Project the point of view that ruling is great and that work is simply
what people do who are unable to rule. Take
the attitude that the people must suffer work because they have failed to rule,
or are too feeble or irresponsible to rule.
In this way every bit of work they do will reinforce their sense of
failure, of self-disesteem, of justice of their lot.
There will always be a
small number (a very few) who are not deluded by custom or selfdisesteem who can
occasionally rouse the people a little way out of their dream that what is,
should be; that what they have got, they deserve.
(Often students, at an age when hormones make them ignore dangers and
sometimes with unconscious anger against parents.) You can turn such people to
great use by acting with extreme decision against them, far out of proportion to
the small danger. The people’s
courage is (usually) too feeble, their information too indecisive, to support
them, and the horror of their fate will awe the people.
The people will think independent thought is far worse than they
suspected, and avoid it more assiduously, and reject their children more
energetically if they indulge in it. A father who in a fine dramatic rage destroys a child’s
puppy will never have to shout: be quiet! in his house.
Do not make yourself a
slave to facts; it will be taken for a sign of weakness, of submissiveness.
If you must fear facts, do so only in private, with as small an audience
as possible. In public, be decisive in ways that bear no relation to the
public facts; people will think you have secret knowledge and feel more secure
trusting their fates to you. Even
the people whose lives are decided by your decision will think you have had
secret knowledge. An oppressed
society, always in ferment, will always throw up opportunities for the display
of mysterious decisiveness.
Keep a long list of
faults moral, religious, legal, etiquettical and so on so that the people will
always be wrong.
The more you take from
the poor, the less power they have left for revenge.
The rich are the bank of the poor - a bank which does not accept
withdrawals nor give interest. You
are protected always by the people’s love of polarisation.
They would rather be polarised into oppressors and oppressed, privileged
and deprived, rulers and ruled, sadists and masochists, than face the obscurity,
vagueness and sublimity of equity, which confuse the wits and demand subtlety,
nuance, delicacy. The people would
rather be up a bank or down a bank than drive along a road.
Calamity is the brain’s holiday. The
day people prefer their flags to be in shifting subtle slight changes of tone
will be the day humanity chooses peace.
Technology is eroding
the effectiveness of the middle buffer class.
The laser-guided guns that, aimed at the Argentinean generals, stopped a
war, can serve as a mark of a new era, in which the generals are exposed at the
rear. Some credit the handgun with
a shift of power a little more to the people.
If any idealistic movement figures out that wealth causes poverty, and
wealth-poverty creates ceaseless violence, disturbance, danger, disorder, waste,
horrors and terrors, and that therefore wealth is the root of 99% of all evil,
and that therefore no person can be good (scientifically serving self) who
neglects to attack the carriers and supporters of wealth - look out, for castles
and cavalcades can be targeted from a safe distance.
Not that destroying the highest members of the social pyramid destroys
the pyramid, but some may succumb to the emotional temptation to think so.
251)
Sinking fund: a place where they hide the profits from the shareholders.
Public: the people who pay the taxes and buy the goods and better damn
well keep their noses out of politics and the way business is run.
Profits: wages for those who didn’t work.
Prices: materials, wages, taxes, profits added up and divided by
customers. Philanthropist: a bandit
who is kind to beggars. Munitions
manufacturers: patriots who want to sell us rifles for protection against
foreign powers to whom they have sold cannons.
Lodge: an association of men who love one another because it is good for
business. Fairytale: a horror story
to prepare children for the newspapers. Criminal:
a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a
corporation. Business: the art of
extracting money from another man’s [person’s] pocket without resorting to
violence. Benefactor: one who
returns part of his loot. Ambition:
a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
Air travel: seeing less and less of more and more, faster and faster.
Advertising: something which makes people think they’ve longed all
their lives for something they’ve never heard of.
252)
‘If you were working very hard and receiving a hundredth of a fair
share, would you want someone receiving double a fair share to share with
you?’ ‘Yes’. ‘And Jesus
said ‘do to others as you want others to do to you’?’
‘Yes’ ‘And Jesus said ‘only those who do what I say to do are
Christian’?’ ‘Yes’.
‘And you are not doing to the underpaid what you would wish people to
do to you if you were underpaid?’ ‘No’.
‘What is the logical conclusion of these answers?’ ‘That I am not a
Christian’ ‘And nor are millions of others who revel or dabble or devil in
the name of Christian, in order to believe themselves good when they are not.
But then: was Jesus loving?’ ‘Yes’.
‘So what he suggested will help us?’ ‘Yes’.
‘So we are hurting ourselves; what we are doing is selfpunishing,
because it really is bad, not just because someone said so?’
‘Yes.’ ‘And who hurts themselves are mad?’ ‘Yes’.
‘And if we think Jesus said it was bad just because he said so, and not
because it really was bad, we are believing Jesus was mad?’ ‘Yes.’
253)
‘ I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention
[smallpox inoculation] into fashion in England; and I should not fail to write
to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them
that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of
revenue for the good of mankind’, Mary Montagu.
Extrapolate the implications of this across human time and place and
think how many rich and poor have died and suffered unnecessarily so that
doctors can be overpaid.
254)
Dear Editor. I write to
praise the social system, and to strongly protest the frequent grumbling
criticism of our social order. We
hear criticism of the rich and poor. On
the contrary, I say the rich ought to receive every encouragement to continue
their support of the leisure research of the poor.
After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and some
businesspeople are very dull boys indeed. Money,
stamps, medals are trifles that should not be begrudged to the rich for so great
a sacrifice of all the imaginative pursuits that make life undull.
The poor too - those who have had work stolen from them by society’s
bungles - should receive our unstinted praise and boundless admiration for their
tireless courage in pushing the boundaries of lifestyle, reinventing the arts of
leisure and rumination, pioneering the frontierlands of the new and the good.
Our social machine is worldwide cranking and wheezing its way closer to
the clifftop. (20% of the worlds
soil lost in the last 20 years and no person, responsible or otherwise,
responding; people starving and people thinking ‘the social machine is
working’.) Words should fail all of us in trying to express the exquisite self
sacrifice of those who selflessly elect to remain in the chaotic machine in
return for the empty shows, the merely token rewards of money, power and status
to oversee the production of those necessities and necessary luxuries (toilet
paper, soft drinks, etc, etc) on which our society ‘depends’.
And on the other hand,
how can we sufficiently praise those who, on a survival pittance, struggle
selflessly and far from complainingly to take the machine apart or to build a
less dangerous social wheeze from the scraps, offcuts and cast-offs of a society
producing more damage daily than it can mend in a week?
If the image may be permitted, I feel as if a stadium crowd of angels is
on its feet cheering deafeningly as humanity builds itself up to reach for the
final goal. Everybody should buy
thousands of dollars of shares to raise the stockmarket, and to double the
nominal value of rich people’s estates, to give them the signal that we are
right behind them in their selfless pursuit of those unimaginative empty dollars
(all those zeros) and to free up their financial and moral support of those
pioneers and creative spirits who are bringing us - if ceaseless work, endless
courage and patience can - a new and wheezeless social machine.
So let,s hear a hearty
cheer for the bludgers (those who do the equivalent of one or two fulltime jobs
and receive 10, 20, 100, 1000, or, yes 100,000 times the average income), and
for those others who have devoted their impoverished, hopeful, weary and
imaginative lives to the work of the regeneration of the hearts, happiness,
health and social fabrics of the dear, cruel, mentally legless human race!
Project: form a
people’s group; with a sufficient number of people and by focussing the buying
on a narrow range of stocks, (most likely to rise but this is not critical) you
should be able to ‘pump’ money out of the market.
Individuals to keep control of their own money to protect against
embezzlement, but by secret timing of buying and selling (together) pumping
money out of the market. (You can
be sure the rich are doing it.) A Rothschild in the 19th century had enough
shares to be able to make the market plunge by selling to extort his entrance
into the anti-Semite French upper class. (Extrapolate
to present and future time to know the secret history of humanity.)
255)
‘A Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks or declare
dividends by which in a few years he amasses fifty million dollars from the
industries of the country, and he is one of the remarkable men of the age.
But if a poor, half-starved child should take a loaf of bread from his
cupboard to appease her hunger, she is sent to the Tombs [prison]’, Victoria
Woodhull.
256)
Dear Editor. I hope your
readers realise that we are being very much visited by extra-planetary
paparazzi? Leaving a significant
amount of litter, looking in a lot of places they’re not wanted and making a
lot of unauthorised comment about us to a lot of ‘people’ we don’t know. Only last night I recovered this note which fluttered down
from a small ‘saucer’ which squealed away when I opened the back door to
shout at the dogs. Although written
in an unusual dialect of galactic journalese, I know enough of the lingo from
earlier spacenappings of myself and family (I say this for them, they milk the
cows while we’re away) to give your readers a basic translation:
Today I have for my
readers a very interesting and unusual idea in race survival and development.
It is called the SAPDON-LIE-PUPCO or:
‘see-a-problem, do-nothing, let-it-explode, pick-up-the-pieces,
carry-on’ strategy, and I don’t think it will disappoint those looking for
exciting, different and novel programs. It
certainly works for them! Population growth is exponential! A good result.
Millions dying amidst plenty of sustenance, outbreak of violence
virtually constant, fiscal inequity factor of 10 million, and rapid loss of the
medium in which all of the sustenance is produced, are greeted with seemingly
effortless nonresponse (or perhaps that should be: total response to smaller
problems). This is a race to keep an eye on.
Perhaps we will be seeing them on the galactic scene in the
not-too-distant future. On the
other hand, there is talk that there may be other races on this planet far more
successful who, when their numbers increased to create a room problem,
miniaturised themselves. Tests are
being conducted on consciousness and happiness levels among the ‘insect’
races, and I’ll keep you posted as results come in.
As I write my letter to you from the planet’s surface I am hearing the
endless music of the ‘cicada’ tribe. They
certainly sound happy to me!
257)
‘When conditions are evil it is not your duty to submit…. Your duty is to see that those conditions are changed.
If your church forbids you, you must change your church.
And if your god forbids you, why then, you must change your god’,
Clemence Dane.
