institutional critique - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

This white paper offers a comprehensive critique of five major international institutions — the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), and World Health Organization (WHO) — through the lens of Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA). By applying the Primary Axiom of Value, which defines value as that which enables the universalizable development of life capacities without depriving others of the same, the paper exposes the systemic life-incoherence embedded in institutional logics. It identifies five recurring meta-patterns of dysfunction — money-value supremacy, elite governance, siloization, epistemic reductionism, and crisis management without transformation — across all institutions examined. The paper then proposes a bold and necessary re-grounding of global governance based on regenerative principles, participatory sovereignty, and life-coherent metrics. A new global architecture is outlined, including the formation of a Regenerative Global Commons Council and the adoption of institutional life-value metrics. The work serves as both a rigorous philosophical critique and a practical framework for those seeking to co-create a civilization where life, not abstraction, is the measure of all value.

This paper presents a rigorous philosophical inquiry into the deep structure of war, challenging entrenched assumptions underpinning the dominant military paradigm. McMurtry demonstrates that prevailing concepts of “national security,” “self-defense,” and “just war” rest on unexamined metaphysical premises that normalize mass homicide as a rational necessity. By exposing the fallacies of equating national interest with militarized aggression and conflating security with destructive power, the paper argues for a fundamental reframing of war. McMurtry distinguishes between pathological wars — those that annihilate human life and capacities — and enabling wars, which target disabling patterns such as disease, corruption, and environmental degradation without destroying life. He contends that the primary enemy is not other nations or peoples but the institutionalized military system itself, which perpetuates cycles of violence, fear, and economic exploitation. The paper proposes a redirection of collective energies towards non-military modes of “war” that liberate human and ecological potential, challenging the conflation of survival with domination and opening a horizon of transformative alternatives for global peace.