08 Enough or plenty

If we want to share the riches of our planet equitably, it would seem that we must learn how to have enough. Many of us believe that not taking more than our fair share, and focusing on our needs rather than on endless greed, makes us a good person. And yet this insistence on enough, the belief that if we we take more then someone else will suffer, is a form of scarcity thinking, a form of fear. In an abundant world, we can all have a life of plenty - and this should be our communal ambition, the celebration of a thriving humanity on a thriving planet. By shifting to an abundance mindset, we can celebrate a life of plenty.

Transcript

Enough or Plenty

Welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast where we examine what it means to live abundantly. My name is Karim Benammar. 

Today, I would like to start with a question. I would like to think about the notions of enough and plenty. When do we have enough? When do we have plenty? What's the difference between this idea of having enough, and this idea of plenty? 

I think using these two words, or playing around with the meaning and the way we use these two words, will help us understand this crucial shift between a scarcity way of thinking - a way of thinking in terms of lack, in terms of bare necessity, in terms of survival - and allowing ourselves to think of a world which is much more generous, where there is a sense of plenitude, of plenty, there is a sense of overflow, there is a sense of abundance, there's a sense of surplus, there's a sense that there is enough, more than enough for everyone, now and in the future. 

And while we say this, it feels a little bit strange. This feels like a heaven on earth, or it feels like Paradise, where the rivers flow, milk and honey; there are all kinds of religious or mystical associations with this idea of abundance, of this kind of abundance of goods and of happiness and of well-being. There is also a much more restricted idea, which is: should we not be happy with what we have, is there a time when, what we have is enough. 

And so, the words are fairly close together in a way. You might think that there is not much of a difference between saying “I have enough, I've had enough, you know, my body is full, my belly is full, I've had enough food, I've had enough to drink, I've had enough of this”, and saying, “well, there's plenty, I've had plenty to drink, I've had plenty to eat”. And yet I do think there's a difference, a fairly crucial difference, but it's a difference in tone, it's a difference in feeling, it's a difference in taste almost, a difference in worldview, a difference in the kind of way in which you're engaged in the world. You are thrown differently into the sense of enough or the sense of plenty.

Let’s start with enough. When you say “I've had enough”, it also means “I'm fed up with it, I've had enough”. It's full, but in a negative way, it's negative in the sense that you don't want anymore, “I've had enough of this”. Or “I have enough food”: that's not negative in the sense that you didn't want the food, but negative in the sense, you don't want any more food, it met my requirement. It's enough. There is enough food, there is enough gasoline in the tank to reach our destination. There's enough charge in our electric vehicle to make it to the charger, to update our examples a little bit. There is a sense that there was a certain need, there was a certain requirement, and it was met. There was a line to which you needed to fill, whether it was a tank, or your stomach, or something, or your mind with ideas, and it is filled, and now it's enough. It' satiates you, it satisfies you, but then you don't want any more. 

To me, there's always been a little bit of a sense that you've reached the barrier from a negative position. You set a limit because you knew what you wanted, and then when the limit was met, the problem was resolved. There was a lack: the tank wasn't full enough, your stomach wasn't full enough, and now you filled it, and now you're done. In that sense to me, the sense of enough has always been: we've solved the problem of a lack.

And I suppose my other association has to do with distribution and economic fairness; when people say: this is enough for me to take, because then there's enough left for other people. There's a saying attributed to Gandhi: “there is enough in the world for everybody's needs, but there's not enough for everybody's greed”. If we would just focus on simple things, simple foods, and simple water, and simple basics. It was this idea that if we minimise our needs to a fairly bare minimum, then there is enough. And so, if it's enough to survive, then it's enough. I have enough calories to survive, or I have enough foodstuffs to survive, I’ve drunk enough, I have enough shelter to be safe, I have enough opportunities, and then I should be contented, satiated, happy, etc. 

The implication, or the argument, is always that there is a fixed amount of goods, there is a fixed - economists always talk about a pie, like an apple pie, or any kind of other pie, I imagine a round cake, that if you cut into bits, and you get a nice kind of pie chart, which they always use, you can see what chunk of the cake goes to this person, what chunk of the cake goes to somebody else. If I take a small part of the cake, or my “fair share” of the cake, or a little bit of the cake, my bare needs, my bare essentials, then there is enough for other people to take their fair share.

