From Structural Violence to Life-Value Coherence: A Normative Framework for Civilizational Viability | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Modern civilization exhibits a persistent paradox: expanding monetary growth and military capacity coexist with ecological degradation, widening inequality, and systemic public health instability. This paper advances a structural explanation. Violence is defined not merely as episodic conflict but as the avoidable reduction of life-capacity below materially attainable conditions due to institutional design.

The analysis demonstrates how accumulation-centered value codes — equating rationality with monetary self-maximization — generate institutional structures that produce structural violence. Through five schematic models, the paper maps the causal architecture of this system, its recursive feedback insulation, its militarized security inversion, and its pathological growth dynamics.

A life-value reversal is then articulated, redefining rationality as life-capacity enablement and proposing an operational Life-Capacity Audit Framework for institutional assessment. Crisis is modeled as a bifurcation point between retrenchment and revaluation.

The framework offers a coherent normative and diagnostic grammar for aligning economic, security, and governance systems with ecological stability and intergenerational viability.

The Grammar of Viability: Diagnosing the Limits of Measurement, Preserving Coherence Across Scales, and Designing for Endurance | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Across physics, medicine, and governance, systems increasingly succeed by their own metrics while failing to endure. Precision improves, control tightens, and indicators look better — yet coherence erodes and collapse arrives abruptly. This trilogy argues that these failures share a common structural cause: a persistent confusion between projection and reality.

Measurement is indispensable, but it is never exhaustive. Action proceeds through stabilised variables — observables, biomarkers, indicators — while the conditions for persistence reside in relational structures that cannot be fully projected without loss. This work names that structure as fibered viability: systems act in a measurable base space, but remain viable only if hidden coherence in the fiber is preserved.

Organised across three interlinked volumes — physics and philosophy, clinical medicine and systems thinking, and policy, economics, and the civil commons — the trilogy traces a single, scale-stable grammar from the electron, to the patient, to the nation. In each domain, viability depends on invariant relations, bounded coupling, and the protection of regenerative capacity rather than on optimisation of projected targets alone.

The Grammar of Viability offers a unifying framework for understanding why optimisation without coherence produces brittleness, and how science, medicine, and governance can be re-situated within the constraints that make endurance possible.

The Money Exception: How Monetary Abstraction Cancels the Moral Limits of Private Property — and How Life-Value Restores Them | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Modern political economy rests on an implicit moral inversion: money, originally a means of exchange, has become the governing standard of value. This paper traces that inversion to a pivotal but underexamined move in early liberal property theory — the treatment of money as a morally exceptional object. Reconstructing the original life-grounded constraints on private property articulated by John Locke, the analysis shows how labor, sufficiency, and non-waste once functioned as intrinsic moral limits. The introduction of money, conceived as non-perishable and value-neutral, quietly bypassed these limits in practice without refuting them in principle.

The paper names this bypass the money exception and demonstrates how it reverses the value order of society: life ceases to govern property, and property — measured monetarily — comes to govern life. Drawing on John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology, the paper distinguishes between life-sequence and money-sequence systems and explains why money-governed systems reliably generate ecological degradation, public health failure, and social insecurity while appearing economically successful.

Rather than rejecting markets or private property, the paper argues for restoring the life-grounded conditions that once made them morally intelligible. It reframes contemporary crises as a correctable design flaw in the moral architecture of political economy and offers a coherent basis for re-embedding money, markets, and property within the requirements of life itself.

Ethics as a Science of Viability: Life-Value Onto-Axiology and the Conditions of Human Flourishing | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Contemporary societies face a persistent paradox: despite widespread commitment to values such as health, prosperity, freedom, and sustainability, social, ecological, and human crises continue to deepen. This white paper argues that the problem lies not in the absence of values, but in the absence of a shared, life-grounded standard for what value is.

Drawing on Life-Value Onto-Axiology, developed by John McMurtry, the paper reframes ethics as a science of viability — the systematic inquiry into what allows living systems to continue, adapt, and flourish without self-destruction. At its core is the Primary Axiom of Value, which defines value as the expansion of the coherent range of thought, feeling, and action, and disvalue as their reduction or destruction.

The paper unfolds this axiom step by step into universal human life necessities, life-coherent principles of social and economic organization, measures of sufficiency and progress rooted in civil commons development, the concept of life capital, and life-value efficiency criteria that prevent short-term gains from eroding long-term capacity. Ethics, economics, public health, and ecology are shown to share a single underlying logic: life must be organized so that its enabling conditions are preserved and enhanced over time.

Written for a general but serious audience, this white paper provides a coherent framework for evaluating policies, institutions, and economic systems without reliance on ideology, preference, or abstract metrics. It offers a durable orientation for distinguishing genuine progress from destructive success by using life itself as the measure of value.

Unresolved Threat and the Architecture of Civilization: Why Trust-Based Ethics Fail at Scale and How a Life-Focused Political Economy Can Succeed | ChatGPT5.1 & NotebookLM

Civilizations across history have consistently exhibited a striking divergence between their highest moral ideals and their lived social, economic, and political realities. This contradiction — often framed as hypocrisy, corruption, or moral decline — has appeared across religions, ideologies, and cultures. In this paper, we propose a unifying systems explanation for this universal pattern. We argue that large-scale societies undergo a structural transition from trust-based to threat-based regulation when storable surplus, coordination scale, and institutional distance outpace a society’s capacity to maintain shared vulnerability. This transition enables the export of consequence, producing asymmetric safety and converting threat from an episodic disturbance into a chronic background field embedded in political, economic, and biological systems.

