In Economics 101 we learn that marginal changes in the beginning can affect major financial outcomes in the long run. So it is with behaviours. Life traits are multipliers as we experience love, hate, kindness, jealousy, cheerfulness, greed and lies.

Lying

Telling one lie impels the telling of more until the circumstances become self-consuming. Lies may be omission of important information or commission to gain advantage over others; false judgement; or to attain favour. Habitual lying is as compulsive as any addiction and just as destructive.

Being honest requires courage and humility, willingness to admit fault and take responsibility for wrong done purposely or inadvertently. Having admitted wrong and apologised, allows us to move on, learning from the experience, to do better in future. In that way, honesty is a life multiplier, giving example, encouraging others to do likewise and never having to look back.

Sooner or later, a reckoning for lies occurs. All the controls and mandates stipulated by unelected bureaucrats during COVID without disclosing the science are being challenged by people who lost their jobs, their loved ones and businesses. The groundswell is beginning. Fauci is not science.

Expect that another groundswell of protest, recrimination and compensation to be mounted over the dishonest claims of climate change and cheaper renewables. Facts: Nobody controls the weather. CO2 is an essential plant food. Most do their best to look after the environment.

Any lifecycle business case for cheaper renewables fails at every point: mining to produce essential inputs; manufacturing in China, transport by fossil fuelled vehicles; destruction of landscape ecology; loss of valuable productive land; maintenance and end use costs; not recyclable, going to landfill; cost of demolition and disposal; additional subsidies for transmission grid to remote sites; opportunity cost of failing to invest in other more reliable energy and social needs like housing; loss of manufacturing; vulnerable sovereignty. In fact the sheer weight of all-consuming, all compounding feel-good lies about climate change must soon bring the gravy train to a halt. China doesn’t care about such virtue signalling. I’d prefer housing with reliable energy – as if we were a first world country. As if!

The ultimate aim to decarbonise the economy, depriving people of the very innovations that have advanced our way of life, means taking us back to the dark ages. Reading Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book, Apricot Jam, is a stark reminder of the hollowness of dictatorial grand plans like Climate Change and Communism. Solzhenitsyn wrote how first they came for the men, then chopped down the apricot tree from which was made the jam of the title, then came for the grain, then seed grain, women, children and animals, so the means of production and survival so long practised by  farmers were lost to the grand plan. People starved. ‘In 50 years, this land will be flourishing’ the soldier remarked. Revisiting 50 years later, the people were still without bread. Why expect anything different from the CC dictatorship?

Anastasia Palaszczuk’s Environmental Protection and Other Legislation Act for Queensland reaches much the same multiplier. First the land will be taken – more land for national parks (to become unmanaged fire and vermin havens); then the means of production is to be reduced – fewer animals allowed on farms; wind and solar panels are approved blights on the landscape; no mines, coal or gas fired power. Unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to determine, STASI like, who can do/produce and what. Already inflation is rising, power becoming all but unaffordable as it is unreliable, water will soon be at a premium, food shortages continue, quality of education declining and health services are congested. No way to run a state!

Hatred

I’ve never understood hatred can be perpetrated by so many, sometimes against people they do not even know. So much effort to maintain the rage! Social media is awash with hatred spewed out by the ill-informed to satisfy existing bias, ideology or political bent, usually to destroy challenges to power and privilege. Self-reflection would be too painful. Instead hatred multiplied by bots.

Manifestations of hatred occur in families, workplaces, schools and political arenas. It’s way more comfortable to point over there with accusations and blame, than to rankle in discomfort at facing truth, having to make adjustments before being forced to do so by circumstances.

Too often I’ve seen families destroyed when one in the family marries a partner who lies, manipulates and distorts to divide the person from the family of origin. Malevolence is multiplied when the balancing influence of families is lost, along with contact with grandchildren weaponised for greater impact.

In Australia, Coalition Prime Ministers Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison ran the gauntlet of hatred for such facile accusations as checking a watch, eating an onion and taking a week’s holiday.

Hatred of Donald Trump is manifest in the relentless legal attempts to obliterate him and anyone associated with him for having the gall to win the 2016 election, then implementing policies beneficial to the American people, as he said he would.

So consumed with hatred is the Democratic machine and its mouthpieces in tech and media, that they boastfully “fortified” the 2020 election for a Biden win, overturning Trump’s policies that saw America self-sufficient in energy, no wars, adversaries contained, higher employment and wages and secure border.

Biden and Democrat hatred of Trump has multiplied disadvantage for US citizens and the rest of the free world. Biden presided over an inglorious exit from Afghanistan, Russia has invaded Ukraine, China threatens Taiwan, Iran threatens everyone, and little Rocket Man in North Korea prances his ballistic missiles. USA is no longer self-sufficient in energy, begging rogue nations for consideration. Over 2 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border; 107k citizens have died from fentanyl poisoning; inflation is rampant; people continue to die from COVID. Even remedies for COVID mentioned by Trump as beneficial were withheld from Florida, a Republican state, where they were being put to effect saving lives. Death of your own people is of lesser value than hatred of Trump and maintaining power.

Demonising a person is a tool of hatred justifying destruction. That’s how the Department of Justice in the USA has been relentlessly weaponised against Trump by the Biden Democrats, even before Trump was elected, during his presidency and in the 19 months since. Consider why the same FBI agent has been responsible for the FBI engineered “white supremacist” kidnap threat against Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan; FBI operatives videoed urging protesters to enter the Capitol building on January 6; and in charge of raid organised on Trump’s Mar-o-Lago home.

See a pattern here? Hatred multiplied and compounded blinds people in Agencies like the FBI to the harm they do to targets and also to their own reputation from unequal, unjust administration of the law. As Stephen Covey asserts in his book The Speed of Trust, loss of trust can bring down governments, organisations, families and businesses.

Love  

Love is perhaps an even greater multiplier in that the more one gives, the more love there is. Love is infinite. Patience, kindness, cheerfulness, thoughtfulness, respect and good manners indicative of love can sometimes be thin on the ground, yet light up the day and multiply the joy in the life of those so blessed. Even more so when love offered is well received.

What I love weddings, over and above special clothes for the special occasion, is the abundance of love that drew a couple together to commit to each other before a gathering of people who love them. Wishes of hope, love and companionship abound.

Yet love does not end on the wedding day: love grows manifest in the endurance of a relationship, and in the children, grandchildren and if lucky, great-grandchildren, produced as a consequence of the love of two people. In later years looking back on the history of family one can see the strength of generative love multiplied through the vicissitudes of life, especially when lived honestly.