The word enough, and the concept of “is there enough?”, to me is always associated with that scarcity thinking, in the sense that you are always looking at something that is acceptable. We're full, we're satiated, we're happy - but from the limit underneath, as it were, from below. What's the minimum requirement to achieve this? What's the minimum amount of calories, or foodstuffs, or housing, or clothing, or whatever. There's nothing wrong with this kind of modesty: people might have very simple tastes, or people might be perfectly happy with simple foodstuffs, and simple this and simple that. It’s not for me to judge what kind of choices people make, not at all. If you're happy living on very little, then that's fine.  

But the implication always seems to be that there is a moral imperative that you should live with as little as possible, because then there'll be enough left for everybody else. Take the smallest possible piece that meets your requirements, so that others may take a similar-sized piece, and then there is enough pie to go around. I call this fixed-pie thinking: you should take a small piece because the pie is limited, and therefore you shouldn't take more than your fair share. If you want too much, then you directly deprive other people of their share. This requirement to “just live within your means” or “just according to your needs, not to your greed” is: be modest in your needs, so modest that everybody can meet their needs.

[music]

You might think, Well, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with everybody just taking their fair share, and then leaving enough for everybody else? Isn't that what fairness, and what an ethical decision or a moral decision would be like? Isn't that what we consider a good thing - not to grab the whole thing for yourself because of your greed? We might not be able to get everybody to behave that way, but wouldn't it be great if we shared resources equally? 

Now, the word “plenty” to me opens up a certain space, it opens up an emotion as well. “I have plenty”: there's so much food here that I will eat to my plenitude, and there will still be food leftover. And again, you might think “well, isn't that a waste?” Right? If there's more than you need? Then what are you going to do with this extra food? If there's more to drink than you want to drink, what are you going to do with the extra water or wine or whatever it is you're drinking? To me the whole point of feeling a sense of abundance is the sense that even if I stuffed myself, even if I ate more than I could ever eat, there would still be more food. Even if I drank to filling myself in ad also a very unhealthy way, there would still be more. Even if I charged searched my car and drove aimlessly around the world, there would still be energy to power that car, to drive me even further. 

The sense of plenty is a sense of a limit, but the limit is self-chosen as it were. So, it's almost irrelevant. There is no real limit. There is so much out there that everybody can grab as much as they want, and there would still be stuff leftover. Perhaps again, we have this association “well, the land of plenty, isn't that an illusion? Surely things run out. There is not always more food. There's not always more drink, there's not always more energy?” Well, I don't know, I think that in certain aspects, in certain parts of our experience, we are starting with that surplus. 

Sometimes it's difficult to conceptualise. Because you might say “yes, but as long as there's hunger in the world…” This is an objection that people often make to me, and they get quite excited when they make that objection, quite angry. Sometimes there's this trembling in their voice, as they say “surely as long as there's famines in the world, you can't say that we have too much food. There is not enough food to feed everybody. There's too many of us”. The answer to that, I think, is: “it's true that in certain places, for certain groups of people, there's not enough food. But most of the time, almost all of the time, these are economic reasons: people can't afford the food. There are logistical reasons: the food can't be brought to them. The logistical reasons often have to do with conflict: there's a war going on, so we can't sort out the food thing. It might have to do with a drought, it might have to do with the farming situation, that large farms are producing the kind of crop that isn't useful to the local population, or that we're growing soybean to feed cattle, or that we're growing corn to make ethanol - car fuel made from corn. 

In fact, we are producing more than enough food, much more than we need. It's just not evenly distributed. And so to me, the idea of “is there enough or plenty”? and “do we have more than we need?” is not completely related to the question of whether it's equally distributed. You can have the reality that we produce more food than we need, and that there still are famine, and still people who can't afford to eat enough food. 

