This excerpt extends the Beyond GDP agenda by shifting the question of progress measurement from technical correction to relational responsibility. Drawing on Humberto Maturana’s relational biology, it argues that indicators are not neutral mirrors of reality but acts of distinction made by observers within particular histories, institutions, languages, and emotional orientations. Measurement therefore does not merely describe a world; it helps bring forth and conserve a way of living. While Beyond GDP frameworks rightly expand attention toward well-being, equity, sustainability, social trust, and ecological integrity, a life-coherent approach asks whether these indicators remain answerable to life or become new instruments of control, ranking, and institutional self-legitimation. The excerpt reframes progress measurement as a participatory, ethical, and reparative practice grounded in organism–niche relations, legitimate coexistence, and collective learning. Its central claim is that the purpose of measurement should not be to compare, rank, and manage societies, but to reflect, converse, repair relations, protect life-enabling commons, and conserve the conditions for human and planetary flourishing.
Tag: public policy
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.
Beyond War: A Life-Value Onto-Axiological Critique of Armed Conflict in Iraq, Ukraine, and Gaza | ChatGPT4o
This white paper offers a comprehensive and systemic critique of war through the lens of Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), a normative framework that grounds all legitimate value in the preservation and development of life-capacities across biological, psychological, social, and ecological domains. By examining the conflicts in Iraq, Ukraine, and Gaza as paradigmatic case studies, the paper reveals that war is not an aberration of politics but a structural expression of life-incoherence — a breakdown of systems that prioritize domination, strategic abstraction, and resource control over the sanctity and flourishing of life.
Through in-depth analysis, the paper demonstrates that each conflict is sustained by epistemological distortion, axiological inversion, and the operation of what LVOA theorist John McMurtry terms the Ruling Group Mind (RGM) — a system of elite-controlled narratives and institutions that obscure causality, justify violence, and normalize systemic destruction. War, in this context, emerges as a predictable consequence of governance systems unmoored from the ontological ground of life.
Moving beyond critique, the paper outlines a Regenerative Peace Paradigm based on five pillars: ontological grounding in the sacredness of life, epistemological clarity, axiological coherence, institutionalization of the civil commons, and regenerative feedback through trauma-informed systems. It calls for the transformation of security paradigms, the demilitarization of global systems, and the reconstruction of international institutions capable of upholding life-support infrastructures across all cultures and ecosystems.
This paper serves as both an academic intervention and a moral appeal to policymakers, peacebuilders, civil society leaders, and cultural creators. It asserts that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of life-system coherence — a goal that is not only ethically imperative but structurally necessary for planetary survival. The time has come to shift from managing crises to realigning civilization with the only value that endures: life itself.
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.
