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.

This chapter was written when the Transition was imagined as a single, rapid, coordinated event. Passages from that original plan are kept for transparency in marked boxes; the current approach is gradual, voluntary and democratic (how the approach has evolved).

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, Milton Friedman, argued in 1970 that the only social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits, so long as it stays within the “rules of the game” (Friedman, 1970). In practice, that principle has been used to justify almost anything legal, regardless of how it 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 put serious care out of reach for many, and medical bills can ruin even middle-income families: about 14 million American adults owe more than $1,000 in medical debt (KFF, 2024). 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 single generic acetaminophen tablet billed at $1.50, when a hundred of them can be bought online for about the same price (Brill, 2013), and similar markups on items as simple as a tiny box of tissues or a disposable medicine cup.

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. Nurses earn far less than the executives above them. Orderlies are often not paid a living wage. The EMTs who perform a $1,500 ambulance ride are themselves paid a median of about $19 an 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. Until recently, you most likely wouldn’t even find out about it until you got the bill, and there were few to no protections; only in 2022 did the No Surprises Act bar most such surprise bills. 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 routinely decide what to develop by profitability, not by medical value. In 2018 a Goldman Sachs report asked investors outright, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”, noting that Gilead’s hepatitis C cures had shrunk the company’s own market (CNBC, 2018).

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. Claims are routinely denied, leaving it up to the stressed and possibly gravely ill patient to navigate the quicksand and obstacle course of challenging the denial: on the HealthCare.gov marketplace, insurers denied one in five in-network claims in 2023, and fewer than 1% of denials were appealed (KFF, 2025). Yet without insurance, any major medical need could cost us our home or our life.

Accountants and insurance adjusters often dictate what medical options are or are not allowed, based entirely on financial considerations (GAO, 2011; Lazarus, Los Angeles Times, 2017). 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, cost more than “less healthy” foods, even when their production costs the same or even less: a healthier diet costs about $1.50 more per person per day (Rao et al., 2013). When you’re living on sub or barely-living wages, that is a real barrier, and fresh fruit, fish and good meat are often simply out of reach. 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 for unhealthy food and drink is concentrated in poorer neighborhoods and aimed disproportionately at Black and Hispanic consumers (Journal of Urban Health, 2015; Rudd Center, 2022). 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 measurably reduced for several nutrients (Davis, Epp and Riordan, 2004), and taste often suffers too, which you can verify by comparing produce from your own garden to the same veggies from the supermarket. 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.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the seed company Delta & Pine Land were granted a patent for seeds engineered so that the next generation would be sterile, soon nicknamed “Terminator” seeds. The purpose was plain: to stop farmers from saving seed and to make them buy new seed every season. It was never sold, but not because the industry had a change of heart. A worldwide outcry from farmers, scientists and humanitarian groups forced Monsanto to pledge not to commercialize it, and in 2000 the UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a moratorium that still stands. Meanwhile, the same goal is reached by other means. Patents and licensing contracts forbid farmers to replant patented seed; in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that they may not. And hybrid seeds, which do not breed true, have kept farmers buying new seed every year for nearly a century. This is what the system reliably rewards, and it took organized resistance on a global scale to hold the worst of it back.

Saving seed from one harvest to plant the next is as old as farming itself. Patented seed changed that. Farmers who buy it sign contracts forbidding them to save it, and the companies enforce those contracts. A 2013 report by the Center for Food Safety found that Monsanto had filed more than 140 lawsuits against more than 400 farmers and some 50 small businesses in the United States, winning over $23 million, and some farmers were ruined. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously, in Bowman v. Monsanto, that a farmer may not replant patented seed without paying. The companies employed investigators and ran anonymous tip lines, and independent seed cleaners, who had cleaned farmers’ saved seed for generations, were sued until many found the work too risky to continue. Stories of farmers sued merely because patented pollen blew onto their fields are not borne out by the court records. The reality is quieter and in some ways worse: an ancient freedom turned, by contract and patent, into a liability.

In South America, during the soy boom of the 2000s and 2010s, the pressure took two forms. In Brazil and Argentina, where the law protected farmers’ right to save seed, Monsanto set up a private royalty system at the grain ports: harvests were tested for its genes, and 2 to 3 percent was deducted from any farmer who could not prove the fee had been paid. Brazilian farmers’ unions challenged it in court and lost in 2019. Meanwhile, as genetically modified soy spread across millions of hectares, landowners expanding their plantations used hired gunmen, private security and, at times, local police to drive peasant and Indigenous families from their land. Peasant movements documented intimidation, evictions and the killing of their leaders. In Córdoba, Argentina, residents who blockaded a planned Monsanto seed plant were beaten by men linked to a construction union while police stood by. They held their ground, and in 2016 Monsanto abandoned the plant. No conspiracy was needed. A corporation collecting royalties, landowners expanding their holdings, and authorities who protected the powerful all profited from the same boom, and each reinforced the others. That is what oligarchic capture looks like on the ground (see The Structural Dynamics of Oligarchic Capture).

Sources: Boston College Law Review on seed-sterility technology; CBAN on Terminator technology; Bowman v. Monsanto (2013); The Guardian on the Center for Food Safety report; The Conversation on Brazil’s seed royalties; La Vía Campesina on Argentina; The Ecologist on Malvinas Argentinas.

