You’ve
made a pile in something or other. You’ve had to keep it secret because it is illegal, but so
far you’ve evaded the law. But
now, the police are on to you. They
are breaking down the door. You are
arrested and go to jail for 30 years minimum for accumulating $100 million.
Impossible? It could
happen in your lifetime, if the Poor Conspiracy succeeds in its purpose, to make
wealth illegal.
It is a fact that documents exist which show that in Berlin, London,
Singapore, Beirut, Miami, Rio de Janiero, Melbourne, Moscow, there are groups
working to outlaw wealth; to shift
world consciousness to hate wealth as evil, as the devil, as the cause of all
world problems.
The fact is that this time is the first time in history that
the bulk of people, the ordinary person, has been free to be able to be
educated sufficiently to be able to be convinced that wealth is evil.
Too much information is available, because of modern technology, to
prevent people thinking for themselves. Obviously
ordinary people cannot think as well as extraordinary people.
They will come to conclusions further from the truth than the conclusions
extraordinary, exceptional people will come to.
The best minds (not merely academic minds, but minds strong enough to
function out in the real world with all the distasteful sides of life
experienced and included in their thinking), the people who have ruled and
guided the world always, face an extraordinary challenge at this time in
history: to convince the mass of
humankind, who for the first time in history have access to information
sufficient to let them think, and who are flush with the excitement of new
thought, that they are wrong. That while their conclusions are understandable on the
information they have, their conclusions will lead to disaster for humanity.
That however sincere their conclusions, the conclusions of those best
minds who have ruled and guided humanity always are based on a wealth of
experience and tradition (passed-on experience) that puts their conclusions
light years ahead of any honest, sincere opinion of the brightest individual
inexperienced in guiding the world and new to thinking itself.
All over the world groups are spontaneously springing up with the
theme: wealth is bad.
The information coming at people from television, radio, computer, film,
newspapers, magazines is leading many to think their way to the conclusion
wealth is bad. They are working out (their first opportunity in history)
that the world-average hourly payrate is US$10 an hour, that no-one can work
much harder than the average, that the maximum work hours in a lifetime is 100
hours x 50 weeks x 50 years, so that the maximum earnable in a lifetime is less
than US$2.5 million, perhaps no more than somewhere around US$1 million saveable
after a lifetime’s living expenses, so that fortunes of $100,000 million are
ludicrous. They are working out
that someone paid US$10 million an hour is earning $10 an hour and receiving the
pay of one million workers, so that 2000 such people being paid a million pays
will make 2000 million workers work for nothing;
that is, that a mere 2000 super-overpaid are responsible for the entire
third-world poverty - with all the misery, oppression, violence, disease and
ignorance that poverty implies. That
all those methods of levels of better pay and worse pay generate a tension of
injustice that manifests as endless war and crime. Everyone is under attack in some way or other from everyone
worse paid, and feels poor and hard-done-by relative to everyone better paid.
They are starting to say that if wealth goes, poverty goes, and war and
crime will go because they are generated almost invariably by a (legitimate)
sense of injustice. That since so few are overpaid there is little downside in
prohibiting it, that wealth is always unjust, always a theft of sorts, because
it is always more than can possibly have been earned. That wealth is power and power corrupts, so wealth is an
incentive to evil; is the incentive
to most of the evil deeds done in the world.
That 99% of people will be better paid if fairness of pay is enforced,
that 80% of people will be paid more than 10 times as much, 10% of people will
be paid 100 times as much. That
rich people (overpaid people) will be safer, able to live real lives, because as
long as they have huge amounts of what everyone wants, have most of the supply
of what everyone wants, and what many desperately need for survival, dignity,
freedom from economic slavery, etc, they will continue to be under attack, must
be suspicious, energetic, vigilant, paranoid, severe, etc.
These people who argue this way are not exposed to the hard facts of
life. They have been exposed only
to the soft facts of life by indulgent media.
Their conclusions are based on the soft facts of life.
Their conclusions are understandable, natural, on the facts they have.
The rulers and guides of humanity, actually ruling and guiding humanity,
with minds strong enough to have access to data sources throughout history that
give the hard facts of life, the hardest, most distressing and disturbing facts
of life, have naturally come to different conclusions.
The destruction of human life is very possible if well-meaning ordinary
people, without experience of the hardest facts of life, are allowed to spread
their message of “peace and sanity”, etc.
They say not only that the level of tension and stress created by
having hourly pay from US$10 million per hour down to 10c per hour is the cause
of the reduction of happiness to a 100th of what it easily could be with fiscal
equity (equal pay for equal work), but also that that super-extreme level of
tension could very easily be the cause of the destruction of the planet.
