Chapter 18: Capitalism, Health and Well-Being: Mental, Emotional, Physical, Spiritual, Individual and Social

Under Capitalist paradigms, profit motive, market share and stock prices are the prime considerations and motivations driving behaviors and decisions. The survival, rights, options, access to resources, ability to thrive, choices and quality of life of an individual or of a company are determined primarily by their amount of wealth or the lack of it. In practice, this creates strong reinforcement for putting profit and market share above all other considerations.

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).

Classic Capitalist logic is strongly influenced by "the law of supply and demand." This means that when demand is high for a product or service, especially when supply is limited, the supplier can raise prices. Thus the supplier can drive prices even higher by deliberately reducing the supply, creating an artificial shortage. Under Capitalist paradigms this is accepted, unchallenged and considered on a par with the laws of physics.

In all matters of health, dentistry and the like, this leads to a massively destructive and dangerous dynamic. When people are sick, injured, in pain, dying or in danger of losing mobility, quality of life or the ability to function normally, they are highly motivated and often desperate to remedy the situation.

This is both conscious and instinctual. An animal caught by a bear trap will chew its own leg off in order to escape, since to remain in the trap is certain death. Likewise, a human who is in pain, injured, sick or receives a death sentence from cancer or heart disease, will often go deep into debt or sell their house if that is the only way to get relief or have a chance of survival.

The healthcare industry capitalizes on this in the extreme. Anything medical, dental or health-related is hyperinflated.

Because the stakes are high, demand is high. Capitalist reinforcers are compelling. Prices of medicine, medical procedures, lab tests, doctor visits, prosthetics, rehabilitation, hospital stays and everything in hospitals, ambulances, surgery, even vitamin supplements and foods perceived to be healthy are as high as the market will bear, hundreds or thousands of percent above actual production costs, cripplingly high.

In healthcare professions, as well as in all sectors of a Capitalist model, there is sharp disparity. Even though an ambulance ride might cost $1,500 or more, the emergency medical technicians manning the ambulance and saving lives often earn under $40,000 a year; in May 2023 their median pay in the U.S. was about $38,930. Nurses and doctors generally earn a living wage, while top hospital and insurance executives can be paid many times what frontline staff make.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2023: Emergency Medical Technicians.

As mentioned previously, even medical and dental schools are dramatically more expensive than all other fields except law. This is as much the case in "alternative" as it is in "mainstream" healthcare industries.

The pharmaceutical industry is also destructively shaped by the reinforcers built into Capitalism. When faced with a choice to develop and produce two equally effective medications for treating the same condition, these companies reliably choose to develop the more profitable one, even when the other one is easier to produce and make easily accessible to patients, even when the less profitable one is therapeutically superior.

Pharmaceutical companies frequently rush through the clinical trials needed to test efficacy and safety of medications, in order to get them to market more quickly. Profit routinely comes ahead of patient safety and well-being in the order of priorities. Freed of profit motives after the Transition, medical and other scientific research will be able to focus only on human health and well-being.

As previously mentioned, parasitic industries have grown up around and intertwined with the healthcare industries like an invasive malignancy: not just insurance companies, but also billing industries, collections agencies, medical attorneys, financial speculators who profit from buying and selling medical debts, advertising and marketing industries, lobbyists (who push healthcare corporations' agendas upon legislators), scam artists pushing untested remedies, and more.

Billionaires at the top of the economic pyramid always have access to the best medical care available. For the rest of the population, it is ultimately not even doctors or other healthcare professionals who decide what care a patient gets. Such decisions are made by accountants, insurance adjusters and company reviewers who are pressed, and at times paid bonuses, to deny or cancel as much coverage as can be legally defended (GAO, 2011; Lazarus, Los Angeles Times, 2017). One California insurer paid an analyst bonuses for meeting targets for cancelling members' policies (California Healthline, 2007), and in 2022 Cigna's medical directors denied more than 300,000 claims in two months, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each (ProPublica, 2023). Through this parasitic arrangement, the insurance industry dictates to medical professionals what treatment they may or may not give.