258)
It would be insane, if you were lost in bush and likely to die of
hypothermia, to start taking an interest in, say, how deep a rabbit hole was, or
studying the lichen. Scientists are
mad like this. What are our bright
young scientists doing in a world with people dying in their millions from
foodlack, disease and violence? What
can these people focus on while the world is exploding constantly like a burning
fireworks factory? Synchrony in
menstruation, type A personalities, depression, how complex patterns such as the
pigmentation of seashells arise (answer: complexly), quantum field theory, the
‘non luminous matter that he feels dominates the universe’ (probably his
mother in the doorway), nuclear-powered X-ray laser, [2 years] hoping to see a
proton die in a five-storey cube of water, absolute zero physics,
semi-conductors, nuclear fusion, integrated circuits, universe theory, atomic
resolution microscopes, condensed matter, chaos [world government?], NMR
scanners, amorphous plastics, transistors, metal cracks, alloys, non-linear
equations, topology, axioms, fourth dimension, carcinogenes in dung fires,
volcanic eruptions and weather, global environmental problems, a fast data
finder chip, robots, computer language, computer networking.
It doesn’t matter how
useful these tools may be in the solving of world problems: if scientists are
not focussed on world problems now, they won’t be in any future time.
Whatever tools are created, they won’t be used on world problems.
They are fiddling while the world burns.
Every intelligent person should see this problem and know it, but the
aperture of their vision is stopped way down and their intelligence is as useful
as stupidity. They can’t see the
forest for the trees, the tree for the leaves.
The tree is 99% black from anaerobic organic matter buried under its
roots, and they are working on harmless spots on the healthy leaves, for science
is today a luxury sport, often not even working on problems, let alone the
greatest problem. Science as an
idle brainsport of the overpaid, the legal thieves.
259)
‘Humanity is still far from that stage of maturity needed for the
realisation of its aspirations, for the construction of a harmonious and
peaceful society and the elimination of wars.
Men [people] are not yet ready to shape their own destinies, to control
and direct world events of which - instead - they become the victims’, Maria
Montessori.
260)
The problem becomes the problem of how 5 billion people can force one
thousand people to give up their unearned superwealth.
Or how the 4 billion grossly robbed can get past the world middle class
to force the thousand grossly over-privileged.
The 4 billion who have been robbed of education, organisation,
communication, mobility, health, brainpower, leisure, social stability, as well
as of the basics. The middle class
who have no life experience of difficulties, pains and miseries and will protect
their comforts like cornered rats against walking misery and justice.
(‘I have known sorrow and learned to aid the wretched’, Virgil.) The
middle class who will defend their position with justice on their side, since
they receive, approximately, what they earn.
The one thousand superrich, who have most of the levers.
261)
‘Genius is the talent for seeing things straight.
It is seeing things in a straight line without any bend or break or
aberration of sight, seeing them as they are, without any warping of vision.
Flawless mental sight! That is genius’, Maude Adams.
Which books hit the mother of all
nails on the head?
262)
Speech to the white rulers of South Africa.
For Helen Suzman. (Written
during apartheid. Can be applied to
all such.)
You have conquered, you
have conquered. By force of arms
merely, not by instilling admiration for any aspect of your nature.
Not by admiration for your appearance, your intelligence or your
ingenuity. Clearly you felt these
ways were not available to you. You
have conquered.
And after conquering,
you would think that you would want to maximise your enjoyment, to gorge as many
agreeable fruits of conquering as you can.
Instead, you huddle up close to, you associate yourself with, you pass
laws to ensure the continued existence of, this dirtiness, this ignorance, this
ugliness, this shame, this distressing distress, this ever-boiling-over,
explosive resentment. This
misunderstanding-ever-generating, extreme difference of understanding, this
expensive, timedevouring, soul- and virtue-destroying violence and repression,
this fear and insecurity, this conscience-battering cruelty (so that you have to
attend church for self justification). Having conquered, you plant a worm in
your foot, and leave it to fester, to give you pain and continual expense and
bother of trips to the doctor, who, however, you instruct never to take the worm
out. For fifty years.
You conquer. Having obtained a hornets’ nest, why do you stand under it
and bang it with a stick? The
French so love their culture that they gave it to the natives of their colonies.
The French so disliked the dirt and ignorance, they removed it.
You keep the dirt and ignorance by you, preserving it.
The French are so proud of their education that they gave it to the
natives. You so little esteem your
education that you do not spread it.
Why would anyone do
this? Why would a conqueror embrace
and shake a hornets, nest, stand up to the neck or even the knees in mud?
It is curious that anthropology has never seen this most unusual and
hard-to-explain behaviour as worthy of study.
White anthropology has sought the unusual in coloured races, as if white
behaviour could not be unusual. Is
a conqueror so ashamed and guilty on some level of the psyche that he must atone
by selfpunishment? If that were to
be established to be so, conquering would lose some of its charm.
If a conqueror knew that he would be unable to stop himself atoning for
his sin of conquering for fifty years - or who knows how long this is going to
go on - then many conquerors would hesitate and desist.
Or it is that you are
unable to make the adjustment from conquering to having conquered, and you, for
nostalgia for the fight, must continue to try to provoke the corpse of your
defeated victim, like a cat with a dead mouse, tossing it yet in the hope of
some life and opposition? Are you
addicted to trouble? You know the
blacks don’t like you, because you conquered them, and so you go on sticking
the spear in to bring out any opposition. For
the conqueror of a people can never rest, as the defeater of a snake can.
With a snake, there is clear evidence of an end to the opposition; when,
for instance, the snake's head is off. But
with a people, short of perfect genocide, the conqueror can never rest, and so
must go on pricking with a spear to test for signs of recovered energy.
And the conqueror fears to do anything that might put strength into the
people you made into an enemy instead of into a friend with whom you could be
easy; things like health, education, housing, land. Forgetting that as you make them stronger, you make them more
a friend. And the conqueror lacks
the will to remove the head of the snake. And
cannot make that transition to being a good samaritan to the blacks.
Perhaps you should take a leaf from the bible of the New Zealand Maori,
who so loved a good fight and so little feared extinction, that he sent potatoes
and guns to the enemy when he thought the lack of either would force a stop to
the battle.
If you lift a people up,
you will finally be free. If you
breed similarity, you will develop understanding and intermarriage and avoid
confrontation. Conquered peoples
can respect and admire their conquerors. People
forget. And they forgive.
Years of daily business erode hatred, when the spear is put away.
Feel the weight of your black millstone! The world learned, in the case
of Germany after WWI, the true high costs of keeping a country down.
(Perhaps, one day, the world will learn the true high cost of keeping the
third world down.) Nurse the blacks so you don’t have to carry that weight! So
they can carry their own weight!
263)
‘You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself’,
Ethel Barrymore. Ditto the UN, etc.
264)
We all believe in equal pay for equal work.
It would be atrocious if some were paid twice as much as others for the
same work. We live in a world where
some are paid 10,000,000 times as much. That
fact stops all talk. That fact
undermines almost everything that is written and done in this world.
That fact exposes the blindness in almost everything that is seen,
understood and believed. No teaching is beginning and ending with this fact.
No psychology is addressing this enormous fact.
No trade union is waxing indignant over this or is using it as a powerful
argument in their aims. No peace
institute takes it as a given fact that this is the perpetual cause of wars.
Everyone is asleep to this most significant of facts.
Everyone is being violently tossed and sickened on this incredibly
violent sea and yet no one can see it. Because
of this incredibly rough sea of fiscal inequity, people rich and poor are being
shot, bombed, conscripted, raped, addicted, starved, abused, blinded, dumped. There is no one who is experiencing none of these things, no
one who will not sooner or later experience many of them, and no one who is not
all the time experiencing the psychological byblast of all of them.
And yet humanity is not awake to it, but asleep to it.
265)
‘The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system
to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud.
It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not
sacrifice for gain’, Helen Keller.
The author is obviously
strongly anti, and yet her argument is much weaker than it can be and ought to
be. ‘Gain’ is too positive a
word. ‘Morals’ too unpositive a
word. In asking people to give up a
positive-sounding thing for morals, it gives morals a bad name.
Why should one lose? The
person who asks us to lose, it is easy to feel, is a bad person, an enemy, a
hater of us. And this is what churchman have done for centuries, giving
goodness a bad name. They have made
goodness a tyranny, which people of spirit have at least in their hidden lives
opposed. They have made god a
tyrant and associated love with it. Better
to have said: society has no
happiness it will not sacrifice for the miseries of wealth.
Helen Keller’s expression pours a nonrational moral opprobrium, by
context trying to make gain sound bad, shoots a weak arrow (though strongly felt
and flung) at business people, which arrow I suspect hardly sticks in their dark
grey suits. Morality has developed
a purely superstitious sense of what is good, which strong people parry in the
name of sense and sanity. If a
morality cannot show why a thing is bad for people, show how and where and how
much it hurts people in ways they can relate to, it had been better not to
exist, since it says far and wide: there are no sensible reasons for following
this. Morality is not love unless
it helps the person it invites to subscribe to its principles.
If they are not rational reasoning principles, they are insane
principles, they cultivate insanity. Humanity
has set up morality, and bows down to it, understands it as a bad thing and
secretly does not follow it. No one
suspects the existence of true morality, the fine art of happiness.
266)
Poem.
You can hear a plop from the toilet
Without thinking of, you know, bog sausage.
You can go to bed with someone
Without thinking of the pound of excrement
They might be carrying
(Or you could before this poem.)
And you can comprehend the idea ‘starving’
Without thinking of starvation.
There’s one right title for this poem
Comes to mind. It’s ‘Mental
hygiene’.
267)
‘Most rich people are the poorest people I know’, Elsa Maxwell.
268)
To permit unlimited wealth is to make human society a barbarous lottery
in which a very few win fabulous prizes (which make them hated and hunted by all
humanity) and the very many suffer the most extreme deprivations.
269)
‘The city is a machine miraculously organised for extracting gold from
the seas, airs, clouds, from barren lands, holds of ships, mines, plantations,
cottage hearthstones, trees and rocks; and he, wretchedly waiting in the
exterior halls, like the porters or the newsboys, could not even get his finger
on one tiny, tiny lever’, Christina Stead.
270)
The wouldn’t-it-be-great poem
Wouldn’t it be great if we all didn’t put
our hands over our mouth when we cough
and fed the starving
if we used our knives
to feed our faces
and fed the starving
if we all picked our noses
in the street
and fed the starving
if we didn’t recycle any
aluminium cans
and fed the starving
if we were all
promiscuous
and fed the starving
if we wore
crumpled clothes
and fed the starving
Project: continue this poem
271)
Simone de Beauvoir. ‘The
only public good is that which assures the private good of the citizens.’
‘All oppression creates a state of war.’
272)
The purpose of life is to have the best time you can. But that immediately suggests that therefore one should have
the maximum amount of good things. Whereas
full satisfaction of desires comes from moderation. Pursuit of maximum satisfaction devours the soul.
