to itself.  It tricked the left leg with the words “I’ll give you help, if you’ll just pay me for it, a little each day.” Pretty soon the right leg had more blood than it knew what to do with, and it had to exercise a lot to build up its muscles to use all the blood.  The right leg was very happy.  The left leg languished, and the right leg felt rather contemptuous, to be truthful.  But the right leg was well brought up and masked its disappointment in the performance of the left leg pretty well.  And the right leg would kindly give the left leg advice on how to improve itself.  The left leg did not do exercises to build itself up, the right leg noticed.  The left leg got thinner and was too weak to carry much weight.  But the right leg didn’t feel sorry for itself; it had more character than that, and took on the left leg’s work without a murmur of complaint.  Well, perhaps a little, but much less than it was entitled to, considering the lazy performance of the left leg.  The left leg seemed viciously determined to try and exist without muscle at all, which struck the right leg as, frankly, the perverted attitude of an inferior breed.  Meanwhile, the right leg was huge with muscles and health.  The right leg took to hopping, which was better than limping.  The right leg was doing very well, except it had to spend a lot of time and energy stopping bad blood and gangrenous excrescences coming over from the left leg.  And that is how the two legs jogged along.
    Figures for people starving have been put at 10,000 a day, 40,000 a day and 60 million a year.  We hear ‘millions starving’, ‘the starving millions’, ‘big problem’, we never hear ‘billions who could feed’, ‘billions going about their business, making money, sidestepping depressions, drugs, crime, etc’.  By these figures, there are at least 100 people for every one starving.  If $1 a day will feed a person, as we are told, $60m times 365 will feed the starving.  This amount is about a third of $60 billion, which is about one-thousandth of the world economic pie, $50 trillion.  One dollar in every one thousand will feed the starving.  $10 out of $10,000.  $20 out of $20,000.  10% of 1%.  If one person in ten will give 1%.
    If you were going to sit down with a good appetite and eat a whole blueberry pie, and someone came to the door and said you could save a life by giving up one-hundredth or one-thousandth of that pie, you would give it willingly.  After all, it costs you ‘nothing’ and you get the kudos of being the saviour.  (Why is there no sense of kudos when we give $10 to Save the Children?) A voice might whisper, you should be prepared to go as far as sharing a half, for you are both equally human; but forget that, the situation does not call for it.  A thousandth of our economic pie is all that is called for.  Perhaps a thousandth does not trigger any synapses, fire our cylinders.  Let us say, we’ll pay the share of ten of the poorest non-starving, and aim at 1%.  1% sounds too little for kudos, but translate it into dollars, $200 a year if you earn $20,000, it is too sizey for comfort.  (Memo to agencies collecting for the starving, have groups of ten people, preferably neighbours, at the door in order to trigger sense of kudos.)
    Is it reasonable to expect that the world North, which has spent several centuries plundering, raiding and enslaving the South, from Spanish conquistadors in South America, slave-traders in the Atlantic and Pacific, British, French, Belgian and Germans in Africa and Asia, should now turn around and give a little?  Strength by giving?  It is a contest between a simple and satisfying instinct and a reason that is like a cloud fleeing in the sky, a reason which can always be made to seem obscure, doubtful, contestable; and instinct is prolific in producing counter-reasons.  Man, the rationalising animal.  On the other hand, few are the extreme, testosterone, macho, adventurous, flesh-slashing, piratical destroyers.  Most of us are the peaceful, constructive, normal ones, without, however the extreme testosterone to control the extreme destroyers.  Perhaps we can understand strength in giving till it heals.  
    Is there one of us who, if we were alone is some isolated spot, the middle of Australia or a remote island, with access to as much food and general life support as we do have in our actual lives, would not share our foodstore with anyone who turned up?  So we are not by nature starvers of strangers, murderers by omission. 
    But perhaps someone will say, we fed them only because we feared the law if we were to let such a person starve.  So let us imagine we have a group of friends with us, or extended family, and that there are no other people in the world to impose any behaviour control through law.  Now is it possible to imagine people who would let such a person starve, like the pack of dingos I saw on TV who would not let a starving dingo eat at a kill of theirs?  Science cannot tell us the percentage of people who would act this way, but I would set it low, below 1%, assuming the group had plenty.
    There have been stories of Victorian couples, who, for an inheritance, starved someone to death in their attic.  How many of us would do such a thing without the motivation of inheritance or hatred?  Surely very few.  Yet we do it.  What are the differences that make the difference? 
    It is a passive act, an act by omission, an act without responsibility.  If there was a big parent, whose face filled the sky, who turned up every now and then and frowned at this and that act, or audited the planet every twenty years from his or her spaceship, we wouldn’t do it.  No one blames us (no one whose voice we heed), there are no one’s eyes which make us feel subdued.  There is no strong guidance from our father-figures and mother-figures, our popes, Caliphs, First ladies, Queens.  What would happen if our parent figures or our idols said: This is not acceptable, you are letting people starve, feed them, there must not be one person hungry to death ever again?  What if Elvis had said that?  What if Madonna or Michael Jackson said that?  Why don’t they?  Why don’t parent figures talk and act like parents?  If Madonna said it, those who are totally besotted with her would obey (for how long?  Would it kill the magic?); those unbesotted would say she has gone megalomaniac, and ignore the message.  If Hillary Clinton said it, she would be stopped, institutionalised if she wouldn't stop.  If the Pope said it, many sincere Catholics would respond.  Some Catholics would object, if the public mood permitted it.
    A lot of us have our consciences lodged with our parents, and we have no parents or no parental voice.  
    Unfortunately, most children are brought up to think goodness lies in obedience to parents.  When such children graduate from parents they graduate from goodness or ‘conscience’.  The law becomes the only conscience, and war and starving people of other countries by not writing a 1% of income cheque is legal.  If people are to have no consciousness, if their alive consciences are to be atrophied away by parental mistraining, the law must make all bad things illegal.  For none of us want to starve anyone, but there is nothing to fire our synapses. 
    The parent’s harried ‘don’t do it, because I said so’ at the supermarket translates to people starved across the world.  We need a resurrection of why.  When a child says why, the insecure teacher or parent feels threatened, checked, challenged, cornered.  Asking why should be encouraged, it is the only way to keep thinking, or consciousness, or conscience, alive and kicking.  Parents are afraid that if children are given freedom to think, that they will come to the wrong conclusions.  They will, and either they or their parents will learn something.  Often parents suppress their child’s thinking because they themselves were suppressed and have come to think it part of morality. 