In circumstances where common sense and basic human instinct would demand putting the good of the patient above all else, profit and stockholder gains are the prime motive. Patient well-being is of secondary, tertiary or quaternary concern, sometimes not considered at all except in terms of public relations to the degree that they impact profits. It is not uncommon for bitter disputes to arise between a healthcare professional bent upon giving a patient the best care possible and an insurance company, accountant or administrator bent upon maximizing profits and minimizing expenses. They are at cross-purposes. Medical considerations routinely yield to financial considerations, even when a life is at stake.

Capitalist reinforcements more often than not favor denying the best treatment, unless the patient has enough money to make it financially worthwhile. Here again we see how Capitalism favors and reinforces lack of compassion and common sense, putting profit far ahead of human well-being and even human life. It is not unheard-of for an insurance company to repeatedly deny a patient's claim and keep it tied up in paperwork when the patient is in imminent danger of dying, delays that in documented cases have outlasted the patient and spared the company the expense of treating them. In 2007, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan died hours after Cigna, under public pressure, reversed its refusal to pay for her liver transplant (NBC News, 2007).

We humans are a social species. A good portion of our strength comes from pooling our knowledge, skills and resources. To knowingly allow a human being to die, suffer, or become disabled through going untreated or not properly treated, is inhuman, inhumane, and against the survival of our species. When one of us is weakened, we are all weakened. When one of us thrives, we all benefit. Yet under the Capitalist paradigm, statements like "It's nothing personal; it's just Business" are commonly used to justify business decisions that ruin the lives of human beings. This justification is almost universally accepted as valid and unassailable.

This reflects the degree to which people are culturally indoctrinated to accept that Business supercedes the good of human beings, in much the same way as, for centuries, much of Chinese society accepted the cruel and debilitating practice of binding girls’ feet, until Chinese reformers, many of them women, campaigned it out of existence in the early twentieth century, and some cultures today accept female genital mutilation as a necessary rite of passage. This mindset contributes to the cultural acceptance of dehumanization and the devaluation of human life.

Note again the feudalistic parallels: those at the top of the economic pyramid always have direct access to the finest health, dental, legal and other care because they can always afford whatever it costs. Since Corporations, which are legally recognized as “persons” “who” happen to occupy the highest reaches of the Pyramid (even hospitals are corporations or owned by corporations), ultimately serve to concentrate wealth and power into the controlling hands of those at the top, we see that once again the occupants of the top of the economic pyramid ultimately (directly and indirectly) dictate who gets or does not get what medical treatment. Medieval royalty likewise had the power of life and death over their subjects.

Under Capitalist paradigms, the reinforcers in place strongly select in favor of denying the best treatment to most patients, most of the time. Capitalism is fundamentally and functionally incompatible with achieving an optimal level of healthcare for all human beings in the community. This applies to both mainstream and alternative medical treatments.

The pattern of extreme inflation of prices of health-related goods and services does not end with actual medical care. Typical examples are "health foods," organic foods, supplements, weight loss programs and more. For example, foods known or perceived to be healthier than mainstream foods, as well as prescription diets and supplements, are universally dramatically more expensive than similar foods more affordably available at supermarkets. Such foods and supplements often cost double or more the price of more mainstream versions of the same foods.

People living on sub-living or just-above-living wages, are usually not able to afford the healthier versions. Even within supermarkets, one frequently finds, for example, oranges for $1.50/lb, while oranges in the Organic section may cost upwards of $5.00/lb. Health food stores are universally radically more expensive than mainstream grocery stores. The reasons and mechanisms are the same as with medical treatments: when people believe that their health and survival will be much better eating certain foods, they are willing to pay a lot more for them.

Under the reinforcers of Capitalist societies, producers and distributors will take advantage of this demand by raising prices to maximize profits. Here again we see the feudalistic socio-economic pattern: the occupants of the upper levels of the economic pyramid can easily afford to eat the healthiest foods while the rest of the population cannot. This is so well understood that advertising for unhealthy food and drink is concentrated where people have less money: outdoor ads for sugary drinks are denser in low-income neighborhoods (Journal of Urban Health, 2015), and candy, sugary drinks, snacks and cereal made up 73% of food advertising on Black-targeted and Spanish-language television in 2021 (Rudd Center, 2022; see also U.S. Right to Know). Those at the top determine the cost of most things and the salaries of most people while they themselves can afford to stay healthy and be treated when something goes wrong. The vast majority can afford neither.

