[Download Full Document (PDF)]
Executive Summary
Background.
Modern economies systematically reward activities that disable life — ecological degradation, chronic disease industries, financial speculation, housing speculation, surveillance capitalism — while undervaluing activities that enable life, such as care work, ecological stewardship, and public health. This paradox arises from institutional design choices that tune profitability toward extraction and enclosure.
Problem.
The result is widespread structural violence: harm embedded in systems that prevent populations from meeting their basic needs. This is compounded by systemic betrayal, where institutions mandated to secure life necessities — governments, health systems, regulators — collude in harm by privileging the money-sequence of value (M–C–M′) over the life-sequence (flows → needs → regeneration → flourishing).
Framework.
To address this, the paper applies John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), which defines value as what enables and extends life capacities across time. LVOA specifies universal life necessities (ULNs) — air, water, food, health, shelter, belonging, peace, ecological continuity, and life-time — as the non-negotiable criteria of value. Complementing this, the TATi–triality framework introduces a symbolic diagnostic grammar to test coherence in practice across three dimensions: homeodynamics (care/maintenance), morphodynamics (adaptive pattern), and teleodynamics (purpose/meaning).
Findings.
- Historically, profitability from harm emerged through six stages: enclosure, colonialism, industrialization, developmentalism, neoliberalism, and digital enclosures.
- Contemporary systems of harm include fossil subsidies, industrial agriculture, chronic disease industries, financialized housing, surveillance capitalism, and war economies.
- Each of these systematically disables one or more ULNs.
Solutions.
The paper proposes six interlocking design levers:
- Metric realignment: ULN dashboards, life-value impact statements.
- Fiduciary reform: stakeholder life-capacity duties, rights of nature.
- Ownership and finance redesign: public/co-op banking, commons trusts, outcome-based models.
- Chokepoint reduction: open standards, distributed infrastructures.
- Transparency: supply-chain passports, impact labeling.
- Restoring life-time: debt relief, shorter workweeks, urban design for wellbeing.
Conclusion.
Disabling life is not inevitable; it is the consequence of specific institutional choices. By re-coding profitability to align with life-value, societies can replace structural violence with structural care. This requires a civilizational coherence turn: embedding coherence into the design of metrics, institutions, and infrastructures so that enabling life becomes the most rational, rewarding, and sustainable path.