After all, we have all the bombs. (World
tension has been great enough to make the bombs.)
All we need, for the end of the world, is the detonator.
The nuclear equivalent of the shot that killed the Archduke of Serbia and
started the First World War.
How is rhetoric like this to be countered?
Am I being alarmist, some will ask. I concede that positive feeling for the rich is still strong.
The greatest businessmen are hailed as heroes, looked to as oracles;
crowds still energetically wave flags at passing royalty, and are excited
right down to their pelvic floor, if you’ll excuse the expression, by a royal
invitation. But I see signs, I see
reason to fear this deference, this innocence, is growing thin.
Information, even mere information is filling people with a level of
pride, of self admiration, that is robbing them of the spontaneous unthought
innocence that makes them smile broadly and wave flags vigorously at shining
passing royalty. People are
starting to think that one in the hand is worth two in the bush.
They are beginning to think that perhaps a decent coat around their
shoulders is better than the finest coat covering royalty’s.
The people will always underestimate the costs (moral as well as
financial) of organisation. Mass
education is democratisation. People
will incline to think: it will
organise itself. People have a naïve
faith in everyone getting on with their own business.
Even the great (but naive) Plato believed that everyone doing their own
thing, everyone doing what gave them most pleasure and joy and satisfaction,
would automatically create order. As
if Mother Nature pre-ordained an order, for which it is only necessary that
people look inside and follow what gives them most satisfaction to be in touch
with, to find their place in. Rulers
and leaders are “control freaks”, they say, who have never tried to find
their inner thing or personal joy, and so are trying desperately to create order
artificially, outside themselves, by minding others’ business.
The people are finding their voice for the first time in history.
Finding a rhetoric, finding arguments.
For the first time, the ordinary person is learning logic, is learning
the skills to refine their arguments and expression to the point where it is
difficult to defeat them in debate, and they will grow in confidence in their
own thinking. They are now
disciplined in their feelings. Their
arguments have a greater appearance of good sense.
Can they be countered without telling them the worst of the truth?
For them to know the worst might be a destruction of the world in another
sense: a loss of innocence so deep
and so sudden as to drive the many insane.
Can the rulers justify their position only by destroying the innocence
they are there to protect?
A new rhetoric to drive back the people’s new rhetoric must be
found, or the human race risks a holocaust of the mind.
Unless… Unless, perhaps - the
idea just occurs to me - rather than be forced to reveal the darkest mysteries
of the human reality, or create a new lie to drive back the people’s new
thought, the leaders could simply retire from the field - fold up their tents
and creep away, as it were, for a while, till the ensuing chaos calls them to
return… It is a thought.
What else does the new rhetoric of the people say?
That the world is in the condition of a village that has been
repeatedly raided by bandits, that all the pay that people have earned and never
received is in existence, there for the taking, in the hands of the
“bandits”; that there is an
upside to the fact that the people have been robbed so successfully for so long: there is a treasure-trove of their rightful reward all stored
up, there for the taking, and so extreme is the inequity, that 99% are
underpaid, and are in for a pay increase.
Simply understand the truth, the wealth of the few is your money,
and take it. All those facts about
world inequity - a quarter of one percent “own” half the world, etc. - are
good news. There is a treasure-box.
And it belongs to you in truth and justice.
And taking it - insisting on making wealth or overpay illegal - will
bring world peace as well. It is
the highest, the essential moral duty, to make wealth illegal.
It will guarantee enormously increased happiness for your descendents
forever. It will save the rich from
an embattled, false life. It will
remove the enormous guilts that people must feel who do the monstrous things
enormous wealth tempts, incites them to do.
The true purpose of morals is maximising happiness.
Opposing overpay is extremely moral.
Nothing else is sane. Or
effective.
That good people have over the centuries been sidetracked by corrupt
churches into pursuit of pseudo-goods, to distract them from the practice of the
true good, the good that makes sense, the good that actually does make
happiness. People’s huge appetite
for being good has been soaked up by an abundant invention of behaviour
instructions so that they never get to doing a real good:
opposing unearned ownership.
I do not think, gentleman (and madam) that their best rhetoric will
daunt you. As ingenious as it is, I
am on the contrary inspired to feel that their best rhetoric will help you reach
the brilliant ideas necessary to counter their “intelligent folly”.
With that inspirational confidence, then, I have collected and
selected the most impressive specimens from their writings.