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 inherited conditions such as sickle cell disease and hemophilia. 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 where this could lead. Gene therapies already carry prices of $2 million to more than $3 million per patient (BioSpace), and drug makers and insurers have experimented with paying for them in instalments over years, “like you’d pay a mortgage” (Managed Care, 2019). Agriculture shows how far the logic can go: farmers who plant patented seed may not save and replant it, and must buy again every season, as the Supreme Court confirmed in 2013 (Bowman v. Monsanto, 2013). It is not hard to imagine the same model applied to a person: a child cured of a congenital condition before birth, whose parents, and later the grown child, are locked into paying for that cure for the rest of their lives. No one would legally own that person’s body; but a lifelong obligation to keep paying for one’s own healthy body, with no way out, would be a form of servitude. There is nothing in the operating principles of the paradigm that prevents it, and plenty that pushes in that direction.

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. So the buffalo, free to all, were turned into a commodity: in the 1870s, hide hunters supplying a booming commercial hide trade killed millions of them in barely a decade, often leaving the meat to rot, and the land was turned over to high-maintenance imported 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 the European colonisers who invaded these lands, intent on displacing, starving out and killing off Indigenous nations in order to claim ownership of their lands while native blood was still wet. Almost all of that land was taken by force or deception, and many of today’s reservations are not the ancestral homes of the peoples who live on them, but places to which they were forcibly removed when others wanted their land. 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. For most of American history, families buried their own dead. Today that has become remarkably hard. In Washington State, burial is allowed only in a cemetery owned by a corporation or similar organization; Indiana requires a licensed cemetery, and California requires county approval for a family burial ground. In nine states (as of the Federal Trade Commission’s 2012 list), families must hire a funeral director even if they do everything else themselves. No state requires routine embalming; the practice spread during the Civil War, to ship soldiers’ bodies home, and has been sold ever since. But time limits, zoning, setback rules and deed requirements put a simple family burial out of reach in much of the country. Even the right to buy a coffin elsewhere had to be won: only in 1994 did the FTC’s Funeral Rule stop funeral homes from refusing, or charging extra for, a casket bought somewhere else. And gentler alternatives such as human composting have needed new laws, state by state, beginning with Washington in 2019.

Sources: Washington RCW 68.20.010; FTC Funeral Rule.

As in medicine, dentistry, and law, literally everything about the funerary industry is cripplingly expensive. A casket bought from a funeral home commonly costs thousands of dollars. Much of the burial and preparation process is shaped by rules and industry practice and priced out of reach of most of us. Cremation is another option, but still typically costs in the thousands of dollars. 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 in Tonga. A European visitor in 1895 called Tongans “the most independent people imaginable”, since their land gave them most of what they needed, and estimated that the average Tongan worked about one day a week, which he could only see as laziness (Jenson, 1895). Missionaries reshaped Tongan religion and law, and church contributions and taxes pushed households to produce for money. When Tongan copra growers formed their own cooperative in 1909 to sell without European middlemen, it quickly gained thousands of members, and the British agent had it shut down (Tonga Ma’a Tonga Kautaha). In the 1970s an anthropologist found that Tongan farmers still generally avoided wage labour, joining the cash economy mainly when they needed money for specific obligations (Marcus, 1978). And as recently as 2010, a World Bank report on Tonga recorded people saying that “money is not considered to be that important – people just stop working when they have what they want”, and that church and family obligations always take priority over business (IFC/World Bank, 2010). What outsiders treated as a problem was common sense: work to meet real needs, then turn to family and community. 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. The kibbutzim of Israel were never more than a few percent of the population, yet for decades they supplied a far larger share of its leaders. In 1967, when kibbutz members were about 3% of Israelis, they held 15% of the seats in the Knesset; they provided around a quarter of the army’s officers and farmed about a third of its agricultural land; and one of Israel’s Nobel laureates, the chemist Arieh Warshel, grew up on a kibbutz. 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. Defenders of modern feudalism often claim that cooperation is inefficient, unproductive, and against human nature. The evidence says otherwise. Elements of the new paradigm have already been tested, and they work. Worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms reliably match or exceed the productivity of conventional firms, by roughly 4 to 18 percent in the studies that measure it, when workers genuinely share in decisions. They also survive at least as well, keep jobs more secure, provide better benefits, and support their communities (Logue and Yates, background paper for the ILO World Employment Report 2004–05). Some have lasted for generations: the Mondragón cooperatives in Spain, begun in 1956, now count nearly 70,000 members (Christian Science Monitor, 2024). Fuller experiments were crushed by force before they could prove themselves over time: the Paris Commune, which ordered abandoned workshops handed to the workers' cooperatives that had run them (decree of 16 April 1871), before it was overrun that May; the collectives of Revolutionary Catalonia and Aragon in 1936–39, which participants described as transforming their daily lives (Souchy); and the worker-run industrial belts of Santiago, Chile, destroyed by the military in September 1973 (University of Virginia dissertation).

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.”

Regulation can soften the current socio-economic paradigm, as the Nordic social democracies show, but no amount of regulating, tweaking, fine-tuning or jerry-rigging can make it reliably empower, nurture, and sustain the happiness, well-being, mental and physical health, and fulfillment of all or even most of the people; wherever concentrated wealth can buy influence, those gains erode. By design, by its very structure, the paradigm, in all of its variations, reliably 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. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009, and in many states tipped workers can be paid a cash wage of just $2.13 an hour, relying on customers’ tips to make up the rest; the employer must make up the difference to $7.25 only when tips fall short. Even $7.25 an hour, full time, is far below 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 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.