    In fact, in the world there are two things called morality.  People who wish no harm to others wish liberty for all, and freedom of speech and inquiry.  People who do wish harm to others suspect the same in others, and therefore feel the only security is in numbers, the largest numbers.  Feeling everybody wanting to destroy them, they feel the only security is being the biggest meanest son of a bitch in town.  That means the biggest, most cohesive group.  And that means that obedience becomes  good.  Group loyalty instead of loyalty to thought, truth, reality, sanity.  Those who do not fear others because they do not fear themselves wish freedom to all.  Those who are opposite wish structure, organisation, cohesion into the biggest strongest group, and death to all who will not join to make ‘us’ bigger and stronger.  For such, freedom is an enemy.  The two moralities are mixed up together in the world and fighting within persons, nations and organisations.  
    Thomas Aquinas can write: necessary for salvation: to know what one ought to believe.  He sees no contradiction in suggesting belief is subject to will, because his participation in an organisation forces him to subscribe to it.  Belief is subject only to experience and understanding, interpretation.  To will a belief is to fake a belief.  A person can only look inside and see what he or she believes; cannot will to change it; such is madness, but a madness brought to being by a logic, of haters assuming haters.
    ‘Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity.  What has been the effect of coercion?  To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites’, Thomas Jefferson.  And so America was founded on a secular base.  But still the logic goes on in life.  The bid to patriotism, to love your country right or wrong, goes on, because people are afraid that the unkindness they see or think they see in themselves and assume to be in others, drives them to submit to being part of the biggest juggernaut, sacrificing self to save self, and therein generating the idea of obedience as a virtue and infecting others, destroying their life in saving it.  Is this what Jesus meant when he said, those who keep their life will lose it?  
    This explains why so many will still belong to an organisation that has burned thousands of people alive.  It explains why so many people will gather around the Bible, which is such a mishmash, and give it such a mystical status.  ‘A federation of Christians is inconceivable in which each member retains his own opinions and private judgement in matters of faith’ Pope Pius XI.  And yet, the set of official Christians opinions has changed, has had a history, has been modified by the people who came in the door.  Because people are so desirous to join the biggest juggernaut, the Papacy can demand that people leave their opinions at the door.  But what is left of the person then?  Nothing.  There is nothing alive, nothing thinking, nothing enquiring.  An opinion is not a handbag.  It is the person.
    Susanna Wesley could write ‘To subdue the will of the child is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education, without which both precept and example will be ineffectual.  But when this is thoroughly done, then a child is capable of being governed by the reason and piety of its parents till its own understanding comes to maturity, and the principles of religion have taken root in the mind’.  I don’t like to read this.  I much prefer reading this: ‘Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy.  Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow… unhappiness, the chilling pressure which produces… ‘the mind’s green and yellow sickness’ - illtemper’, Ann Eliza Bray.  How will understanding grow if it is given no food, no exercise, no space?  The child’s head is to be not living thinking but soil in which the principles of religion (subduing wills) grow like roots.  How will thinking come about by not thinking? 
    The Catholic Church (to take one example of an illiberal institution) is against freedom of speech, freedom of thought.  As St Robert Bellarmine says: ‘freedom of belief is pernicious, it is nothing but the freedom to be wrong’.  It is inconceivable to me that anyone could every reach the point of being 100% sure about anything, but one can see that the people who do reach that point must think it wrong to let people be wrong.  To really be sure you are right, you would have to have no brain at all.  But there is no doubt there are such people.  Or they measure rightness, not by evidence, facts, likelihood, and experience, but purely by the size and power of the believing body.  Policemen too become so sure they are right, that they start beating up the suspect before the trial.  (Cells for pretrial accused should have every comfort compatible with security, should be different from those of the proven guilty.) Rightness is something they usurp to shore up a crumbling identity.  Truth is just an icon to such people. 
    Angel Maria de Arcos, S.J, writes ‘Q.  What are liberal principles?  A.  Those of 1789; so-called national sovereignty, freedom of religious cults, freedom of the press, freedom of instruction, universal morality, and other such.  Q.  Is there no grade of liberalism that can be good?  A.  None.  Q.  Then a Catholic must be anti-liberal?  A.  Without a doubt.  Q.  What of modern democracy?  A.  (It is) contrary to Catholic faith, to justice and to virtue. 
    Obedience is self-contradictory, non-logical, impossible.  If A is to obey B, what is B to do?  If to obey, the stream of obedience is either endless or ends in someone who is obeyed.  But if that person is not to obey, why are the others to obey?  If that person is not to obey, then it is possible not to obey, therefore possible for all.  Again, if a person is to obey, how will that person know to obey?  Not by obedience, for that stage is not yet reached, but by himself, then all acts by the self.  
    Suggestion is another matter.
    If any person, child or adult, is inaccessible to reason, to good and strong and clear reason, then, well, perhaps that is what religion is for, a holding-pen for the subsane.  
    The exercise of reason is still a minority activity among humanity.  Universities sprang up in the medieval period as theatres to stage the battle of reason versus authority, but reason and freedom of thought and speech are not yet customary in children’s schools, nor in the working environment.
    Conscience or conciousness is the centre of being, the theatre where decisions are taken, drawing on all the faculties of mind, memory, understanding, desire, imagination, intuition, instinct, to decide what is best to do.  When that is abandoned in obedience it means having no conscience - no consciousness, no mind - at all.  One is simply added legs, arms, eyes, etc of the person one obeys.  If that person is suicidal, suicide is multiplied, as in the case of Jim Jones in Guyana; paranoid suicidal, as with David Koresh at Waco; paranoid genocidal suicidal, as with Hitler; murderous, incestuous, piratical, as with some of the Popes; or plundering and starving, as in the modern western world. 
    Conscience must atrophy where obedience is practiced.  At the Nuremberg trials the judges were appalled at the defense of obedience (‘I was just obeying orders’), yet obedience is inculcated at all western schools.
    Friedrich von Berrhardi, German general: ‘We must rouse in our people the unanimous wish for power, together with the determination to sacrifice on the altar of patriotism, not only life and property, but also private views and preferences in the interests of the common welfare’.  This common welfare is a mystical entity opposed to and not the sum of the welfares of the individuals involved, whose welfare, property, preferences, opinions, consciences, even lives will be sacrificed.  Such a common welfare is clearly the enemy.  The churches, being also temporal, political entities, have had the same will to encourage others to sacrifice themselves.  It is like saying to people going to their different destinations, ‘if we all decide to go to X, we could hire a bus and get there more quickly’.  Yes, but no one would be where they wanted to go.  It is sacrificing the essence, the preferences, the conscience, for the non-essence, the going to a goal.  The worse a person’s opinions are and the less successful the opinions are in bringing happiness and success, the more attractive the dumping of the ‘private views and preferences’ will be, and the less the person will feel they are giving up something of the essence.  The more people are frustrated in finding something to do with their lives the more they will be attracted to groups and away from themselves.  Society should pay more attention to making sure people have something fulfilling to do, should keep a closer eye on misfits and people who can’t find a place.  