The whole idea of plenty is that there's so much that even if everybody wants a lot, there is still stuff left. That whole idea is that there is never really a limit. If we need more food, we'll just grow more food. It's not a fixed pie. We might not be able to do it immediately. There are scarcities to do with bad weather, with bad harvests of a certain kind of crop, which leads to scarcity. We have the Russian-Ukraine war, which has led to a very worrying, lack of grain on the world markets, which has led to price rises and hunger, terrible side effects of an already terrible conflict. But we're not fighting because there's not enough food. We're fighting for other reasons, and a consequence, we disturb the possibilities of logistics and economics to give the plenty of food that we have to people.

[music]

What about energy? There's not enough energy, right? Again, because the war, there is a crisis of energy, there's not enough natural gas. Even if there was enough natural gas and oil, we shouldn't burn it because of climate change, etc. There is again this perception of fundamental scarcity. You say “well, you shouldn't travel so much. Travel “enough”. That's enough travel for this year. Don't fly around the world, that's antisocial. Flying itself, for a certain group of people, has become a tainted activity. (Don't get me started on that. I love flying. And I think flying is one of the fantastic inventions of the human spirit. I do realise that there's climate problems with flying on fossil fuels, but all of these problems can be solved. That's the subject of a different podcast). 

But again, with energy: we can just make more energy. If you are in the situation that you have a solar panel that you put on your roof, say, or put somewhere, and it has captured energy from the sun, and you use that that energy to power your house, and your cooling, and your heating ,and your car, your electric car, then you can drive as much as you want. You're not taking it from somebody else, there is plenty of sun. We're not going to run out of solar energy if we make enough solar panel. Again, you can make the argument “yes, but the solar panels themselves and the cars cost energy to make”. Yes. But again, you're just shifting the problem a little bit further down the road. And the answer is the same. We can have enough energy to build enough cars, we can recycle car parts, which we already do to a really quite remarkable extent, et cetera, et cetera. 

This sense of plenty is really the sense that whatever we need lots of, we will just make lots of: it's in our power to do so. It's in our power in terms of energy. It's in our power in terms of food. It's certainly in our power in terms of objects: we can mass-produce objects very, very cheaply. People say “oh, yes, but what about the ecological pollution from mass-producing?” Well, yes, if you don't recycle, and producing with dangerous chemicals is cheaper. I'm not arguing that we should produce as cheaply as possible, but I think that even if we produce safely, it will still get cheaper and cheaper to produce. Because we will have machines that build machines, and whatever task we set ourselves, we can achieve a world of plenty. 

In fact, for a couple of billion people, that world is already there. People are not short of food. In fact, people are trying to lose weight all the time, by eating less food, or eating very special foods, or combinations of food. People are overwhelmed by too much food, too much drink, too many TV series, too much music on streaming channels, too many opportunities to travel, too many experiences, too much social media stuff to keep up with. And then suddenly, plenty and abundance become a negative word in a different sense. We feel overwhelmed. 

And I would argue that that's because we don't know how to deal with it. If you've always lived in a world, whether it was your personal world, or just the communal world, the notions of the community that you were part of, that thought that scarcity is a natural system, that enough is the highest thing you can aspire to, then plenty is confusing. It's disorienting. It's uncomfortable. And I say “some people”, because I'm not sure everybody suffers from this problem. I hope there's plenty of people out there - plenty of people, wink, wink - who just enjoy plenty. And who have never really thought about “should I feel guilty about taking more than my share?” I took half the pie, and then we just made another pie. Or I just ordered another one. 

This to me is the shift. It's a shift in production. It's a shift in distribution, also. It's a shift in thinking in terms of possibilities, so there's quite a lot of logistical, economic, structural, systemic points here. But the deepest point, really the most important point, is one of allowing ourselves to think of plenty. In using that word, enjoying plenitude. In seeing the overflow, the fact that there's so much more than you need, as a blessing. 

The other thing is to perhaps overcome this sense that enough is morally right. That if we limit our usage, we are being extremely moral, that the right thing to do is to use as little as possible, that by grabbing a lot of what we want, we are somehow taking more than our share, we are being unfair, we are being antisocial, we're being evil.

