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Deep Dive | Governing through the biology of love
Debate | Can the biology of love govern
Critique | Prioritizing life capacity over money value
Explainer | Life-Coherent Governance
Cinematic | Deriving Governance from Autopoiesis: The Ethical-Political Arc
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Executive Summary
The previous companion papers developed a biological arc from autopoiesis to living coherence, an affective arc from emotioning to viable affective coupling, and an evolutionary arc from natural drift to evolutionary living coherence. The ethical-political arc begins from the same premise: living systems cannot be understood apart from the relations that conserve or disable their viability. The affective white paper already argued that institutions and policies shaping exclusion, insecurity, domination, housing precarity, ecological degradation, or humiliation are not merely “social” conditions but can shape affective biology and disease risk.
Maturana’s biology of love provides the biological-ethical ground. Love names the domain of relational behaviors in which the other arises as a legitimate other in coexistence. This does not make politics sentimental. It makes social life biological: fear, domination, exclusion, humiliation, and coercion narrow the domains of action available to persons and communities, while recognition, dignity, and reciprocity expand them.
Galtung provides the diagnostic grammar of harm. In “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” he introduced structural violence as harm built into social structures rather than only direct physical injury. In “Cultural Violence,” he later defined cultural violence as any aspect of culture that can be used to legitimize direct or structural violence (Galtung, 1969, 1990).
McMurtry provides the evaluative criterion. His life-value analysis argues that social systems must be judged by whether they enable or disable universal life goods, life necessities, and civil commons infrastructures. In this view, the common interest is grounded not in price, profit, preference, or corporate right, but in the conditions required for life-capacity to be maintained and developed (McMurtry, 2011).
Ostrom provides a governance grammar. Her work on common-pool resources challenged the assumption that shared resources must be governed only by privatization or centralized command, showing that communities can self-organize durable commons institutions under appropriate conditions (Ostrom, 1990, 2009).
The central thesis is:
Life-coherent governance is the non-forcing coordination of social, ecological, economic, and institutional conditions so that living beings can conserve and expand their capacities for life, participation, repair, and coexistence.
Life-Coherent Governance and Violence Analysis Framework
Please scroll to the right to see the right columns| Core Concept | Primary Theorist | Biological or Ethical Grounding | Description of Function | Life-Enabling Counterpart | Life-Disabling Pathology | Universal Life Necessity Addressed | Strategic Goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Life-Coherent Governance | Bichara Sahely (Synthesizing Maturana, Galtung, McMurtry, Ostrom) | Stewardship of life-coherence | The non-forcing coordination of social, ecological, and economic conditions to expand life-capacity. | Non-Forcing Stewardship | Pathological Governance (Conserved Civilizational Drift) | Intergenerational viability and planetary life-support | Organize society so life can continue to bring forth viable worlds |
| Life-Value Onto-Axiology | John McMurtry | Life-grounded evaluation (Life-Value) | The criterion that judges systems by whether they enable or disable the range of thought, felt being, and action. | Civil Commons | Money-sequencing and Institutional Capture | Universal life necessities (clean water, food, shelter, care) | Shift from money-value to life-value as the ruling value-sequence |
| Civil Commons | John McMurtry | Social metabolism of living coherence | Socially constructed systems that secure universal access to life goods as a matter of right. | Universal Access and Democratic Stewardship | Commodification of life goods and systemic inequality | Health, Education, Water, and Ecological Integrity | Protect, nourish, and regenerate the shared life-infrastructure of society |
| Biology of Love | Humberto Maturana | Autopoiesis and Structural Coupling | The relational domain where the other arises as a legitimate other in coexistence; the biological ground of social existence. | Legitimacy, Dignity, and Reciprocity | Fear, Domination, and Exclusion | Relational validity and social participation | Conserve conditions for coexistence and non-forcing coordination |
| Structural and Cultural Violence | Johan Galtung | Diagnostic grammar of harm | Identifies harm built into social structures and the symbolic forms that legitimize injury and deprivation. | Structural Justice and Cultural Legitimacy | Institutionalized deprivation and symbolic normalization of harm | Avoidable life possibilities and security of life necessities | Transform conditions that disable life into conditions that enable flourishment |
| Commons Governance | Elinor Ostrom | Social-ecological systems sustainability | Institutional rules and self-organization that allow communities to govern shared resources without privatization or state command. | Local Self-Organization with Accountability | External centralized command or privatized extraction | Shared life-support systems and common-pool resources | Support viable self-organization and nested institutional accountability |