We develop a formal Threat–Trust Phase Model of civilization and show how threat-dominant regimes systematically destabilize ethical coherence, generate population-wide autonomic dysregulation, and drive the modern epidemic of non-communicable disease. We demonstrate how dominant scarcity narratives, unemployment, austerity, and inequality function as active threat-maintenance mechanisms rather than neutral market outcomes. Integrating evolutionary anthropology, trauma biology, political economy, public health, and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), we identify the monetary and institutional design features that falsely sustain artificial scarcity and ambient insecurity.

We then outline a life-focused political economy in which intrinsic health is elevated as the primary macroeconomic target, regenerative capacity replaces throughput optimization, and public policy is formally screened through an Intrinsic Health Impact Assessment (IHIA) framework. Finally, we analyze the political economy of transition, elite resistance, and the emerging global corridor in which risk can no longer be reliably exported across space, class, or time.

The paper concludes that ethical failure at civilizational scale is not fundamentally a moral failure but a control-systems failure. Trust-based ethics collapse not because of human depravity alone, but because threat-dominant institutions structurally select against them. For the first time in human history, however, the monetary, biological, and institutional tools now exist to deliberately redesign civilization around shared safety and intrinsic health.

The Inversion of Value: Reclaiming Labor, Life, and the Foundations of a Regenerative Economy | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

This white paper investigates the civilizational significance of Abraham Lincoln’s assertion that “labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.” Lincoln’s insight clarifies a fundamental ordering of value: life generates labor, labor generates value, and capital is stored value. When capital is subordinated to life, economies are capable of renewal. When capital is mistaken as primary and life is made secondary, economic and social systems become extractive and unstable.

Modern industrial and financial systems have inverted this relationship. Labor is treated as a cost, life as a resource, and capital as the presumed origin of wealth. This inversion underlies rising inequality, ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and the erosion of meaning in work and community life.

This paper reconstructs a coherent framework in which life is primary, labor is expressive intelligence, value is defined as that which supports the continuation of life, and capital is a tool that must be guided by this purpose. It outlines economic structures, institutional forms, and cultural practices that support regeneration rather than extraction.

The conclusion is not ideological but structural: sustainable economies are those in which capital serves life. Regenerative civilization begins with remembering this order.

Fractured Sovereignty: Modern Monetary Theory, Private Finance, and the Politics of Constraint | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) demonstrates that sovereign currency-issuing governments cannot become insolvent in their own unit of account, yet these same governments routinely behave as if they are revenue-constrained. This paradox — formal sovereignty coexisting with self-imposed austerity — raises profound questions about who truly governs money. This paper argues that sovereignty is not a unitary attribute but a fractured condition, divided across three registers: formal, functional, and ideological.

Formally, governments retain the authority to issue currency and extinguish liabilities through taxation. Functionally, private banks and supranational institutions wield shadow sovereignty by creating credit, enforcing fiscal conditionalities, and disciplining governments through market reactions. Ideologically, austerity narratives and household analogies naturalize scarcity, embedding constraint into common sense and foreclosing democratic imagination.

By synthesizing MMT’s descriptive insights with political economy and cultural theory, this paper re-theorizes sovereignty as a contested field rather than a binary attribute. Drawing on the works of Wray, Kelton, Mosler, McMurtry, Polanyi, and Gramsci, it situates monetary practice within a broader struggle over democracy, legitimacy, and collective provisioning. The conclusion argues that reclaiming sovereignty requires interventions across all three registers — asserting public monetary authority, restructuring financial institutions, and dismantling austerity narratives. In an era of overlapping economic and ecological crises, such reclamation is not optional but necessary for the survival of democratic society.

Introducing “Ten Essays In Honour of John McMurtry – January 6, 2024 by Jeff Noonan (Author), Giorgio Baruchello (Author)”

This Festschrift collects ten essays — plus an explanatory appendix by John McMurtry — honouring the scope and influence of his life-value onto-axiology (LVOA) and related ideas such as the civil commons. The volume opens with Jeff Noonan’s introduction and Giorgio Baruchello’s survey of McMurtry’s intellectual biography and core concepts, then advances applied and theoretical developments across ethics, public health, political economy, science policy, pedagogy, and food systems. Chapters examine the life-ground of value versus money-sequenced capitalism and the climate emergency (Card), a research horizon for the life-capital synthesis (Noonan), grounding social determinants of health in life-value (Watson), a virtues-based path within LVOA (Myers), two decades of “system-cooked science” (Olivieri), a practical learning program for the life-capital solution (Sahely), and civil-commons-oriented reform of food systems (Sumner & Mustapha), alongside a personal tribute (Barrington). McMurtry’s appendix restates the Primary Axiom of Value and the universal human life necessities, anchoring the contributions in a common evaluative grammar. Together, the essays argue that policies, institutions, and practices are good insofar as they coherently enable wider ranges of thought, felt being, and action across persons and ecologies, and are bad insofar as they disable them.