This paper addresses the paradox that disabling life is often more profitable than enabling it. Drawing on a genealogical analysis of enclosure, colonial extraction, industrial throughput, neoliberal financialization, and digital enclosures, it demonstrates how institutional design has structurally tuned profitability toward harm. These arrangements exemplify what Johan Galtung termed structural violence and what we identify as systemic betrayal: the failure of institutions chartered to protect life to fulfill their mandate.
To diagnose and counter these dynamics, the paper advances John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA) as a normative compass, grounding value in the enabling and extension of universal life necessities (ULNs). It complements this with the TATi–triality framework, a symbolic diagnostic grammar that operationalizes coherence by testing whether policies and institutions sustain care (homeodynamics), adaptive pattern (morphodynamics), and purposive meaning (teleodynamics).
Building on these diagnostics, the paper proposes six design levers — metric reform, fiduciary and charter redesign, ownership and finance transformation, chokepoint reduction, transparency and traceability, and restoration of life-time — that can realign profitability with the enabling of life. The conclusion argues for a civilizational coherence turn, in which profit no longer flows from disabling life but from structurally embedding care, resilience, and flourishing.
