Tag: Prof John McMurtry

The Commercial Determination of Disease and the Loss of Health Sovereignty: A Life-Value Analysis of the Present Disorder and the Conditions of its Resolution | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

Chronic disease now constitutes the greatest burden of human suffering worldwide, yet its origins are systematically misrepresented as matters of individual choice or biological inevitability. This paper reframes the global rise of non-communicable diseases through the lens of the Commercial Determinants of Health: the systems, practices, and environments shaped by commercial interests whose profitability depends on patterns of consumption that undermine human wellbeing. Drawing on John McMurtry’s life-value framework, the analysis demonstrates that present health crises arise not from ignorance or failure of personal responsibility, but from a structural misalignment in which economic value is defined by profit-growth rather than the conditions that sustain life. The resulting architecture affects biology, psychology, social order, political capacity, cultural meaning, and human self-orientation. Health sovereignty — the capacity of societies to protect and enable the conditions of human flourishing — is shown to be eroded through epistemic, legal, economic, institutional, cultural, and existential constraints. The paper concludes by outlining a coherent, three-layered framework for restoring health sovereignty through the re-grounding of value in life itself, the reassertion of public governance capacity, and the renewal of cultural orientation toward sufficiency, relation, and coherence.

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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.

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Life-Coherence Monetary Governance: A Policy Framework for Debt, Credit, and Fiscal Sovereignty in Service of Life | ChatGPT5

The prevailing global monetary architecture is structurally misaligned with the conditions required for long-term human and ecological flourishing. Rising household indebtedness, speculative credit growth, and the under-provision of universal life necessities have converged to produce chronic instability, widening inequality, and systemic ecological degradation. Conventional monetary policy, grounded in the loanable funds and neutrality of money doctrines, remains ill-equipped to address these challenges. This paper presents the Life-Coherence Monetary Governance Model, an integrated policy framework that synthesizes Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA) as a normative compass, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as an operational foundation, and the complementary insights of Steve Keen’s “stock” approach to private debt management and Richard Werner’s “flow” approach to credit allocation.

The model positions the Life-Value Impact Assessment (LVIA) as a binding precondition for all monetary and fiscal actions, embeds a debt-jubilee mechanism targeted at life-necessity debt overhangs, and establishes a credit-guidance taxonomy to channel new lending toward productive, ecologically regenerative uses. By aligning sovereign fiscal capacity with universal life necessities and regulating the stock and flow of credit within real-resource constraints, the framework aims to deliver macroeconomic stability, equitable prosperity, and ecological resilience. The paper outlines the theoretical foundations, policy instruments, institutional arrangements, and evaluation metrics required for effective implementation, and concludes with a call to reorient monetary governance toward the preservation and expansion of life’s carrying capacity.

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From Life-Ground to Life-Value: The Enduring Legacy of John McMurtry and the Future Potential of Humanity | ChatGPT4o

This paper offers a critical reflection on the legacy of Canadian philosopher John McMurtry, grounded in the commemorative volume Ten Essays in Honour of John McMurtry (Northwest Passage Books, 2024), edited by Jeff Noonan and Giorgio Baruchello. At the heart of McMurtry’s thought lies Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), a universal evaluative framework that defines value in terms of life-capacity enablement. Synthesizing insights from the Festschrift’s contributors, this paper argues that McMurtry’s work represents not only a diagnosis of systemic life-blindness in contemporary institutions, but a regenerative logic for planetary and civilizational renewal. His core axiom, that nothing can be of value unless it serves life, offers both a moral compass and a design principle for an increasingly fragmented world.

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From Life-Value to Coherence Attractor: Reframing McMurtry’s Primary Axiom as a Meta-Epistemological Compass for Integrative Meta-Design | ChatGPT4o

The Primary Axiom of Value, formulated by philosopher John McMurtry, offers a universal criterion for evaluating systems, processes, and institutions: “That which enables life is of value; that which disables life is not.” While originally articulated in the context of ethical and political philosophy, this axiom has increasing relevance amid the contemporary metacrisis — an entangled global condition of ecological collapse, systemic fragmentation, and epistemic breakdown. This white paper reconceptualizes McMurtry’s Axiom as a meta-epistemological attractor: a symbolic phase constraint that can guide integrative meta-design across health, governance, education, and ecology. By embedding the Axiom within a regenerative coherence framework and aligning it with developmental models such as the TATi grammar (Tend, Align, Transcend, Integrate), we demonstrate its capacity to function not as a metric, but as a value compass — orienting diverse frameworks, policies, and symbolic systems toward nested, life-enabling coherence. In doing so, we propose a unifying principle for bridging integrative paradigms, informing cross-disciplinary coordination, and grounding a new civilizational attractor centered not on control, optimization, or abstraction — but on the living spiral of life coherence.