    The worse a person is in their character, their desires, their behaviour, the more attractive self-surrender in religion will be.  The person will not change, for surrender is of the psyche, while character and desire are physical, inscribed in the cells, the genes, but they will feel validated in the religious group.  They will be as bad, but now approved, accepted, supported, organised, funded.  Religions, the same as revolutions, are hijacked pretty quickly by the worst.  As long as the religious founder is alive, people may be really changed for the better, but after the founder has gone, people will continue to be attracted by the hope of being improved, but the change will be more superficial.  As time goes on, the religion will be more and more loaded with worse people.  The reputation of the founder will be a magnet long after the power to change has gone.  As the bad increase, the good will leave.  The history of early Christianity shows this pattern.  The very arising of political structure in the second century is a sign of bad character.  The departing of the desert fathers, the debauched bishops of the second century that Gibbon talks of, and the unholy wars among Christians over whether Jesus was like, or the same as, God.  The Christian emporers could have avoided all the troubles in Christendom if they had not given any temporal benefits to Church leaders.  Then only spiritual people would have been attracted.  The will to think an organisation good is the will to lose a bad conscience in it.  Far from leaving their opinions and preferences at the door, people have brought them in, so that Christianity, and every other religion and organisation, has had every character imaginable, and there is no unchanging core character to Christianity at all.  Is Christianity kindness and gentleness?  Christianity has been brutal and barbaric, cannibalistic and cruel.  Is Christianity a spirit of peace?  Christianity has gone to war.  Is Christianity turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, giving your shirt as well if a person steals your coat?  Christianity has had every sect except a sect specialising in that.  Is Christianity poverty?  Christianity has been and is rich.  Is Christianity sharing a meal with all types and sorts of people, a disregarding of all differences and sharing of a common humanity with rich and poor, black and white, clean and dirty, smart and dull, respectable and disreputable, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, young and old, literate and illiterate, active and contemplative, radical and reactionary, male and female, all religions, all types?  No.  Although embracing, including, not judging, not excluding, is the radical meaning of love!
    People persist in believing Christianity has a character and a goodness. 
    Consequently, it has acted as a shield for bad behaviour, child abuse and promiscuity.  The pattern will persist as long as people project their desires for a better world on organisations, give institutions the reputation of their dreams.
    Obedience to society is, then, what has drained people of the conscience that would enable them to respond to starvation, a response we have shown they would make if society were not present.  If you mentally make everyone disappear except you and the starving person - you’re alone on the planet - people would respond.  The misfortune is that society’s leaders consider questions of morality to be personal private matters, and do not lead, do not fill people with conscience after society has made them conscience-zombies, conscience-zeros through obedience-training.  By keeping a closed mind, you don’t stay yourself, you stay other people.
    We, who have been trained, conditioned, habituated, accustomed to obedience, which is consciencelessness, must struggle to resurrect our own personal views and preferences, institutions, feelings, notions, that have been sunk into atrophy, into a communal mishmash of custom and self-destructive unawareness.  The principle that guides decision-making must be: what will hurt me?  What is hurting me?  Plunging people into poverty, misery, starvation, disease is not good for my survival rating.  Do the world leaders imagine that people make the enormous commitment to become terrorists out of imagined injuries?  Isn’t there a connection between robbing the Palestinians of land, property and the opportunity of making a living, and Palestinian terrorism?  Justice is the cost of peace.  It is a cost, but it is a bargain.  We are allowing ourselves to be guided by testosterone freaks who cannot grasp the connection between the injustices we inflict and the reaction of our victims and who only think to retaliate on the violent reaction of the people we hurt.  
    Imagine a house preparing for a home wedding and reception.  How nice that is! But just add that there is someone locked in an attic, being starved to death with the knowledge of all, and the situation turns to the utmost ghoulishness and horror.  And yet that is the situation in the planet we are on.  Every second.  We are trusting our instincts with our consciences and our instincts are letting us down.  As surely as lemmings are let down by their instincts when they migrate across a landbridge that is no longer there.  We are starving people to death and slowly but surely the reaction to that, an equal and opposite carelessness of human life foreign to human nature, is descending on us.  And we are as mystified as the lemmings are as they plunge to their deaths.  Aging tourists on their first international vacation after a lifetime of hard work and decent living do not know why they are being hijacked at sea. 
    One can wonder whether pure reason can lead to action in the face of broadly accepted instinct.
    Imagine if the starving were relocated into our midst, one to every thousand, but still unable to earn or spend.  I imagine the starving would be well-fed, even over-fed, and perhaps well doctored too, without input from welfare agencies.  Distance seems to be a factor in the triggering of our instinctive consciences. 
    Again, imagine just two people alive, at a great distance, perhaps planets apart, or galaxies apart, yet with means to help as simple as writing a cheque.  Few would, I think, fail to support.  And yet, in the same situation with millions of others about, our response could dwindle - does dwindle.  So it is a matter of both distance and the presence of others that prevents conscience triggering.  Which is why a peace army, that would set up video communication between communities, would bridge the triggering gap. 
    It may seem that this dispassionate discussion of this matter is itself callous and cruel, or indecent.  That is because I am going against the social silence on this matter.  Wounds have to be probed to the bottom; the bullet has to be dug out.  Alleviation of the pain has to be postponed until the wound is clean.  After that the wills of doctor and patient can move in the same direction.
    The Nazis and the German (and other Axis) people have been held culpable for the concentration camps.  The holocaust is regarded as the worst human crime, and horror at it is greater for Germany being high on the list of civilised nations.  Germany’s genocide bites deeper into our self-esteem than the genocide of Idi Amin or Pol Pot.  (Racial discrimination there.) The crime is worse for being against ‘innocent’ men, women and children; that is, against people who were not doing deliberate ill directed particularly against the Germans.  What can be said in their defense?  The Germans had lived through hyperinflation, the making of their assets worthless, their society undercut at the roots, in their money.  Germany had next door a new totalitarian giant that openly proclaimed its will to engulf the world.  Some of the communists were Jews.  The Germans were being told that the money crisis was an act of communists, to weaken Germany for takeover.  Some of the German financiers were Jews.  Money is close to people’s hearts: quite rightly, for it is food, shelter, medicine, pleasure, home, family, life and pride.  Many Germans were forced to pawn items of sentimental value.  Many pawnbrokers were Jews.  Perhaps it is true also that the Jewish history of persecution and social separation makes some Jews dishabituated from feeling sympathy for non-Jews.  There is some extenuation for the Germans leaving their senses and running to scapegoating a race.  Any German with property had reason to fear communism, and therefore had reason to put money into propaganda.  If Jews were attracted to the better side of communism, German wealth was quick to see its worst side.  Communism was a mixture of social justice and tyranny.  How would we react if a harsh tyranny sprang up on our borders, and our money and houses became worthless, and we were offered countless ‘proofs’ that this was the work of a certain race?  How many of us could have found the truth when the books were burnt, freedom of thought attacked, and secret police spies and terror were everywhere?
