I hope the reader now has a reasonably clear picture of what wellbeing is, how it works and how it is shaped by the conditions in which people live. We are now in a position to apply this new perspective and expand the view, to look at contemporary human societies in more depth; to see how existing conditions of living affect wellbeing and to discern the kinds of changes required to really put wellbeing at the centre of social values and practices. As the recent World Health Organization Geneva Charter for Well-being stated, this is the urgent challenge of creating ‘well-being societies’ (World Health Organization, 2022a, p 1).

This chapter begins the process of developing a social, ethical, and political view of wellbeing by examining social conditions as they are now and seeing how they do harm to individual and population wellbeing. As will be seen, despite grandiose opinion from some about how wonderful modern societies are, their current performance on psychological wellbeing is in fact disturbingly poor and has the potential to get even worse. However, before beginning to examine the specific ways in which societies harm wellbeing, it is important to hold in mind that the picture is certainly not all bad.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, organisational features of some contemporary societies such as modern medicine, public education and a safe food supply are broadly favourable to wellbeing. Similarly, within any contemporary society one will likely find a range of everyday cultural beliefs and social practices that already provide for wellbeing to some extent and have potential to do so even more effectively or equitably, such as in the ways we care for children and family members, value and support our friends, engage in education, and take pleasure and solace in art, music, or natural beauty. Thus, while most people would not maintain a fully formed understanding of wellbeing as described in this book and might not think about their lives in these terms, nevertheless there are many ways in which people already value and practice wellbeing abilities to some extent.

Furthermore, as one looks across the many different nations and cultures of the world it is possible to see that some do relatively well in creating social and economic conditions favourable to wellbeing for all, while others are performing badly.

Wellbeing as a universal human concern

This book is about human wellbeing, perhaps one of the most widely examined topics in history. If you questioned people about what is ultimately most important in their lives, the great majority would land on ideas to do with wellbeing such as being happy or content, having good health, making a positive difference in the world, or taking care of family. Speaking to these universal human interests, scholars over centuries in diverse fields such as philosophy, politics, medicine, education, economics, religion, development studies and psychology have theorised, researched, and written about wellbeing (Tiberius, 2014; Huppert & Ruggeri, 2018). Indigenous peoples’ philosophies of human nature and our place in the world also commonly place wellbeing at the centre of concern (Gee et al, 2014) and show that intellectual inquiry into wellbeing has been with us far longer than the period of so-called ‘recorded’ history. While Western thinkers tend to see wellbeing as a property of individuals, Indigenous philosophies commonly understand it in terms of interrelatedness between individual, community, culture, and the natural world (Durie, 2005; Tynan, 2021; Mackean, Shakespeare, & Fisher, 2022).

Today, scholarly work and debate on wellbeing – conceived and studied in a wide variety of ways – continues apace. And those voices are joined by an ever-growing chorus of self-appointed wellbeing gurus, influencers, and lifestyle ‘experts’.

Universal interests in wellbeing are also reflected in the defining principles of major international institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (World Health Organization, 1948, p 1). The UN Declaration of Human Rights says that ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself [sic] and of his family’ (United Nations General Assembly, 1948, p 1). The UN Development Program says that, while processes of economic development may have value, ultimately ‘the end of development must be human well-being’ (United Nations Development Programme, 1990, p 10). The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) framework for measuring wellbeing expresses a similar view, saying that ‘Societal progress is about improvements in the well-being of people and households’ (Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development, 2022).

A change in perspective

As was considered in Chapter 1, contemporary human societies, with all the means of mass communication at their disposal, are filled to overflowing with beliefs and ideas about human psychology and our nature as thinking and feeling beings. In their daily lives, all human beings will routinely apply one or several of these beliefs to explain and interpret the actions and intentions of other people, whether those most familiar to them, or those they are aware of through the media or other forms of public discourse. The beliefs people use to explain the human world to themselves and others are built from their personal experience over a lifetime and may be derived from their parents, a religion or political ideology, a book they have read, or some other thread of ideas woven into their culture. These beliefs matter because they can and do influence social and political behaviours and attitudes; sometimes in ways that are favourable to human wellbeing, sometimes in ways that are entirely not so. Right now, as I explained in Chapter 1, the ideas shaping our societies are missing something crucial. The aim of this chapter is to begin to fill in that missing piece.

My first aim is to describe some of the basic dynamics of everyday social intelligence. It is my hope that the ideas presented here will help to explain aspects of other people's behaviour which might otherwise seem difficult to understand. I also hope they will ‘ring true’ by giving you a fresh perspective on some of your own experience. However, some of these ideas may also be challenging because they will attempt to get ‘under the surface’ of everyday, folk-psychological views of human intelligence, and (to some extent) under the surface of the typical individual's everyday patterns of conscious thought. By this path, one can begin to understand more clearly some of the processes of social psychology which underlie many of the problems societies face, but also – just as importantly – begin to develop a deeper understanding of human wellbeing.

Appreciating some of the basic dynamics of social intelligence will not give us the full picture of wellbeing (to be developed in Chapter 3), but it is an essential starting point, particularly because it explains the role that stress arousal plays in how people navigate everyday social environments and relationships.

In this final chapter, the aim is to draw together the threads of all those preceding to tackle a most urgent question: what political and practical steps can governments, communities, and individuals best take now to move our shared lives toward a society based on wellbeing? And in contemplating this question, it seems to me that the wellbeing society is just this; a society working with understanding and intent to cultivate the conditions in which human wellbeing can be realised. In this work, there is no sense in which the process could or should culminate in a utopian finished product. The understanding and conditions needed for wellbeing will always have to be made and remade anew. Wellbeing itself is not an idealised state to be reached but an ongoing process embedded in ways of living.