[music]

Instead, what about asking: “what if we make plenty?” What about creating plenty of energy? How do we produce so much energy that anybody can use as much energy as they want, to travel around the world, to heat or cool whatever space they want to live in? What about making plenty of energy? There is plenty of energy: the solar abundance is 10,000 times what we need. There is geothermal energy, which might meet all our energy needs by itself. There is the possibility of fusion reactors, perhaps, in the future. The goal should not be to produce enough, the goal should be to produce plenty. 

While we're at it, why don't we do that with food? Let's produce plenty of food. We know how the mechanism of food production works. There is nothing stopping us from producing plenty of food. We know how to produce plenty of goods, let's produce plenty of goods. Perhaps you would agree that there's already plenty of music, there is more music than you can listen to in your life on a simple streaming service, there are more TV series or movies or YouTube videos or TikTok videos or whatever being made than you can watch in your lifetime, and there's nothing stopping us from making ten times that amount, or one hundred times that amount. 

We are moving into this age of abundance of products, in first instance of digitizable products, but perhaps in all products. I think that should be our aim. And then we change the moral question. The moral imperative, the moral rule, the moral injunction that we impose upon others shouldn't be “please restrain yourself, please take only as much as you need. Don't take anything else. Don't take anything more. It's enough for you. It's enough for now”. This sense of enough, which to me always has this moral sense that that's the good thing to do, you get merit for doing that, you're a good person. And it's not just about you having enough, but making sure that nobody else takes more than their share. 

What about “take as much as you want, there's plenty, we will make more, more than you can ever need, more than you can ever greed”. That word greed is interesting, because I actually think that the greed comes from the fear that there's not enough. So, it's actually the opposite. In a world where there is more than you need, in a world of plenty, there is no reason to be greedy, it doesn't make sense to be greedy. I have a deep sense that greed comes from fear. Greed is a form of fear. “Let me grab the whole pie even if I can't eat all of it. Just in case, you know, I might want some pie in the future, and there isn't enough. Because I know there's not enough pie. So let me grab all of it”. Fear is what drives greed. In a world where you're guaranteed plenty, it's always enough. 

Let's take the example of music. Music is digital, so it's not directly applicable to physical things like food, for example. But it's an experience we already have. Me listening to as much music as I want to is not going to stop anybody else from listening to as much music as they want to. In fact, me telling them about the different types of music I listened to might encourage them to listen to more different music. These things that are abundant, like joy, and love, and excitement, they spread when you share them. It's the old idea: if you share an apple, you each have half an apple; if you share an idea, you both have an idea. Knowledge, love, humour, appreciation, all these things multiply when you share them. We could call that the law of abundance, or the law of multiplying by sharing.

People will say “yes, but it doesn't apply to physical products. But that line between what is physical and non-physical is shifting. Music in the past was a physical product, it is no longer a physical product. Energy was to a certain extent a physical product, it may no longer be a physical product. It might still have physical characteristics, but the physicality of it will be so abundant that it won't matter. And the same thing might happen to a certain extent with food. You might be able to generate so much food yourself that you're not taking it from somebody else. And if you're not taking it from somebody else, then the sense of “I'm actually taking from your pie, I need to limit myself, otherwise I'm stealing from your pie” doesn't apply either. These two things are no longer connected. 

I think that sense of fairness and poverty is not related to distribution. It's related to our ambition in producing. We can produce more, and then it doesn't matter what everybody wants. People will have a sense of plenty. When they have a sense of plenty, the consumption will go down because there won't be this fear that “I need to take it now before it runs out”. Then you say “well, why wouldn't you have unlimited consumption, limitless consumption?” Well, because you physically can't. We've seen it with food: you can't overeat at some point. It makes no sense to overeat. You might enjoy leaving some food on the table, but if you keep doing that, what's the point? You can't physically over-drink. You can't physically listen to six pieces of music at once. You can't for that matter live in six houses at once. There are all kinds of limits that are not the limits of taking as little as possible, but are just the physical limits of our existence, which means that plenitude can be achieved. We live in time; we are not immortal. We do not have limitless lives. Therefore, almost by definition, we don't have limitless needs. 

Thank you for listening. I will see you on the next episode of Cornucopia.