    Desperate diseases need desperate remedies and danger is time for adrenalin, not niceties.  Hitler was the national adrenalin people knew they needed.  How loud was German Jewish wealth in defense of Germany against communism?  Fervent nationalism is against the Jewish intellectual and ironical tradition.  And the Jews needed to sound twice as patriotic to be thought half as patriotic as the non-Jewish German.  While middle Germany was clearing its throat, fringe Germany - the misfits, failures, oddballs, fanatics, psychopaths, lovers of destruction - the people who like to see everything in black and red - had grabbed centre-stage and taken German conscience hostage.   
    They took innocent people - people they believed were extremely dangerous - and imprisoned them, killed them, starved them, worked them to death.  
    Humanity has done the same to people in the third world: imprisoned them in national borders, starved them, worked them to death in appalling misery.  And we have not even the excuse of a national hysterical belief that these people are destroying us.  Nor the excuse that the secret police will crash down the door if we assist these people.  The Germans acted in delusional self defence; we are acting, by our inaction, without fear or danger.  If it is twenty times worse to kill for no reason than to kill in delusional self defense, and if it is twenty times worse to fail to go to the aid of someone in the absence of constraints then we are 400 times worse than the German people who we hold to have been very bad.  I don’t see any rational way out of this conclusion, except that one can say that the Germans were 400 times worse for not relieving the starving in Africa than they were for not relieving the Jews in Germany.  This agrees with one’s intuition that the Germans were no better or worse than us, that any two samples large enough of humanity will be pretty much the same in character.  At the same time, we are no worse than lemmings. 
    This is powerful stuff.  There may be sincere souls who will feel very bad about themselves on reading this.  We all know of denial, and what weakness makes us call on denial, and therefore what is the likely consequence of removing the bandage of denial.  There are people who live between denial and awareness, people who are marginalised in human society by their inability to practice denial as well as most.  If we are to think of humanity as wholly human, then we are so evil that it scours all possibility of honour, of ever being able to hold our heads up.  It is only by thinking of ourselves as only slightly emerged from the pool of nature, of instincts, that we can be exonerated enough to entitle ourselves to exist.  When one sees chimpanzees acting in concert to surround and tear to pieces and eat a monkey, one is horrified to one’s moral stomach and disgusted from living.  But if one sees similar human behavior as animal behaviour, it is possible to ‘forgive’ and go on.  I am here sharing my own subjectivity about this, to comfort anyone that shares it.  It struck me one day that it is strange if I can find any behaviour of my own species repulsive: it implies non-homogeneity of human nature.  Therefore I was pleased to hear the theory that we may descend from more than one ape: I identify more with the character of the bonobo than the chimpanzee, which seems to have the character of the macho male.  Thought is consciousness; without consciousness there is not really existence, so loss of freedom to think with perfect freedom from constraints physical and psychic is a great loss of quality of life, of happiness.  Without freedom of consciousness, of conscience (our picture of the whole, of what is actually happening) we are as happy as a blunt knife is useful.  The item for sale is freedom to be, the price-tag is stealing from bandits; the will of the 99.99% against the (self-destructive) will of the 0.001% (the 50,000.) 
    Another consolation is that if we are careless murderers of our own kind by neglect as well as active murderers of our own kind, we are 1% murderers and 99% carers, lovers and sympathisers.  If we kill our hundreds of millions, we let live our billions. 
    And (to borrow a phrase of Forrest Gump) that is all I have to say about that.

20)      ‘Why shouldn’t the … people take half my money from me?  I took all of it from them,’ Edward Filene.  Not even economists admit this.

21)       Two people who work exactly as hard as each other, one getting $20,000, the other $100,000.  The one buys the most expensive meat as often as the other buys mince; buys the most expensive fish as easily as the other buys the cheapest fish.  The traffic fines of the one are five times more painful.  The other has five houses as easily as the one has one house.  It is as if everything is to cost one five times as much as the other.  The retirement of the one, the sicknesses of the one, is going to be five times easier.  Money involves people’s psychology so intimately that there are social taboos about talking about how much people earn.  And yet people are not up in arms about inequity.  They will strike over a few percentage points pay rise, and yet think nothing about someone having billions.  A person with one billion has an annual income of $30,000,000 at just 3% interest.  Why is there no populist movement to limit fortunes?  Do people know, do people sense the power of the bloc they would be pushing against?  Employees can hate a company if they are getting low wages and the company is making a profit.  People can fight a government that is pressing them hard.  But animus seem to evaporate when it comes to individuals, who have thousands of times a lifetime’s  earnings, who have the lifetime earnings of thousands.  Is it that when it comes to wealthy individuals in contrast to institutions, people project their own desire for wealth on to the wealthy person faster than they can resent them?  Is it that we identify with them and will not attack ourselves?  There is something here for psychology, but the type of person who studies psychology is probably not usually the type of person who would be interested in money.  Psychology does not study money, although money is at the centre of human concerns.     
    When I read about the rich, I start to churn inside.  They are just people who have accepted an inheritance in a social environment where accepting an inheritance is normal, usual and not immoral (although it is unjust); or they are people driven to make money in a system situation where to ‘make’ ridiculous amounts of money is very occasionally possible.  But to accept a different lifestyle, a position above others, to draw a line between people and oneself is so immodest, so insulting, I condemn them, even apart from the appalling cost in creating ‘the poor’ and the endless world struggle and stresses that that involves.   
    ‘The rich are the scum of the earth in every country’, G.K Chesterton.  ‘The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly of having more as a privilege which dehumanises others and themselves,’ Paulo Freire.  ‘The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor.  It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor.  It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich’, G.K Chesterton.  
    Broadly, the rich are the more energetic people.  There are energetic poor who will be rich; there are people who are energetic in directions that use or do not generate wealth; there are energetic poor who will be crushed by poverty; but broadly I think it may hold that the rich are more energetic.  Breadth of mind probably makes it more difficult to make it in the world, just as holding a plank at right angles to the path makes it slowgoing through bush.  Broadly, then, the more energy you have (including the more energy from better food, and healthcare), the closer you are to the top.  The more oppressed you are, the less energy you have to fight it.  It is the exceptions that make history, but it is the rule that makes the constant historical pattern.

 ‘Let the revolting distinction of rich and poor disappear once and for all, the distinction of great and small, of masters and slaves, of governors and governed.  Let there be no other difference between human beings than those of age and sex.  Since all have the same needs and the same faculties, let there be one education for all, one food for all,’ Francois Babeuf.