There are also parasitic industries in this field, businesses and individuals who take advantage of people's survival instincts: supplement manufacturers who charge exorbitant prices for their products, packaging and presenting them as somehow vastly superior to less expensive products. Many of these claim to be unique and the best available.

Similar practices extend to allegedly “enhanced” versions of bottled water, herbal preparations, diet drugs and regimens, seminars and "retreats" for physical or psychological/emotional/spiritual well-being, spas, and other goods and services purporting to be essential and uniquely indispensable for health and well-being. Whether they actually function as advertised or not, they are unaffordable on most people's budgets. When confronted with this fact, purveyors inevitably use a manipulative psychological gambit with words to the effect that "you don't want to skimp on your health, or the health of your loved ones do you? What price is too high for perfect health and long life?"

One must also ask, why are more affordable foods often so much less healthy than expensive foods in the first place?

This question reveals once again the now-familiar pattern that is replicated throughout the Capitalist paradigm. Profits in agriculture are generally based on size, weight and appearance of produce. The higher the yield per acre, the higher the profits. The more potatoes or apples per acre, the higher the profits. The redder, bigger and plumper the tomatoes, the bigger the profits.

Corporate agribusinesses and independent farmers (in order to survive in competition with large Corporate producers) expend tremendous resources to maximize profits. How these measures affect the nutritional quality of produce is a secondary or tertiary consideration, and even then often primarily motivated by avoiding expensive legal consequences.

For centuries farmers have used selective breeding to improve both crop yield and quality; but today, the overwhelming trend is towards large-scale agriculture that favors practices that almost always cause a degradation of the nutritional quality of produce and damage to the environment that is our only home. In the production of vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs, dairy, and more, the pressure is to push for rapid growth to large sizes, through breeding crops for yield and through growth-promoting hormones and feed in livestock, often at the expense of taste and nutritional content. Between 1950 and 1999, the nutrient content of 43 U.S. garden crops fell measurably, with median declines of about 15% in iron and vitamin C, 16% in calcium and 38% in riboflavin, largely because higher-yielding varieties dilute the nutrients (Davis, Epp and Riordan, 2004); British food tables show iron in fruit and vegetables down by about half between 1940 and 2019, and copper by nearly as much (Mayer, Trenchard and Rayns, 2022). Rising carbon dioxide adds to the loss: the largest study to date, covering 43 crops, finds that plants grown under higher CO₂ contain less zinc, iron and protein (ter Haar and colleagues, 2025). And the way industrial farming treats the soil may be part of the problem: ploughing and heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides damage the fungal networks that help plants draw minerals from the earth, and early studies suggest that farms which rebuild soil health can grow markedly more nutritious food, though the evidence is still mixed (The Guardian, 2026; FoodFacts).

Tomatoes may be bigger, redder and more drought-tolerant. Steers and chickens may get bigger faster using these methods, but almost universally the nutritional content of a pound of food is far less than of a pound of food raised without these methods and is bland tasting by comparison.

These practices also often contaminate waterways with hormones, drug residues and other substances that can adversely affect the population (USGS, 2002). These practices also deplete the soil, necessitating the use of ever more fertilizers. The overuse of pesticides further contaminates the surroundings and results in pesticide-resistant pests.

Currently we see corporate agribusinesses using genetically modified crops (GMO's) to achieve increased yields, resistance to pests and other marketable traits into both plant and animal crops. These are marketed to farmers at all levels around the world with promises of increased profits when using these seeds and animal stock.

One can understand the logic behind splicing genes for desired traits from one organism into another organism: blight resistance spliced into the genes of potato plants from some species of plant that has this resistance; drought tolerance spliced into corn crops from some species of desert grasses, etc. This topic alone could fill a book, but here we look at the impact upon farmers and other sectors of the population. Keep in mind that seemingly unrelated traits are often regulated by the same genes, so the effects of genetic re-sequencing could be unknown for a long time. It is too soon to know the full long-term effects of genetically editing the genomes of food crops on their nutritional content or on the ecosystem at large, although a major 2016 review found no substantiated evidence that foods from the genetically engineered crops then on the market were less safe to eat than conventional foods (National Academies, 2016). The socio-economic impact on many farmers around the world, however, has been devastating. In GMO'S we have a situation where Capitalist paradigms allow corporations to actually patent organisms that carry the genetic modifications that they added to the genomes of the naturally occurring varieties. The fallout has already been destructive in the extreme.

