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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Problem
Contemporary institutions prioritize monetary growth and strategic dominance as primary indicators of success. Yet ecological instability, structural inequality, and systemic public health vulnerabilities intensify. This divergence signals structural incoherence rather than isolated policy failure.
Core Claim
Violence is best understood as the avoidable reduction of life-capacity produced by institutional design. When rationality is equated with monetary self-maximization, institutions systematically degrade the life-support systems upon which civilization depends.
Structural Architecture
The paper demonstrates:
- Governing value codes shape institutional design and life-capacity outcomes.
- Structural violence reproduces itself through feedback insulation.
- Militarized security often masks internal life-ground erosion.
- Unregulated growth detached from ecological and social constraints mirrors pathological proliferation.
- Crisis functions as a bifurcation threshold between retrenchment and revaluation.
Proposed Reversal
A life-value framework redefines rationality as life-capacity enablement. Institutions are evaluated by whether they expand cognitive, biological, and social capacity across generations.
The Life-Capacity Institutional Audit Framework operationalizes this shift through measurable dimensions:
- Expansion of life-capacity
- Protection of universal life necessities
- Alignment of growth incentives with ecological constraint
Implications
Durable peace requires structural coherence between institutional design and life-ground viability. Growth must be reintegrated within ecological and social constraints rather than detached from them.
The choice facing modern civilization is not growth versus stagnation, but self-referential accumulation versus life-coherent viability.
Structural Frameworks for Civilizational Viability and Life-Value - Table 1.csv
Structural Frameworks for Civilizational Viability and Life-Value - Table 1.csv| Conceptual Model | Governing Value Code | Institutional Design Features | Primary Rationality Metric | Ecological and Social Outcomes | Security Paradigm | Growth Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accumulation-Centered System | Rationality = Monetary Self-Maximization | Financialization, Extractive Growth, Militarized Security | Expansion of monetary throughput / Magnitude of monetary multiplication | Structural Violence, Ecological Degradation, Inequality, Systemic Public Health Instability | Strategic Dominance | Self-Referential |
| Life-Value System | Rationality = Life-Capacity Enablement | Civil Commons Reinforcement, Ecological Constraint Integration, Cooperative Security | Expansion of life-capacity across persons and generations | Structural Peace, Regenerative Stability, Expanded Life-Capacity | Life-Ground Resilience | Re-Regulated |