 Yes, my spirit says to this, yes a thousand times.  This quotation can stand on every page I write, as the sum of all I write.  The distinction of rich and poor, the very phrases ‘the rich’, ‘the poor’ are revolting.  But people do not feel it as I do.  Some more, some less.  What if the difference arises from the games, perhaps the hierarchical, alpha-male games of the chimpanzee versus the egalitarian games of the bonobo, which themselves are survival adaptations to different circumstances?  Can people be influenced by reason?  Is reason a new survival tool?  Or merely a spectator of genetic change?   
    ‘The lawcourts of England are open to all men, like the doors of the Ritz hotel’, Lord Darling.   
    ‘The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.  On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point.  But they are more or less ignorant, and it is that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.  The soul of a murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness,’ Albert Camus.  ‘Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good: and that all questions are open,’ Clive Bell.
    But while the conscientious and modest are, Hamlet-like, asking the questions, the energetic and unimaginative are, Claudius-like, usurping the high ground, even the moral high ground.  But on the matter of rich and poor, I think even the intellectually thorough can presume to know: that people should have equal pay for equal work, that no one can work more than, say, one and a half times harder than the average or moderate rate of hardness of work, that no one can work more than twice as long as the average, that perfect equality of pay is very much more just than the almost perfect inequality of pay that prevails, that radical difference of lifestyle among humans is inimical to human values; and so on.  Extreme self-confidence is a vice, but a highly efficient self-defender and propagandist. 

22)      ‘The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes’, Stanley Kubrick.  ‘When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief occupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip’, Doris Lessing.  ‘The nobility of England, my lord, would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount’, Robert Bolt.  ‘An unjust society causes and defines crime: and an aggressive social structure which is unjust and must create aggressive social disruption, receives the moral sanction of being ‘law and order’.  Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice’, Edward Bond.  ‘The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda’, Martin Buber.

23)      ‘A horse does not admire its companions.  It is not that they will not race against each other, but this is of no consequence, for, back in the stable, the one who is heavier or clumsier does not on that account give up his oats to the other, as men want others to do to them.  With animals virtue is its own reward’, John Berger.  ‘And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame, but each for the joy of working’, Rudyard Kipling.  ‘Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within’, D.H Lawrence.  ‘The idea that to make a (person) work, you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an action.  We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way’, F.  Scott Fitzgerald.  
    One way in which wealth bias or propaganda or rhetoric attacks egalitarianism is on the grounds of incentive.  Communism is scoffed at for removing the incentive to work.  The rhetoric does not say that people are to be goaded into work, but the point of view is the old idea of force and slavery in different words, and involves a degree of polarisation of humanity between those qualified or inclined or entitled to provide incentive and those destined or required or obliged to suffer it. 
    I am in some degree of agreement, that people need some degree of incentive.  Justice requires that reward be proportional to work, although justice need not prohibit those who out of happiness or strength are happy to do more work than their fair share.   
    The subject deserves more attention than wealth bias gives it.  The subject deserves more attention than I can give it, and I give these notes by way of opening a discussion.   
    Despite the supposed lack of incentive in Communism it was no slouch.  Starting with a handicap, it passed the West in some fields.  Naturally, books on Russia that are to be consumed in the West (those that are best sellers anyway) do not emphasise anything that would make Western ego uncomfortable or smaller.  Most flattery is by omission and it is the rare soul that is interested in seeking the counter-ego information that serves disinterest or impartiality, a.k.a.  ‘truth’.  If allowance is made for the first world’s dependence on the third world, and if first world ghettos and slums are remembered in the calculation, would the first world or the communist world be found to have produced more and wasted less?  We have to include Stalin’s murdered millions, but then perhaps the millions dead in third-world wars have to be placed at the first world’s door.  We make an absolute difference between the freedom in the West and the totalitarianism in Asia, but if we were to measure the difference, and again, include the third world with the first, would capitalism or communism come first, or how far ahead would capitalism be?  10%?  50%?  200%?  A lot of freedom of speech is eroded by the law against slander and libel, which is only a couple of centuries old.  That is to say, a lot of nonslanderous free speech is inhibited by the law against slander.  In the West, employers gag employees without a blush.  University proctors gag MPs on campus without a blush.  Police have attacked peaceful demonstrators without scandalising the establishment.  Freedom there is, but it is thinner than it could be.  Principles of freedom are vulnerable to power, and in the West there is plenty of power relativity because fortunes are unlimited.  Again, why are films in the West often about fantasies of totalitarianism?  Aren’t people who have been sold the tale of freedom in these films trying to guess the real nature of Western power?  Trying to know that Western power is inimical to their interest?  ‘The world  is always disposed to consider what is done by a great and powerful monarch as of course right, and even when it would seem to them wrong, they believe that its having that appearance is only because they are not in a position to form a just judgement on the question, not being fully acquainted with the facts, or not seeing all the bearings of them’, Margaret of Anjou.  If ‘the people’ are less tame than this, still it is true that they are in suspense between hope of the better and partial ignorance of the often censored worse. 
    So do we know that incentive has produced any benefits in the West?  The world witnesses an endless struggle between ‘ego’ and the truth, between the desire for good news and the desire for the news, the will to denial and the will to maturity, the impulses to shoot, and to thank, the messenger of bad news.  Bad news is more bearable to the personality optimistic of fixing things.  The more people live with their heads in the sand (where would we be without the ostrich for that metaphor?) the greater the burden on those who cannot not see. 
    What is invariably overlooked in this defensive argument for incentive is that incentive is for the bad as well as for the good.  If people are more bad than good, incentive will make things worse.  It is because of incentive that we have a struggle between common sense and corporations.  (And the sight of madness in action makes the sane person mad.) Incentive ignites madness as much as sanity.  If people are more mad than sane….  We could all give thousands of examples of terrible things people have been persuaded to do for big money.  TV, the newspapers and lives provide many examples.  War itself: ‘war is good business, invest your son’.  When big money inspires people to such terrible things as murder, kidnapping and war, and inspires people to no greater good deeds than technological toys (many destructive and dangerous) it clearly becomes part of self-protection to oppose wealth.
    Again, what is to be the incentive?  That, if you work harder you will receive more?  That, if you don’t work, you will receive nothing?  The extreme inequity of capitalism (and communism) means that a few will receive excessive reward for work (and sometimes for no work) and most will receive very little for work.  Most would receive more for work (much more up to 100 times more) under a strict or approximate egalitarianism than under present capitalism so to whom does the argument by incentive belong?   
