im putting my comment on your blog because i'm interested to see what your fellow thinkers have to say:

After doing about 5 minutes of research on your quoter…i see that he, himself, did make a living. but ok, maybe he didn't believe in it. perhaps he was an idealist and hippie before his time (like the hippies in chicago who expect me to give them 75 cents so they can buy starbucks…cause they dont want to get a job and just have starbucks handed to them for a quick, guitar, hippie tune)

1. maybe, MAYBE one in 10,000 are capable of supporting everyone, but a. they're not doin it b. why should one person be responsible for 10,000 other people? that's just…friggin mean. the rest are still capable of helping themselves, so why shouldn't they?

2. jobs are indeed invented, and keep being invented, because right now that is the only way those 10,000 people can eat dinner and give their kids dinner. the “drudgery” here being food, then shelter, etc etc. that allows him to exist.

3. “true business of people should be to go back to school”.-umm just a few short months ago i remember you talking about all the negatives of going to school and how you werent going to do so….so…now it's a really good thing? Also, colleges would not be able to function without those looking to just earn a living. for instance, who would take out the trash that those students leave behind? do all teachers want to teach…or are they teaching as a way to earn a living while doing some kind of research that may not be at the betterment of the human race?

4. if life was easy and awesome and i could just watch law and order all day whilst eating steak and crab, i totally would. but as life is…in reality…is that we work. i work two jobs on top of a job that is in my actual line of work. i work two other jobs so that my parents don't become that “1 in 10,000″. i work so that they dont HAVE to support. i earn so that i understand what it means to work becasue it makes me a better, nice person. i earn so that i have self respect and can be proud of my life and that i am not living off of others, or just “one”. i earn cause i'm not lazy and believe in creating a happy life for myself in the world i am living in…which i can be happy in. even if i dont like working at Yogen Fruz.

the.end.

I think people who do honestly focus on making a living are those who do NOT create unnecessary spending or buying because everything they earn has to go to necessities. that is why we are in such hard times economically.

changing 10,000 is not easy and realistically will not happen. there certainly are changes that need to happen but i think it is important to fully live in the world we actually live in. and how do we make this REAL world better, not a dream land. and changing 10,000 people is a dream land

so, is that last point that we should all live on a kibutz? and i think you should live and interdependent life for a bit before you preach it, you cant possibley FULLY live in that world where you are. amy lived on a kibutz for a bit, you should try it and see how it feels (not saying it's bad but that you should have that experience before you say it is what is best). and please dont say you have because you havent. or try living independently first? when you go to college, get a job, pay for your own books, your own anything. i really think that would let you see a side of life you havent yet. just what it's like to say hey, i cant buy ANYTHING extra for myself that i didn't pay for. all those conferences you go to, they can come out of your pay check, ya know? i think it would be a valuable experience to actually live those lives first. i feel like a lot is preached but…THROW yourself into other lifestyles before informing the world what is right and what is wrong.

Katie, I agree with a lot of what you say but I think you're missing some key points he's getting at.

It's that if people have to focus on making a living, it creates a lot of unnecessary spending and buying. Once you start dislodging a few people from pursuing their passion that begins to ripple across the whole system. 1 in 10,000 people can create enough economic value to support everyone else. Fuller doesn't imagine those other 10,000 people would be sitting on their asses, they'd be finding some other way to make a difference in the world, in a way that's not directly economical. Not everyone creates value along the same line of currency.

Vegging out on media is what many people worry most people would do if they did not have the pressure to survive, but
people who are engaged in some passionate pursuit rarely veg. They more likely use media for small doses of entertainment. People who make a living doing something they don't care about are often the ones who veg as a form of escape.

To reach the world Fuller is talking about it wouldn't be as simple as just changing one thing – i.e. 10,000 people just deciding they don't have to earn a living anymore. A lot of pieces of society would have to rearrange.

And in his point about school, it's not school that's the important piece of what he's describing, it's that people should “[go back to thinking] about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they
had to earn a living.”

So for him as an academic that meant school. For me not necessarily so, because frankly undergraduate education doesn't let you think about “whatever it was you were thinking about”. And that's one of my main gripes.

And while self respect is something everyone should strive for, independence isn't. But dependence is not the alternative. Interdependence is, but that's a longer conversation.