From Cultural Violence to Planetary Coherence: Recovering the Gospel Grammar for a Second Axial Spiral | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

Humanity stands at a civilizational threshold where ecological, cultural, and institutional systems are globally entangled yet symbolically fractured. This white paper integrates Johan Galtung’s theory of cultural violence, John McMurtry’s war-state paradigm, and memetic diagnostics with the recovery of a latent Gospel grammar of regenerative coherence. Together, these lenses reveal how cultural myths, emotional hijacks, and structural lock-ins perpetuate systemic incoherence, while also uncovering universal symbolic grammars — encoded across world traditions — that can orient humanity toward a Second Axial Spiral.

We propose a critical caution: coherence grammars can themselves be captured, commodified, or weaponized if abstracted into hegemonic universals. To prevent this, a Preventing Weaponization Charter is outlined, grounded in polyphonic attribution, life-value onto-axiology, memetic vigilance, and the safeguarding of symbolic mystery.

The paper concludes with a design framework for planetary re-coherence, integrating triality logic, symbolic time crystals, TATi grammar, and life-value ethics into systemic transformations in economy, law, governance, health, education, and technology. The invitation is to re-member our symbolic inheritance, reclaim emotional and memetic sovereignty, and become a custodian species aligned with the regenerative patterns of the Kosmos.

From Coordination to Coherence: Realigning Life, Language, and Systems for a Regenerative Future | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

We are living through a coherence crisis. Our collective symbolic systems — the languages, institutions, technologies, and economic logics through which humanity coordinates — have drifted out of phase with the autopoietic rhythms of life. While our capacity for second-order coordination through shared meaning has enabled vast social holons — families, economies, nations, religions — this symbolic power carries hidden risks. When our meaning systems decouple from biological realities, they produce structural and cultural violence, invisibly undermining the universal life necessities that sustain us.

This white paper integrates insights from Humberto Maturana’s autopoiesis, Arthur Koestler’s holons, Ken Wilber’s social holons, Johan Galtung’s positive peace framework, and John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA) to map a path forward. It argues that humanity now requires third-order coordination: the conscious redesign of our symbolic architectures — metrics, narratives, and institutions — to phase-lock with life’s regenerative processes.

By centering LVOA’s Primary Axiom of Value — that good is what enables or enhances life capacity — the paper proposes a framework for aligning meaning, systems, and technologies with the nested coherence of living systems. Through this lens, we explore pathways to positive peace, regenerative economies, and institutional redesign, offering practical tools for individuals, communities, and policymakers to realign human systems with life’s capacity to flourish.

Cultural Violence and the War-State Paradigm – Diagnosing and Transforming Recurrent U.S. Pathologies (2024–2025) | ChatGPT-5 & NotebookLM

This white paper synthesizes Johan Galtung’s concept of cultural violence and his archetypal diagnosis of U.S. foreign policy pathologies with John McMurtry’s analysis of the war-state paradigm. It applies this integrated framework to four contemporary cases — Gaza and the ICJ genocide proceedings, the Red Sea crisis, NATO expansion in the Ukraine war, and U.S.–China technology geopolitics (CHIPS/AI).

Findings demonstrate that the patterns identified by Galtung and McMurtry are repeating: myths of chosenness, Manichean binaries, and projection mechanisms legitimize escalation; the war-state’s closed circuit of necessity drives opposition into annihilation; structural lock-ins of the arms economy and alliances perpetuate militarization; and cultural rituals and necessity narratives obscure alternatives.

The risks are multi-dimensional: erosion of humanitarian law, escalation spirals, arms-driven inflation, democratic erosion, and cultural normalization of annihilation. Yet history shows that cultural codes can shift, arms races can be interrupted, and civil commons can be rebuilt.

We conclude with a layered package of therapies: delegitimizing cultural violence through education and symbolic reform; breaking the war-state’s lock-ins with diplomacy-first triggers, legal guardrails, and budget rebalancing; and reconstructing the civil commons as the basis of life-serving security.

