Chapter 18: Mental, Emotional, Physical, and Spiritual Well-Being of the Individual and Society under the Current Paradigm
Under the current paradigm, the driving imperatives of all businesses are profit, stock price, and market share. All other considerations are secondary to those factors. In a society where one’s rights, freedoms, options, the respect one is given, and quality of life are mostly determined by how much wealth one does or doesn’t have, this spawns cultures where the lives, quality of life, or well-being of human beings are sacrificed daily in pursuit of those imperatives.
Think of one of the central tenets of the dominant paradigm: the “law of supply and demand.” This means that when demand is high and supplies are low, suppliers can get away with raising their prices as high as “the market will bear,” meaning, as high as they can get away with. Conversely, when demand is low and supply is high, prices drop, sometimes meaning that goods and services get discontinued since they are not profitable enough. Sometimes those products are life-saving medicines for people with certain life-threatening conditions.
The paradigm has few to no built-in limits on how far providers and employers can push the envelope. It doesn’t take a genius to see that all a producer has to do to drive prices up, is to cut production or hide surplus in order to create scarcity, cover it up with explanations blaming it on weather, war, labor unions, or whatever they can spin. This is actually common practice, which is encouraged, reinforced, and accepted. In fact, a widely-quoted economist postulated that the only social responsibility of a business is to make money for their shareholders – regardless of how that affects employees, clients and customers, the nation, or even the world. His pronouncements are treated as though they were laws of physics. They aren’t!!!!!!!
Look at all things medical, dental and legal in the United States, from college to actual practice. Prices are entirely out of reach for all but the modern feudal lords. Health insurance is needed by most people in order to even have the possibility of getting treatment for unexpected medical crises, though insurance companies do pay certain employees a good salary to look at all claims to find any legally defensible way to deny them.
Why are these kinds of services so arbitrarily overpriced? It’s because when you have a medical, dental, or legal problem, you have little to no choice but to have the service. It’s not a luxury item or a “wish list” kind of thing. It’s you life, your quality of life, your pain that won’t go away on its own, or your freedom at stake. Just as an animal caught in a trap will chew off its own leg to escape, so many people will sacrifice their home, car, nest-egg, and go into debt to cover the cost, because the alternative is disaster. Providers and whole primary and parasitic secondary industries relentlessly and mercilessly exploit this non-optional demand to the max. You wouldn’t take a home equity line of credit, sell your possessions, or take on massive debt to buy a yacht or personal jet, or to afford an inflated piece of jewelry, but you might do so to save your life, your loved-one’s life, keep yourself or loved-one out of prison, or to be able to eat again without unbearable pain. The paradigm places few to now limitations on this exploitation. In fact, this gouging is encouraged and strongly reinforced. Those who engage in these practices are playing the game the way it’s designed to be played. The problem is the game itself.
Everybody, at ever level, adds to the hyper-inflated costs to the patient: doctors, hospitals, labs, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of surgical equipment – the list goes on and on – as well as the parasitic insurance companies. Thus we see a tiny box of tissues billed at $10 and a disposable medicine cup at $20.
The pervasive disparity of such societies are evident even in a lucrative field such as medicine or law. Hospital administrators make enough money to not have to worry about their long-term survival. Doctors are typically paid six figures. Yet nurses make barely enough to survive. Orderlies are not paid a living wage. The paramedics who perform a $1,500 ambulance ride, are themselves paid $11 or $12 per hour. In the U.S. at this time, there’s a disturbing trend where “private equity firms” keep stables of medical providers, who are out of network for most or all patients, and contract them out to hospitals and clinics at vastly inflated rates which are passed on the patients, who have no knowledge, choice, input or appeal on the matter. If you insist on an anesthesiologist who’s in-network, then you just can’t have that life-saving surgery. Most likely you won’t even find out about it until you get the bill. There are few to no protections. And guess what, the CEO’s of private equity firms make multiples of what hospital administrators make. To these companies, doctors and medical services are no different from tractors or investment properties, and patients are not even a consideration.