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.

The destructive impact on farmers does not stop there. 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 commercialise 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. As described above, patents and licensing contracts forbid farmers to replant patented seed, and the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld them. 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 organised resistance on a global scale to hold the worst of it back.

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 genetic use restriction technologies; Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, "Terminator Technology"; Bowman v. Monsanto Co., 569 U.S. 278 (2013); The Guardian on the Center for Food Safety report (2013); The Conversation on Monsanto's royalty system in Brazil; La Vía Campesina on Argentina; The Ecologist on the Malvinas Argentinas blockade.

We must not underestimate the degree to which human beings are and can be devalued, disempowered and marginalized under Capitalism. These precedents in agricultural genetic engineering create a fertile legal environment from which dangerous trends can launch. Medical research is on the verge of dramatic breakthroughs in genetic treatments that could easily prevent and/or cure previously incurable conditions. One can imagine genetic engineering eventually being applied to human beings for noble purposes such as preventing diabetes, spina bifida, multiple sclerosis or other debilitating genetically-caused health conditions. So far so good.

Given the history of Capitalist societies, however, it is not at all a stretch of the imagination to picture individuals born or treated with these modifications being declared the intellectual property of the patent-holder of such treatments, or being born into a life in which they will be legally obligated to pay fees to the patent-holder for all or much of their lives. There is nothing in Capitalist societies to prevent it. There are very strong reinforcers for companies to engage in such practices. Should this occur, once again we would see how the Constitution guarantees rights in theory which Capitalistic constructs override and negate in practice.

Historically, the role of Capitalism in food production has been mostly deleterious to the greater good. For example, when the European settlers swept west across what became the United States, they encountered a free, virtually inexhaustible, robust, maintenance free meat supply in the form of vast buffalo herds. But it was impractical to make much of a profit off of it. Anything that is in plentiful supply and freely available to everyone is an anathema to Capitalist motivations and society. Once a market was found, the herds were slaughtered almost to extinction: in the 1870s new tanning methods made buffalo hides valuable to tanneries in the East and in Europe, and with no rules on the kill, hunters shot millions for their hides alone. Expensive, high maintenance European cattle then took over the emptied plains as a profitable food source. It was common for passengers on trains traveling through the buffaloes' environment to shoot hundreds of them as they passed by just to pass the time, and for the U.S. army to do so in order to starve out the Native American Nations who fed upon the herds.

Sources: M. Scott Taylor, "Buffalo Hunt: International Trade and the Virtual Extinction of the North American Bison" (NBER Working Paper 12969; American Economic Review, 2011).

The funerary industry is another example of how the reinforcers built into the Capitalist paradigm generate parasitic, predatory and destructive dynamics in a society while placing hurtful, unnecessary burdens on people in their times of greatest pain.

Funeral practices vary widely from culture to culture. Some cultures bury their dead, some cremate, some have other practices. In the United States, one of the most aggressively Capitalist societies in the world, the funerary industry forces loved-ones to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to bury their deceased.

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. Even cremation is very expensive, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. Under Capitalism, even dying incurs an expensive financial burden.

In reality, the process of embalming is a far bigger threat to public health than natural decomposition. The chemicals used in embalming are extremely toxic to the environment and prevent the natural process of decomposition, which is part of the natural cycle. Burying one's deceased loved-one two meters underground does make sense in terms of public health. Infusing the corpse with toxic chemicals and encasing it in an expensive box is actually more harmful than simply burying the bodies in their natural state and letting them decompose.

To reiterate, the funerary industry has long used lobbyists to enlist lawmakers in rules that steer families toward paying its fees, one way or another. At one of the most vulnerable times in a person’s life, these vultures prey upon their grief with the most macabre manipulations with sales pitches like "You loved your mother. You wouldn't want her to be buried in a plain pine box. Surely if you want to honor her memory, you want her to be embraced in our deluxe coffin for $10,000? You wouldn't want to skimp on you mother's final resting place, would you?"

Sources: Washington RCW 68.20.010; FTC Funeral Rule.