Watch “How Advertising Creates Cultural Violence” on YouTube

Sustainable Human Published on May 10, 2018 Support the creation of more videos like this: https://www.patreon.com/sustainablehuman Words by Peter Joseph Our economy is based on consumption and advertising is the arm of creating artificial demand. And without that arm, we wouldn’t have people aspiring to things that are highly irrational. When advertising presents something… Read More

Eco-Genocidal System Violence of our Private Money System Still Unseen

“Money is one of those cultural forces that has remained mostly invisible to the conscious ‘western’ mind. It is therefore to a civilization as the DNA code is to a species. It replicates structures and behaviour patterns that remain active across time and space for generations.” – Transformation Management: Towards the Integral Enterprise In a previous… Read More

Eco-Genocidal System Violence Still Unseen – Structural and Cultural Weapons of Mass Destruction by the Multiplying Money-Cancer Class

Structural violence, a term coined by Johan Galtung and by liberation theologians during the 1960s, describes social structures – economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural – that stop individuals, groups, and societies from reaching their full potential. In its general usage, the word violence often conveys a physical image; however, according to Galtung, it is the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or…the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible”. Structural violence is often embedded in longstanding “ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience”. Because they seem so ordinary in our ways of understanding the world, they appear almost invisible. Disparate access to resources, political power, education, health care, and legal standing are just a few examples. The idea of structural violence is linked very closely to social injustice and the social machinery of oppression. Read More

“Global Projections of Deep-Rooted US Pathologies” by Johan Galtung (1996)

This paper by Johan Galtung analyzes the deep-rooted cultural, psychological, and structural drivers underlying U.S. foreign policy, conceptualizing them as collective “pathologies” that are projected globally through patterns of violence, domination, and exceptionalism. Using psychoanalytic metaphors and systems theory, Galtung identifies three interlinked complexes — Chosenness-Myths-Traumas (CMT), Dichotomy-Manicheism-Armageddon (DMA), and Repression-Projection (RP) — as embedded in the U.S. collective subconscious and shaping elite decision-making. He argues that these archetypal forces narrow foreign policy choices, sustain a worldview of “Good vs. Evil,” and normalize violent interventions while marginalizing nonviolent alternatives. Through ten case studies — including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War, Vietnam, U.S. policy in Latin America, Israel-Palestine, and the Gulf War — the paper demonstrates how these deep structures reproduce global violence and inhibit rational, cooperative responses. Galtung concludes by calling for “therapies” to deconstruct these unconscious pathologies and foster new forms of dialogue, empathy, and multilateralism as pathways toward sustainable peace

It has been accomplished! Violence = Acquired Life Destabilisation Syndrome (ALDS)

Definition of syndrome

a group of signs and symptoms that occur together and characterize a particular abnormality or condition

a set of concurrent things (such as emotions or actions) that usually form an identifiable pattern
– https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/syndrome

In my attempt to understand the root cause of the causes of life destabilisations, several articles synchronistically and serendipitously provided definitive answers yesterday that is consistent with the assertion that violence is an acquired syndrome rather that a congenital defect of our human nature. (Please see: US Defence Secretary Calls on Military to be “Ready” for War Against North Korea. “There are No Risk Free Options”, Army is accepting more low-quality recruits, giving waivers for marijuana to hit targets, War Culture – Gun Culture: They’re Related, and The Psychology of Mass Killers: What Causes It? How Can You Prevent It?.)

The last article was seminal for me in connecting different ideas I have come across over the years in my search for meaning and understanding of the underlying method of this violent madness that pervades every aspect of our society today. What I propose to do is summarise as best as I can in the author’s own words the ideas presented and how they are intimately connected to each other and to provide a neurobiological framework that connects the best neuroscience with the deepest analytical psychology in our toolkits of life appreciation.

Cultural Violence by Johan Galtung (1990)

This article by Johan Galtung (1990) introduces the concept of cultural violence as a complement to his earlier theory of structural violence (1969). Cultural violence refers to those aspects of a society’s symbolic sphere — including religion, ideology, language, art, empirical science, and formal science — that can be used to legitimize direct or structural violence. While cultural violence does not physically harm, it normalizes and renders acceptable the conditions or acts of harm, shifting perceptions of violence from “wrong” to “right” or “inevitable.” Galtung employs a violence triangle framework that interrelates direct violence (physical acts), structural violence (systemic inequality), and cultural violence (normative justification), alongside a violence strata model highlighting their different temporalities and causal flows. The paper provides examples from multiple cultural domains and explores how cultural narratives, ideologies, and cosmologies sustain violence across generations. Finally, Galtung connects these insights to Gandhian principles of unity of life and unity of means and ends, proposing a transition from a vicious triangle of violence to a virtuous triangle of peace rooted in cultural transformation.