Pharmaceutical companies consistently choose to develop a new drug that’s more profitable in preference for a drug that’s just as good or better, but that is less profitable.
For the billionaire modern feudal lords at the top of the socio-economic pyramid, cost is literally a non-issue. There is no conceivable medical procedure that would even noticeably dent their lifestyle in any way. For the rest of us, our only option is to fork over money every month to parasitic entities called insurance companies whose lobbying of lawmakers is so successful, that we see that year after year, insurance premiums, deductibles and copays ratchet up rapidly while both range of procedures covered and percentage of costs covered steadily decline. Often claims are denied by default, leaving it up to the stressed and possibly gravely ill patient to navigate the quicksand and obstacle course of challenging the denial. Yet without insurance, any major medical need would leave us literally either on the street, or under the ground.
Accountants and insurance adjusters often dictate what medical options are or are not allowed, based entirely on financial considerations. Yet nobody is prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license, because under the parameters of the paradigm, financial considerations always outweigh all other considerations, unless arms are legally twisted behind backs in a big way. The best treatment from a financial point of view is almost always not the best treatment for the patient, medically.
Other parasitic industries that arise out of the dominant paradigm surround medicine are collections agencies, brokers who buy and sell medical debt, advertising and marketing agencies, lobbyists, medical coders, billers, and of course the various scammers and con artists that abound in such societies, pushing untested medicines and remedies on vulnerable people.
All of these harmful behaviors are strongly reinforced by the dominant socio-economic paradigm. If such behaviors were to not happen within the confines of this paradigm, businesses would go under, jobs would be lost, and facilities would close. The problem is that the paradigm is inherently non-viable and inimical to the good of real human beings on every level. It is a paradigm that has been tried countless times and proven itself utterly harmful. We are a social species which is how we’ve survived and proliferated. When one of us suffers, it diminishes all of us. When one of us benefits, we all benefit. It is inhuman and inhumane to knowingly let a fellow human being die or suffer unnecessarily. Marines will risk their lives to get wounded comrades to safety. Yet administrators, accountants, and insurance adjusters will deny treatment to patients whose lives depend on it, and not feel the least remorse. That is the mentality conditioned into us by the social environment under this paradigm. “It’s just business” is used to justify all manner of decisions and practices that enrich the ultra-rich at the expense of everybody else, even to the point of ruining or ending lives.. And people accept it. In that case, it’s time to do away with “business.” The “just business” excuse is about as tenable as the “just following orders” excuse. It should no more be accepted than should female genital mutilation, in cultures where it is practiced. Dehumanization is never, ever acceptable, anywhere, at any time!
The parallel between the prevailing modern feudalism and classical feudalism is incontrovertible. Medieval royalty had complete power over the life, death, and property of serfs and peasants. Today, the ultra-wealthy modern feudal lords have unrestricted access to all goods and services, at all times. The corporations that they control are themselves considered “persons” under the law. They control enough of all resources and wealth, that they set prevailing pay rates and cost of living, in ways that ensure that wealth and resources continually flow into their hands and out of the hands of employees and consumers. As in Medieval times, we peasants have no appeal or lever to bear on this mechanism.
In both mainstream and alternative medicine, making a profit is strongly reinforced. Serving the best interest of the patient often runs counter to what’s most profitable. There is nothing but lip-service to reinforce prioritizing the good of the patient over profits.
The gouging and exploitation in health matters doesn’t end with healthcare. Healthier foods, or foods popularly perceived as healthier, are priced at multiples of the costs of “less healthy” foods, even when their production costs the same or even less. When you’re living on sub or barely-living wages, you simply can’t afford $5 per pound for oranges or $40 per pound for meat of fish. The same is true for supplements, weight loss programs, and more. People who have enough money, mostly the ultra-wealthy, pay the price without a second thought. People living on a-little-above-living wage will sometimes pay the prices, even though it means taking another job or risking not making it through the month. Everybody wants to be healthy, a fact exploited effectively through marketing and advertising.
