From Metastasis to Meta-Stasis: Why the Cancer Stage of Capitalism Is Structurally Exact — and How Life Recovers | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Across biology, medicine, economics, and planetary governance, systems have become increasingly adaptive while simultaneously more fragile. This paper advances a unified regulatory framework explaining this paradox. It traces the evolutionary arc of regulation from homeostasis (stability through constancy) to allostasis (stability through change), identifies metastasis as the characteristic failure mode that emerges when adaptive power escapes governance, and introduces meta-stasis — stability through viability — as the missing regulatory layer required for recovery. Drawing on cancer biology, stress physiology, systems theory, and life-value ethics, the paper demonstrates why John McMurtry’s diagnosis of a “cancer stage of capitalism” is not metaphorical but structurally exact. Healing is reframed as the recovery of jurisdiction: the restoration of the system’s capacity to govern adaptation itself, protect buffers, enforce boundaries, and preserve future option space. The framework integrates biological, social, and planetary scales into a single logic of solvency and offers a non-ideological pathway from crisis to cure grounded in the conditions by which life endures.

Rationing to Life Necessities: A Guide to McMurtry’s Life-Value Compass | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

This document introduces John McMurtry’s Primary Axiom of Life Value and its practical application through the principle of rationing to life necessities. It explains why today’s global system prioritizes profit over survival, creating crises in health, education, economy, governance, and ecology. Drawing on McMurtry’s metaphor of the “cancer stage of capitalism,” the work contrasts the destructive logic of money-sequence growth with the sustaining logic of life-sequence value. For a general audience, the text illustrates these concepts with everyday examples — bottled water versus clean water systems, luxury housing versus homelessness, fossil fuel growth versus climate stability. It argues that rationing to life necessities is not austerity but liberation: the foundation of real freedom, justice, and sustainable development. The document concludes with a call for life-coherent governance, science, and meaning, positioning humanity at a civilizational choice-space between collapse and renewal.

From Cancer Stage to Coherence: A Regenerative Framework for Planetary Survival | ChatGPT5

The convergence of climate instability, biodiversity collapse, resource scarcity, and social inequality signals not isolated crises, but a unified systemic emergency. Drawing on the PNAS Nexus “Earth at Risk” report and John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology, this article frames the planetary predicament as the “cancer stage of capitalism,” wherein an economic system grows uncontrollably, consumes its host, and ignores feedback until collapse. We argue for a shift from extractive growth to regenerative coherence — a systemic re-alignment of human economies, institutions, and cultures with the life-support systems of the Earth. The article introduces the Nested Host Coherence Map, a multi-scalar design for aligning individual, community, national, and planetary systems around the universal provisioning of life necessities. By integrating ecological science, economic reform, and moral philosophy, we outline actionable pathways for replacing extractive capitalism with a regenerative economy grounded in care, reciprocity, and justice. The choice before us is stark: evolve or perish.

THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISM REVISITED: FROM SEMIOTIC AUTOIMMUNITY TO LIFE-SYSTEMIC HEALING | CHATGPT4o

This work revisits and radically extends John McMurtry’s diagnosis of capitalism as a systemic cancer — one that has metastasized across the human body, society, and planet. Through the lens of Life-Value Onto-Axiology, we diagnose late-stage civilization as suffering from a breakdown in its semiotic immune system — the cultural and symbolic capacities that once discerned what serves life from what destroys it. The result is a civilization that mistakes pathology for progress, monetizes its own life-support systems, and attacks its commons in a state of autoimmune collapse.

We propose a regenerative alternative: a transition to a Pulse Civilization, one that pulses in coherence with the rhythms of life, guided by a universal Life-Value Compass across four interdependent domains — vital integrity, social coherence, ecological synchrony, and temporal stewardship. Central to this transition is the design of LifeCoin, a regenerative public currency that funds civil commons and life-support systems based on real-time life-capacity indicators rather than profit or scarcity.

This manuscript offers a full systems diagnosis and treatment plan: composting obsolete institutions, restoring public trust through symbolic coherence, and revitalizing collective intelligence through distributed governance and bioregional feedback. It invites the integration of ritual, story, body, and policy into a living immune response — one capable of healing civilization from within and guiding the emergence of a life-valuing future.