So there is a trick at the heart of life.
(Puritans, of course, think: if it isn’t in the maximum, perhaps it’s
in the minimum.) The reason maximum pursuit exhausts is that it is like hunting
day and night. It leaves no time
for the catch to come back at you, for the rabbit to stew, the fire to warm, the
night peace convince you of happiness. Also
maximum pursuit is maximum chance of not reaching your quota.
273)
‘The very essence of all life is growth, which means change… Some
societies, particularly ours attempt to divert the need for change by
entertainment and a rapid succession of fads.
All of these ‘circuses’ may convey the illusion of change, but in
fact they accomplish the opposite. They
do not meet the need for growth and enlargement of the mind.
Instead, they often confuse us so much that we overlook the terrible
frustration of this need. They
thwart rather than fulfil it’, Jean Miller.
The over incentive of
limitless wealth creates an extreme satisfaction of desires in which there is no
space to discover what our needs are. The
need for growth becomes too subtle to see. We become foreigners to frustration and frightened of it, yet
all real fulfilment, growth fulfilment, lies within it.
274)
Centenary history of Raglania 1992-2092.
In 1992 Raglan was
separated off from the rest of NZ by electronic fences on land and sea sides.
Everything of any value was removed and the people were left to their own
devices. The economy quickly became
a basic agricultural one. Loans
were extended to them out of kindness, but they were not very good at paying
them back. They developed cash crops to export to pay the loans, but the
banks raised the interest rates and the buyers paid less and less for the
exports, so the Raglanians were not very good at paying their debts.
Nonetheless the Raglanians were paying the NZers millions more in debt
repayments than the Nzers were lending the Raglanians.
The Raglanians tried to
escape from their own country into NZ. Now
of course it isn’t fair for a person to take what they haven’t earned.
The NZers have worked hard to create the wealth that they have (and that
enables them to generously offer loans to the Raglanians) and while it is very
natural for the Raglanians to envy it and want it, the NZers have a right to
keep it and protect it from the people who want to share in it without working
for it.
As time passed, it
became clear that the moral nature of the Raglanians was so, um, undevelopable,
shall we say, that they would never stop trying to steal a lifestyle instead of
earning it, so it became necessary to inflict severer and severer punishments on
escapers until the punishment was severe enough to penetrate their basic
misunderstandings. (They might have
learned from the good example shown them by the NZers, who never once tried to
escape from NZ into Raglania.) Although the punishments were now so severe as to
be very distressing for people of refined natures to hear about, as much was
necessary if one didn’t want NZ overrun by Raglanians.
The Raglania lifestyle
is very primitive. They have not
made the advances in education or technology other nations have.
Their clothes are very primitive, or ragged handmedowns given by the
generosity of charity from outside agencies.
They continue to wear these clothes after they are very holey and
stained, whereas of course we because of our more refined taste, like always to
wear clean neat clothes.
Because within Raglania
there was - even with outside loans and charity - too little or little enough to
go round, strong competition broke out between every couple of groups.
Missionaries were constantly astounded at the depth, intensity and
frequency of conflict, and as often as they were called out to try to stop
conflict in one place, they would hear of conflict in another place.
It is understandable if one says that among such a warlike people there
were times when, sad to say, resentments were taken out on the innocent,
defenceless, peaceseeking, nativebefriending, self-sacrificing missionaries.
Out of the fighting
emerged larger and larger factions and more and more powerful men, from whom,
with the help of the NZers was formed a government.
However, corruption, nepotism and overthrow were constant themes of the
history of the century. A
government formed out of warring factions is very hard to train.
It is very hard to make such a government look after all the people
fairly, as governments do in civilised countries like our own.
Either the government of Raglania was made up, with the help of NZers, of
both or all factions, and was difficult to hold together and to make it trust
itself enough to function, or was made up of a major faction, inclined to
partiality and under attack from its rivals.
But with such difficulties N.Z patiently bore, in order to bring the
benefits of technology and civilisation to this troubled area.
In the primitive conditions, people were forced to work extremely hard,
only perhaps to see their crops swept away by flood, eaten by insects or stolen
or burned by warring factions.
Among a people so
shiftless, belligerent and hard-of-learning, famine and drought were perhaps
inevitable. Even aid had difficulty
getting in to such a country. You’d
think that aid would be welcomed gratefully and every assistance given, but aid
workers had to risk their lives to do their selfless work.
The Raglanians could not give up their endless pugnacity even to feed
themselves. NZers raised $100,000
to send to the Somalians, I mean, Raglanians - 3c for every NZ man, women and
child. Some said we should have
sent more, but others reminded them that the Raglanians were wasting the food,
selling it on the black market and so on, and the armies were stealing it.
Let the Raglanians learn to stop fighting and have an uncorrupt
government and then the NZers will help them.
Already too much has been given and wasted.
Why should the NZers help at all under such circumstances?
NZers had no help but built their nation by their own wisdom and efforts.
What the Raglanians cannot do on their own, they very possibly cannot do
with all the help in the world. A
sieve holds no more water if more water is poured in.
A people without civic maturity is beyond help.
Some have suggested that
the electronic fences be dismantled, that the Raglanians simply be allowed to
travel freely throughout NZ. Advocates
of this move point to the cost of the electronic fencing, the waste of the
potential of the land in Raglania. Advocates
point to the history of the area before 1992 in defence of their claim that
Raglania could be brought up to the same standard of living as NZ.
But this is absurd and
grossly irresponsible. They would
do themselves an injury in our machinery, would fall victim to alcohol, endanger
the lives of our children if they drove on our roads.
They might light a fire on the floor of a house.
They would cause endless trouble to the police.
Look at the state of Raglania.
No.
It is better that they stay where they are. In time they will perhaps learn that wealth is made by
sacrifice of the time needed to get an education.
One day, one grand day in the future, the fences will come down, the
electronic person-detectors will be switched off, the laserguns deactivated.
And we will greet one another as brothers, as equals.
When we will be brothers, when the Raglanians are pacific, neatly
dressed, properly educated and hardworking.
Not before.
275)
Nancy Henley. ‘The
humiliation of being a subordinate is often felt most sharply and painfully when
one is ignored or interrupted while speaking, towered over or forced to move by
another’s bodily presence or cowed unknowingly into dropping the eye, the
head, the shoulders. Conversely,
the power to manipulate others’ lives, to take graft, to price-gouge, or plan
the bombing of far-off peasants is conferred in part by others snapping to
attention in one’s presence, their smiling, fearing to touch or approach,
their following one around for information or favours.
These are the trivia that make up the batter for that great stratified
waffle we call our society,’ ‘The history of power shows us that victims of
unfathomable oppression have arisen to claim their rights, that power is
persistently being broken down and overturned.’
276)
What is the environment? Is
it whales and dolphins, sea and forest? Or
is it chimney stacks, stolen cars, wage claims, bank robbery, the Queen of
England with $10 billion ($10 million a week), the Gulf war, the starving
millions among the well-fed billions, drug trafficking, skyjacking, fraud,
letterbombs, TV, mortgage payments, mercury poisoning, Union Carbide’s perfect
misbehaviour over the Bho Pal accident, the Exxon Valdez, unsafe streets,
pollution, strikes, genocide, spies, Rumanian orphan babies, corrupt politics,
assassination, demonstrations, Tiananmen Square, workdeath, children living in
sewers, killing fields, police state torture, the heartache of the marketplace
up and down, rubbish in Antarctica, fighting industrial and political giants for
human rights? Violence pollution
kills hundreds of millions; air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution
kills very few. Yet we hear nothing
of the first.
277)
Henry George, ‘The association of poverty with progress is the great
enigma of our times.’ ‘So long as all the increased wealth which modern
progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and
make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want,
progress is not real and cannot be permanent.’ ‘Poverty deepens as wealth
increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, because land,
which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labour, is monopolised.’
‘What has destroyed every previous civilisation has been the tendency to the
unequal distribution of wealth and poverty.
The same tendency, operating with increasing force, is observable in our
civilisation today showing itself in every progressive community and with
greater intensity the more progressive the community’.
‘Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long as we
recognise private property in land. Until
that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation are in
vain’. ‘It is not necessary to
confiscate land; only to confiscate rent [landrent]’, ‘We cannot safely
leave politics to politicians, or political economy to college professors.’
‘The ideal state is not that in which each gets an equal amount of wealth, but
in which each gets in proportion to his [her] contribution to the general
stock.’ ‘Men will submit themselves to torture and to death, mothers will
immolate [kill] their children, at the bidding of beliefs they accept’. ‘Capital is good; the capitalist is a keeper, if he [she]
is not also a monopolist. We can
safely let anyone get as rich as he [she] can if he[she] is not also a
monopolist. We can safely let
anyone get as rich as he [she] can if he [she] will not despoil others in doing
so.’ ‘How many men [people] are there who fairly earn a million dollars?’
‘If thinking men [people] are few, they are for that reason all the more
powerful’. ‘Whoever he may be,
and wherever he may be placed, the man [person] who thinks become a light and a
power.’ ‘There are three ways an individual can get wealth: by work, by
gift, and by theft. And, clearly
the reason the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so
much.’ ‘Great wealth always supports the party in power, no matter how
corrupt. It never exerts itself for reform for it instinctively fears
change.’ ‘If there were but one man [person] in the world it is manifest
that he [she] could have no more wealth than he[she] was able to make and to
save. This is the natural order.’
‘Land itself has no value. Value
arises only from human labour. It
is not until the ownership of land becomes the equivalent to the ownership of
labourers that any value attached to it. And
where land has a speculative value it is because of the expectation that the
growth of society will in the future make its ownership equivalent to the
ownership of labourers.’ ‘Property in land is as indefensible as property in
man [persons].’ ‘That value which the growth and improvement of a community
attaches to land should be taken for the use of the community.’ ‘Social
reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting, by complaints and
determinations, by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions, but
by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas.’ ‘Power is in the
hands of the masses. What oppresses
the masses is their ignorance.’ Here you have a major way in which money
(leisure, culture, health, education, enjoyment, etc) is taken in large lumps
off the people who do the work, the working classes, and it takes till the late
19th century for someone to spot it (and he not an economist, but a journalist
with a head on his shoulders and eyes in his head) and what impact does it have,
what penetration of human consciousness? George
Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoy took it up, societies sprang up around the world,
but they have fizzled out (infiltrated and stultified by money interests like
the anti-vivissectionist societies have been by the drug company interests?)