In addition, advertising in poorer areas emphasizes fast food; in wealthy areas, healthy foods are more highlighted. And the quality of food available in poorer neighborhoods is demonstrably inferior to that offered in affluent neighborhoods.
There is also a plethora of related products and industries, mostly unregulated and having few if any standards, that prey upon people’s health concerns: “enhanced” bottled water, weight-loss and fitness regimens, health spas, seminars and retreats, “Self-help” books which may or may not be effective, and numerous MLM”s and network marketing businesses. The common response when these purveyors are challenged on their (usually exorbitant) prices is “How can you put a price on your health? Surely you don’t want to scrimp on you health, which is priceless!”
On the topic of food, why is food sold in less affluent areas inferior to that sold to the wealthy and their vassals?
It goes back to the core principles of the dominant socio-economic paradigm. The highest priorities are profit, stock prices and market share. The maximum yield per acre serves all of those priorities, even more so if produce has the appearance of quality, regardless of actual taste or nutritional value. If profits are maximized, then little to no thought is given to nutritional quality.
In order to maximize yield per acre, both plant and animal crops are forced to grow bigger and produce quickly at high volume. Hormones, antibiotics, fertilizers, insecticides, and genetic manipulation of genomes are all used to achieve this goal. As a side-effect, the nutritional value is demonstrably and dramatically reduced, as is taste, which you can verify by comparing produce from your own garden to the same veggies from your garden. The food we eat in less affluent neighborhoods is less nourishing, which leads to the need to add supplements or eat more, which means profits for yet a different industry, another vulture feeding on the decaying carcass of employee-consumers.
The fact that these fast-track methods also contaminate water tables and deplete the soil is not even considered in operational decisions. It’s much more cost-effective to pay lobbyists to convince lawmakers to look the other way or deny that there’s any harm done. Also, depleted soil means more profits for companies that make fertilizer.
Genetically modified crops have added their own damage to the big picture. The mega-corporations that produce these strains market them to farmers around the world with promises of higher yield and higher profits. Due to the dominance and competition of mega-agribusiness corporations, small farmers must maximize profits just to stay afloat. Many sign on, then only later learn that they have stepped into quicksand that they never saw coming.
For one thing, producers often make these crops produce an inferior or nonviable second generation, preventing farmers from keeping seed from this year to plant next year as they’ve done for generations. Additionally, the contract they sign with the seller obliges the farmer to buy seed from the company every year. Even more extreme, these corporations claim all organisms with the modified genome as their “intellectual property.” Thus saving a bumper crop can be prosecuted similarly to illegally downloading or copying songs or videos. Even more extreme, if some of the genetically modified organisms (plant or animal) show up on a neighboring farm that didn’t buy from the company, either by wind pollination, being shared or washed by rain from one plot to another, or by any means, these predatory corporations have actually successfully sued the unfortunate innocent and hapless farmers out of business for copyright infringement and taken over their farms. When developing nations have passed laws to protect their farmers from such predatory practices, these corporations have gone so far as to challenge the country’s sovereignty and even place private troops on the ground to intimidate farmers and their advocates.
Many farmers have neither the background, nor the energy, nor the time to read through the fine print of such contracts, much less understand what they mean in everyday terms. Companies know this and take full advantage, since they know that as far as courts of law are concerned, “You signed it” is all that holds any weight. The precedents stemming from the concept of a genetically modified organism being the “intellectual property” of the person or company that did the editing, are far-reaching, dangerous and dystopian in the extreme.
At the moment, there are multiple efforts in medicine to develop genetic treatments for many conditions, from cancer, to diabetes, to hereditary conditions such as spina bifida and MS. Sooner or later, genetic treatments will most likely become more and more common. Who wouldn’t welcome a shot that will cure their child’s congenital heart defect or type 1 diabetes in utero. Cures will come for currently uncureable conditions.