How does it affect one's psyche, one’s mental health, to grow up and live in an environment where one must constantly struggle against an implicit denial of one's right to exist, in which the people around one are potential competitors or exploiters? How might it affect one's psyche to live and grow up in an environment where one is embraced and supported by a social environment which encourages, affirms, and supports one's existence, empowers one to reach one’s full potential, where one's right to exist is affirmed and embraced, in which the people around one are a support system?

Under Capitalist paradigms, the individual is by default under constant siege by an unceasing lifelong economic denial of their right to exist, against which they must constantly battle. This situation produces a pervasive state of irresolvable stress and, for many people, an ongoing series of traumas that leave much of the population living with chronic stress and free-floating anxiety.

We humans evolved as hunter-gatherers. We are well adapted to crisis situations of short duration where we are able to respond in whatever ways are needed to resolve a threat or emergency: an encounter with a predator, a fire, flood, landslide or other natural disaster, extreme weather, disease, accidents, etc. We are not evolved to live under constant unrelenting stress in a situation where we are blocked from taking actions to truly remedy and resolve the situation, living in chains forged of an economic system that intrinsically denies their very right to exist, barred from exiting the system by laws that define alternative lifestyles as criminal.

There is also a vast array of indirect secondary and tertiary kinds of damage and degradation of the quality and vitality of life that have a pervasive negative impact on all who live in Capitalist paradigms. For example, the fragmented, alienated lifestyle in these paradigms creates a plethora of unnecessary complications and inefficiencies that consume a disproportionate amount of our time and energy while rendering us physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially drained.

Our hunter-gatherer and agrarian ancestors ate food, when they could obtain it, that supplied all of their nutritional needs, lived in close contact and association with family and friends, experienced vigorous cardio and strength training as part of their daily activities of living, and were integrally connected to one another in a strong social support network. In contrast, under modern Capitalist paradigms, we most often commute to work far from where we live. We must make time (and pay money) to belong to a gym in order to get exercise to stay healthy (unless we work in farming, construction, mining, metal foundries, athletics or other highly-physical jobs). Many of us pay still more money for dietary supplements to make up for diets that convenience and cost push toward industrially processed food. Then we pay money for activities and entertainments to de-stress ourselves. More often than not we commute long distances to spend time with loved-ones, always having to find ways to fit these activities into our lives in such a way that it doesn’t conflict with the demands of our jobs, which are all the more demanding due to the artificially enforced overproduction/overconsumption of deliberately short-lived goods and services. This fragmentation is a secondary effect of Capitalist paradigms yet is reinforced by them and inevitable. If food does not provide full nutrition, then there is a profitable market for supplements. When sedentary life inherently lacks exercise, there’s a profitable market for gyms, exercise equipment, fitness products, and personal trainers. Capitalist reinforcers favor the fragmentation and exacerbate it.

The intention of this comparison is not to romanticize our hunter-gatherer and agrarian past or to suggest that we turn back the clock. Food was not always attainable. People frequently fell victim to predators, infections, injuries, disease, and natural disasters. Cultures ran the gamut from peaceful, highly synergistic and supportive to warlike, brutal and authoritarian. Contact between groups was sometimes traumatic. Lifespans were generally shorter and infant mortality higher. Some early and traditional agrarian societies were rigid and repressive. It goes without saying that it would not be practical for eight billion of us to return to a hunter-gatherer or agrarian lifestyle, even if we all wanted to. Yet it is important to be aware of what strengthens and sustains our mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and social well-being and thriving and what does not. It is a mistake to compare different eras of human history and rank them. It is important to learn, both from what worked and from what didn’t work, in all known eras and cultures past and present. Part of our task is to combine and synthesize what works into viable ways of life while knowingly avoiding repeating or perpetuating what doesn’t work. We evolved as hunter-gatherers and as such we require a certain level of exercise, nutrition, continuity and connection to one another.