278)
Project: get on a soapbox and argue for the most extreme inequity.
279)
Anatole France. ‘If you
have a fresh view or an original idea you will surprise the reader.
And the reader doesn’t like being surprised. He never looks into history for anything but the stupidities
he knows already. If you try to
instruct him, you only humiliate him and make him angry. Do not try to enlighten him.
He will only cry out that you insult his beliefs.’ ‘You believe you
are dying for the fatherland - you die for some industrialists.’ ‘The devine
law … is never anything but the codification of human prejudice.’
280)
When people hear talk of redistribution, they laugh, because it seems a
too human contradiction: the money is bad if he has it, but good if I have it.
Like the rustic who said he hated money that was not his own.
In their fiscal simplicity (devised on them) they do not realise the
money is theirs.
281)
‘The workingmen [women] have been exploited all the way up and down the
line by employers, landlords, everybody,’ Henry Ford.
282)
It’s more important to spend $17,000 on a ZZZZZZ personalised number
plate.
283)
‘Governments have ever been careful to hold a high hand over the
education of the people. They know,
better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the
school. Hence, they monopolise it
more and more…. The school
imprisons children physically, intellectually and morally, in order to direct
the development of their faculties in the paths desired’, Fransisco Ferrer.
284)
Give $100 a year to the starving and see the sky again.
285)
Buddha. ‘As a mother, even
at the risk of her life protects her child, so let there be love without measure
among all beings. Let love without
measure prevail in the whole world, above, below, around, unstinted, unmixed
with any feeling of differing or opposed interests.
Then the saying will be fulfilled: even in this world holiness has been
found’. As beautiful and
refreshing as this is, it is an invitation to unreason and superstition as long
as it does not give a reason for the suggestion.
‘He turned to the rich and said: give! Give not only one tenth; give,
not only what you do not want; but give all that is wanted to feed the hungry,
to clothe the naked, to teach the ignorant, to nurse the sick, to save the
sinner. Give, because nothing
belongs to you, neither land nor treasure, not even your own body. Give, because life is a fleeting shadow, which will soon pass
away from you with all that you now call your own. Give, because what you leave to your own children and not to
all, is more often a curse than a blessing to them.’
The arguments are on the
whole nonsequiturs. If nothing
belongs to anybody, why give it to anybody?
I believe the only possible argument is the argument that it is in their
own interest to do so. Failure to
use that argument has implicitly suggested that it is not in the interest of the
well-off to give; and therefore the teacher is an enemy, or a friend of scant
sympathy, for the rich.
‘Let your soul lend
its ear to every cry of pain, like as the lotus bares its heart to drink the
morning sun. Let not the fierce sun
dry one tear of pain before you yourself have wiped it from the sufferer’s
eye. But let each burning human
tear drop on your heart and there remain nor ever brush it off until the pain
that caused it is removed.’
The rhetorical force of
this may make one blush to ask: why? And
yet one has to ask why in order to be sane, awake, and not sentimental,
credulous and manipulable. It might
be true to say, though it has yet to be objectively proved, that every pain does
scorch every heart, however far away or however little one thinks of them.
There is nothing an
eighth as powerful as these quotations in Christianity, or indeed in most
Buddhism. (The crime rate is a
little lower in Buddhist countries.) ‘Believe nothing…merely because you
have been told it…or because it is traditional or because you yourselves have
imagined it. Do not believe what
your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher.
But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be
conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all things - that doctrine
believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.’ If a teacher doesn’t have
this opinion, isn’t he or she insane with pride?
286)
The only problem in the world is that the people with above world average
wealth and income do not give 1% wealth and income a year to the people furthest
below the world average.
287)
‘There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead and the
ability to lead, and even less to the ability to lead somewhere that will be to
the advantage of the led . . . Leadership is
more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than the able, and those who
scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torment than by
any demand for their guidance. .
. Legislators who are of
even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues.
Many governors and senators have to be seen to be believed.
A cultured college president has become as much a rarity as a literate
newspaper publisher. A financier
interested in economics is as exceptional as a labour leader interested in the
labour movement. For the most part
our leaders are merely following out in front; they do but marshal us the way
that we are going,’ Bergan Evans. The
chaos of mercenaries everywhere.
288)
The world the Great Temptation. Not
worth a fly’s wing. The world in
her pretty blue and white and green print dress sits down and pours a bottle of
black ink on her dress and rubs it where it falls on her tan brown legs.
Every nation dishonoured by genocide, by treachery, by shamelessness.
If only people walked about with black veils over bowed heads for a
hundred years after these foul deceptions and mad murders.
But no. With their matching
toilet paper and their portable leisure tables they celebrate the trail of
stupid waste behind them in the history books and around them in the brutalised
countries and ahead of them in the Mafias breeding in every desperate land.
Not worth a fly’s wing. And
if I thought everything that happened was a miracle worth reporting, and it not
worth a fly’s wing, falling from a spider’s web, rejected nutritionless
brittle juiceless filigree curve and network?
And if I thought it worth reporting her dishonour, and encouraging the
consciousness of humanity to clean her dress, and it was just a choice part of
the Great Temptation, the temptation to think it worth more than the wing of a
fly? And what if all that we wanted
to record - the anguish and the specialness and the miracles of tribulation and
disgrace were very god, his gift of himself; heartache, universal energy?
- Don’t make a beautiful thought season oceanic foulness.
Just the poet not wanting to be with the human race.
And the poet having no home everywhere.
And no point of view sufficing.
289)
Smedley Butler. ‘I spent
33 years [in the Marines] . . . most of my
time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the
bankers. In short, I was a
racketeer for capitalism . .
. I helped Tampico purify
Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912.
I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil
interests in 1914. I bought light
to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank]
boys to collect revenue in. I
helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of
Wall Street…In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way
unmolested…I had a swell racket - I was rewarded with honours, medals,
promotions…I might have given Al Capone a few hints.
The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts.
The Marines operated on three continents.’ ‘You know very well that
it [the American Legion] is nothing but a strike-breaking outfit used by capital
for that purpose; and that is the reason we have all those big clubhouses and
that is the reason I pulled out of it. They
have been using the dumb soldiers to break strikes.’ ‘For years the bankers,
by buying big clubhouses for various posts, by financing its beginning, and
otherwise, have tried to make a strikebreaking organisation of the Legion.
The groups - the so-called Royal Family of the Legion - which have picked
its officers for years, aren’t interested in patriotism, in peace, in wounded
veterans, in those who gave their lives . .
. No, they are interested
only in using the veterans, through their officers.’ ‘War is a racket.’
‘War, like any other racket, pays high dividends to the very few.
But what does it profit the masses?
. .
. The cost of operations is
always transferred to the people who do not profit.’ ‘But there is a way to
stop this racket. It cannot be
smashed by disarmament conferences, by peace parleys at Geneva, by resolutions
of well-meaning but impractical groups. It
can be effectively smashed only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to stop it is by conscription of capital before conscription
of the nation’s manhood . .
. Let the officers and
directors of our armament factories, our gun builders and munition makers and
shipbuilders all be conscripted - to get $30 a month, the same wage paid to the
lads in the trenches. Give capital
thirty days to think it over and you will learn by that time there will be no
war. That will stop the racket -
that, and nothing else.’
A rare case of frank
speaking from the side of might. We
must make maximum use of it; as an index of what is not said when the mighty
speak; that is, of the constant propaganda of omission; as an index of the
ceaseless use of good organisations as reputation-launderers and as sheep’s
clothing. And again, can we afford
wealth when it is so diabolical and loveless?
If wealth did not deceive people, it would not survive; people would not
tolerate it. Whatever hides need
not go to trial: it accuses itself, it confesses.
Wealth is war. There is
hope, great hope, in the fact wealth has to hide, because it means the will of
the people is good, is sane.
290)
Five million
Starve
(To death)
Five billion
(Don’t)
Watch.
291)
‘The wicked have a solid interest that the good never seem to possess.
The good are grand for one great rally.
Then they go home and work at their business.
The cohesive power of public plunder remains on the job,’ Nicholas
Butler. Crime pays - billions.
292)
Poem: History:
Wheat and tares
Wheat and tares
Poem: History:
coda:
Vicious and not
greed and not
cruel and not
nasty and nice
humanity:
vicious to saviours
blind to massacrists.
wheat?
: grades of tares
self-deception:
ravening wolves in
Christ’s clothing;
the black wearing white
is not surprising.
O humanity!
In your eagerness to
expunge evil
how often you have been
vicious to the innocent
how hard for you to be
vicious to the vicious!
An undisguised bad man,
like Amin,
is so rare as to be
refreshing
to the man sorrowing
with seeing.
Some days I find relief
in
thinking: I don’t
care! All is good.
Regret nothing.
They choose it.
Celebrate the bad.
Accept all
in the face of these
things,
unprotestant as the sun.
Today the word is:
O
humanity.
Echo
with me:
O humanity.
It is a true word;
you can say it truly
quite a few times
if you exhale your mind
between
times.
You are asleep if you
have any
subject
but this.
How does the world-meter
on
justice / injustice
stand, eh?
Is it pointed a little
below midway?
Up the justice end at 50
hoorahs or at the other end
at 50 megahorrors?
What are you doing
today,
while it is a fact that
the extremely pleasant
Tahitians were
decimated by engines of
the church?
This is your heart
how do you classify
oppression?
Under ‘world
problems’
a
subdivision of ‘United Nations’?
agony of your heart
history acid hissing
history
humanity, heart:
you still have a little
problem:
you still strain out
petty theft
swallow the camel and
all its dung.
of
what?
of genocide.
Jesus was wrong about
tares:
you don’t need to
wait,
if you don’t pull
them,
but clip them at ground
level.
(you can feed a thousand
per hectare if you clip
the weeds, not pull
them)
your little problem:
your concentration, your
scruples, your effort
is inversely
proportional to the
seriousness
instead of reading more
about the
missionaries and the
Tahitians
I read Charles Causely,
who wrote ‘Timothy
Winters’
but who I scan in vain
for
more the same.
‘the
truest poet writing in
England today’
travels: Malacca, Lake
Louise, Odessa,
Cornwall; his house -
‘named after a Saxon
spring’ - homecoming,
childhood, spirit
of the storytellers and
ballad-spinners
of ancient Cornwall:
high in
critical acclaim,
confirm and
enhance his position,
pre-eminent
poets
between the land
self-deception (fakepeace,
whitened sepulchre) and
the land
selfpeace lies the land
selfdisturb.