Yet, given existing precedents and the prevailing thought shaped under the dominant feudalistic paradigm, we can easily imagine the creators of these therapies claiming ownership over beneficiaries of their treatments. This could take the form of obliging patients to pay a subscription-type fee for the rest of their lives, or even go as far as the corporations claiming ownership over the individual and the right to dictate some or all of their life decisions. While the Constitution guarantees you certain inalienable rights, these could be overridden by corporate intellectual property laws. You are technically free; but the body you inhabit belongs to the corporation that gave you the genetic therapy that saved you from death or disease. There is literally nothing in the operating principles of the paradigm that countermands it, and plenty that makes it almost inevitable.
In many cases, the dominant paradigm has shaped decisions that unequivocally degraded and sabotaged abundant food sources. A prime example is the deliberate gratuitous slaughter almost to extinction of the native buffalo in the United States and their replacement with imported European cattle. The buffalo were an abundant food supply, free to all and sufficient to sustain Native Americans and European invaders as well, if hunted purely for food. The dominant paradigm cannot and will not abide the existence of any resource that is not exploitable for profit. There was no practical way to profit off of the buffalo. Solution: exterminate the buffalo and import high-maintenance European cattle, which are highly profitable. Motivation for the atrocity wasn’t restricted to just food source profitability, however. It also served the goals of European hordes intending to displace, starve out, and kill off indigenous nations in order to claim ownership of their lands while native blood was still wet. Since then, none may live anyplace unless they pay someone for permission to occupy the space. Hardly the hallmark of a democratic and humane society.
The funerary industry is yet another predatory industry that preys upon people at their most vulnerable. Their lobby has ensured that, in the United States at least, families of decedents are legally obliged to patronize this industry of shameless vultures. The laws are worded to appear motivated by public health concerns, which is pure fiction. In fact, burying a body two meters deep as-is, creates no public health hazard. Lawmakers would have us believe that burying a body pumped full of formaldehyde and other noxious chemicals, encased in a box treated with yet other toxic chemicals, is less of a public health risk. This is utterly false and illogical.
As in medicine, dentistry, and law, literally everything about the funerary industry is cripplingly expensive. Even a simple pine box costs thousands of dollars. Literally every aspect of the burial and preparation process are arbitrarily mandated by laws and priced out of reach of most of us. Cremation is another option, but still typically costs in the thousands of dollars. It is illegal to perform your own burial on your own property, even if you own your home. Funeral parlors use cold manipulation and guilt psychology to try to sell their wares. “Surely your dearly-departed deserves only the best! What’s a few thousand dollars, if it means they’ll be comfortable and suitably presented for all of eternity?” Whether or not you can afford these costs is irrelevant. They will be forced upon you, no matter what, and if you can’t or don’t pay them, they will go to collections and can have your wages garnished, tax returns seized, or liens against any property you many have.
Consider how it affects us physically, mentally and emotionally to grow up and live our lives in a socio-economic environment where we must constantly struggle against an ever-present default, implicit denial of our right to exist, occupy space, eat, drink, or exercise any of our Constitutional rights, and where our fellows include potential competitors and exploiters? Imagine how it would be to live in a society that by defaults values us, respects and facilitates our access to all that we need and want, and is populated by potential colleagues, friends, and benefactors!
This lifelong battle to combat the default denial of our right to exist, creates constant, pervasive stress, anxiety, and traumas that cause ongoing, measurable harm to our health and well-being.
As hunter-gatherers, we evolved to be able to respond well to the stress of intense but short-lived emergencies such as natural disasters, encounters with predators, and the need to find food and shelter. We are well-adapted to that kind of stress, and its occasional occurrence is not necessarily detrimental in and of itself. The kind of stress induced by living under modern economic feudalism, however, is a different kind of stress. It is unrelenting, ongoing and all-pervasive. And in contrast with natural disasters and such, in which we typically respond in a more or less unified social unit, the socio-economic stress that we live with is configured that each of us must confront it alone or, at most, with one partner. Not only that, but this kind of stress is artificial and arbitrary, with rules that change and that generally work against us. In a natural disaster or confrontation with a predator, we are not constrained in how to respond. Under financial assault or attrition, we are severely restricted in our options. The physical, emotional, mental and spiritual toll are crushing over time. We were never evolved to be able to cope with this kind of stress. It is always damaging, wearing us down more and more over time, and it is utterly arbitrary and unnecessary.
