Now, now, I hear you: if we all "lived like billionaires," we'd soon consume everything, including each other.

Actually, we've been in the process of doing just that.

… there could be enough of the fundamental metabolic and mechanical energy sustenance for everybody to survive at high standards of living- and furthermore, there could be enough of everything to take care of the increasing population while also always improving the comprehensive standards of living. Granted the proper integration of the world around potentials by political unblockings, there could be enough to provide all people to enjoy all earth at a higher standard of living than all yesterday's kings, without self-interferences and with no one being advantaged at the expense of another.

Utopia Or Oblivion

So we can discuss what "standard of living" might mean, and whether "another" in his context might include the millions of species making up the living biosphere of this planet. Of course it might!

Let's adjust the resolution of Fuller's tremendous statement. Renewable energy running progressively miniaturized clean technologies devoted to "livingry" rather than weaponry, in a context of state-of-the-art local organic agriculture can now bring 1. Food, clothing, and shelter of the best sort for every person, and 2. What this site celebrates: Freedom from compulsory toil.

Fuller went on to say that 70% of jobs in North America are not producing life-support, but crap. Eternal "growth," as the economists use the term, means eternal crap, which means eternal waste. Free people with free imaginations don't need crap, and furthermore don't want it. The real thing is within reach of free people. What is the real thing? Your own life.

How many free people do you know? I would define freedom the same way Bob Dylan defined success: "A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do."

Let me rephrase that:

"A woman is a success if she gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between she does what she wants to do."

Now Jim Andrews, who does what he wants to do, might say "hey-- what if he wants to go to bed in the morning and get up at night?" But of course.

A guy I knew who was on welfare told me he felt like taking a machine gun into some bureaucratic office and opening fire, saying "Now-- me!"

But then the office worker might say, "what about me?" Fact is, the billionaires of the earth are often workaholics. They obviously don't know when to stop, nor do they know the meaning of the word "enough." Fuller said "there is enough to go round… handsomely." Note that word, "enough." It is incompatible with economic growth. Economic growth proceeds on the silent premise that there is never enough, and the more the "growth"proceeds, the more they create scarcity from abundance, until after a while tourists on holiday from other galaxies will see a core floating through space rather than the great ark of orchards it was so recently. "Too much is not enough." Orson Bean wrote a book with that title.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term, "the earth's core."