Who shows us white,
shows
our black
and must pay the price for the
unkindness
who shows us black
makes
us look light!
Praise him and
god save us.
I speak out of myself
like a spring flowing
one voice among many,
many
perhaps ringing finer,
clearer, further
wishing I was the only
voice,
hoping I am true.
Whence this now faith to
write
as though I had perfect
faith to be heard?
I am heard if I hear
myself;
others hearing us, is,
as it always was, will be,
in at least two senses,
accidental.
Always a Mafia to kill a
Kennedy
never a soul to touch a
Stalin.
Stalin killed 60 million
Russians.
Human / what reason,
what excuse,
what purpose for this
enormous
self-hatred?
The periodicals sit neat
and clean
bravefacing the daylight
in Auckland University
none asking the burning
question.
How little hatred for
warstarters!
I am a traitor to my
race
because I do not wish
for myself
ugliness beyond the word
ugliness:
far far beyond.:
the trenches, etc.
A shellpulverised
landscape: ‘all
traces of humanity
obliterated’!
gifts showered on Cook,
Wallis
de Bouganville by the
natives.
Overwhelmed. Bligh:
mutiny because crew
wanted
to stay in Tahiti.
Happiness.
man not born in sin?
bloody was!
said the mission.
corrupt society to
blame?
society sent out
missionaries.
warmth of their welcome.
asked for land.
given it.
people debarred from the
area.
seven years, no
conversions.
chief reduced to an
alcoholic,
supplied with firearms.
whole nation converted
in a day.
reign of terror.
unbelievers put to
death.
illegal to wear flowers,
to sing,
tattoo, surf or dance.
hard labour for dancing.
natives exported
throughout
the Pacific: islanders
reduced
to level of English
working class.
slave overseer imported
from Jamaica.
all breadfruit trees cut
down.
population in 30 years
of missionary rule from 200,000 to 6,000.
Tahitians ‘gentle,
benevolent, open,
gay, peaceful, devoid of
envy’. a
religion that ‘forbids
every innocent
pleasure’. senior missionaries
ran a still. police, being paid
from fines, were anxious
to secure
convictions. missionaries
arrived poor, died with
abundance
of wealth’. man walking with
arm around woman
compelled to
carry lantern in other
hand.
man who predicted
weather from
behaviour of fish put to
death.
King Pomare turned into
an Idi
Amin by the
missionaries.
Tahitians lost their
artistic impulse.
after W.W. II. S.
American jungle opened
with bulldozers.
natives arseniced
with sweets, diseased
with infected
clothing, gunned by
mercenaries.
America took over
missionary role
from England.
‘those who organised
the massacres
were in most cases
functionaries
of the Indian Protection
Service.’
‘In the 50’s the
great extermination
of the forest Indians of
South America
began.’
‘Missionaries within earshot
of these things’.
‘use of linguistics
as a front.’
‘missionaries prefer to
deal in O T fulminations
or epistles
of St. Paul. Quotations
from the
religious founder
himself are
generally avoided and in
particular
its central inspiration,
the Sermon
on the Mount.’
O humanity!
this mirror, Tahiti,
South America.
293)
‘The military problem, psychologically speaking, resolves itself into
taking every advantage of the herd instinct to integrate the mass. … Constant repetition of the item to be inculcated
unsupported by any reasons will have an immense effect on the suggestible,
herdminded human. An opinion, an
idea, or a code acquired in this manner can become so firmly fixed that one who
questions its essential rightness will be regarded as foolish, wicked or insane.
Suggestion, then, is the key to inculcating discipline, espirit, and
morale,’ John Barns (American general.) In society in general, also, the
absence of reasons in daily institutions makes one who questions a nonbeing.
Reason is outside society. The
loss of consciousness, awakeness, awareness, aliveness, is part of the high cost
of living in the profit-loss, hyperextreme society.
Of course, no one is aware of it.
294)
O people, I implore you to
give up this foolish and
wasteful charity to the
starving. Think of your
children, your health.
Think
what more could be done
in the important fields
of
leisure, recreation and
fitness,
self-improvement and
education
if you brought your
money
back home where it
belongs!
To give a tenth of your
income is so excessive.
How
can you live with the
shame
of sending money
overseas
that could give your
children
more vitamin pills,
books
and sports training?
295)
‘A friend is one who warns you,’ Proverb.
296)
Stunned in the library
Now I am
Mater
miseracordiae
Fulltorn with the pity
and terror
Of human vish (issniss)
Why a book on Vikings?
The oh-oh poem:
Oh-oh
We stamped on the Incas
and they weren’t bad
[etc.]
There are many writers
today, doing
excellent
work
But none have found the
point
of
consciousness today:
We are starving people
by our unwill
By unwill, we are
starving people.
There is your centre;
turn on that.
It is easy to be
brilliant about fancies.
Wandering through the
library, looking for hope:
‘The skilled
helper’, second edition,
models, skills, and
methods for
effective helping.
‘The Imperial
Palace’ (Japan, colour plates)
‘Midrash Rabbah:
Genesis’
“Freedom to starve’
(Salaries: a taxi-driver: $6 a week)
Are the rich ever called
labourers?
Why are the poor not
called workers?
Are they not workers and
labourers
too, like the rich?
Most art and learning is
invalidated
by
the wealth evil
You don’t study jade
when the house stinks.
Wealth evil?
But wealth is so clean
and beautiful!
Poverty unjust?
But poverty is so dirty
and ugly!
‘The spade in northern
and Atlantic Europe’
(Ulster
Folk Museum Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University,
Belfast)
‘Woman, why do you
weep?’
Female
circumcision and its consequences
Third World Books
‘Practical orthoptics
in treatment of squint’
‘Wildfire loose: the
week Maine burned’
‘deserves
the highest marks for . .
.
balance’
‘tragic
plight of those who lost homes,
livestock,
pets, and even loved ones’
‘vast
outpouring, of equipment and money
into
Maine’ ‘how people drew together and helped each other.’
Having been plundered is
the gravest of
crimes
and the punishment is the
loss
of your humanity, the right to rescue.
But, I mean, how can we help
the
poor?
We need more money, not less.
There are so many things
we have to buy
Rape Crisis
Lifeline
Minority language
programs
.
. .
So many things .
. .
- Asthma research: Hey!
(getting
a bit angry) we’re
talking people’s lives here . . .
Why do archaeologists -
people -
put
life’s efforts into
trying
to find out about
prehistoric
houses, tombs?
After all, no one would
come
round
to my house if it fell
down
and expect to try to
find
out my soul or toothcare.
What they are really
doing is
grooving
on ignorance
People would rather
groove on
ignorance
than feed starv.
We live in one country
Many names, one game
One folly.
it is more important to
make a toll call
than
to feed the starving
to learn the piano
noise
pollution is more important
the timber industry
challenging the limits
sound quality
a royal divorce
cigarette price rise
the Whitbread
round-the-world race
skiing is more important
columbian
drug wars
oriental market account:
hot dog $1.50
Thai combination sample
$5.00
Asian desserts: coconut
jelly $1.00
almond
tofu $2.00
Total: 5 weeks wages of
a
Sao
Francisco river fisherman.
297)
Dante Alighieri. ‘The
Church of Rome, by confounding two powers in herself, falls into the mire and
fouls herself and her burden’. ‘I
affirm that gain is precisely that which comes oftener to the bad man than to
the good; for illegitimate gains never come to the good at all, because they
reject them. And lawful gains
rarely come to the good, because, since much anxious care is needful thereto,
and the anxious care of the good man is directed to weightier matters, rarely
does the good man give sufficient attention thereto.
Wherefore it is clear that in every way the advent of these riches is
iniquitous,’ ‘And what else, day by day, imperils and slays cities,
countries and single persons so much as the new amassing of wealth by anyone?
Which amassing reveals new longings, the goals of which may not be
reached without wrong to someone.’
298)
The world’s problems could be solved in a day,
if the rich gave their
money away
Till the financial sea
was calm;
But the rich would
tremble with innocence
And the poor would be
drunk with ideas
299)
‘Arbitrary power is a thing that men begin to be weary of, in kings and
churchman; they juggle between them mutually to uphold civil and ecclesiastical
tyranny . .
. Some have cast off both
and hope by the grace of God to keep it so .
. . Laity and clergy. It
was your pride that begot that expression, and it is for filthy lucre that you
keep it up; that by making the people think that they are not as holy as
yourselves, that they might for their penny purchase some sanctity from you, and
that you might bridle, saddle and ride them at your pleasure. I say this not as being troubled by your ‘Union’; your
covenant, if you understand it, is with death and hell,’ Oliver Cromwell.
300)
Song
Uncle Claudy1
I
wish you wouldn’t do it
I
wish you wouldn’t do it
But
you do
The world is made of a
bulldozer,
and a
body nothing else
The bulldozer goes over
the body
every
time, makes it
mushy and red.2
1. Hamlet’s uncle, i.e.
Nazis, warmongers,
Bolivian torturers, the
billion with
credit cards who give
not a thousandth
to the concentration
camp victims i.e.
the starving to death
(Sudan, Biafra,
Bangladesh, etc, etc.)
2. Tiananmen Square, etc, etc.
301)
Thomas Cooper. ‘A strong
suspicion prevails that the human intellect has been kept in fetters by men who
have boldly assumed superior wisdom, that their dictates might pass without
inquiry - men who professedly deal in concealment, darkness and mystery, and who
fatten upon human ignorance’. ‘Every
politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the
reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who
becomes angry at opposition, and endeavours to cast an odium on free inquiry.
Only fraud and falsehood dread examination.
Truth invites it.’
Where would human
intellect be now if it had not been heavily braked by
wealth-power-corruption-evil? How
easy it is to remove suspicion from church and state, to remove the certainty of
courses inimical to everyone, simply by not overpaying anyone!
302)
Peter Cooper. Industrialist.
‘Every manufacturer ought to remember that his fortune was not achieved
by himself alone, but by the co-operation of his workmen.
He[She] should acknowledge their rights to share the benefits of that
which could not exist without their faithful performance of duty.
Not until the capitalist is just enough to recognise this truth, can he
ever join a group of workmen [women] and feel him[her] self among his [her]
friends.’
303)
Poem
What shall we talk about
Out
of all the world’s 1?