    In the West, there is the possibility of fabulous wealth.  This acts as a carrot that is bigger certainly than any carrot under any ‘equitarianism’.  But the more who attain the big carrot, the less big carrot there is for others.  The incentive is the ghost of a big carrot.  The psychology is that of a lottery again, and it is hard to say it is wrong to take a ticket.  It is not intended that the donkey eat the carrot, or only as often as keeps them alive.  There is no fairness between the cost of carrots consumed and the donkey’s work, in world inequity as  in lotteries.  The first world exports its work and imports its carrots.  The first world is a club of prizewinners.  Correction: it is hard to say it is wrong to take a ticket, provided  the investment is not deeply damaging to income.  The world lottery is deeply damaging.  The third world is forced to ‘gamble’ 80%-99% of its income.  You say that the third world may work hard but it does not produce much because it doesn’t have machines?  I say, if financial justice had existed over the centuries, the third world would have its share of machines; and if it is the machines that make the difference, there is no more reason to pay the difference to the people with the machines than to other people.
    What more can we say about incentives?  I feel there are more questions here than I have asked.
    Note that an argument, as this classic (perennial) pro-wealth one, can carry the day though it is full of holes, as long as no one sees the holes.  America entered the space race after sputnik because sputnik challenged Western establishment arguments.  A modest nation will give visitors a tour of its failures, its worst successes.  ‘This is our least well-housed, this is our worst suburb, these are our least happy people’.  These least happy will sit on the dais with the president, they will make the speeches.  Such a nation would be devastating to nations as we know them.  The argument runs that inequality is better than equality because the amount of work people do is unequal, and it is here that incentive comes in.  We have said we have to distinguish between incentive where twice as much work is rewarded by twice as much pay (no one else a loser) and incentive where twice as much work is rewarded by five or ten or a million times as much for some and not for others, or for a few and not (in fact, the opposite) for the many.  The argument for inequality above depends for its force on what it glosses over.  The plausibility is inequality (reward) matched with inequality (work.) But there are not one but many inequalities, and the argument depends on a match.  People who work hard and get paid well (they don’t care if it is too well) support the argument.  (We’ve all met them.) People who don’t work and don’t do well support (bolster) the argument.  The other two types of people destroy the argument.  Very little is done in western culture, in any culture, to undermine those who do well out of little or no work.  ‘No one’ attacks this form of injustice, which includes inheritance. 
    ‘The continuance of the inheritance idea - the idea of living on through things, property, children - subtracts any possibility of the communal society succeeding.  For people to live communally instead of competitively, the bonds of inheritance must be completely broken’, Ti-Grace Atkinson.  The limiting of inheritance and gifts to descendents to permit the passing on of items of sentimental value, would go a very long way to destroying war and other disturbances by increasing the spread of power, justice and opportunity.  It would be tough on the heirs, but as the heirs’ parent was self-made, it will seem less strange if the heirs have to be.  The best inheritance is the right to be self-made.  And there will be no shame in the heirs’ new poverty (supposing they haven’t made anything of themselves before the parent’s death) where such poverty is the social custom.  And the ‘poverty’ will only be the plateau asset and income level of most humankind.   
    What do we need incentive for?  How did people survive before there was the chimera of golden wealth to drive them on?  One of the perhaps often unanalysed reasons why people dream of getting away from society and being self sufficient is to be restored to a labour and toil un-poisoned by the drivenness, the goadedness, the coerciveness that eats at human dignity.  Are we so illfitted to the world that we have to construct a goading system to keep ourselves in it?  Of course once incentive is artificial and not natural, it is not necessarily adjusted correctly.  The level of incentive in society is excessive and deficient.  ‘Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always’, Mary Wortley Montagu. 
    People in such societies pick up very young the fear that they will not have the incentive to work.  Some people resolve this fear by incorporating drivenness, incentive, into their being.  Some people, who are sensitive to the indignity (and illogic) of humanity driving itself, refuse to work under such conditions and so become object lessons in the morality of drivenness.  People pay people to motivate them.  They hunt energy.  Energy becomes the buzzword of sucrose bars.  ‘Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?  Philip Larkin, ‘Who first invented work, and bound the free and holiday rejoicing spirit down?’, Charles Lamb.  ‘Where the whole man is involved, there is no work.  Work begins with the division of labour’, Marshall McLuhan.  ‘Find the work you love to do and you’ll never have to do a day’s work in your life’, Confucius.  Our culture does not understand that seeking one’s happiness through finding one’s own true work is the main duty of every person.  Failure to pursue happiness should be the things moralists frown at, not all the nonsense things they do frown at.  Work begins with artificial incentive, over and against natural restiveness and the natural motivation of desires.  To live otherwise is to live a slave.  Most people are out of their mind in the sense that they always use someone else’s.  To pursue motivation, to accept incentive, is to make a cult of alienation.  If work is a duty, it is not a pleasure.  If it is not a pleasure (in the broad sense of being a good experience), it is a perversion to do it.  Those who promote work as a virtue and ‘laziness’ as a disgrace: why do they bother if inactivity is its own punishment?  Are healthy people ever lazy?  Does not lazy, almost by definition, imply ailing?
    All the corruptions of all the areas of life - religion, medicine, art, sport, business, politics, science - belong at the door of incentive, that over-incentive of the usually chimerical golden carrot.
    Because there is no natural measure in incentive, distortion is possible everywhere.  Apparently, incentive is so abnormally high that people are producing more than can be consumed without the hyping of desire by advertising.  Who, on his own, would pump up his desires and then pump up his motivation to satisfy them?  Only profits and coercion can do this.  So compulsive is excessive work that it cannot be spread around evenly, so that distinct cultures, of leisure and work, are emerging.  Instead of machines and computers increasing our leisure, advertising has stepped in to increase our desires to match our frenetic production.  All casual contacts that make a community are sacrificed to watching smart dialogue on TV.  Work has become an idol to which all human values are sacrificed.  The businessman who censures the beachcomber and yet has to admit he is making money so he can retire and sit on the beach…  
    Our culture is owned by, defined by people who are afraid of their desire to rest, who cannot admit to a desire to rest, who accuse others of ‘laziness’ because the fear of it enshrouds their minds.  People who have lost their balance; the balance obvious and simple, of work and rest, of tension and relaxation.  People who command others to enter into their paranoia, who force others to work without leisure to prove to themselves it is possible.  People who have never sensed that nature was okay, that if nature said ‘rest now’, you could trust her.  Who have never thought nature would give the impulse to work when it was right to work.  People who are very frightened, I don’t know why.  Who avoid people who are not similarly frightened.  People who want to be rewarded for work, and want everyone to be under this system.  People who jealously guard the system of rewards.  I think they are guilty people who project their guilt onto innocent people (innocent people being like a white film screen) and who simultaneously work at atonement by punishing themselves by work.  At the same time, wealth (if they make it) gives them the justification they need in heaps to drown the guilt. 