(And I remind you, that the growth of these groups is exponential and
spontaneous, i.e., independently arising. That
is, it is, I am confident, not financially driven from some source, but
informationally driven - a much deeper threat to our world control;
a control, need I add, which is I believe not only sincere but right.)
They have a sort of realpolitik of their own, which if naïve has a
certain charm. They say that wealth
is power, and that therefore the most powerful people are not presidents and
such, but the richest, and those are your real leaders. They say that if fortunes were limited to even just a
billion, it would have the good effect of replacing the peak of wealth and power
in one person’s hands with a plateau of 458 billionaires equally rich and
equally powerful, thereby diluting the potential insanity of one at the top.
(But, they say, it would still leave world power in the hands of people
with a huge vested interest in the money point of view.
There would still be times they agreed among themselves and disagreed
with the many, and lacked the experiences and the interests of the many.)
They say that if the inequity factor (the ratio of highest and
lowest pay rate for the standard unit of work - dubbed quaintly a “bokim” by
one group - defined as one hour's work at world average hardness of work -
neither slacking or “busting a boiler”) was reduced by a factor of just 10
(from 100 million to 10 million), world violence would shrink to one tenth.
Annual “violence pollution” drop from 100 million deaths per annum
from war and starvation to 10 million deaths per annum.
(And injuries drop from 1000 million to 100 million.)
It is an exciting, a tempting picture.
An insidious picture. No
doubt a specious picture. But how?
I look forward with interest to your detection of the fallacy which must
be in it. A saving of 90 million
lives and 900 million injuries per annum and still permitting a pay rate maximum
of $1 million per hour or a minimum of $1 per hour!
They call it a global Marshall Plan, and draw attention to the
possibilities opened up by adding another 5 billion customers for first world
goods. (Projections indicate first
world population will double in 100 years to 2 billion, third world grow from 5
to 100 billion. In the 20th century
capitalism adjusted from low-wage to high-wage economic philosophy for the first
world. The obvious next step seems
to be to do this globally. A market
growth from one billion to 102 billion in one century!
What a future! (One group makes the point that there is one hectare arable
land per person now and agriculture can feed 1000 per hectare, so conceivably
the world can support something of the order of 1000 times present population.
Present world population in a crowd would cover an island only 50
kilometres diameter. Extrapolate
the world’s most intensive horticultural practice all over the globe:
obviously the available land is hardly utilised.
On the other hand, world top soil is being lost at 1% a year.
No top soil left before world population reaches 100 billion.
Cause of this: squeezing $50 billion per annum out of the third world,
forcing them to cut down trees. You
know if these data are true or not, or false data generated by your
fear-and-loathing agencies. If
these data were true, these groups would be right to conclude we are mad or
madly myopic.)
Consider the following extract:
“Imagine your government proposes to introduce cards of two
colours, which you will have to present every time you make a purchase.
These cards will be randomly distributed in the population, you will
carry the card for life. Red cards will mean you pay 10% more for everything you buy,
blue, 10% less. What would be the
reaction to such an idea? Would
people resist such a system? Would
anyone think it would have any benefits at all?
Would any government in fact suggest such a scheme?
If it was introduced, would it result in forgeries, thefts of the good
cards, a class distribution emerging between blues and reds, a preference in
marriage partners, pressure to lend good cards, etc?
What if the percentage were increased? Would it make the scheme better?
Or worse?
What if the scheme was increased to a ludicrous extreme, say cards
ranging from paying 1000 times the ticket price for everything you buy, all your
life, to paying as little as one millionth?
Would you believe there is somewhere where such a scheme, in its
most extreme form (cards from 1000 times to one millionth) is in existence and
it is universally uncriticised?
Would you believe that place is planet earth?
(Because obviously paying one millionth is the same effectively as being
paid a million times the fair average pay.
Being paid a thousandth the fair average pay - a thousandth of what value
you create by your work - is the same effectively as being charged 1000 times
the ticket price.)
We, humanity, have a scheme as insane, as pointless, as
troublemaking, as disturbing, stressful, unfair, inflammatory, as a scheme which
has people paying, randomly and arbitrarily, between one millionth and 1000 time
ticket price. And we have no
criticism for it, and energetic and creative support (rationalisation) of it
from many of our brighter.”
Interestingly, many of these groups, quite independently, as I believe, have come to the conclusion that the rich are not to blame. The rich are not the enemy. The system is the enemy, and the system is supported by human consciousness or unconsciousness. By all those (overpaid and underpaid) who believe wealth is good not evil, a source of happiness, not unhappiness.