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From Primal Wound to Moral Wholeness – Re-indigenizing the Self Through Nested Coherence | ChatGPT4o

This paper proposes that the modern world’s moral disintegration — characterized by widespread violence, systemic oppression, ecological collapse, and social fragmentation — can be traced to a civilizational disruption of developmental and relational coherence. Drawing on Darcia Narvaez’s evolved nest theory, this paper integrates a symbolic grammar of coherence (TATi: Tend, Align, Transcend, Integrate), the principle of symbolic recursion, and John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology to present a developmental, symbolic, and ontological account of how evil is produced, perpetuated, and potentially healed.

Rather than understanding evil as malevolence, we reframe it as systemic misalignment from the nested life conditions required for the emergence of the full moral self. Through disrupted early care, obedience-based institutions, ideological scripting, and symbolic compression, modern societies systematically produce what we term partial selves — individuals dissociated from their own moral compass, relational intelligence, and planetary embeddedness.

The antidote lies not in moral authoritarianism, but in the restoration of symbolic, relational, and developmental coherence across scales. We show how re-indigenizing the self and society through evolved nesting, symbolic recursion, and life-aligned moral metrics can restore moral agency, regenerate communal life, and reweave human participation in the greater ecology of becoming. In doing so, this paper offers a framework for moral regeneration grounded not in external authority, but in the living grammar of coherence itself.

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From Breakdown to Reweaving: Toward a Regenerative Framework of Coherence Across the Organism, Society, and Planet | ChatGPT4o

This white paper advances a unified framework of regenerative coherence by integrating foundational insights from John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology, Darcia Narvaez’s neurobiological ethics, Riane Eisler’s partnership–dominator sociocultural model, and Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic analysis of civilizational cycles. Synthesizing these perspectives through the TATi grammar (Tend–Align–Transcend–Integrate), biotensegrity principles, and symbolic recursion, we propose a cross-domain model that enables diagnostic clarity and transformative design across biological, social, and planetary scales.

The framework is premised on the holofractal nature of living systems, emphasizing phase coherence, narrative integrity, and systemic attunement as central to life-sustaining evolution. Pathologies — whether autoimmune disease, long COVID, social collapse, or ecological breakdown — are seen as failures in recursive coherence, phase-locking, and symbolic integration. Using visual tools (mandalas and rotors), narrative diagnostics, and resonance metaphysics, we offer actionable interventions to restore alignment at multiple levels of life hosting.

This transdisciplinary synthesis reframes human development and civilizational possibility through the lens of symbolic regeneration, enabling institutions, practitioners, and communities to become stewards of coherence in a rapidly fragmenting world.

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Constraint and Coherence: An Integrally Nondual Metaphysics of the Kosmos | ChatGPT4o

This treatise presents a comprehensive philosophical, scientific, and spiritual inquiry into the integral nonduality of constraint and coherence as the foundational architecture of the Kosmos. Drawing from multiple disciplines — including systems theory, metaphysics, biology, semiotics, ethics, and cosmology — it argues that constraint is not the antithesis of freedom, but its enabling ground, and that coherence is not passive harmony, but the active resonance of well-aligned parts within a meaningful whole. Through engagements with key thinkers such as Ken Wilber, Terrence Deacon, Arthur M. Young, Bernardo Kastrup, and John McMurtry, the treatise traces how constraint and coherence are the unseen grammar of evolution, knowing, design, and ethics. It concludes by offering a regenerative framework for civilizational realignment, practical diagnostics for coherence breakdowns, and embodied practices of Kosmic participation — positioning constraint not as coercion, but as grace, and coherence not as conformity, but as luminous flow.

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The Problem Isn’t You — It’s the System: An LVOA Reflection on Personal Blame and Systemic Injustice | ChatGPT4o

This article expands upon Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov’s viral essay, “The Problem Isn’t You, It’s the System,” by critically engaging it through the philosophical framework of Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA). It examines the pervasive neoliberal myth of personal failure and reveals how structural injustices — masked as individual shortcomings — function as ideological tools to prevent collective awakening and systemic reform. By exposing the life-incoherence at the core of modern economic systems, the article reorients readers toward collective solidarity, relational healing, and participatory redesign. It concludes with targeted calls to action for activists, educators, and policymakers seeking to co-create life-enabling alternatives.

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From Rivalry to Regeneration: Reclaiming Our Future Through Life-Value Onto-Axiology | ChatGPT4o

This white paper addresses the civilizational threat posed by the convergence of exponential technologies and rivalrous social dynamics, a trajectory that Daniel Schmachtenberger describes as structurally self-terminating. Integrating his analysis with John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), we diagnose the life-blind value systems at the root of systemic breakdowns across economics, media, governance, education, and identity. We propose a civilizational re-alignment grounded in the Primary Axiom of Value: that value is that which sustains and enables life-capacity without loss. From this foundation, we articulate the emergence of regenerative systems and sovereign selves — anti-rivalrous, coherence-generating, and ontologically grounded in interdependence. The white paper outlines the qualities of imaginal cells, the redesign of value equations, and the cultivation of semiotic, emotional, and systemic coherence as prerequisites for a viable future. Coherence, not control, becomes the foundation of civilizational continuity. Only life-value aligned systems survive — and evolve.

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