I would like you for a moment to forget everything you have learnt and the interpretatations of all the experiences of your encounters. I would also like you to imagine there are no nation states, no religions, no money and no schools of thought or any other concepts that usually divide us, like race, ethnicity, sexual preferences or any other divisive ideologies as a matter of fact. Now I would ask you to look inside yourself to find that one thing that you can be absolutely sure about. What is it that everyone else on the planet, including those past, present and future, will also be absolutely sure about? What is it we all can agree on that is a gift to each one of us, which we will soon realise, is not of our making and totally dependent on the gifts of others to realise its maximum potential? What is this gift that keeps on giving which many of us take for granted in everything we think, say or do? Isn’t this gift, the gift of life?
What if we want to discover the determinants of a good life, the determinants that would allow for life flourishing, that would allow us to feel fully alive and connected to the full spectrum of life that came before us, that live and dwell among us, and will continue to sustain the others when we are gone? Where do we look for guidance and comfort that we are on the right path of awareness, appreciation and understanding of it all?
Are there any organising principles we can ellucidate that would be able to guide us in this journey and discovery of what it would take for full life-actualisation? If there is an ultimate organising principle, what would it be? What would it be organised around? Would it necessarily and sufficiently be around the provision of the means to life which are in short supply? How do we know what these means of life are? Is there a complete and universal set of means of life which all humans require to flourish? If so, would not the provision or deprivation of of each and all of these means of life determine whether we, as individuals or a society, live a fuller life or become deeply impoverished, respectively? Isn’t the true measure of the performance of any society or economy the extent of its provision of these means of life to its members? How do we then measure the wealth of means of life, that produces more wealth of means of life in cumulative yield through time? And finally, how do we define the efficient production and distribution of these means of life which are now in short supply, and are there any criteria to guide us in how we define efficiency?
Over the millenia of this grand human experiment, many great thinkers and societies have attempted to answer these questions and many schools of thoughts have been produced along the way. However, if we look at our track record, what is absolutely certain is that instead of producing more means of life and having it being distributed to each member of our societies, we have in fact created conditions that continuously undermine the quality and integrity of the production and distribuion system of the means of life to sustain all life, to the point that the value of the collective wealth of our means of life have been severely depreciated over time!!
Where have we gone wrong, and where do we turn for guidance? Fortunately for humanity, Professor John McMurtry has devoted his entire life to answering these questions, and has written extensively on these life-matters without much of his analysis becoming accepted as part of our orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It was only within the past 4 months that I had discovered his work, and the insights he has provided has without a doubt enriched my understanding of all the important questions I have grappled with over my life course, especially with regards to given the “progress” of civilisation over the millenia, why is there still more suffering in terms of poverty, crime, diseases, gross inequality and wars and threats of more wars, which any civilised group of people should have already solved. What I have since learnt is that we have created mythologies/narratives/stories to legitimize and justify the persistence of these man-made disasters in order to maintain the priviledge and status quo and assuage the guilt and insecurity of those in power!!
It need not be this way as our rules of society can be constructed to ensure they are formulated and guided around the organising principles that are being sought and have already been discovered by Professor John McMurtry’s life-value analysis as he has provided exact and objective criteria to steer us on our lost path to a fuller life understanding and its actualisation, be it at the individual, societal or planetary level. In the next blog articles, I hope to use my expertise as a medical doctor to highlight where his life-value analysis is implicit in our principles and practice of life-stewardship in the medical field, and where the lessons learnt can be applied on a larger scale and in different domains to ensure that our rules of engagement and interactions are fully life-enabling and fully life-coherent as it pertains to the production and distribution of means of life which are now being more than ever before threatened.
I highly recommend that you study Explaining Life-Value Onto-Axiology | The Primary Axiom of Life Value and the Universal Human Life Necessities and Principles of their Provision by Prof John McMurtry which provides the life ground of understanding and the organising principles of it all. Also he has critiqued our present economic schools of thought and has shown where some of the greatest thinkers of our time have erred and have gone off-course, and why they have bequeathed to us a worldview based on life-maladaptive money capital. Rather than being grounded in life capital understanding and its applications, which truth be told, is the wealth of means of life, that produces more wealth of means of life in cumulative yield through time, our present schools of thought have created more life complications and economic and political problems than what they have been purported to solve.
Please refer to How Unexamined Premises Lead to World Oppression: John Locke, The Theory of Private Property and Money by Professor John McMurtry and McMurtry on the Mis-Appropriation of Adam Smith by Globalists for more details. Please also refer to Human Rights versus Corporate Rights: Life Value, the Civil Commons and Social Justice by JOHN MCMURTRY where he “provides the long-missing basis for understanding” which are “the universal life necessities of humanity across cultures and the evolving civil commons infrastructures to ensure them.”
If you are like me, and want a better world for ourselves and our children, then we need to more than ever before take Professor McMurtry’s prescient and prophetic words and writings seriously and apply them in every domain of study and investigations to get our “households” in order, be it at the community or global levels. It is only if we stand together in solidarity and in healing, would we be able to celebrate this most precious gift of life that has been bestowed onto us, and for which we have an ultimate duty and responsibility to preserve and protect and provide for the just production and distribution of our life capital, the sum total of our means to a flourishing life.
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