We will thrive best if we learn from hunter-gatherer, farming and industrial cultures alike, each with knowledge the others lack, take what works from each, and weave that distilled knowledge into ways of life that truly serve human happiness and well-being while sustaining our natural ecological support system. A good portion of modern technology, medical and other scientific knowledge, and creative media are most certainly beneficial and enrich our lives. Other portions are destructive, toxic and degrade our well-being and quality of life. A good portion of the lifestyles of our hunter-gatherer and agrarian ancestors would not be beneficial to re-enact; yet other aspects of those ways of life would greatly enrich and enhance our well-being. Wisdom and best results will come from synthesizing ways of life that integrate and combine the most positive life-enhancing features from all known human societies. An integrated lifestyle that inherently and routinely includes healthy exercise, fully-nutritional food, meaningful work, play and sharing with loved-ones, creative expression and other human activities needed for full well-being is vastly preferable to a fragmented lifestyle in which the needs of every aspect of our humanity are separate, cut off, and available only for a price.

To grow up and live in a society that nurtures and reinforces one's individuality, talents, and contributions, one can easily imagine will result in a population of symbiotically, synergistically thriving individuals with a higher general level of physical, emotional and mental health than has been observed in the absence of such a paradigm, and a reciprocally empowering cycle of mutual benefit among individuals as well as between individuals and the community.

From similar paradigms that have been observed, one can infer this as well. 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.

In broader terms, there are good reasons why people almost invariably seek to leave repressive, restrictive, abusive and dictatorial regimes to emigrate to freer, more open and tolerant societies. We have a large body of data that show that people who grow up in loving, positively functional families and communities tend to function better and have better mental, emotional and physical health than people who grow up in dysfunctional, abusive families and communities.

Many psychological studies have shown that "normal" well-adjusted individuals can become torturers and abusers when such behaviors are encouraged and reinforced. Look up Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (Reserve Police Battalion 101), Jane Elliott’s “Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes” exercise, the Milgram Experiment, and The Wave (Ron Jones) to see some powerful examples.

Under Capitalism, people in the lower echelons of the economic pyramid cannot afford to eat healthy, belong to a gym, etc., whereas in post-Transition communities, healthy food and exercise facilities will be accessible to everybody. There will be almost no reinforcement for the production of unhealthy food.

There is little data to go on, since what this Transition aims to create has not been done yet on such a scale. The kibbutzim of Israel are one well-known example. A number of peoples in the Americas lived by similar principles before the European invasion and colonization; but most of those were violated, exterminated, and forced to adopt European culture at gunpoint. There have been a wide variety of smaller-scale paradigms that have been quite successful. This dovetails with the results of many psychological studies.

Each culture tends to see its norms as universal traits of human nature, and so tends to produce and focus on studies proving this belief to be true. Fewer studies and resources are devoted to studying alternative or unfamiliar paradigms. Since hierarchical, Capitalist societies have dominated much of the world, few studies have been done of synergistic, mutualistic, non-hierarchical peer-based models, since they are assumed to be impractical and contrary to human nature. But we can extrapolate from small-scale experience and data to predict that people’s overall level of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social well-being and health will improve dramatically (see Gray, Psychology Today, 2011).

More on Healthcare

A 2018 report called "The Genome Revolution" published by Goldman Sachs epitomizes the incalculable harm that Capitalist paradigms do to the People of any community.

It states that new genetic treatments show promise of great benefits for patients and society, but rather than enthusiastically advocating an aggressive push forward in that area, instead of urging for accelerated research to develop these treatments as widely and quickly as safely possible, the report questions their viability in terms of "sustained cash flow" and "the sustainability of a franchise." Its analysts asked their investor clients outright: "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" (CNBC, 2018). Goldman Sachs advises investors rather than conducting research itself, but the question shows what the system rewards: research that cannot promise a lot of money over a long period of time struggles to attract the investment it needs.

Along the same lines, also in the United States as discussed previously, we can see how the reinforcers present in Capitalist paradigms led to and engendered the Purdue Pharmaceuticals fiasco in which the company knowingly and deliberately advertised the opioid painkiller oxycontin as non-addictive and safe, which exacerbated the epidemic of prescription medication addiction, abuse and escalating death toll.

Between this behavior of the mega-pharmaceutical corporations and the interposition of the completely parasitic healthcare insurance industry as gatekeepers between patients and healthcare professionals, it is a wonder that the death toll is not higher. In addition, it is not at all surprising that U.S. life expectancy stalled for a decade (Donnelly, Fortune, 2018; BBC News, "US Life Expectancy Declines for First Time in 20 Years", 2016) and fell sharply in 2020 and 2021; even after recovering to 78.4 years in 2023, it remains years below that of other wealthy nations, as healthcare industry corporations tighten their stranglehold on the availability and development of care while a constantly growing number of people struggle in an increasingly bleak uphill battle of financial survival.

