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Deep Dive | Replacing the money sequence with life
Debate | A Blueprint for Life-Coherent Peace
Critique | Putting Life Coherent Peace Into Practice
Explainer | Life-Coherent Peace
Cinematic | Engineering Flourishing: The Triadic Architecture of Life-Coherent Peace
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Executive Summary
Peace is often defined negatively: no war, no open conflict, no visible disorder. This definition is dangerously incomplete. A society may be free of bombs while tolerating hunger, ecological destruction, preventable disease, loneliness, humiliation, dispossession, and despair. In such a society, the guns may be silent, but life-capacities are still being disabled.
This paper proposes Life-Coherent Peace as a more adequate framework. Peace becomes life-coherent when social, ecological, economic, cultural, and political arrangements conserve and expand the capacities of living beings to think, feel, act, relate, and flourish without destroying the life-ground of others.
The framework integrates three major thinkers. John McMurtry provides the value criterion: value is whatever enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought, felt being, and action; disvalue is whatever reduces, disables, or destroys these capacities. Humberto Maturana provides the biological and relational grounding: living beings are autopoietic unities structurally coupled to their medium, and human social life depends upon languaging, emotioning, and love understood as acceptance of the other as legitimate in coexistence. Johan Galtung provides the diagnostic grammar: violence appears directly, structurally, and culturally wherever avoidable life-disablement is organized or legitimated.
The synthesis leads to a practical claim: peace cannot be measured only by the absence of direct violence. It must be assessed by whether institutions, economies, languages, technologies, ecologies, and cultures enable or disable life-capacity.
The paper therefore proposes two methodological tools. The Life-Coherence Test asks whether a policy or institution expands or contracts life-capacities, secures or deprives the means of life, strengthens or weakens civil commons, reduces or reproduces violence, protects or degrades ecological life-support, arises from mutual legitimacy or domination, and subordinates money-sequences to life-sequences. The Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol addresses the harder problem of competing life-needs, where different life-enabling claims come into conflict.
The paper concludes that Life-Coherent Peace is neither technocracy nor moral absolutism. It is a disciplined, dialogical, life-grounded practice of social learning under constraint.
Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol_ Key Steps and Practical Outputs
Please scroll to the right to see the right columns| Step | Guiding Question | Evidence to Gather | Main Risk if Ignored | Practical Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Identify affected living unities | Who or what is affected by this decision? | Stakeholder mapping; ecological mapping; future-generation implications; affected communities; species and habitats | Invisible victims; narrow human or economic framing | Full life-field map |
| Map life-capacities | How are thought, felt being, action, relation, culture, and ecological viability affected? | Health data; livelihood data; community testimony; ecological indicators; cultural impacts | Reducing harm to money loss or abstract preference | Life-capacity impact profile |
| Distinguish needs from wants | Which claims concern universal means of life, and which concern discretionary wants or money-sequence interests? | Water, food, shelter, health, safety, education, care, ecological dependence, cultural continuity | Treating luxury, profit, or convenience as equal to life-necessity | Ranked needs matrix |
| Identify thresholds | Which harms are irreversible, non-substitutable, cumulative, or urgent? | Extinction risk; watershed collapse; mortality; severe trauma; displacement; cultural loss; ecosystem tipping points | Assuming all losses are compensable | Non-negotiable thresholds and red lines |
| Seek compossibility | What options preserve multiple life-capacities together? | Alternatives analysis; regenerative design; relocation options; transition planning; public investment; cooperative models | Premature sacrifice of one life-domain for another | Compossible option set |
| Use minimum sufficient force | What is the least dominating intervention capable of preventing serious life-disablement? | Legal options; social supports; enforcement alternatives; restorative mechanisms; rights protections | Coercive life-value; bureaucratic domination; paternalism | Least-harm intervention pathway |
| Require participatory languaging | Have affected people participated in defining the problem and the solution? | Deliberative forums; Indigenous consultation; worker assemblies; community review; public reasoning | Epistemic violence; technocratic imposition; cultural erasure | Participatory decision record |
| Monitor, repair, revise | What harms emerge after implementation, and how will they be corrected? | Monitoring indicators; grievance systems; ecological audits; social review; adaptive governance | Static policy failure; uncorrected harm; institutional self-protection | Revision and repair cycle |
