Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney’s Speech that served as the inspiration for this document
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Executive Summary
This white paper argues that the converging crises of our time — geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, institutional erosion, and ecological degradation — share a common source. They are not the result of isolated policy failures, nor primarily the consequence of bad faith or poor leadership. They arise from a set of deeply embedded assumptions about value, scarcity, growth, money, and power that no longer correspond to the conditions required for human and planetary viability.
For decades, these assumptions were stabilized by what came to be known as the “rules-based international order.” That order offered a compelling narrative: economic integration would generate mutual benefit; rules and institutions would restrain power; and compliance would purchase security. While never fully realized, this narrative was sufficiently credible to organize cooperation and justify compromise, particularly for middle powers.
That credibility has now collapsed.
In his 2026 address to the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney described the present moment as a rupture rather than a transition. He observed that economic interdependence has been weaponized, that multilateral institutions are functionally diminished, and that compliance with established norms no longer guarantees protection. This paper takes that diagnosis seriously — and extends it.
It argues that what has failed is not merely a set of rules, but the value framework underpinning them. Money, markets, growth, efficiency, and formal compliance have been treated as ends in themselves rather than as instruments accountable to life. As a result, systems can register success by their own indicators while systematically degrading the life conditions — health, security, ecological stability, and social trust — on which all enduring prosperity depends.
Drawing on the work of the Canadian philosopher John McMurtry, this paper adopts a clear evaluative criterion: a system is objectively dysfunctional if it advances abstract measures of success while eroding the real capacities of people and societies to live and adapt over time. This is not a moral judgment, but a test of coherence. Systems that destroy their own conditions of possibility cannot be sustained, regardless of how sophisticated their rules or institutions appear.
The paper proceeds in four movements.
First, it clarifies what has changed in the global order and why continued invocation of a “rules-based” system now obscures reality rather than stabilizing it. Second, it systematically exposes the lies we have learned to live within — economic, political, monetary, and cultural falsehoods that persist not because they are believed, but because they are performed. These include the myths of monetary scarcity, market neutrality, growth-as-progress, juridical sovereignty without material capacity, and the belief that there is no alternative.
Third, the paper introduces life-value onto-axiology as the missing framework needed to diagnose these failures and to distinguish means from ends. It integrates key insights from Modern Monetary Theory, including the recognition that money is a public accounting system constrained by real resources rather than a scarce commodity. In doing so, it highlights the quiet but decisive admissions by central banks — most notably the acknowledgment that money is created through lending — that render many prevailing fiscal and policy narratives untenable.
Finally, the paper outlines the contours of a life-coherent international order. Such an order would evaluate economic and political arrangements by their capacity to sustain life across time, not merely by their ability to generate growth or enforce compliance. It would redefine sovereignty as freedom from coercion through life capacity, security as the protection of health, energy, food, and ecological stability, and cooperation as coordinated resilience rather than ritual multilateralism.
The paper does not propose utopia, nor does it deny conflict or power. It argues instead for realism of a deeper kind: one that acknowledges real constraints, names false necessities, and aligns institutions with the conditions of survival they must serve.
Its purpose is not to assign blame, but to make knowledge explicit. As McMurtry observed, knowledge wins in the end — but only when it is known. This paper is an attempt to bring into the open what our systems already reveal in their failures, and to show that a more honest, coherent, and life-serving order is not only possible, but necessary.
Taxonomy of Institutional and Systemic Lies
Please scroll horizontally to see right columns| Domain | Lie Named in Source | Underlying False Assumption | Life-Value Consequence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Economic | The Lie of Monetary Scarcity | Treating money as a scarce, naturally occurring resource analogous to gold or household budgets. | Artificial scarcity imposed on life-support systems (health, housing, climate adaptation) while financial indicators are protected as ends. |
| Economic | The Lie That Markets Allocate Toward Human Well-Being | Markets are neutral mechanisms that efficiently allocate resources toward socially beneficial outcomes. | Chronic misallocation where luxuries expand while public goods like social cohesion and ecological stability erode. |
| Economic | The Lie That Growth Equals Progress | Rising GDP is a proxy for societal success and general improvement. | A perverse accounting where societies grow richer by destroying their own conditions of survival (health, environment). |
| Economic | The Lie That Efficiency Is Always Good | Minimizing cost and reducing redundancy is always synonymous with intelligence and responsibility. | Loss of system resilience; lean systems collapse under shocks, socializing the cost of failure across vulnerable populations. |
| Monetary and Financial | The Household Analogy Fallacy | Sovereign public finance is analogous to a household needing to 'find' money before it can spend. | Distortion of public investment as 'irresponsible' and under-provision of services as 'prudence'. |
| Monetary and Financial | Inflation as Moral Failure Rather Than Capacity Signal | Inflation is purely a result of excessive spending or lack of moral restraint. | Regressive adjustment where households bear costs through unemployment while structural deficiencies remain unaddressed. |
| Political and Institutional | The Lie of a Functioning Rules-Based Order | Rules and institutions reliably constrain powerful actors and protect the exposed. | Misorientation where states assess risk through a framework that no longer governs outcomes, delaying necessary adaptation. |
| Political and Institutional | The Lie That Sovereignty Is Primarily Juridical | Sovereignty is defined by legal recognition and territorial authority regardless of material capacity. | Hollow sovereignty where flags remain but states suffer chronic vulnerability to external shocks and coercion. |
| Political and Institutional | The Lie That Security Is Primarily Military | Safety is guaranteed by military spending and force projection over non-military systemic risks. | Mismatch between investment and risk; societies remain exposed to non-military shocks like pandemics and climate instability. |
| Political and Institutional | The Lie That Enforcement Can Substitute for Coherence | Stronger discipline and penalties can repair systems that have fundamentally incoherent designs. | Escalating friction between institutions and society; authority becomes brittle as consent gives way to compulsion. |
| Social and Cultural | The Lie of Individual Responsibility for Systemic Outcomes | Health, wealth, and opportunity are primarily the result of individual choice and effort. | Systemic problems remain unaddressed while individuals suffer internalized shame and stress from conditions they cannot control. |
| Social and Cultural | The Normalization of Precarity | Insecurity in housing and work is a sign of economic dynamism and competitiveness. | Cumulative stress and social fragmentation that undermines the human capacity for cooperation and problem-solving. |
| Meta-Lie | There is no alternative | The current harmful system is a natural law or an immutable necessity. | Paralysis of collective imagination where adaptation is reduced to coping and decline becomes self-fulfilling. |
