Tag: Prof John McMurtry

Towards Learning the Life Capital Solution (An Essay as part of the Festshrift for Prof John McMurtry) | Bichara Sahely (2024)

This essay honors and extends John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology by arguing that contemporary health, social, and ecological crises share a common root: a life-blind social value system organized around private money sequencing rather than the sequencing of life. Drawing on the author’s medical practice and multi-year correspondence with McMurtry, the paper introduces life-capital — the wealth of means of life that reproducibly generates more means of life through time — as the missing integrator across clinical medicine, public policy, and planetary stewardship. It sets out McMurtry’s Primary Axiom of Value (value = that which enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action) and the Universal Human Life Necessities as testable, operational criteria for designing institutions, laws, and programs that measurably enable life rather than degrade it. The essay calls for open access to life-relevant knowledge, a shift from extraction to life-value addition, and practical rationing to life necessities (not scarcity), and it closes with action-questions spanning AI, public health, reconciliation, and institutional learning. An Appendix sketches how the life-capital lens unifies “One Health” across people, animals, ecosystems, and knowledge systems.

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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.

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Min(d)ing ChatGTP for the Social Biases, Blindspots, Fault Lines and Roadblocks to Adoption of Life-Value Onto-Axiology in All of Our Relations

Table of Contents

♦ On Democracy
♦ On the Military-Industrial Complex
♦ On Zeitgeist
♦ On Wider Dissemination
♦ Overview for Data Analysis of “ChatGPT’s Take On Integrating Life-Value Onto-Axiology with other Life-Coherent System Thinkers, Frameworks and Global Institutions”
♦ On how best to integrate true but partial life-coherent perspectives
♦ On Roadblocks and Challenges
♦ On Transmuting Profit and Power Dynamics to Social Profit and Empowerment
♦ Why does the dominant paradigm persist despite systemically driving socially and environmentally life-degenerative consequences?
♦ Is resistance futile, and how can we be hopefully optimistic for meaningful life-coherent changes?

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ChatGPT’s Take On Integrating Life-Value Onto-Axiology with other Life-Coherent System Thinkers, Frameworks and Global Institutions

Table of Contents

♦ Defining the Base of It ALL

♥ Life-Value Onto-Axiology
♥ The Primary Axiom of Value
♥ “The Capital Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure”
♥ Life Capital

♦ Introducing Life-Coherent System Thinkers

♥ Daniel Schmachtenberger’s “Metacrisis”
♥ Nate Hagens’ “The Great Simplification”
♥ Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics”
♥ Daniel Christian Wahl’s “Designing Regenerative Cultures” and “Living the Questions”
♥ Bernard Lietaer’s “Monetary Vision”
♥ Riane Eisler’s “Caring Economics” and “Social Wealth Indicators”
♥ Genevieve Vaughan’s “Maternal Gift Economy”
♥ Jason Hickel’s “Degrowth”
♥ David Korten’s “Living Economics”
♥ Charles Eisenstein’s “Sacred Economics”
♥ John Fullerton’s “Regenerative Capitalism”
♥ Darcia Narvaez “Evolved Developmental Niche” and “Cultivating Cooperative Companionship”
♥ John Galtung’s “Violence Typology”
♥ Sally Goerner’s “Energy Systems Science”
♥ Ken Wilber’s “AQAL Integral theory”
♥ Sir Michael Marmot’s “Health Gap” and “The Social Determinants of Health”

♦ Introducing Life-Coherent Frameworks

♥ The Three Horizons Framework
♥ The Theory of Triadic Influence
♥ Modern Monetary Theory

♦ On Healthy Matters

♥ One Health: Part 1
♥ One Health: Part 2
♥ Universal Public Services
♥ Public Health Policies
♥ Health in All Policies

♦ On Wars and their Dis-Solutions

♥ War Critique
♥ The Palestinian-Israeli “Conflict”
♥ The United Nations and “Global Truth and Reconciliation Initiatives”

♦ Alignment with Life-Coherency

♥ On ChatGPT Alignment with the Primary Axiom of Value
♥ On Game Theory Alignment with Life-Value Onto-Axiology
♥ On Christian Values

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Social Philosophy and Oncology | G. Baruchello and E. Hjörleifsdóttir (2014)

McMurtry’s work offers a contribution to the understanding, as well as to development of standards for the measurement, of human well-being, so that progress and regress may be interpreted in ways that mainstream economic criteria neglect or fail to ascertain, both in theory and in practice. The importance of determining novel standards and indicators is considerable, and widely acknowledged by many academics and politicians (for example, the 2008–2009 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission created by the French Government), but above all it is important to reconceptualise economic phenomena so as to re-orient them in line with life-based criteria.