         If we have capitalism sandwiched between two pieces of socialism, we will have some hope of having the incentive system of a proportionality between work and money without having the very extreme distortions of that caused by money and power concentration; that is, without having wealth and poverty, overpaid and underpaid, bloated and wretched.  ‘Poverty?  Wealth?  Seek neither.  One causes swollen heads, the other, swollen bellies’, Kassia. 
    Money was designed as a universal intermediate barter item, easily divisible.  That is, if you have goats and you want saucepans, you don’t have to find someone with saucepans who wants goats; you only have to find someone who wants a goat and someone else who has saucepans.  Moreover, if one goat equals five saucepans, and you want just one saucepan, you don’t have to take five saucepans, or find five people who want pieces of goat.  Very convenient.  If everyone was given equal money, this excellent function would still operate.  If money was equalised, say, every year or five years, the just inequality could have play in that time, and the equalisation would prevent tyrants emerging. 
    The Old Testament describes a sabbatical system in which debts were cancelled every seven years.  I don’t know if the Jews ever practised it.  The injustice of such a system would have been productive of a huge amount of justice.  As long as extreme inequity is legal, as long as equity is not written into law, many acts of justice (‘robbing’ the overpaid and giving to the underpaid) will be illegal.  ‘A poor thief’ is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, isn’t it?   
    As well as the fact that wealth is other people’s earnings, money as an incentive is degrading to humanity.  Money is good; as good as the good things it buys, things as vital as food; but the goods money can buy tend to be the tangibles.  There is an enormous loss of the intangibles, the subtleties like having windows in more than one wall of a room, and like a street having some element like a little park, even a seat, as a focus for local identity; such things are sacrificed to cost-cutting before they are considered, before anyone has opportunity to think at what price they value them.  I personally suspect the lower ceilings of modern buildings are responsible for a lot of stress and tension in modern life: we are all claustrophobic to some degree.  (After all, the higher ceilings were put in for a reason.)  But as we have largely abandoned the practice of conscience or consciousness, the practice of feeling how we feel about things, we are unlikely to notice. 
    In short, incentives are good, but moderation in incentives is vital to happiness, personal and social.  The incentive of being paid ten million dollars for a standard unit of work and the incentive of being paid one dollar for a standard unit of work (one day’s work of world average hardness) is the same: you do the work, you get the money.  Promotion of equity in the  name of peace does not affect incentive.

24)      ‘(Lycurgus’s) second political enterprise was a new division of the lands, for he found a prodigious inequality, wealth being centred in the hands of the few; and by this reform Laconia became like an estate newly divided among many brothers.  Each plot of land was sufficient to maintain a family in health’, Plutarch.

25)      There are two views of society.  One, that society is good, government is benign, laws are largely just, and people are, in democratic countries, free from inimical constraints.  Two, that society is the engine by which intraspecies domination is extended far beyond the alpha male domination of males and females in nature.  The first view is always held more than it in truth should be, because it is in the interests of the dominators.  
    ‘Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.  Men (people) have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom’, Edward Burke.  It would not be necessary to state this principle if it was being practised.
    Everyone is going to live out their lives every second within the great drama of might versus right.  Every person is going to be robbed or robber, underpaid or overpaid, surrounded by underpaid and overpaid, seeing, hearing and hearing about the explosions of might and the explosions of right, is going to be under the pressure of might in the subtlest ways, protecting a frail and delicate plant of a sense of right.  And yet children are not even given a paradigm with which to think about it.  To the establishment, all statements on the subject have the whiff of danger to them.   
    ‘(Anacharsis) laughed at him (Solon) for imagining the dishonesty and covetousness of his countrymen could be restrained by written laws, which were like spider’s webs and would catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but be easily broken by the mighty and rich’, Plutarch.  The whiff of such dissenting opinions is rarely smelled at school to make the people more sympathetic to principled lawbreakers and to make future policemen and women more dialectical in their attitude to the law and to lawbreakers.  Do we think  of the establishment as dishonest and covetous?  The answer to that question is a measure of how successful the propaganda - much of it by silence and omission - is.  It is not necessary that there be a conspiracy or even conscious intent.  There need only be the continuation of myopic self-interest with privileged means and a will to move into areas they shouldn’t go into, when the people are not alert and active and sure enough to prevent them.   
    Society has to be judged in comparison with nature if we are to see how much society is a contrivance to provide for human wants and how much it is predators and their prey.   
    In a state of nature each creature has a share of the whole earth undivided.  From the time people had an interest in immovable property - a cave, an oasis, a crop - the world has been divided up.  In society, where every bit of land has been divided up, each new individual who comes into the world not only has lost his/her single share in the whole earth undivided, but has lost his/her share in the earth divided.  Clearly each individual has an ownership right to one nth share in the world where n is the current human population of the earth.  Just as one person owns the whole world if there is only one person.  This share is about one hectare or two acres of agricultural land, plus a helping of deserts and mountains.  This is taken off from each individual at birth without effort by the almighty society.  The human child growing up finds that the world is largely closed off, unavailable.  The instinct for exploration, which is growth, is checked.  Perhaps some turn sailors because that instinct for an unbounded environment is so disgusted, so offended by fences, walls, and the fear that keeps us from climbing them.  That check on the nerves, muscles and the inner call to go, to move, to investigate, must have a psychological effect.  The child is free to play in its parents’ property, like a marble rattling in a box, if the parents have any property.  A family of five has a natural right, not only to five shares in the whole earth undivided, but five nths of the land and the sea and of all the animals, plants and minerals on and in them. 
    ‘The meek shall inherit the earth but not the mineral rights’, says Paul Getty.  The meek do not inherit the earth, and especially not the mineral rights.  And yet how clear an ignoring of people’s rights is indicated by the fact that minerals and oil are regarded as individual property rather than property in humanity. 
    If a hundred pioneers enter a valley, they will divide it up between them.  Later comers will be as entitled to an equal share, because the first comers did as little to earn it, and yet the later comers will be excluded; they will have to buy.  As time goes by and population grows, the landowners will receive ever-increasing rents, also for nothing.  In the colonisation of the world, it has of course been true that the rich have had more money to buy land, ahead of the settlers, often without even being there. 
    ‘A poor relation - is the most irrelevant thing in nature’, Charles Lamb.  This seems to be the attitude of the power-carrying world always.  Lamb was born in 1775.  The arrival of the reliable handgun in the 19th century was responsible for the extension of suffrage to the unpropertied and to women.  Assassination came into the hands of the poor. 
    With money as with land: the people are ignored.  When a government creates more money, it gives it to the banks, not to the people, although the new money devalues the old money.  The banks are entitled to lend figures around twenty times their cash holdings, so the people pay in years of sweat for this money made at a stroke of a pen. 
