The Well Living and the other possible worlds

Abstract

The ethical critique of capitalism is based on the fact that the economic reasons that cause the deterioration of the environment are the same ones that end up producing the impoverishment of the majority of the planet’s population. Thus, making the poor the main victims of this perverse model of development that, by sacrificing Nature in the name of profit, ends up sacrificing human beings. After all, as Capra put it, “Ten dollars of coal equals ten dollars of bread.” The perversity is, precisely, in the triggering of an ecocidal process, with consequences still unimaginable for life on planet Earth. The Well Living, as an alternative possible and already under construction, unlike capitalism, is guided by shared responsibility and solidarity, as common to native peoples, who welcomes the lessons received: lessons from community life, nature conservation and Human wisdom. The horizon, then, extends to another type of civilization, welcoming the multiplicities, responsible for other ways of doing politics, able to commit to the realization of economic equity from the affirmation of community life. This is a change in thinking and acting, placing the common good above individual interests, which means the destruction of the essence of capital. Therefore, to put a limit on quantitative consumption, ensuring greater fairness, by releasing the human qualitative limit and the happiness of the community enjoyment. This experience, which is both ancestral and contemporary, qualifies the construction, not of a future humanity but in the relation of forces, of “a world where many worlds fit”. This way, the universalization of a stronger culture and the single form of effective citizenship are avoided. Living Well is a privileged interlocutor of decrease, not as a negative growth, but as an aggregator of alternatives capable of teaching the world that happiness is in coexistence and not in consumption.