How the World Works Here is the way humanity operates. 1) Everything is assigned a value.

Valuation is carried out by us individually and collectively, with the latter having by far the greater consequences since it reflects a group rather than personal valuation. Whether we like it not, we are all forced to face the reality of collective valuations with which we may profoundly disagree. Human beings themselves are assigned a value. In capitalist nations, your wealth is taken as the primary measure of your human value. In religious societies, your public devotion to God is the measure of your human value.

2) Anything with a high value is massively desired and in enormous demand. Anything with a low value is not desired and there is no demand for it at all. In human terms, most people have low value and are in little demand. Celebrities, entrepreneurs, aristocrats, nobility, super rich etc are in immense demand. Ordinary people desire nothing more than to join this elite. In advertising, celebrity endorsements are used to raise the value of a product by simple association. Ordinary people crave to be in the company of celebrities and the elite because it raises their own value; they think the gold dust rubs off on them. Hence the rich keep getting richer, and more and more powerful and influential. Their value keeps going up while that of the ordinary person keeps going down. This is the master-slave culture. Infinite value is assigned to the masters and zero to the slaves. Even those who are simply related to the masters are assigned infinite value (this is what we define as privilege: unearned, undeserved, artificial value). The slaves, by tolerating this situation, show that the valuation placed on them is correct. They are worthless. How could anyone in the UK who tolerates the obscenity of a privileged hereditary monarch be anything other than pathetic scum who deserves to be called someone else's subject, and to be branded a "commoner"? Anyone with high self-esteem will unquestionably fight the elite and seek to topple them. No person with any self-respect would ever tolerate being called someone's "subject". 3) Reason is an instrument for helping us to plan ways of getting the things we desire. Reason, by itself, is not greatly valued in our society. If the ordinary person were offered a choice between being averagely attractive but one of the world's greatest geniuses versus being averagely intelligent but one of the world's greatest beauties, the vast majority would opt for the latter option. Beauty is associated with extremely high status amongst your friends; it is accorded an immense value by potential sexual partners; it secures you higher paid and more glamorous jobs; you are treated better by people; you are the centre of attention. Smart people are accorded low status in our world - unless they are rich. The fictional character Ann of Green Gables posed the question of whether it would be better to be angelically good, brilliantly clever or divinely beautiful. The first

option would be of the least interest to most people, the second would appeal only to clever people and the vast majority would do anything for the third. All the wars and conflicts of the world are about competing valuations e.g. capitalism has a very different value system from communism. Everyone is in a struggle, one way or another, for those things accorded the highest values. So, there you have it: the world in a nutshell. It has three phases: valuation, leading to desire for things of high value, and then leading to rational planning as to how best to get the desired things. Our world revolves around valuation, desire and reason, but desire is seen to be much more important than reason, and valuations are often utterly irrational.