Beyond the Midas Trap
From Claim-Sovereignty to Life-Grounded EconomyBy Dr. Bichara Sahely
Length4h 19m
About this audiobook
Modern civilization is not trapped only by climate breakdown, inequality, technological acceleration, debt, or geopolitical rivalry. Beneath these crises lies a deeper disorder: the monetary-financial capture of the life-ground. Beyond the Midas Trap names the condition in which money, credit, debt, rent, property, asset values, and financial claims become more strongly protected than the living conditions from which all real value arises. Drawing on life-value philosophy, monetary theory, political economy, structural violence, commons governance, and civilizational repair, this audiobook asks whether money, finance, law, technology, and governance can be restored to their proper role as servants of life. Its central claim is uncompromising: no financial claim is legitimate if its enforcement requires the disposability of life.
Audiobook details
GenreBusiness and Economics, Philosophy
Length4 hrs 19 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateMay 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1
21. Introduction: A Warning at the Edge of Civilization
32. The Midas Trap as Diagnosis, Not Destiny
42.1 The ancient warning of Midas
52.2 Why the curse is not wealth, but life converted into abstraction
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62.3 The modern Midas sequence: life → asset → claim → yield → power
72.4 Diagnosis rather than fatalism
82.5 Why the trap can be escaped only by restoring money to life-service
93. The Deeper Trap: Life-Blind Value
103.1 Value abstracted from life
113.2 McMurtry’s money-value sequence and life-value correction
123.3 Claim-sovereignty over life-capacity
133.4 Financial stability versus life stability
143.5 Why finance becomes civilizationally dangerous when it becomes ultimate
154. Monetary-Financial Capture as a Seven-Primitive Stress Test
164.1 Constraint: debt, property, ratings, law, asset values, and fossil-financial dependency
174.2 Margin: households, states, ecosystems, communities, and future generations under narrowing repair capacity
184.3 State: managed depletion under financialized stability
194.4 Disturbance: crises that reveal the hidden hierarchy of rescue
204.5 Perception: what the financial lens sees and what it renders invisible
214.6 Regulation: protecting finance from life or life from finance?
224.7 Options: what futures become unimaginable under claim-sovereignty
235. Necessary Distinctions for Monetary-Financial Discernment
245.1 Money is not wealth
255.2 Credit is not neutral
265.3 Growth is not flourishing
275.4 Rent is not productive contribution
285.5 Financial stability is not life stability
295.6 Austerity is not always necessity
305.7 Property is not absolute
315.8 Corporate personhood is not living personhood
325.9 Investment is not always repair
335.10 Digital innovation is not civilizational progress
345.11 The economy is not the life-ground
355.12 Realism is not submission to financial power
36Synthesis: distinctions as repair instructions
376. Naming the Machinery: Scholarly Instruments for Seeing the Trap
386.1 McMurtry: money-value sequencing and life-value ontology
396.2 Hudson: rentier capture and neo-feudal finance
406.3 Werner: bank credit creation and the allocation of futures
416.4 Keen: private debt, endogenous money, and crisis dynamics
426.5 Lietaer: monetary monoculture and systemic fragility
436.6 Modern Monetary Theory: fiscal myths and real-resource constraints
446.7 Mosley: democratic illegitimacy and the hidden power to create money
456.8 Galtung: financialized structural violence
466.9 Ostrom: civil commons and the governance of shared life-goods
476.10 Wilber: developmental arrest in high-complexity institutions
486.11 Synthesis: the claim-system as secular sacred incoherence
497. De-Implementing the Generators of Monetary-Financial Capture
507.1 Debt peonage and predatory lending
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