Another form of harm caused by the dominant paradigm arises out of the enforced level of alienation between individuals, groups, and subgroups, and the fragmentation of our lives on every level. All to commonly, there’s little to no continuity or connection between where we live, work, shop, recreate, worship, study, and perform the other activities of our lives. Our home and work are often far distant from one another. Our workmates mostly live far from where we live. As employees, we are not involved in decisions of our workplace. We often have no natural flow of activities in which we would naturally get to know our neighbors. The food we buy is produced far from where we live. We are reduced to tiny individual or nuclear family islands. Extremely little remains of the strong bonds of community out of which our strength and resilience as a species arose. Forced by the socio-economic paradigm deprived of our greatest strength as a species and subjected to permanent toxic stress, we are weakened, crippled, and disempowered. The paradigm makes this state of affairs mandatory, since the restoration of strong community bonds among fully empowered individuals would weaken and eventually undo the hierarchical power structure and the hegemony of the ultra-wealthy modern feudal lords. This was expressed explicitly by colonial enterprises that discovered, upon setting up shop in the Tongan Islands and indoctrinating Tongans in both their religion and their version of the economic pyramid and working for money, that Tongans worked hard but would stop working when they saw that needs had been fulfilled or when an important community event took precedence. The colonials expressed frustration that they couldn’t make a profit because the Tongan workers felt empowered to decide when to work or not to work, based on common sense. For the modern feudal paradigm to survive, all but the feudal lords must be completely and unconditionally locked into utter compliance with the imperative to keep profit flowing to the oligarchs at the top of the command structure. The more we are disempowered, the more we can be sold products that we would never want or need if we were fully empowered and living in vibrant, integral, connected communities. Products that clumsily replace what we lost as we lost that mutual social support system.
This is not to romanticize the hunter-gatherer days of our evolutionary origins. There were many down-sides; and such a lifestyle wouldn’t be practical with our current population, in addition to which most people wouldn’t want to adopt that lifestyle and would be completely unprepared in terms of skills and appropriate technology.
Yet it’s not wise to abandon every aspect of those origins. We will thrive best if we look at all of our collected experience, from the distant past through the present, in order to identify what does and what does not serve our happiness and well-being from each era and culture, in order to discard that which causes harm, doesn’t work or doesn’t serve and then weave together all that does work and serve into a functional framework for human society, regardless of whether a particular practice came from the twenty-first century, the twelfth, the sixth B.C., or before recorded history and regardless if it arose in Europe, China, South America, Africa or wherever. Regardless of whether it came from Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, shamanism, feminism, communism, or any other source.
Much of modern technology is either beneficial, or has beneficial applications. It would be a mistake to throw it out, just as it is a mistake to perpetuate it all, as is, without re-examination. Once we replace the current modern feudalistic paradigm with a modern symbiotic, peer-based one, profit motive will disappear. We will then be free to look at which of our technology serves our well-being and which does not. That also means looking at alternative forms of similar technology, with a high preference given to forms that are sustainable, renewable, and not damaging to the ecosystem of which we are an integral part.
We will also benefit from restructuring the patterns of our social and functional interactions, with the goal of creating a more interconnected, integrated default way of life. This may likely involve emphasizing distributed small to mid-scale local food and energy production while de-emphasizing large-scale centralized production. Lifestyles will integrate so that healthy exercise and rest are inherently part of normal life. Producers and consumers of goods and services will interact directly to a much greater degree than now.