First, it has already been highlighted that the type of ‘growth’ conceptualised and pursued in today’s global market has had systemic negative effects upon life at many levels, to the point of making possible the explanation of said implications by means of a cancer-based explanatory model. ‘Real capital’ as ‘life capital’ is both unseen and harmed by standard economic thought (CSC2013, p. 12).

Second, in the wake of the current economic crisis, the same global market has been proven equally unable to attain ‘growth’ on its own life-blind terms, that is, in terms of pecuniary aggrandisement for money investors and/or managers (cf. Crotty, 2000). ‘Real capital’ as sheer ‘money’ is not there either, especially if one considers that the vast meltdowns of the last few decades have been caused by speculative bubbles in exponentially ‘leveraged’ masses of currency without any ‘grounding’ in ‘a medium of exchange and capital’ such as ‘gold, labour, or livestock’ (CSC2013, p. 12).

The system’s inherent rationality, which economics textbooks presuppose, is to be seriously questioned, and that is what McMurtry’s work does, consistent with Castoriadis’ (2005a, p. 129) poignant characterisation of the Socratic role that philosophers are expected to play in genuinely democratic societies: the possibility and the ability to call established institutions and significations into question. Whether he will be listened to, we do not know. However, responding to a cancer diagnosis by avoiding what alone can work is fatal.

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Prof John McMurtry – Winning the War of the World – Toronto Z-Day, 2014

John McMurtry shows that a false economic paradigm holds the world in thrall to a global corporate death system masked as market freedom. Liberation is explained as grounded in humanity’s repressed life-value code, life capital bases and civil commons organization which unify across distances and differences.

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THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISM (2): Second edition of McMurtry’s book updates cancer diagnosis | Giorgio Baruchello (2013) | CCPA Monitor

A review essay of the second, revised edition of John McMurtry, Understanding the Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Cancer to Cure (London: Pluto, 2013). Published in the November 2013 issue of the CCPA Monitor, Canada.

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Corporate Child Abuse: The Unseen Global Epidemic | Prof John McMurtry (2013)

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul”, Nelson Mandela says, “than the way in which it treats its children”.

Who would disagree?

Yet today children may be assaulted, diseased, or killed by pervasive corporate drugs, junk-foods and beverages, perverted by mindless violence in multiple modes, deployed as dead-end labour with no benefits, and then dumped into a corporate future of debt enslavement and meaningless work. How could this increasing systematic abuse be publicly licensed at every level? What kind of society could turn a blind eye to its dominant institutions laying waste the lives of the young and humanity’s future itself?

The abuse is built into the system. All rights of child care-givers themselves – from parent workers to social life support systems – are written out of corporate ‘trade’ treaties which override legislatures to guarantee “investor profits” as their sole ruling goal. Children are at the bottom, and most dispossessed by the life-blind global system. The excuse of “more competitive conditions” means, in fact, a race to the bottom of wages and benefits for families, social security, debt-free higher education, and protections against toxic environments to which the young are most vulnerable. At the same time, escalating sales of junk foods, malnutrition, and cultural debasement propel the sole growth achieved – ever more money demand at the top.

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From Ontario to the United Nations: An Introduction to the Thought and Influence of John McMurtry, FRSC | Giorgio Baruchello

Born in Toronto in 1939, the third son of a prominent Canadian barrister, McMurtry was educated as tuition-free scholar-athlete at Upper Canada College (1951–57). He then read English (1957–61 BA) at Trinity College, University of Toronto, graduating with A standing while receiving the Clough Memorial Trophy (Outstanding Athlete Award) during his B.A. Subsequently, McMurtry starred as professional football player for Calgary Stampeders during his Master’s studies in philosophy (1961–62, MA awarded 1963), to which he brought his rare experiences as an elite athlete, developing thereafter philosophy of sport and competition qua areas of original research (e.g. McMurtry 1974 & 1983) and, more deeply, ground-breaking critiques of self-maximising games as a general model of rationality (e.g. economic and contract theory; cf. McMurtry, 1984b, 1997b, 2011 & 2012).

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