Why Xi

By John Weyland

This book contains seventy-six pieces. They are all meant to say something new and to be things useful for understanding the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524691592

John Weyland

(Author did not want to provide. All his other books for this series did not have ATA)

Book preview

Chapter 1

Why the Chinese emperors picked their officials through tests on literature.

This seems a very odd thing to do. What has knowledge of the classics go to do with running a country?

There is an explanation.

During the many centuries of the Chinese empire most people could not read or write. Reading and writing had nothing to do with daily life.

Illiterate officials who ran parts of a country could not be controlled by whoever was supposedly running that country. He knew very little about what they were doing. He had no effective way to tell them what to do.

The Chinese emperors did not like this. They wanted to actually run their country themselves.

To do this they had to create a bunch of officials dependent on them. And these officials had to be able to read and write so they could tell the emperor what was going on and so he could tell them how to deal with it.

He decided to do this through the tests. He had the tests held every year and he made the ones who did the best his officials.

It was a big thing in China. Anybody who succeeded had a lifetime career in important positions that paid very well.

The tests were on the literary classics because that was practically all the written material that was generally available.

The system worked pretty well. The Chinese empire lasted until recently. It was only in the 20th century that the tests were abandoned. That was because a modern school system had been introduced. The government can now hire the best students and get the same results.

Chapter 2

That money is spent over and over again confuses people.

They think a government stimulus increases spending more than it does.

This has caused a lot of misunderstanding in the past 80 years or so since government stimulus started.

The government gives out a hundred billion dollars in stimulus.

So it increases spending by a hundred billion dollars.

The original recipients have spent it.

Other people than the original recipients then spend it.

So the stimulus has increased spending by 200 billion dollars.

And so on. Every time the stimulus money is spent spending supposedly increases by that amount.

So simulus spending is great. The stimulus amounted to to a hundred billion dollars and you get 100 billion dollars additional spending every time that money is spent.

Isn’t that great!

But it does not happen.

The stimulus does increase spending by whatever amount it is the first time it is spent.

But it does not increase spending at all the next time it happens. Or from then on.

That is what confuses people.

When spending is totaled it is spending over a period of time.

If spending is being totaled for a year, for example, the number of times it is spent has to be figured in.

So that one hundred billion dollars raises total spending by one hundred billion dollars the first time it is spent. But for total spending to stay at that level the same amount of money has to be spent over and over again. This does not increase total spending—as people think—it just keeps spending up to where it was.

In short, spending has to be repeated to stay the same.

Which means stimulus is not nearly as great as it is taken to be.

Chapter 3

Why government by the best is not the solution to the problem.

Government by the best goes back to Plato.

He worked out a very elaborate scheme.

Actually, there was only one simple idea behind it.

That was to get the people governing to do what was in the best interests of the community rather than in the best interests of themselves. The people who would do this would be the best.

He recommended all sorts of radical changes.

There was absolutely no interest in his scheme—except by later academics.

There have been many variations on this idea since Plato.

One that actually got put into effect was communism.

With communism the top party members were supposed to be the best.

Not because of themselves but because of the system.

Because of the system they would do what was best for the community.

It did not work.

Religions have tried to deal with the same problem.

This problem did not exist when human beings lived together in small collectives.

Which they did in the primitive age.

Then what was in the best interest of the group was also in the best interest of the members of the group.

The problem came with the agricultural age and is still with the human race. It is the problem of selfishness. How is the human race going to get its members to do what is best for their community if that is not what is best for them.

Strangely enough, the human race discovered the solution to this problem and put it into practice. But it did not realize what it had accomplished and so backed away from the idea.

The idea was to use selfishness against selfishness.

That happens with competition.

With competition selfishness benefits others. The more somebody tries to get for himself the more he provides for others.

Selfishness cannot be done away with. But it can be made to serve a purpose the opposite of itself. It is the solution of the problem that Plato was trying to solve.

Chapter 4

Happy in this world?

That is not a Christian thought

That the U.S. Constitution proclaims it was a right is a big departure in western thinking.

According to Christianity, happiness comes in the next world, not in this one.

This is a world of toil and sorrow.

That’s the whole idea of Christianity.

Humanity brought it on itself by committing Original Sin.

Read the Bible. There it is.

America was a place where you could be happy. That was new.

Free land. Practically no government.

There’s mention of God in the U.S. Constitution, but no mention of an afterlife, happy or otherwise.

The men who drew up the Constitution were influenced by the popular thinking of the time in Europe.

This was the Enlightenment.

According to the Enlightenment, there was a God.

He was resonsible for the universe. Period.

This was the God in the Constitution.

If Americans wanted to believe in the Bible and Jesus Christ and all the other variations of Christianity, they could, but that was up to them. The Constitution gave them no encouragement.

The Pursuit of Happiness attracted little attention when the Constitution was being debated and approved.

But it came into its own with the Great Depression and the years that followed. The government was intervening in people’s daily lives. Then the question arose: what is the purpose of all this? The answer had been lying there all along: the Pursuit of Happiness.

What else were we living for?

Chapter 5

The closest human beings are ever going to get to heaven is their imagination.

This may not be much but it is something.

The heavens of religions do not exist.

They never did exist.

Human beings believed in these heavens because they wanted to.

They could believe in them because they had imagination.

Imagination makes it possible to see something that does not exist.

Human beings do not want to die.

No living creature wants to die.

That is the nature of life. Stay alive.

Other creatures stay alive as long as they can.

But they cannot believe they are going to stay alive after they die.

Because they have no imagination. Their brains are not developed enough.

Only human beings can have this belief.

One of the advantages of it is that it cannot be proved false.

What does not exist in the first place cannot be proved not to exist.

So human beings could go