    While we are on the subject of banks and interest, we may mention another practice of lenders against the people.  Repayments are often calculated to be infinitesimally larger than the interest, so that each payment diminishes the principal infinitesimally, so that the period of the loan is lengthened and the repayments are in total many times the principal.  No social agency, not  schools, not the university economics courses, are in a hurry to tell the people that a small increase in the repayments can greatly reduce the terms of the loan.  Not even bank mortgage clerks understand it.  Banks carefully discourage lump sum repayments, and increasing the regular repayments; by penalties where they can.  It is a disgrace.  It is a con.  It is a disservice of the very unfriendly kind.  The practice costs people with mortgages hundreds of thousands, and years of work.  Advertisements of friendly banks with smiling happy mortgages should put us in mind of Emerson’s ‘The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons’ and Hamlet’s ‘One may smile, and smile, and be a villain’. 
    For the share in the whole earth undivided I don’t see how society can compensate its members except by providing commons, parks, and maximising public rights on private land; for example, the right to walk across, and camp one night, on rural lands.  
    The outline of society, the flatness of rural landscape and the still increasing heights of cities, reproduces and expresses (greatly dampened by gravity) the fiscal inequity in society.  Would people live in cities to the extent they do and will, if money was distributed in proportion to work?  I don’t think so.  ‘Hell is a city’, Shelley.  The poor are forced into cities, as into prisons and poorhouses, refugee camps and concentration camps.  The poor always say that it was the last resort.  The person who owns the land controls the area.  The poor are forced into debt and forced off their land.  People are forced to be tenants and then tenants are evicted at will.  People pouring into cities raises the value of the city land which gives more money to the rich to buy more rural land.  The rich grow money (cash crops) instead of food.  Think that there is enough available land for each family to have ten acres, four hectares.  Imagine the flourishing of fruit trees, nut trees, farmyard animals, children and human values, if the world were so divided.  And where there was so much equality, boundaries would be that much less strict.  ‘Oedipus went to Thebes, Peter Rabbit into Mr.  McGregor’s garden, but the story is essentially the same: life points only towards the terror’, Russell Hoban.  The terror is boundaries.  
    I have never anywhere come across the suggestion given above, that society is obliged to compensate the individual for all the values, psychological, physiological and others as well as financial, of land taken away from the individual.  The three card trick deceives the eye.  No one notices what has been stolen.  People are offered a ladder, a social ladder.  This distracts people from the sense of loss.  This ladder is good to occupy all classes, all levels for the duration of their lives.   
    The question arises from this: what if this debt were paid?  What would happen if every human entitled to an equal share of the values of land (mineral, agricultural and animal) - and sea - were paid either in land or in land rents?  This would be paid from birth with the parents holding the rights in trust till the child claimed it.  It would probably destroy the evil of wealth, replace urbanisation with ruralisation, decimate disease, cruelty (the implacability of power) and despair.  Revive arts and crafts, the family, generosity and simple pleasures.  Remember the progress of the Roman empire, towards urbanisation and the nostalgia for farmlife and the golden (rural) age, until the human impossibility of extreme urbanisation broke the empire.
    ‘The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men [people], the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all to evil designs’, Pliny the Elder.  
    ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay; … a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, when once destroyed can never be supplied … his best companions, innocence and health; and his best riches, ignorance of wealth’, Oliver Goldsmith.  ‘The more princes abstain from touching the wealth of their people the greater will be their resources in the wants of the state’, Aelia Pulcheria.  ‘He represented to her that the greatest glory of a monarch was the liberty of the people, his most valuable treasure in their crowded coffers, and his securest guard in their sincere affection’, Eliza Haywood.  Society is pyramidal, in that the emergence of individual wealth is always shrinking of national wealth.  Wealth is decadent, the mould of decay.  ‘The greatest nations, like the greatest individuals have often been the poorest; and with wealth comes often what is more terrible than poverty - corruption’, Oliver Shreiner.
    The quotations above from Pulcheria and Haywood are similar in heart to this: ‘Preferring to store her money in the stomachs of the needy rather than hide it in a purse’, St Jerome.  The instinct to make oneself strong by making those around one strong is feminine.  The instinct to make oneself strong by strengthening oneself at the expense of others is masculine and wrong: the strength one gains is always less than the enmity one arouses.  ‘Slavery always has, and always will produce insurrections wherever it exists, because it is a violation of the natural order of things, and no human power can much longer perpetuate it’, Angelina Grimké.  ‘The contents of his [Sitting Bull’s] pockets were often emptied into the hands of small, ragged little boys, nor could he understand how so much wealth could go rushing by, unmindful of the poor’, Annie Oakley.  I can’t see how it would hurt if those words were posted up in every classroom in the world.  I don’t see that anyone could be called educated who didn’t know them, and love them and spread them.
    ‘Human beings are not so constituted, that they can live without expansion; and if they do not get it one way, must another, or perish’, Margaret Fuller.  In the city one sees that expansion is only possible upwards; on all sides the human spirit is straitened and confined.  The straight boundaries of city buildings are like the straight joins between bubbles, where individual expansions meet.  For the animal in the wild, movement is limited only by its own desire.  Our development of privacy of possession of bits of mother nature has meant that for all of us most of the world is closed down to footpaths and parks and the pocket handkerchief of private property.  Only owners of very large areas of land get to feel how it was in the golden age when the land was undivided and all available to each.  Even for the owner of the largest areas, most of the world is closed , and when he or she travels, has to remain on the footpaths.
    When we claimed right to a resource, we thought we were gaining, because we were reducing the demands on that resource by all others.  But we also at that point lost our rights in all other resources over the whole world; oops.  And moreover, ensured the loss of all rights of all our descendents forever, or until private property is rejected; oops again.   
    ‘Thanks to the march of civilisation, privacy has been exploded among us, and individuality effaced.  People feel in thousands, and think in tens of thousands.  No quiet nook of earth remaining for the modern Cincinnatis to cultivate his own carrots and opinions, where humors may expand into excrescences, or originality let grow its beard!’ Catherine Gore.  Are many of our mental problems because of too much contact with others?  Guinea pigs develop hierarchical and sadistic behaviour when too closely confined.  And how many valuable opinions do we not develop in the rush of endless input? 
    ‘Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense’, Gertrude Stein.  The city represents, and is, an excess of everything, a damaging intensity and packedinness.  It represents a lack of nothing, the ghouls of supply.  ‘It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing’, Gertrude Stein.  The one thing that does not occur to information-human, city-human, is to leave the mind empty like a runway for the solution to arrive.  The circle is both the symbol for nothing, and completion or fullness.  (As well as god, and love.) The universe is mostly empty, and that is a relief.

26)      ‘O life, no life, but lively form of death;
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds’ 
                  Thomas Kyd

on to part 3 of Global Happiness...