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This white paper offers a new interpretation of John McMurtry’s Primary Axiom of Value — “That which enables life is of value; that which disables life is not” — as a foundational attractor for addressing the metacrisis. In an era marked by ecological, political, epistemic, and existential breakdowns, dominant models of value assessment have proven fragmented, reductive, and often life-incoherent. We argue that McMurtry’s Axiom, when reframed through the lens of regenerative coherence and symbolic recursion, provides a unifying compass for meta-design — enabling systems and institutions to realign with life’s generative logic.
Drawing from recent metatheoretical work, including the Mapping an Ecology of Integrative and Metamodern Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis (IAM, 2025), and integrating developmental frameworks such as the TATi grammar (Tend–Align–Transcend–Integrate), we develop the Axiom as a meta-epistemological attractor: a recursive symbolic principle that guides perception, evaluation, and design through phase-wise coherence with life. Unlike metrics that quantify static outputs, the Axiom functions as a value compass, attuned to pattern, phase, feedback, and host sensitivity.
We illustrate this framework through use cases in:
- Regenerative health systems: restoring multi-host coherence across fascia, mitochondria, narrative, and care;
- Governance design: embedding coherence clauses in constitutional logic and subsidiarity;
- Ecological policy: reattuning planetary phase dynamics through metabolic and symbolic repair;
- Education systems: fostering developmental symbolic recursion over standardization.
Ultimately, we propose that the Primary Axiom be adopted as the central attractor in integrative meta-design: a recursive phase-constraint that enables transdisciplinary alignment, institutional legitimacy, and the unfolding of a coherence-first civilizational model. By aligning our structures with the principle of life coherence, we recover not only a foundation for truth and justice, but for healing, meaning, and mutual flourishing in a living Kosmos.
