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.
