wellbeing economy - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

This white paper diagnoses the pervasive racket-like dynamics embedded within modern political, economic, and cultural systems. By “racket,” we refer not to conspiracy but to institutionalized schemes of engineered dependency, in which harm and profit become co-dependent. Through a four-layer causal framework — surface mechanisms, structural drivers, meta-structural grammars, and axiological roots — we demonstrate how racketeering is reproduced across domains such as healthcare, education, science, religion, finance, agriculture, and climate governance. Drawing on real-world examples including the opioid epidemic, housing speculation, fossil fuel subsidies, and vaccine inequity, we show how mis-specified value at the root cascades downward into exploitative structures and practices.

The analysis concludes that current systems are functioning as designed, not malfunctioning. The core error lies in equating profit growth with human flourishing, a mis-specification that privileges symbolic abstractions (money, assets, metrics) over universal life necessities. Alternatives, however, already exist: wellbeing economies, regenerative agriculture, universal healthcare, open science, and rights-of-nature jurisprudence provide living proof of possibility. We propose re-specifying value in terms of life coherence — anchoring governance, economics, and culture in the Primary Axiom of Value: that which enables life is good; that which disables life is bad. By aligning reforms across all layers of the causal cascade, societies can move from systemic racketeering to regenerative coherence.

This paper addresses the paradox that disabling life is often more profitable than enabling it. Drawing on a genealogical analysis of enclosure, colonial extraction, industrial throughput, neoliberal financialization, and digital enclosures, it demonstrates how institutional design has structurally tuned profitability toward harm. These arrangements exemplify what Johan Galtung termed structural violence and what we identify as systemic betrayal: the failure of institutions chartered to protect life to fulfill their mandate.

To diagnose and counter these dynamics, the paper advances John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA) as a normative compass, grounding value in the enabling and extension of universal life necessities (ULNs). It complements this with the TATi–triality framework, a symbolic diagnostic grammar that operationalizes coherence by testing whether policies and institutions sustain care (homeodynamics), adaptive pattern (morphodynamics), and purposive meaning (teleodynamics).

Building on these diagnostics, the paper proposes six design levers — metric reform, fiduciary and charter redesign, ownership and finance transformation, chokepoint reduction, transparency and traceability, and restoration of life-time — that can realign profitability with the enabling of life. The conclusion argues for a civilizational coherence turn, in which profit no longer flows from disabling life but from structurally embedding care, resilience, and flourishing.