Talk about the extreme
failure
The
camel of cruelty swallowed
The world straining out2
gnats3
Mention a man4 who said
Be gorillas
Not chimps
Throwing stones
Tearing limbs
And who found no words
to make hearing
whose no magic words
made hearing
1. Speechless word here.
2. Ten million
3. Phone bills, new tyres, etc, etc.
4. Christ
304)
Charles Colton. ‘A
licentious press may be an evil, an enslaved press must be so; for an enslaved
press may cause error to be more current than wisdom, and wrong more powerful
than right. A licentious press
cannot effect these things, for if it gives the poison, it also gives the
antidote, which an enslaved press withholds.’ ‘Falsehood is never so
successful as when she baits her hook with truth.’ The modern press corrupts
the intelligence with facts. The
people will never learn that they only receive establishment-facts not
people-facts, because they have been prepared for it by school - people-facts
look foreign and therefore look to be not people-facts; and because they have no
historical truth of the struggle between establishment and people to compare the
newspaper with.
People are fond of the
newspapers and the TV news. The
newspaper is a security blanket. It
never disturbs. People fall in love
with the newspresenters, who are perfect. The
news seems to be serious, because it brings grave news.
In fact, it brings no news, but only the olds, the familiar, the
wellknown. What would be disturbing
would be responsibility, accusation.
If by law, taxes had to
fund a newspaper, that had to be free from government pressure, that had to be
delivered to all homes, you might have a free press, if the editor was inclined
to make her/himself aware of all facts and statements that a person seeking real
happiness would wish to know. Many
people would consider it unentertaining.
Project: establish a
free press with a flyer like this: ‘Did you know that at the present rate, the
top soil of the whole world will be gone in 80 years?
Did you know people are paid between $1 and $10,000,000 for a day’s
work? Did you know that the third
world gives the first world US$50 billion more than the first world gives the
third? Did you know it may be true
that the world is very far from being overpopulated? Did you know that it may be true that global warming will
cause an ice age? [Etc.
Provide your own examples.]
How can you achieve real happiness without the relevant information?
Newspapers paid by advertising will not print anything that will annoy
the establishment. You won’t know
what information vital to your happiness you are missing out on.
Subscribe to this paper [etc].’
The paper will be small,
expensive, monthly, but it will be vital, i.e.
living.
305)
Eternity
To those - they used to
call them Tyrants - I -
like every poet before
me -
wave my little unhemmed
Flag - White; not for
my Surrender - Theirs.
306)
Samuel Coleridge. ‘To
doubt has more of faith than that black negation of all thoughts and feelings
which is the lot of the herd of church and meeting trotters.’ ‘He [she] who
begins by loving Christianity better than the truth will proceed by loving his
own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself [herself]
best of all.’
307)
Say it!
Say it!
People have killed
people
Say
it with shame
Say
it with feeling
Say it
Say
it with feeling
Say
it with shame
People have hurt people
Very
very much.
Put it under your right foot
Under
your left foot.
Right
Left
Say it
Say.
308)
Edward Coke. ‘How long
soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law.’
‘Reason is the life of the law; nay, the Common Law itself is nothing else but
reason’. ‘No restraint, be it
ever so little, but is imprisonment.’ ‘It appears in our books that in many
cases the common law will control Acts of Parliament, and sometimes adjudge them
to be utterly void: for when an Act of Parliament is against common right and
reason . .
. the common law will
control it and adjudge such an act to be void.’ The law with its vaunted
protection of liberty: is it a success or a failure?
Has it protected liberty? Could
inequity be worse? Over the
centuries, the law has given more protection to unearned wealth than to earned
property. Historically, broadly,
the law is to the gun as paper money is to gold.
The law is the sheath; the sheath is the economy of the sword.
What the law can do, saves the sword.
What the law cannot do, the sword will do.
309)
Action poem in aid of the starving:
One
by one, take books at the library
off
the shelves
Read
out the subjects very loud.
Throw
them. Laugh.
Look utterly disgusted.
Project: perform this poem as an experimental play.
310)
Jean Cocteau. ‘The
instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up.
If this fails, they try to poison you.
If this fails too, they finish by loading honours on your head.’
311)
A girl with a book on palmistry;
(Hold my head while I go mad)
Her
schoolbag is pink,
(Hold my head.)
She has one of those
courting conversations
(So
opaque to themselves, so clear to others)
With the boy-librarian:
‘How did your exam go?’
‘That’s
not bad.’
If I told her she had
rather red ankles
(She
hasn’t)
She’d be more upset
than
The poor are at starving
to death.
312)
Richard Cobden. ‘I took
the repeal of the Corn Laws as light amusement compared with the difficult task
of inducing the priests of all denominations to agree to suffer the people to be
educated.’
313)
The benefits of violence
Your sister gets raped
(Who you may not like)
You get raped
(Who you may not like)
Your . .
. . .1 gets .
. .
. .2
(Who you may not like)
1. Mother, father, uncle, brother,
etc.
2. drugged, bombed, skyjacked, hacked,
shot, prostituted, corrupted, deceived, robbed, flogged, etc.
314)
Cicero. ‘The safety of the
people shall be the highest law.’ Gross inequity is grossly unsafe. ‘There is no fortress so strong that money cannot take
it’. If there was a liquid that
could turn stone walls to mush, action would be taken.
But when money is as effective, no action is taken against money.
‘For what person is there who would wish to be surrounded by unlimited
wealth and to abound in every material blessing, on condition that he [she] love
no one and that no one love him? Such
indeed is the life of tyrants - a life in which there can be no faith, no
affection, no trust in the continuance of good will; where every act arouses
suspicion and anxiety and where friendship has no place’.
Stalin. Ceausescu.
Rockefeller, with his electric fences and guard-dogs.
Every one of the half million overpaid, in proportion to their overpay.
It was from his education in such words as these that Wilde developed
his: we must get rid of wealth for the sake of the rich.
‘To think is to live’.
315)
Hamlet’s Diary
Words on paper
How strong you are!
Your mighty engines roar
To carry you to the
publisher’s door
Your great tanks of fuel
Will see you through the
centuries
Your mighty limbs stride
Into hearts
Your great voice is
heard
From Vermont to Tibet
Your jaws bite into
consciousness
Your sweet song
enraptures hearts
Your mighty juices melt
and
Dissolve into a loving
dew
All stubbornness of
position
your glad tidings ring
in
Every bone.
Your feet trample apathy
Your hands rescue the
weak.
Your mighty tits squirt
acres
Of milk for the hungry
Words on paper
Very strong .
. .
How weak words are!
The sharpest satire
Generates less action
than
A mosquito whine
Books stand on shelves
like
Dumb columns.
Words heard in the heart
Through the wall of the
brain
Sound like muffled
cannon
From someone else’s
battle:
Errors are made in the
heart.
Words are paper swords
Bent by every cunning
intent . .
.
Strong is strong, weak
is weak, alas, alas!
316)
William Channing. ‘As yet
Christianity has done little, compared with what it is to do, in establishing
the true bond of union between man and man.
The old bonds of society still continue to a great degree.
They are instinct, interest, force.
The true tie, which is mutual respect, calling forth mutual growing,
neverfailing acts of love, is as yet little known. A new revelation, if I may so speak, remains to be made; or
rather, the truths of the old revelation in regard to the greatness of human
nature are to be brought out from obscurity and neglect.’ ‘Great minds are
to make others great. Their
superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage,
not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy,
and to aid them to judge for themselves.’
317)
Starving to death
can’t
be as bad as I imagine;
People
forget about it so
easily
It’s
more important
to stop damaging your skin
to read good books.
to go to church
People
will say:
‘It’s his point of view’.
It’s
more important
to have an ‘I love
Leichtenstein’ sticker
to gain in confidence by doing a
public speaking course.
318)
William Bryan. ‘There are
two ideas of government. There are
those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do
prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.
The democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the
masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class
which rests on them’. ‘The
money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in
times of adversity. It is more
despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than
bureaucracy. It denounces, as
public enemies, all who question its methods, or throw light upon its crimes.’
319)
The Nazis starved people to death
The Germans did nothing
to stop people being starved to death
We go to plays and
Olympic Games
The Nazis had state
terrorism
The
Nazis were convinced the Jews were trying to destroy the nation
The
Nazis killed 1 million a year
We
kill 100 million a year.
Therefore:
Nazis vacuumed their floors.
320)
Orestes Brownson. ‘The
English labourer does not find his worst enemy in the nobility, but in the
middle class . .
. The middle class is always
a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its
inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.’
321)
I resent my doctor
With three properties;
And
the remuneration ratio between
Richest
and poorest
Is
10,000,000!
Therefore:
stormy waters.
322)
Louis Brandeis. ‘We can
have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the
hands of the few, but we can’t have both.’ ‘The greatest factors making
for communism, socialism or anarchy among a free people are the excesses of
capital. The talk of the agitator
does not advance socialism one step. The
great captains of industry and finance . .
. are the chief makers of
socialism.’ ‘The main objection to the very large corporation is that it
makes possible - and in many cases makes inevitable - the exercise of industrial
absolutism.’
323)
It is more important to frost the hair
to
read a feminist novel
to
be a friend of Palestine
to go tramping
to have a critical
bibliography of Stephen Crane
it
is more important to
have 3rd world dental care
to
have a plug-in portable sauna
to
get live broadcasts from the boats in
the Whitbread
It is more important to
have
Tracy
Chapman’s soulsearching lyrics
It’s more important to
have a
medical
solution for male impotence
It’s more important to
have a personal computer
It’s more important
for TV presenters to be
well presented
It’s more important to
have a Christmas
documentary
about a severely handicapped
person who wrote an autobiography
It’s more important to
enhance your
renovated
surroundings with the natural
beauty of wooden handles
It is more important to
be the first to get
a
photograph of the giant squid
It is more important to
design
good music for a Cutex ad
It is more important to
have boat propellers
It is more important to
put your hand
over your mouth when you
cough
It
is more important to mow the lawn
It’s more important
for a stuntman to stagger
to the edge of a cliff and
throw himself off, dead.
It’s more important to
have
beautifully bound books
It’s
more important to have
garden hose reel
synthetic pillows
ironing boards
a power sprayer
pet baskets
quilted bedspreads
pedal bins
giant spaghetti jars
crochet cotton tableware
cork noticeboards
coffee mugs
audio tapes
fireside sets
bathroom scales
a pressure sprayer
batteries
answerphones
It’s more important to
have a billion dollar
atomsmasher
around in city in Switzerland
324)
‘From the moment that the freethinkers began to question the existence
of god, the problem of justice became of primary importance,’ Albert Camus.
The thinker will have to decide for her/himself whether the setting aside
of the pursuit of justice is a primary or secondary effect of religion.
