Toward robust foundations for sustainable well-being societies: Learning to change by changing how we learn

Abstract

This chapter explores foundational issues around the meanings, creation, measurement, and continuous renewal of sustainable well-being societies. It begins with a probe into the long history of concern around advancing human well-being and follows with an inquiry into the deep roots of why sustainable well-being societies are not ubiquitous today. Four bedrock assumptions that forged the status quo and form the core of the dominant, guiding metanarrative are identified. While these cornerstones of the prevailing metanarrative may have had significant relevance for leveraging opportunities and advancing quality of life in the past, they are no longer consistent with our knowledge of the state of the planet, the goals of sustainable well-being societies, or our survival as a species. I argue that the growing calls for large-scale, transformative change rest on three, intertwined building blocks: constructing new, life-affirming metanarratives; clarifying what we mean by sustainable well-being societies and how to measure them; and learning how to use broad heuristics to rapidly develop, prototype, and test promising social and technological innovations. The chapter concludes with sanguine examples that illustrate how meaningful, lasting change is already resulting from using these sorts of heuristics to create powerful new models that are displacing the existing model of reality, not by fighting it, but by making it obsolete.