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We are living through a crisis of coherence.
Across the planet, our economic systems reward extraction over regeneration, our political systems struggle to represent shared interests, and our cultural narratives no longer provide a unifying sense of meaning and belonging. While humanity has become more interconnected than ever before, our collective symbolic systems — the languages, institutions, and technologies through which we coordinate our lives — have drifted out of alignment with the biological realities that sustain us.
At every level of existence, life depends on coherence: cells continuously self-produce and regenerate; organisms coordinate behaviors to survive; ecosystems weave together millions of species in delicate reciprocal balance. This ongoing, self-sustaining dance of life is what biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela called autopoiesis — the capacity of living systems to maintain and renew themselves.
Human societies emerge when these autopoietic beings — us — enter into second-order coordination: we don’t just act together, we coordinate how we coordinate, through language, norms, culture, and institutions. These collective patterns are called social holons: wholes composed of autonomous parts, bound not by biology but by shared meaning.
And yet, this symbolic achievement carries a hidden risk. When the symbolic systems we create — our markets, metrics, ideologies, and technologies — decouple from the living realities they were meant to serve, they can become destructive by design. As peace theorist Johan Galtung observed, such patterns create structural violence: harm that emerges silently from the very systems we depend on, justified and hidden by cultural violence — deep symbolic codes that normalize the unacceptable.
The result is today’s coherence crisis:
- Ecosystems collapse while GDP grows.
- Communities fragment while digital networks accelerate.
- Technologies optimize for speed and profit but not for life.
To navigate this moment, we need more than better tools or policies. We need a third-order coordination: a meta-symbolic redesign of the languages and logics that guide our collective behavior. This is where Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA) offers a compass. As philosopher John McMurtry proposed, we must evaluate all systems — economic, political, technological, cultural — by a single universal criterion:
Does this pattern enable or disable life capacities at every level?
This white paper invites readers into a deeper understanding of how life, language, and systems interweave — and how we can realign them. It proposes a regenerative coherence framework grounded in:
- Autopoiesis → honoring life’s intrinsic capacity to renew itself.
- Shared symbolic grammars → redesigning meaning systems to restore belonging and purpose.
- Life-value metrics → measuring success by our ability to sustain and enhance life’s universal necessities.
A future of flourishing depends on rediscovering coherence across scales — from the inner life of a cell to the cultural narratives that shape civilizations.
This is not merely a technical challenge. It is an invitation to reimagine ourselves: to co-create systems where our languages, institutions, and technologies once again serve life.