Religion’s providing an artificial conscience, a stupid rigid
conscience of formulas, maxims, platitudes has ensured the atrophy of conscience
and has made possible the infinite cruelties of consciouslessness.
‘The proverb warns that you should not bite the hand that feeds you.
But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself,’ Thomas
Szasz. Nietzsche looked forward to a human-based morality: that is
what he meant by the superman. The
Nazi horror is the first effect of humanity with atrophied conscience, removed
from the straightjacket of ‘conscience’-by-force.
The imposition of a formula-conscience not only destroys the thinking
conscience, so that when the formula-conscience is thrown off, the person and
culture is conscienceless and heartless, but also it becomes conscious that it
has under formula-conscience been deprived of life, for thinking conscience is
life, and so it is eager, in its heartless consciencelessness, to strip life
suddenly from those who seem to have it. The
Germans and the Japanese are cultures that most readily throw themselves into
the state, and therefore least live individual conscience, and most actively
take revenge for loss of life, and especially take revenge on thinkers and
thinking cultures, and other independents, like sexual, racial and religious
minorities. Let us hope that the
second effect may be the resurgence of free conscience, at first a tender shoot.
‘The world has achieved brilliance without conscience.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants,’ Omar Bradley.
‘We boast of vast achievements and of power, of human progress knowing
no defeat, of strange new marvels, every day and hour - And here’s the bread
line in the wintry street! Ten thousand years replete with every wonder, of empires
risen and of empires dead; Yet still, while wasters roll in swollen plunder,
these broken men must stand in line - for bread!’ Berton Braley.
325)
Sexism is moneyism. Who
would be disrespectful to a woman with money?
Racism is moneyism. Who
would be disrespectful to blacks, browns, yellows, or reds if they had the
wealth? Ageism is moneyism.
Who despises a rich old person? Brainism
is moneyism. Who would despise
brawn if it was wellpaid?
326)
G. K.
Chesterton. ‘Every man
[person] who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of
the brain.’ What do we harden our hearts for?
To stop things coming in to our hearts that would come in.
And to avoid realities is to be insane.
To refuse it entry is to admit its existence and not admit it.
‘The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been
playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till
the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.’ ‘The English
statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He
is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be
found with the silver spoons in his pocket.’ But what is the use of this?
To stop him stealing the spoons (humanity’s birthright to equal pay for
equal work) give him the spoons? At
least we can say: the ones we have given everything are the ones we know are the
biggest thieves. ‘To be clever
enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.’ And for
people to be stupid enough to let people keep all that money, they have to be
stupid enough to imagine it has been earned.
327)
You pay workers for ideas and they think. You don’t pay them for ideas and they don’t think.
A thing that can stop and start even thought is a very dangerous thing
and needs careful administration. If
you subsidise sheep you get more sheep (fictional and real). Money distorts
every human value. We cannot be
free, we cannot be ourselves until money is made equitous.
Thinkers are the head of god, the brains of humanity.
And money has decapitated humanity.
History has been a headless chicken.
The most practical thought has been marginalised, held in contempt, and
money has bred huge cancers of pseudo-intelligence.
328)
‘When you are skinning your customers, you should leave some skin on to
grow so that you can skin them again,’ Nikita Khruschev.
Profit is such an efficient thief (lossmaker) that it becomes
self-defeating. The only thing one
can do is, as in the game Monopoly, start again with an equal share-out.
But this would likely make businesspeople lose joy in the game: they only
like the game because it is real. A
Marshall Plan to give some of the winnings back to the losers would make it too
much like a game, and not real enough. Poker
is a game, but people don’t return the money they win.
(To reduce the impact of a casino on a local economy, one could set up in
competition a casino where people only lost 10% of what they played.)
329)
‘There is always less difficulty in fixing the mind on small matters
than on great,’ says Plato. In
other words, The lazier the thinker, the
greater the specialisation. Conscience,
and consciousness, mean together-science, the over-knowledge, the
overview-science, the superknowledge. Economics
involves the connection of everything. One
economics will study money, the other everything but. Money is just the trail of every human element, every desire,
misunderstanding, etc. Money is all
but universal value, and value is what is valued towards human happiness.
So economics and ethics are very overlapping.
Every fiscal element effects every other element, so economics is
properly holistic. Holistic
economics has yet to be developed, because the effort of checking the effect of
a change in one element on all other economic elements (which are all
inseparable from all human value elements) is a major discipline.
We cannot pursue happiness without holistic economics, which understands
the movements of the almost-universal value, money. We cannot have a real conscience (as opposed to a
superstitious unquestioning one) without holistic economics.
‘The one real object of education is to leave a [person] in the
condition of continually asking questions,’ Bishop Creighton.
Money is as complicated as the world, and our understanding can never be
perfect. Conscience is
omni-science, but we must try. We can at least see that money is generating extreme
inequity, extreme violence (because money is so vital to happiness, since money
is the value of virtually everything) and act to correct its imbalance.
Economics and ethics (the pursuit of happiness) is/are a waterbed, on
which a movement anywhere is a movement everywhere, and a fixing anywhere on
such a moving surface is like to tear the fabric and leave us with wet backs.
330)
‘It is so stupid of modern civilisation to have given up believing in
the devil when he is the only explanation if it,’ Ronald Knox. The devil is an explanation in the way ‘soporific virtue’
is an explanation for the effect of a sleeping pill.
It is an explanation that says nothing, that contains nothing
(intelligent) further than the question. The
devil, like god, is a question mark, an algebraic x, an airy nothing with a
human shape. What caused modern
civilisation? X caused modern
civilisation. X = What?
We give our ignorance a human shape because humans are the most
intelligent thing we know, yet if anything caused modern civilisation’s
barbarities, it is our ignorance. Money’s divisibleness means that the difference between
cost and price can be adjusted till it is too small to see, so we do not see the
theft, so we tolerate wealth, the source of all our miseries and the visible
extreme accumulation of these invisible thefts.
331)
Cartoon idea: in the lower left corner, a starving person in a barren
landscape; speech balloon in the sky reads: all I want is a room somewhere, far
away from the cold night air, with one enormous chair .
. . oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?’
332)
‘People will endure their tyrants for years, but they will tear their
deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately,’ Woodrow
Wilson. If there is any truth in
this (and it would not even be funny if there was not some truth in it) it has
serious implications for humanity. Where
there’s a will there’s a way. Does
humanity have a will to be happy? My
thesis in some lights is so obvious I cannot think that humanity has missed it
for the thousands of years it has suffered from wealth. Can we assume that humanity isn’t trying to commit suicide?
333)
99% of quotations, (books, plays, etc, etc) are not about the extreme
distortion of wealth distribution. This
is a measure of the unconsciousness. There
is not an injustice which is more than a thousandth as large as this one.
There is not a wrong that screams one thousandth as loud as this one.
This is the greatest crime of all time.
Yet 99.999999% hear it no more than a dog whistle.
The villagers are screaming about an epidemic of rats and mice, but
leviathan taller than the largest liner is coming ashore and going to take the
town in one bite, and only the poet is screaming about that.
The poet admits that he saw nothing of it himself till his fortieth year.
334)
‘The church complains of persecution when it is not allowed to
persecute,’ Luis de Zulueta.
335)
Project: (to wake up to the seriousness of the matter) starve your child
or yourself nearly to death.
336)
‘Long ago he had decided never to be afraid of the deafeningly obvious,
it is always news to somebody,’ P. J.
Kavanagh.
337)
Project: get a picture of a starving person blown up large and hang it in
your living room.
338)
‘I could never believe that Providence had sent a few men into the
world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled
to be ridden,’ Richard Rumbold.
339)
The moral of America is that when people are freed from the tyrannies of
Mammon they use that fresh power of freedom to build Mammon, with enthusiasm,
with pride, with rhetoric about how different they are.
340)
‘War seldom enters but where wealth allures,’ John Dryden. End wealth, end war.
341)
Laws have been passed against pyramid selling.
Yet human economic society is one vast pyramid sell, in which money
climbs upwards.
342)
‘Avarice, ambition, lust, etc are nothing but species of madness,’
Benedict Spinoza.
343)
The rich are rich because they are in debt; the poor are poor because
they have lent their money unwillingly, unwittingly, and at 0% interest, to the
rich.
344)
‘In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as
possible from one class of citizens to give it to the other,’ Voltaire.
345)
Borrowing: one pays more in order to have earlier.
But it is easy to borrow, hard to pay: easy for politicians to approve
loans (especially if there are perks) that the people will have to pay.
If a nation or individual is inclined to live irresponsibly beyond its
means now, what likelihood is it going to be willing to live well below its
means in the future to pay back the loan? Borrowing
creates an unjustified standard of living which is hard to subvert towards
responsibility. Living beyond your
means is not a good preparation for living below your means.
Who borrows, borrows off the next generation, sells his children into
slavery. Creditors impose
conditions, threaten a lower credit rating, higher interest rates.
One never knows how close one is to the slippery slope of debt growing
faster than debt servicing. One
never knows how much the collateral is tainted by speculative values.
The more credit is used, the more it is exhausted.
The gambler’s hope drives people to borrow, and eventually credit
collapses. Gamblers are more
reckless with borrowed money, feeling it to be less real than earned money, but
hoping it will generate more money that will be real.
Borrowed money seems cheap, not being earned, but is more expensive,
having to be paid with interest. Is
there ever justification for a nation to borrow? The nation that has enough credit to borrow, has enough
wealth to raise the cash from itself. ‘There
can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and
debt,’ Henrik Ibsen. Living in
debt is living closer to the edge. Or
over the edge, on a plank counterweighted by those not in debt. Once the line between debt and no debt has been crossed, debt
tends to go to and through the maximum. The
natural and inevitable ups and downs, sudden and cyclical, of fortune cut deeper
when the buffer of nondebt is thinner. After
a depression, people avoid debt. Slowly
the nation lives further and further over the edge; some people on the ends of
the planks counterbalanced by people on planks, etc.
One of the natural economic shocks that flesh is heir to causes the coins
to tumble - into the pockets of those who got out of the market ‘too soon’,
before the boom crashed. Tokyo area
real estate is valued at more than all USA and Europe; and Tokyo is overdue for
its cyclical earthquake.
346)
‘The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or
collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number
is self-protection,’ J. S.
Mill. This principle alone
permits the people to prevent the existence of wealth, even without the fact
that wealth is always theft.
347)
If a system works, people become more ignorant of what works, and it
falls into disuse. The less a
system works, the more appreciative people are of what works.
