Chapter 26: Parasitic Industries

By now you’ve seen the term “parasitic industries” a few times. These are industries that, like a parasitic organism, burden us and drain our resources without contributing anything to our well-being. These industries only exist because things like healthcare, home ownership, and many other necessities are priced far beyond what all but the feudal lords can afford. They also come into being to service the needs of the feudal lords and their enforcers. There are many such industries in the dominant culture. Insurance companies are one epidemic kind of parasitic industry. We pay them a certain amount of money every month in exchange for the possibility that they’ll cover at least a meaningful portion of our medical expenses, which in many cases we could never afford on our own. They aren’t doctors, nurses or other healthcare providers. The premiums we pay are like “protection” money extorted from people by the Mafia and gangs in exchange for not harming them or their property, which is yet another parasitic industry. Insurance companies are businesses. Their top priority is to maximize profits, stock prices and market share. Under the current paradigm, those priorities are in direct conflict with the best interests of insured people. They play the game so that they will always take in a lot more than they pay out. They wouldn’t survive as businesses if they didn’t. Thus we’ve seen premiums steadily rise to unaffordable levels for private insurance and to ever-increasing “employee contributions” for employer health plans, as high as twenty percent or more of our salaries, up seven hundred percent since the 1990’s. Deductibles and copays have skyrocketed, while covered procedures have largely declined. The core operating principles of the current paradigm guarantee that this trend will continue indefinitely. The solution is to scrap the current socio-economic paradigm, permanently, and replace it with one that will give rise to an empowering, synergistic, life-affirming “game” in which all will be able to thrive and each will be free to do so with no artificial obstacles. With this background, it’s no surprise that it’s not unusual for insurance companies to deny claims by default, leaving it to patients to appeal and challenge the denial, tying us up in bureaucratic red tape at a time when they can least accommodate it. There are special insurance company employees whose job it is to look for any legal way to deny claims. Insurance companies spin themselves as looking after our health and well-being. Yet insurance is only “necessary” because the current paradigm puts basic needs out of reach for most of us; and it also further burdens and drains us by driving medical costs up, and by adding to the amount of money we’re forced to have to come up with every month. If it comes to the “bottom line” versus the best treatment for the patient, insurance companies will dictate what procedures healthcare providers can, and can not, give. Insurance companies’ financial interests will always override the medical judgment of doctors. This is all an inevitable result of the paradigm under which we’re operating. Imagine a factory that pollutes a town’s water with waste, making it undrinkable, and then starts a daughter company that sells bottled water to the townspeople. That is the reality of for-profit healthcare. Insurance is but one example from among multitudes of parasitic industries, which, besides insurance, include banks, collections, advertising, marketing, lending, billing, fashion, cosmetics, lobbyists, real estate, stock brokerage, corporate law, financial services, pawn shops and many more industries. Banks effectively serve the interests of the modern feudal lords; but for us serfs and peasants, they are parasitic. After we give them our money, they decide how and when we can access it, and charge us fees for a wide range of excuses, generally charging the most effective penalties on those who can least absorb them. If a billionaire overdrafts an account, banks work with them. If you or I overdraft an account, they charge us escalating fees. They invest our money, making massive profits off of it, and give us a few pennies on every thousand dollars that they make off of it. You can only realistically expect to make enough returns from investments if you have at least a few hundred thousand or, preferably, a few million to invest for a decade or more. Those with that kind of currency have access to much higher returns on investments. The rest of us don’t have that kind of money. A few shares here and there won’t amount to enough to retire on or weather a major financial calamity. And most societies are structured so that one cannot function effectively without a bank account and credit cards. The primacy of currency in the current paradigm also spawns a mass of illegal industries as well: loan sharks, pimps, drug and gun runners, extortionists, blackmailers, scammers, identity thieves, and many similar criminals are literally brought into being by the conditions arising inevitably out of this paradigm. When we decommission this paradigm and replace it with one that works, these kinds of criminal activities will cease, like status symbols, due to having no existential basis, need, or reinforcement. Not all crime will cease, of course; but crimes motivated by currency acquisition will become literally impossible. The paradigm generates legal and illegal parasitic industries, as surely as a candy bar on the ground draws ants. In a society where the extent of our wealth and power almost completely defines our options, degree of freedom and of respect that we’re given, and our quality of life, wealth acquisition is strongly reinforced above all else. Just to survive, people will turn their ingenuity and creativity to coming up with an endless array of schemes and strategies to get as much money as possible, along with the power and privilege that it confers. In the new paradigms to come, currency in all of its forms will be obsolete, irrelevant, and unnecessary. It will cease to exist. A beneficial side effect will be that parasitic industries will die out quickly, deprived of their lifeblood and reason for existence. People in those industries will indeed lose their jobs; but in the new paradigm, every person will equally have access to all resources. People in that position will almost certainly find new occupations where they can leverage their skills. With education and training freely available, they will have nothing blocking them from studying the skill or profession of their choice. In this place, the loss of jobs won’t cause hardship, only change, and mostly for the better. Those few with psychological disorders that render them unable or unwilling to give up the idea of being wealthy and lording it over or bullying others, will have access to the full range of mental health services like anyone with mental health issues. And similarly, they will have to be prevented from harming, harassing or threatening others, firmly, compassionately, and matter-of-factly. The post-Transition paradigms will be non-judgmentally self-scrutinizing, designed to adjust and adapt if we see unintended harmful behaviors being reinforced in ways that we did not foresee. We will catch such societal glitches quickly and correct them before they would have a chance to become endemic or entrenched.