Greater emphasis and support for community arts, theater, sports, and technical innovation, with lively collaboration between communities and individuals, will also help to replace dysfunctional alienation with healthy interconnectedness. There will still be professional artists, athletes, and the like, but without the intrusion of profit motive, we will see Music, Theater, Cinema, Sports, instead of the Music Industry, the Cinema Industry, the Sports Industry and so on. Artists, athletes, cinematographers, sound and video engineers and other people directly engaged in production will drive undertakings, in the absence of owners, executive producers, network executives, investors and brokers. This will seed a cultural, artistic, technological and social renaissance to dwarf the classical Renaissance in Europe.
We can see living and historical examples of how paradigms similar to the new one to come have thrived. Israeli Kibbutzim were only four percent of the population, yet they accounted for roughly fifteen percent of Israeli high achievers: Nobel Prize laureates, groundbreaking artists and scientists, war heroes and such. There are many other examples. Usually such successful societies are sundered by violence or other coercion on the part of hierarchical economic or political power structures that are unwilling to live and let live, which feel the need to dominate and destroy all alternatives. Thus we will need to be prepared to defend our new paradigm if it’s attacked by those clinging to the old one.
Psychological and sociological research shows that people who grow up in supportive, creative, nurturing environments overwhelmingly tend to be happier, better adjusted, and more productive that those from abusive, neglectful or unsupportive environments. Such research has also shown that psychologically typical people can become capable of committing atrocities if such behavior is normalized, legitimized and reinforced to them. The structure of a society, and what it reinforces or fails to reinforce, has a huge impact on social norms and the prevailing degree of well-being socially and individually.
Under the current paradigm, people at the lower end of the wealth and power pyramid, the modern day peasants and serfs, simply can’t afford to eat healthy, practice preventative medicine, or join a gym. In the new paradigm, all people will have access to all resources. Inferior products will no longer be produced. The caste system embodied by high-end, mid-range, and low-end goods an services will cease and be unenforceable.
The new paradigm has not yet been enacted on such a big scale as will be after the coming Transition; but variations of it have run successfully and shown vastly increased productivity, human well-being and satisfaction, and quality of life, before being violently suppressed by those unwilling to tolerate such a different way of life.
Each culture tends to see itself as the most natural, highest, and best expression of human nature. Many conflicts have arisen from two or more cultures feeling the need to cast each other in their own moulds. In reality, human nature boasts an extremely varied palette of traits. In any society, traits that are reinforced become predominant, while those that aren’t reinforced tend to be relatively rare. With the new paradigm, the cultures will change for the better.
The direct impact of the current feudalistic paradigm on human life is incalculably damaging. The damage is well documented and openly published by those who honestly don’t see realize the harm that they’re doing. Promising new medical therapies are advanced or abandoned not based on potential benefit to patients, but almost solely on their projected profitability over a long time. Pharmaceutical companies consider a drug to be a bad idea if it will do such a good job of curing or preventing a disease, that there will soon be few or no sufferers to whom to market the drug. We also have the example of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, who knew very clearly that their painkiller Oxycontin was highly addictive, marketed it to healthcare professionals as non-addictive and safe. Billions of dollars were made, and thousands of people have died. Insurance companies routinely make medical decisions based on economics, not medicine or the good of the patient. In every facet of any society operating under any variation of this paradigm, profits, stock price and market share are the prime and ultimate deciding factors. The good of patients, employees, society, or even the earth itself is always sacrificed to serve those metrics. “It’s just business.”
There is no way to regulate, tweak, fine-tune or jerry-rig the current socio-economic paradigm to make it empower, nurture, and sustain the happiness, well-being, mental and physical health, and fulfillment of all or even most of the people. By design, by its very structure, the paradigm, in all of its variations, inevitably generates a feudalistic, non-democratic socioeconomic power structure in which a small handful of people will sooner or later become the new royals, with a small but slightly larger caste of their vassals and enforcers under them, and the vast majority of us in the role of serfs and peasants. One can no more configure this paradigm to foster a free, democratic, symbiotic, empowering society than one can turn a Bengal tiger into a herbivore.
