Modern societies are exceptionally good at measuring money, output, risk and performance.
They are much less consistent at asking a more basic question: what do our rules and institutions do to the conditions that make life possible? A three-essay inquiry published in 2017 first approached the problem from three directions – environmental conditions, credit and institutional selection, and the embodied consequences of disconnection and chronic stress. The missing bridge is the method that now joins those insights without turning them into a single metaphor or a closed theory.
The Listener’s Edition (Listen)
Download Full Document (PDF) (DOI)
The Science of Living Coherence (PowerPoint 1, 2) (PDF 1, 2)
Deep Dive | Measuring life capacity instead of money
Debate | How rules become our biological reality
Critique | Making the Missing Bridge framework more accessible
Short Explainer | Why Stable Systems Suddenly Collapse
Video Explainer | The Missing Bridge
Cinematic Explainer | Operationalizing Life-Value: The 5-Step Causal Bridge
Click on infographic to enlarge
Click on Master Diagram to enlarge
Summary of the Five Guiding Questions for Life-Value Analysis
Please scroll to the right to see the right columns| Question Number | Question Name | Practical Application | Key Focus Areas | Intended Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is being changed? | Identify the specific rule, practice, institution, or material intervention under investigation while avoiding vague explanations. | Rules, practices, institutions, and material interventions. | Specify the socially produced mechanism being investigated. |
| 2 | What conditions does it change? | Analyze the impact on need satisfaction, resources, exposure, deprivation, safety, time, and information. | Provisioning, exposure, resources, deprivation, and safety. | Determine how the intervention alters the real material and relational conditions of life. |
| 3 | What happens to load, capacity and margin? | Evaluate the demand imposed against the system's ability to respond and the reserve remaining after demand is met. | Load (demand), capacity (response), and margin (reserve). | Identify the relationship between demands and available capacities to assess system viability. |
| 4 | Can the living system regulate and repair? | Examine mechanisms of compensation, adaptation, recovery, trust, learning, physiological repair, and ecological regeneration. | Regulation, adaptation, repair, recovery, and compensation. | Understand how the living unity compensates, adapts, or fails under load. |
| 5 | What happens to future life-capacity? | Measure whether viable options expand or contract across specific scales, time horizons, and displaced costs. | Life-capacity trajectory, viable options, time horizons, and displaced costs. | Determine the final trajectory of thought, felt being, action, and future options for the living unity. |
3 thoughts on “THE MISSING BRIDGE: From Life-Value Onto-Axiology to a Causal Science of Living Coherence”