They have no meaning in themselves. It strikes me, Louis, that you're something of a Platonist, an absolutist, a conservative, someone who's desperate to find something that we can depend on, something unchanging. It seems to me that given the intractability of the institutions that are causing our ecological crisis, what is needed is a theory of change, of how to produce change in this particular set of institutions, not a theory of stability. My sense is that's going to involve creation of an alternative set of institutions, eventually an alternative culture, that serves the useful functions served by the current set without creating the problems it creates, and that has broad appeal. That can only be shown in practice, by people living it.
Pure theory can only go so far.
Even if you could do it, you wouldn't even have begun to address the problem of sustainable communities.