To see things this way is also to realise that, despite our present problems, the wellbeing society is something we can start to work on right now. It is to recognise opportunities for change in the many ways individuals, communities, and some governments are trying to work for wellbeing. A great potential for positive change lies in these efforts, which can only be strengthened by a clearer, shared understanding of wellbeing. In thinking through the social and political challenge of making wellbeing societies it seems that, while it is essential to recognise, resist and change the conditions that do harm, the prospect of success also depends on having a clear, practicable, and positive picture of the conditions one is aiming to create.

Furthermore, in contemplating the question of ‘what to do’ to move societies towards those conditions, it would be easy to launch into a conventional mode of political discourse by listing actions for governments to take; to invest here, to regulate there, to provide more services or programs to remedy this or that social problem. After all, people do this all the time for a variety of reasons and, yes, governments have a crucial role to play. However, my strong conviction is that the whole process of creating a wellbeing society must of necessity cut deeper and reach wider than piecemeal actions by governments alone.

When I first attended university as an undergraduate, like many at that age, I loved to spend time with friends debating profound ideas and issues; trying to understand the world I was encountering as an adult for the first time. For some, that youthful passion for big ideas will dissipate and come to seem like naivety as they move into a career, a marriage, or a mortgage, but that wasn't so for me. For whatever reasons, I continued in my own slow but steady fashion to try to make sense of the world and respond to the profound issues I saw about me. I became politicised in my thirties through the peace and environment movements, and then decided to return to academic study in my forties. It was during my work on a PhD in philosophy that I first encountered and became deeply interested in the role of stress in human social intelligence and mental health. I held onto that interest as I embarked on a career in public health research, examining how governments act or fail to act on the social, economic, and cultural factors that affect the health of whole populations.

In the last several years, I’ve grown increasingly interested in psychological wellbeing; what it is, how it works, how it can be nurtured or undermined. And through that work, it has seemed ever clearer to me that an understanding of human wellbeing has essential insights to offer on the present disturbed and distressed state of our societies and how we can devise and work in practical ways for something much better. This book is my effort to communicate those insights. For me it represents something like the understanding I hoped for as a young man, and for that I feel most fortunate. I hope this book will offer you something in your efforts to understand the world as it is and as it might be.

Matthew Fisher

October 2024

The main purpose of this chapter is to present an explanatory account – a theory – of human wellbeing, what it is and how it works, building on ideas developed in Chapter 2. The direction we are headed, beyond this chapter, is to show how this account can serve as a foundation for further ideas on a most crucial question; how to build societies which truly place wellbeing at the centre of their values and practices. This way of working in steps toward addressing a political and practical question may seem long-winded, but there are good reasons for taking this approach. Thus, before setting out my proposed theory of wellbeing, I will try to briefly explain these reasons.

As introduced in Chapter 1, much of what our governments and communities do now to organise society, deploy financial resources, and so on is not theory-free. It already contains and is shaped by certain values, beliefs, ideas, and assumptions, operating as working theories – explanatory ideas – about human nature and behaviour, what is good or right for us, and what we should do to address problems and improve things. When it comes to public policy – the things that governments do – these ideas are referred to as a ‘theory of change’; that is, a set of working ideas embedded within this or that public policy which says, in effect, ‘if we do x (our planned actions) then, for these reasons, that will lead to y (our intended outcomes)’ (Connolly & Seymour, 2015). For example, when politicians allocate funding to mental health services (the action), they’re operating on assumptions that these will be effective in treating people with mental illness (the reason), and so prevalence of those conditions will be reduced (the outcome). These theories of change may be explicit or take the form of tacit assumptions. They may be newly designed or built into long-standing institutional structures. Their use may be influenced by political interests. They may or may not apply contemporary evidence.

With all that in mind, there are three reasons why an alternative theory of wellbeing is needed to inform political and social change. The first, just mentioned, is that these kinds of explanatory theories are already present anyway, shaping and constraining social activity and politics.

Having examined how current societies do harm to wellbeing I now turn to a more positive question: in light of current circumstances, what principles and practices might we best apply to change course and move toward wellbeing societies (World Health Organization, 2022a)? In putting together what we know about wellbeing with all the issues raised in the previous chapter, two broad areas of challenge for social and political change emerge, and both must be addressed to optimise chances of success. One of these, obviously enough, lies with the area of strategic practice; the planning and implementation of effective, practical actions by governments, communities, and individuals to cultivate supportive conditions for wellbeing. The other lies with the field of politics, and more specifically with the framework of political principles and values that define the role and responsibilities of government and the State.

One reason why this second group of issues really matters for change toward wellbeing societies is because, as we saw in the previous chapter, our present, harmful circumstances are already being shaped by existing answers to these questions, embedded in dominant belief systems and norms of political behaviour; holding a grip on people's understanding of their world, and being actively used to hold current conditions in place. Political leaders use these ideas to try to hide the widening space between their pretend good society and the reality of many people's lives.

Thus, the challenge of change requires action not only to expose how current beliefs and values act to create conditions harmful to wellbeing but also to formulate a positive, alternative view of what is possible. The latter task is the aim of this chapter. Here, the approach I will take is to address the following question: in light of our current circumstances, what set of political principles will best position governments to recognise wellbeing as a core ethical commitment and then to translate that commitment into effective policy? In all cases, the arguments I present for certain political principles for wellbeing will build on my proposed understanding of what wellbeing is and how it works, and the outline of current circumstances from the previous chapter.