An ideal system will therefore oscillate between what works and what
doesn’t, so people never forget what is good and what is bad.
The system described earlier, in which a wealth tax going to the most
underpaid cycles from one hundredth to one whole of the unearned excess every
100 years, meets this condition of oscillation between accumulation and equity.
It could be fine-tuned so that accumulation exceeds the tax half the
time, and taxation exceeds the accumulation half the time. That is, the cycle would be twice as long as the average
profit rate. If the average profit
rate was 10% , the cycle length could be twenty years, starting with one
twentieth. A one hundred year cycle
with a 10% profit rate would give more freedom for ‘accumulation play’
without seriously endangering equity perhaps.
348)
‘Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to
see it tried on him personally,’ Abraham Lincoln.
Why didn’t I think of that? Why
is it that none of us had the consciousness to see that obvious point?
What will reality look like when
we see it?
349)
Wealth is a monopoly. Private
wealth is the murderer of social wealth.
350)
‘The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate
of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairness that afflict the
peoples - that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at,’ Mark Twain.
351)
The word economics comes from the domestic household. It is never the intention of the woman running the household
to ruin the girls with overwork, starve the babies to save money, flog the boys
to make them work harder. The
headwoman and everyone else would have considered her rule a failure if it did
not improve the lot of all in it. The
leader never felt morally prohibited from lifting up and supporting the sick,
the weak, the small and even the idle. She
did not idle because she was ruler, and lounge because of power, and live lifted
up by the exertions of others. She
did not idolise work where work was not necessary, but her aims were the
pleasure of work, the pleasures of leisure, the advancement of the household’s
security and safety, and an unfussy avoidance of waste.
‘Woman’s work! Housework’s the hardest work in the world.
That’s why men won’t do it,’ Edna Ferber.
If we look at history as men trying to run the household, we see failure;
excessive fear of work, leading to use of force on others, lack of real loving
patriotic commitment to the group leading to sacrifice of some members, simple
inability to cope with the many-faceted, full-on,
problems-from-all-directions-all-the-time nature of economy, simply not having
enough love to bind the group into a co-operative trusting team, insanity of
avarice. As biology tells us, the
male tends more to extremes than the female.
The virtue of moderation is a female virtue.
Men work too little or too much. They
discipline subordinates too little or too much.
They save money too little or too much.
Avarice is an old-fashioned vice, not studied by psychology.
But since it creates history (the chronicle of unhappiness), it deserves
99% of psychology’s attention.
352)
‘You can’t hold a man [woman] down without staying down with him
[her],’ Booker Washington. That
is, The first world experiences all the
unhappiness of the Third World.
353)
Economic discussions create an alarmist atmosphere inimical to social
contentment. People who are
overpaid will overwork; that is, wellpaid occupations will swell in numbers and
work will be created to justify the jobs. This
is true of economics. An untainted
economics would recognise certain things. People
produce, people consume. There is
really little in this to get worried about.
If production and consumption change, oscillate, etc, it is no concern of
the economist. The nation is free
to work more or less, consume more or less (than it produces). A ceaseless
increase in per capita production is absurd.
The one thing a government should be concerning itself about, the
inequity of profit, it does nothing about.
It also seems that a basic proper concern is not to be in debt, to avoid
giving the nation a standard of living that exceeds their expectation of how
much work they have to do to get it, which borrowing does.
It doesn’t equip people to live within their means, let alone below
their means so that they can pay debt. Numeration
allows economists to react to small changes in economic factors.
If productivity is down 2%, is it likely the nation has slacked off 2% on
average, or that the figures are rough? The
amount of money per capita should be decided on fundamental principles and put
out of reach of governments, i.e. no
inflation created by governments printing money (except to redistribute wealth,
as explained elsewhere in this book). The whole system should be as natural as
possible. Things that can make a
difference, like import substitution, are often neglected for dickering with
interest rates, etc, which cannot produce things.
354)
‘For two hundred years, the Judges of England sat on the Bench,
condemning to the penalty of death every man, woman, and child who stole
property to the value of five shillings; and, during all that time, not one
Judge ever remonstrated against the law. We
English are a nation of brutes, and ought to be exterminated to the last man,’
John Bright. Five shillings then is
probably around $50 now; Bright’s indignation may be proportional to what five
shillings sounds like rather than what $50 is, but nonetheless a voice of
indignation is most welcome: it seems Dean Swift went mad from lack of company
in indignation; it seems there is no market for indignation in printed form,
although it has sometimes (apparently) been accepted from the pulpit, under the
aegis of an invisible omnipater. The
fact illustrates a point I have made, that state cruelty is proportional to
inequity. ‘Men are not hanged for
stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen,’ George Savile.
Has anyone noticed or commented that this judicial principle of hundreds
of years, is thoroughly unjust? It
is an example of the excessive arrogance that is natural to wealth, and the
excessive humility natural to poverty, to accept this practice.
Lest rich people be inconvenienced, poor people must die.
‘Britons never will be slaves!’
It uses the criminality of the criminal to hide the fact that someone is
being punished for nothing. It is
no more just than convicting the innocent off the street.
355)
An important consideration in any scheme is: will it make the people
happy, gentle and tender and therefore unfit for war?
Happy people get conquered. Good
people get conquered. If people are
to be made happier by equity, it has to be international.
It may be objected then that hardworkers will be subsidising
‘softworkers’, but I think people with similar incomes will tend to become
equally productive as they reach similar levels of education, health, etc.
In any case, if people were to be different, it would be necessary to
give them equal hourly rates for sufficiently long for equality of education,
health, business opportunity to emerge (say, 100 years) in order to establish
any difference. Equality will also
give opportunity for maximum genetic mixing, which is supposed to be good for
our adaptive survival. This
assumption that all races are equally good over all characteristics is of course
opposite to Hitler’s assumption and all haters’.
356)
‘No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust
simply does not exist where hunger is, and as to superstition, belief, and what
you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze,’ Joseph Conrad.
Apply to the hunger of the underpaid for fair pay, the hunger of the
lesspaid for more, to the Mafias of every poverty spot, to the hungry.
357)
This book comes down to: let us learn the golden rule: who slaps will
find his air full of slaps, who hurts will be hurt, injustice is hurting people,
starving people is explosive, if we have the sense to go carefully past a
growling dog let us have the same sense with people, who hurls spears will be
fending off spears, who lives by the sword dies by the sword, who profits loses,
private wealth is private poverty.
358)
‘In the construction of a country it is not the practical workers but
the idealists and planners that are difficult to find,’ Sun Yat-sen.
359)
If the poor realised how much wealth they squander by not knowing
economics! How much happiness and labour they squander.
How recklessly they endow the rich with their wealth and happiness and
leisure (which, in its excess, is boredom, trial and burden to the rich). Wealth
is always an unemployment benefit. (What
they earn is not part of wealth.) Every
bit of work workers put in to a city to improve it increases their rent! The
establishment of USA will have to be done again on equitous principles.
United we stand, divided we fall; equitous pay is union, inequity is
division. Is the grossly iniquitous
status quo unchangeable because the poor, like parents, would rather push
someone else up to fame and fortune than go themselves?
If so, such charity, modesty and selflessness is extremely vicious, since
it causes 99% of human suffering. That
is: generosity is as dangerous as greed to the safety of equity.
Is desire to see wealth spread like manure among the underpaid envious?
If it is, it is righteous envy. Can
we think of the wealth-leaders of the world as bandits, as Nazis?
Not at all. ‘Saville-and-civil’
works: the wolf is a sheep. Oppression
is immediately a form of mind control: the oppressed cannot think that they are
oppressed and not burst with frustration and sadness. The song of the 50s, Sixteen tons: ‘St Peter don’t you
call me ‘cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store, Sixteen tons
and what do you get? Another day
older and deeper in debt’ is the world situation.
‘If you throw a stone in the marketplace, you are liable to kill your
kinsman.’ The world is a marketplace. Moderation
is a tree with roots of contentment and fruits of tranquillity and joy.
‘Brothers love each other when they are equally rich’.
‘A good person is a friend to him/herself’.
A bad person is an enemy to him/herself.
A rich person has more money than wants (otherwise he/she would have
spent the money); so what does he/she want with the money?
A weakness of democracy: all the candidates are unpopular.
We change our governments every few years, like cassettes, looking for
some decent music. ‘Moral
principle is a looser bond than pecuniary interest’, Abraham Lincoln.
Therefore it is necessary for pecuniary interest to be kept small so that
moral principle - doing what is best - is free to be practiced.
In other words, pecuniary interest is insanity.
‘Great poverty and great riches don’t listen to reason’.
Shouldn’t they therefore be legislated against?
360)
‘Glory be, when business gets above sellin’
tinpinny nails in a
brown-paper cornucopy
‘tis hard to tell it
fr’m murder’, Finley Dunne
361)
It’s more important to have
house plastering without
pops or bulges
It’s more important to
have a birthday
cake in the form of a
witch for your 7 year old
to have a university
education
to be feminine
to send you child to
ballet lessons
It’s more important to
restore Hampton Court
to have a Torvill and
Dean special
to take a raffle ticket
for a spa pool
It’s more important to
have
cross-country races
a British- Chinese
theatre
a softer tissue
It’s more important to
form French literary taste
to see a gem of a black
comedy
to see a film that makes
its points
with the utmost charm
to see a film of a
younger man and a bolder woman
to see the winner at
Cannes
362)
‘The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression’, William
DuBois.
363)
The custom of contracted marriages among the plutocracy breeds an atrophy
of affections that passes for and serves as dispassion, poise, temperance and
virtue. They have lost the nature
of affection, and govern mercilessly with poise.
Royals are emotionally lobotomised by arranged or limited-choice
marriages. (Plato: people marry
people similar, but should marry people different.)
364)
“It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that
prevents men [and women] from living freely and nobly’, Bernard Russell.
Wealth-poverty causes ignobility.
365)
Hard states are destroyed from inside; soft states from outside.
366)
‘Solar energy: governments are not interested in developing this - it
is too innocent for them’, schoolchild howler.
367)
There is no benevolence where there is wealth.
Wealth is itself an act of inhumanity and aggression.
368)
‘The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The labouring children
can look out
And watch the men at
play’
Sarah Cleghorn.
369)
The people are far too submissive. Just
as tyranny grows as power grows as money accumulates, so likewise submission
grows with growing poverty.
370)
‘We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to
spend the rest of our lives there’, Charles Kettering.
371)
Good people, because they are good, find fault with themselves, and
assume too readily their leaders are better.
In this way goodness aids and assists evil.