This document introduces John McMurtry’s Primary Axiom of Life Value and its practical application through the principle of rationing to life necessities. It explains why today’s global system prioritizes profit over survival, creating crises in health, education, economy, governance, and ecology. Drawing on McMurtry’s metaphor of the “cancer stage of capitalism,” the work contrasts the destructive logic of money-sequence growth with the sustaining logic of life-sequence value. For a general audience, the text illustrates these concepts with everyday examples — bottled water versus clean water systems, luxury housing versus homelessness, fossil fuel growth versus climate stability. It argues that rationing to life necessities is not austerity but liberation: the foundation of real freedom, justice, and sustainable development. The document concludes with a call for life-coherent governance, science, and meaning, positioning humanity at a civilizational choice-space between collapse and renewal.
