By now, you might have heard: continuing a long string of jaw-dropping mishaps, Uber lost it’s license to operate in London. Let’s talk about it for a moment, because I think it’s a perfect mini case study in failing at the future.

Uber’s big mistake wasn’t losing it’s license, it was having poor eudaimonics. By eudaimonics, I mean a thing’s effects on life: on well-being, real wealth, and human possibility. And Uber is the poster child for poor eudaimonics, the canonical example of the old paradigm failing. How?

Some organizations try hard to expand well-being. Uber seems to have mastered the art of suffocating it. No, really. Let’s count the ways. It essentially takes well-being from its drivers, shortchanging them of what Americans call “benefits”, and the rest of the world calls basic rights (to healthcare, pensions, and so on), working against their every kind of flourishing. It manipulates information to leave societies, drivers, and customers in the dark. And of course it famously built a culture where harassment and abuse appear to be the norm. All these are kinds of human possibility, potential well-being, being destroyed. Poof — they’re gone. It does all that to maximize profits — only even that, too, isn’t working: Uber’s burning billions in order to destroy well-being. All this is a kind of hubris, arrogance, thinking that even though one is just human, one is above humanity, and that is the real mistake here.

But let’s understand the depth of the mistake. Organizations with poor eudaimonics get punished more and more severely. You should see bad eudaimonics as a deferred cost: every bit of well-being that you destroy will one day have to be repaid in some way. There are three kinds of punishment bad eudaimonics earns. One, customers leave. Two, people stop doing business with you. Three, society itself just rejects you. That’s the one that’s the most likely right now, and that’s what happened to Uber. London specifically said: “a lack of corporate responsibility” caused Uber to lose it’s license. Translation: your eudaimonics are pretty awful, and we don’t want you here anymore, because you contribute little in real terms to our well-being, therefore, sorry, but you’re out.

So how did Uber get here? Organizations don’t suddenly choose to have bad eudaimonics. The whole forest is in the seed, and bad eudaimonics are in an organization’s philosophy, values, and culture. There, too, Uber is the poster child for how not to think about eudaimonics: even it’s name (let alone its many public proclamations) refers to a Nietzschean pop philosophy where only the Ubermen, triumphantly expressing their will to power, deserve to live well. The rest? Well, they don’t deserve anything but what the Ubermen want. Which, whether it’s abuse, harassment, bad information, or poor wages, they should be thankful for. Once an organization develops values and philosophies as toxic that, then the rest is just expression.

So organizations with bad eudaimonics offer broken social contracts — those in which well-being and human possibility are destroyed, not expanded. Can we think of other organizations like that? Sure. Here’s another example: Facebook. Just the other day, Zuck released a strange, oddly disconnected video saying how much Facebook shouldn’t be used to hack democracy. Of course, you don’t have to protest a thing that isn’t. Facebook’s social effects are increasingly negative, and that suggests that it, too, is in for steep eudaimonic punishment. In America, anything goes, and that’s a big reason it’s a failing society — but in functioning societies, like the EU, it’s hard to imagine that Facebook won’t be punished severely relatively soon for destabilizing democratic systems. Functioning societies just don’t want organizations that offer poor social contracts — that is what makes them function.

Now here’s the really big picture. Increasingly, organizations like Facebook and Uber — eudaimonically destructive, not constructive organizations — define America’s exports. And that’s a problem. It essentially means that America is exporting its own alarmingly low quality of life, democracy, and society to the world. Does the world really want that? I doubt it.

People like things that are bad for them. But in good ways. Staying out all night dancing till the sun comes up is fun. It might be harmful to your health, your job, and maybe even your relationship, but for precisely those reasons, it’s good for the soul. These things? They’re too often just bad in a bad way.

Umair