Tag: Bichara Sahely

Towards Learning the Life Capital Solution (An Essay as part of the Festshrift for Prof John McMurtry) | Bichara Sahely (2024)

This essay honors and extends John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology by arguing that contemporary health, social, and ecological crises share a common root: a life-blind social value system organized around private money sequencing rather than the sequencing of life. Drawing on the author’s medical practice and multi-year correspondence with McMurtry, the paper introduces life-capital — the wealth of means of life that reproducibly generates more means of life through time — as the missing integrator across clinical medicine, public policy, and planetary stewardship. It sets out McMurtry’s Primary Axiom of Value (value = that which enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action) and the Universal Human Life Necessities as testable, operational criteria for designing institutions, laws, and programs that measurably enable life rather than degrade it. The essay calls for open access to life-relevant knowledge, a shift from extraction to life-value addition, and practical rationing to life necessities (not scarcity), and it closes with action-questions spanning AI, public health, reconciliation, and institutional learning. An Appendix sketches how the life-capital lens unifies “One Health” across people, animals, ecosystems, and knowledge systems.

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There is NO UNITY Without a Life-Valuing COMMUNITY: Uncovering the LIFE-CAPITAL SOLUTION to a Healthier Nation

You may or may not know that I was his private doctor, and I had several opportunities to discuss many issues on life, that were relevant to his life and that of the life of our community.

What became clear very early on was that he was mourning the diminution of our liberating communal spirituality by an enslaving materialistic religiosity, that had captured our political and economic systems of good governance and had created histories and legacies of mental enslavement of our people, still yet unseen.

In this light, I am going to take a deep history and deep heritage approach, to show from whence we came and to whither bound, to show how we can make the Great Turn to transform all of the rules of our social engagements so that they can uplift us to the highest heights and not lead us downtrodden to the lowest-lows.

Sir Probyn had pride of place of Brimstone Hill in his heart, for it manifested the unbreakable spirit in the hearts and minds and backs and hands and feet of the slaves who built it, as manifested in their superb craftsmanship.

For him this was proof of principle that no matter how diabolic the times were, THAT spirit could never have been extinguished and can NOW be tapped into as a source of transformation that guides our thoughts, feelings and actions, individually and collectively, in comprehensively inclusive and imaginatively creative life-enabling ways.

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From Political Warring Insecure Complexes to TRUE PEACE INITIATIVES based on UNITY of COMMUNITIES

It all started last week, when I had another flare of my recurrent joint problems, which are usually triggered from stress at the workplace that appears to be going from bad to worse. I have been trying to wean myself off steroids for the inflammation in my joints over the year, but each time I… Read More

A Life-Grounded Manifesto

In our capitalist politico-economic system, the prime directive enshrined in law is to maximize profit for the shareholders, and NOT to optimize the benefits for all stakeholders, inclusive of workers, customers, communities and our planet. These entities are treated as externalities so as to privatize the gains and eco-socialize the losses.

In this system, workers are seen as a cost (a disutility) and if the capitalists can automate what workers do, and thus bring the cost of “labour” to zero, they would do so readily so as to maximize profit gains. Also having a bumper stock of unemployed people keeps the price of labour low (according to market supply-demand principles), hence the manufacturing of poverty and economic refugees, which can be stopped in a heartbeat if there is the local and global political will to end “wars of life-destabilizations” within and without.

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The true meaning of love and forgiveness – a life-value onto-axiological perspective

LK 6:27-38 Jesus said to his disciples: “To you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your… Read More

An Illustrated Guide to Life-Grounding Elinor Ostrom’s Principles of Managing a (Civil) Commons with Planetary and Population Health Life-Value Guiding Principles

Elinor Ostrom’s 8 polycentric, subsidiarity, hierarchical, coherently-inclusive rule-making and governance-principles can be life-grounded and connected to planetary and population health via life-value guided-principles and strategies as illustrated here.

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