Life-Coherent Peace for Human and Planetary Flourishing
This Project Hub gathers the materials for Life-Coherent Peace: An Autopoietic, Life-Value, Anti-Violence Framework for Human and Planetary Flourishing.
This work applies the Life-Coherent Framework to peace, violence, structural harm, cultural legitimation, civil commons, life-value, autopoiesis, love, and the conditions through which persons, communities, ecosystems, and societies can flourish without destroying the life-ground of others.
The guiding question is:
What must be protected, restored, or redesigned so that peace becomes life-capacity protected?
Why This Project Matters
Peace is often defined negatively: no war, no open conflict, no visible disorder.
But this is incomplete.
A society may be free of bombs while still tolerating hunger, ecological destruction, preventable disease, loneliness, humiliation, dispossession, and despair.
The guns may be silent, but life-capacity may still be disabled.
A life-coherent approach asks whether the social, ecological, economic, cultural, and political arrangements of a society conserve and expand the capacities of living beings to think, feel, act, relate, and flourish without destroying the life-ground of others.
Peace is therefore not merely the absence of direct violence.
Peace is the active protection and repair of the conditions through which life can remain livable.
The Core Claim
Peace becomes life-coherent when institutions, economies, languages, technologies, ecologies, and cultures enable rather than disable life-capacity.
This means peace must be assessed by asking:
Are life-needs secured?
Are civil commons strengthened?
Are communities protected from direct, structural, and cultural violence?
Are ecological life-support systems preserved?
Are people recognized as legitimate in coexistence?
Are money-sequences subordinated to life-sequences?
Are conflicts addressed through repair rather than domination?
The central shift is from peace as order to peace as life-coherent repair.
The Foundational Triad
This project brings together three streams of thought.
John McMurtry: Life-Value
McMurtry provides the value criterion.
Value is whatever enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought, felt being, action, relation, and flourishing.
Disvalue is whatever reduces, disables, or destroys these capacities.
The peace question becomes:
Does this arrangement enable life-value, or does it sacrifice life to a life-blind value system?
Humberto Maturana: Autopoiesis, Love, and Legitimate Coexistence
Maturana provides the biological and relational grounding.
Living beings are self-producing unities structurally coupled with their medium. Human social life unfolds through languaging, emotioning, and love understood as the domain in which the other appears as legitimate in coexistence.
The peace question becomes:
Does this way of relating allow the other to appear as legitimate, or does it require domination, exclusion, humiliation, or erasure?
Johan Galtung: Direct, Structural, and Cultural Violence
Galtung provides the diagnostic grammar.
Violence appears directly through injury, structurally through life-disabling social arrangements, and culturally through symbols, beliefs, and narratives that make harm appear acceptable or necessary.
The peace question becomes:
Where is avoidable life-disablement being organized or legitimated?
Together, these streams form a triadic architecture:
Life-value.
Legitimate coexistence.
Anti-violence.
Direct, Structural, and Cultural Violence
A life-coherent peace process must see more than visible conflict.
Direct violence
The visible injury of killing, assault, terror, coercion, bombardment, rape, torture, and physical harm.
Structural violence
The organized deprivation of life-capacity through poverty, exclusion, unsafe housing, food insecurity, preventable disease, dispossession, ecological degradation, debt domination, and denial of political voice.
Cultural violence
The stories, doctrines, symbols, myths, ideologies, and forms of knowledge that make direct or structural violence appear normal, deserved, sacred, efficient, patriotic, inevitable, or invisible.
Peace remains fragile if direct violence stops but structural and cultural violence continue.
The Life-Coherence Test
This project proposes a practical test:
Does a policy, institution, economy, technology, legal system, cultural practice, or peace process expand or contract life-capacity?
The Life-Coherence Test asks whether an arrangement:
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
subordinates money-sequences to life-sequences
preserves future possibilities for repair
The test does not offer mechanical certainty.
It disciplines attention toward life.
The Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol
The project also addresses harder cases where life-enabling claims conflict.
Sometimes different needs, communities, species, generations, or forms of life-capacity come into tension.
The Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol asks:
Who or what is affected?
Which life-capacities are at stake?
Which claims are true needs, and which are wants or money-sequence interests?
Which harms are irreversible, non-substitutable, cumulative, or urgent?
What options preserve multiple life-capacities together?
What is the least dominating intervention capable of preventing serious life-disablement?
Have affected people participated in defining the problem and the solution?
How will harms be monitored, repaired, and revised?
This turns peace from abstract principle into disciplined social learning under constraint.
Project Materials
The full materials remain in the original project post; this Hub provides a guided entrance into them.
Read
Original Project Post
The full archival post containing the project materials.
Academic White Paper / Full Document
The full scholarly version of the Life-Coherent Peace framework.
Executive Summary
A shorter entrance into the central argument.
Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol
A practical tool for decision-making where life-needs, institutions, ecosystems, and communities come into conflict.
Listen
Deep Dive: Replacing the Money Sequence with Life
A conversational entry into the project’s central shift from money-value to life-value.
Debate: A Blueprint for Life-Coherent Peace
A critical exchange testing whether the framework can guide practical peacebuilding.
Critique: Putting Life-Coherent Peace Into Practice
A reflective stress-test of how the framework can move from concept to action.
Watch / See
Explainer: Life-Coherent Peace
A shorter public-facing explanation of the project.
Cinematic Explainer: Engineering Flourishing — The Triadic Architecture of Life-Coherent Peace
A narrative version of the peace framework.
Master Diagram / Infographic
A visual map of the triadic architecture and practical tools of Life-Coherent Peace.
How This Project Connects to the Commons
This project connects directly to the main pathways of the Life-Knowledge Commons:
The Life-Coherent Framework — the core grammar.
Peace & Repair — the main pathway for this project.
Tools for Life-Coherent Repair — practical questions, checklists, dashboards, and arbitration tools.
Wisdom & World-Bringing — the deeper question of how emotioning, memory, sacred meaning, and distinctions bring forth peace or violence.
Economy & Progress — the relation between money-value, deprivation, life-drain, and structural violence.
Health & Healing — the bodily, mental, relational, and public-health consequences of violence and repair.
Caribbean / SIDS Lab — place-based application under real constraints of climate, governance, dependency, civil commons, and public trust.
Library — the deeper archive of related materials.
Suggested Pathway
For a gentle entry, proceed in this order:
- Read this Project Hub.
- Visit the original project post.
- Read the Executive Summary.
- Listen to the Deep Dive or Debate.
- Review the Life-Coherence Arbitration Protocol.
- Open the full Academic White Paper when ready.
- Return to Tools for Life-Coherent Repair and ask how peace can be evaluated by life-capacity.
No one needs to enter the whole project at once.
Begin where the concern is alive.
Working Questions
Use this project to ask:
What forms of violence are present?
What life-capacities are being disabled?
What life-needs are being denied?
What civil commons are being weakened?
What cultural stories legitimize harm?
What structures reproduce deprivation or humiliation?
What would legitimate coexistence require?
What would repair require beyond stopping direct violence?
What claims are true life-needs, and which are wants or money-sequence interests?
What action preserves the most life-capacity while minimizing domination?
What must be monitored, repaired, and revised?
For difficult decisions under tragic constraint, use the Minimum Harm Question Worksheet.
Invitation
Life-Coherent Peace is not peace as silence.
It is not peace as imposed order.
It is not peace as the victory of one side over another.
It is peace as the protection and repair of life-capacity.
It asks persons, communities, institutions, economies, cultures, and civilizations to become answerable to the life-ground.
The central question remains:
What must be protected, restored, or redesigned so that life can flourish without destroying the life-ground of others?