The operating principles of the dominant paradigm casts societies into opposing groups in a mutually-predatory pattern where one group’s or individual’s gain comes at the expense of another. Employers must minimize expenses and maximize profits to survive. Employee salaries and benefits are expenses, therefore to be minimized. Today, there is at least one state in which, in 2021, the legal minimum wage for some workers is two dollars an hour. At that rate of pay, one would have to work more hours than there are in a week, in order to make a living wage. In the United States and some other countries, this economic principle was actually taken to its ultimate extreme: literal chattel slavery. The Southern states started a bloody war, rather than voluntarily give up their slave economy.
Employees find themselves unable to live from their pay and being exploited in inhuman ways by the employer following the imperatives of the socio-economic paradigm. Sooner or later, employees, also following the imperatives of the paradigm, strike or find some way to strategically force employers to raise pay, provide better benefits, and maintain humane and safe workspaces and norms. This in turn hurts employer profits, which leads to higher prices which employers blame publicly on labor costs. This cycle repeats indefinitely as long as the paradigm operates. The gains, however, are never symmetrical. The parties having wealth and power always sustain far greater gains and smaller losses than the modern serfs and peasants.
Mega-corporations can easily afford to pay a strong living wage and provide good benefits to employees, which would reduce their profits a very small amount. Small businesses, on the other hand, often cannot afford to pay a living wage and provide benefits and be able to stay in business. This is not the fault of the small business owners. It is the fault of an unworkable, non-viable, fundamentally flawed socioeconomic paradigm that puts people in these inhuman positions.
Let’s liken such societies to a living organism. Every organism is a society or community of vast numbers of individual cells, organized into organs and structures. Each cell does what it was “born” to do. All of the cells, and the organs they form, work together to ensure the survival of all of the cells and of the organism that they comprise.
Using the dominant socioeconomic paradigm as an example, imagine an organism in which the various cells and organs survive by preying upon, by devouring or stealing nutrients and oxygen from each other. Such an organism would essentially be suffering from a fatal autoimmune disease, and would not survive long. Both the cells, and the organism, would soon cannibalize itself out of existence. A species of such organisms would never survive for long. Yet that is exactly how the dominant socioeconomic paradigm functions, with us as the cells.
In the United States and some other countries, the goal of a free and democratic society, governed of, by and for the people, is a central goal and mission statement. The only way we can ever even begin to approach this, is to abandon this socioeconomic paradigm as the nonviable design that it is, and replace it with a peer-based, symbiotic, synergistic paradigm that makes colleagues and allies out of the people in it, and fosters the thriving and full realization of each and every inhabitant. This will involve the elimination of currency, which in reality serves no productive function at this time, except as a means for those in power to enforce their power and dictate who has access to what, and who doesn’t.
In the new paradigm, every one of us will have access to all that we need to live fully, including most or all of what we desire. There will be some limits, of course. It won’t be practical for everybody, or anybody to have a private jet. But all forms of transportation will be freely open to all who need to travel. Perhaps today’s private jets will be repurposed for use in emergency situations in whatever way they are needed. Food, healthcare, living space, education, tools, entertainments, and everything else will be freely available to each and all.
Technological and infrastructure development will be based on what best serves the safety and well-being of human beings and of the environment. There will be no need for, and no such things as, profit, stock price and market share. Freed of current corporate restrictions, developers will communicate and collaborate freely, spurring an explosion of innovation to benefit everybody. Competition will be over real merits, not advertising and business practices. No one project will be shut down due to lack of funds. No patient will be turned away because of inability to pay.
We will need to be prepared to repel and neutralize attempts of the current feudal lords and their vassals to re-impose the current paradigm, but to use the minimum force necessary. We will have to work quickly to prevent the feudal lords from trying to destroy or hide their data in spite. Initiation of violence on anybody’s part will be ultimately be handled by law enforcement.
Ownership of all innovations will revert to the actual people who made them. Corporations as such will cease to exist; but operations will continue, fundamentally changed but uninterrupted during and after the Transition.