Introduction: the Art of the Wellbeing Economy

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance is about building a movement and the co-creation of powerful new ‘narratives of hope’ to shift the terms of the policy debate about repurposing our economies and a just transition to Wellbeing. We do not anticipate a singular new imaginary but a pluriverse of possible worlds, just worlds for the human and the more-than- human. Pluriverse – as opposed to the ‘uni’verse – refers to a world of radical inclusion, radical inclusion of ways-of-being-in-the-world [ontologies] and ways of seeing: not a reduction to relativism, but a perspective on power as a disruptive inquiry into the historical imposition of a ‘one world’ narrative aligned to an imagined Euro-modern centre. The pluriverse refers to the Zapatista call for a ‘world fit for many worlds.’ It is an appropriate perspective for an island imaginatively positioned between worlds: in-between (‘idir dhá chultúr’ ).

That shift is already apparent in multiple local-global conversations, dialogues and emergent practices across the world and across the island of Ireland, where visions of community and societal ‘progress’ are being re-visited and re-invented in the image of: Nature, Fairness, Participation, Connection, and Dignity [the foundation of all human rights].

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance is part of an ecosystem of popular, academic and policy conversations that go under many names, informed by a rich vocabulary of dissent and critique.

There is growing consensus around a realization that our dominant economic narratives are not innocent.

Jason Hickel, Carolyn Merchant, Sylvia Federici[1], and many others have traced the emergence of a dominant European narrative of ‘disenchantment’, based on a radical and patriarchal dualistic philosophy of science that reduced Nature to the status of a lifeless object, to the work of Francis Bacon (1561-1626)[2] and René Descartes. It was this unprecedented narrative, associated with the European Enlightenment, that helped sanction the enclosure and privatization of common land, ‘as land was rendered but a thing to be possessed’ and it was enclosure that would in turn, enable this narrative of separation (dualism) to rise to cultural dominance, removing ethical constraints on processes of possession and extraction. Land became property. Living beings became things or, in Heidegger’s words, ‘standing reserve.’ A genocidal assault on women’s bodies was launched in a bid to violently incorporate social-reproduction into the carceral disciplines of capital and commodified labour. Ecosystems were translated into ‘resources’ and ‘natural capital’

The European enclosures were followed rapidly by the colonial appropriation of ‘cheap nature’, a process that was always essentially, in the words of Aimé Césaire, ‘a process of thingification.’[3] Tim Jackson at the Centre for Understanding Sustainability (CUSP) tells us that our dominant economic metaphors are complicit with science.

‘As the philosopher Thomas Kuhn once pointed out, there is no ‘naked eye’. We see the world through our own distinct cultural lens. The lens through which scientists saw nature in the nineteenth century was tinted irredeemably by a fast-growing, brutally disruptive form...leading to huge social inequalities, horrendous working conditions and the disenfranchisement of vast swathes of the population from the land, from political power and from economic self-sufficiency.’ (Tim Jackson)

Shifting the narrative, surfing the zeigeist

In The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown Up Economy (2019), WEAll co-founder Katherine Trebeck problematizes economic growth and national addictions to GDP, arguing that in the industrialised world the great challenge is not to remain competitive, or to increase efficiency or production. The challenge is to ‘slow down without derailing, to reimagine progress beyond more of the same.’ For Trebeck[4] and WEAll the challenge for humanity is to ‘make ourselves at home in the world’.

WEAll Ambassador, Báyò Akómoláfé, agrees, ‘Times are urgent, Let’s slow down.’ 

In a radical challenge to civic society to rethink our approach to political and societal change, Akómoláfé sees much that is tired and too familiar in the hyper-active campaigns and slogans of NGOs. He discerns that the urge of the times is not to create another conventional social movement, not to fix a broken system but to acknowledge our inherent power to summon other worlds. To invoke and prefigure otherwise. 

In a vision that he describes as ‘postactivism’, Akómoláfé comes close to our vision for a Community of Practice for cultural creatives and others committed to the art of the wellbeing economy. Akómoláfé envisages, ‘In these human-scaled circles of rejuvenation, we will weave a new social fabric; a new world will be tantalizingly present and dynamic reality, not a distant ideal. In these places of ‘vulnerability’, we will reclaim a terrain that is free from the paralyzing influences of NGO-speak and politics.

1. Federici, Silvia, 2004, Caliban and the Witch, Autonomedia

2. Attorney General to England’s King James 1, who was also responsible for using torture against peas-ant rebels and heretics.

3. Aimé Césaire, 1955, Discourse on Colonialism.

4. Trebeck, 2019, p.214

This is an invitation to artists, creatives, activists and citizens alike. Art is the very nature of it.

 The tools for the art of the wellbeing economy: 

Vision. 

Resolution. 

Consolation. 

These are the tools from which to cultivate a different future that is as compelling as it is un-thinkable. That is otherwise than being.

Jackson cautions us that our ability to live well, to flourish in less materialistic ways, is in essence an artistic endeavor. Sustainability is the art of living well, embracing ecological limits of a finite planet…limits that are at once strangely liberating and sublime for they invite us to a home-coming, a cosmic love story. An invitation to fall in love with the first miracle: the miracle of walking upon the earth. Jackson has encouraged us to see our work over the next years not as an adjunct to the technical change or economic reform that we so badly need but as the very heart of the transition to a wellbeing economy.