Sources: National Center for Health Statistics, "Mortality in the United States, 2023", Data Brief 521 (December 2024).

The message is clear in any Capitalist paradigm: the ultimate and only criterion is profit. Anything, including human life, well-being, and quality of life will be sacrificed if it in any way, however small, compromises that metric.

This cannot ever be truly corrected by attempting to regulate such behaviors. These are core behaviors that are the most strongly reinforced in Capitalist paradigms. Businesses, especially mega-corporations and the ultra wealthy who run them, will always find ways to ignore and circumvent regulations, or to manipulate lawmakers, courts, and regulatory agencies to neutralize regulation. The only remedy is to decommission the entire Capitalist paradigm and replace it with one that empowers and synergizes all members of the Community at every level.

To use a metaphor, a healthy organism is made up of many individual cells organized into organs, structures and systems that work in concert to ensure the survival and thriving of the organism and the cells comprising it. What benefits one organ, cell or system, strengthens the other organs and the organism as a whole.

Under Capitalistic paradigms, a business/corporation survives and thrives by maximizing profits and minimizing expenditures. From the corporation's point of view, employee salaries and other compensation are expenditures, part of the category to be minimized. A business would thrive best if it could get the maximum work out of its employees while paying them as little as possible, which is why the Southern states of the U.S. were willing to fight a bloody war to try to preserve their slave economy.

Capitalist paradigms cannot function without creating an environment in which businesses must compromise the good of both employees and clients in order to thrive. In the United States we can see this also in laws that some states have that allow businesses which gross less than a specified amount in a year to pay employees less than the minimum wage, which itself is sub-living in all states. (Oklahoma's law, for example, still sets a rate of $2.00 per hour for businesses employing fewer than 10 employees or making less than $100,000 a year, though the federal minimum of $7.25, unchanged since 2009, now covers most such workers (Minimum-Wage.org, Oklahoma). Under federal law, tipped workers may be paid as little as $2.13 per hour, as long as tips bring them up to $7.25; if they do not, the employer must make up the difference.) To put this in perspective, the yearly living wage for an individual in the U.S. in 2017 was $25,106, which comes to $523.04 per week. Even at the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour, one would have to work more than 72 hours a week to achieve a bare living.

The sad reality of Capitalism is that often a small business often cannot survive if it pays employees a living wage and health coverage. When wages go up, prices go up which then perpetuates the vicious cycle of mutual predation. The businesses that reliably thrive are the mega-corporations, which steadily funnel more and more resources up to the top of the pyramid at the expense of those further down the pyramid.

A Capitalist society as a whole suffers from this same dynamic systemically. In such environments, “It’s business” is an argument used to justify policies and practices that cause ongoing grave harm to individuals and to the Community. What benefits one portion of the system routinely harms the other parts.

Therefore, a Capitalist business or society, large or small, is analogous to an organism whose various cells and organs survive by preying upon one another while the organism itself slowly devours the cells within it. In Nature or medicine, such an organism would be suffering from a terminal autoimmune condition. No natural species could survive if it were genetically constructed on this model. Individuals with such a condition would perish without constant immunosuppressant drugs. Such a social structure is similarly nonviable by nature and cannot be fixed, any more than poisonous mercury can be changed into drinkable water.

If we are ever to achieve a thriving community of thriving, symbiotically empowered and fully engaged individuals, and true government of, by and for The People, then we must completely abandon all Capitalist models and start from scratch with entirely new models that embody economy of, by and for the People.

In the new post-Transition paradigms, healthcare, wellness, medicine, and prevention will develop freely and unfettered, driven by the ingenuity of researchers and medical practitioners, motivated by the pursuit of human health and well-being. Even the competition among researchers with their egos in full swing, will embody the kind of healthy competition that produces superior results for all persons.

In the absence of the need for currency, researchers will freely collaborate and share their findings to develop the best diagnostics and treatments possible. When a new and promising development occurs, there will be no holding back, no consideration of cash flow and franchises. The only criteria will be what best serves the health and well-being of human beings. All treatments will be available to all who need them. We can expect to see longevity and wellness statistics begin to improve once again for the community, individually and as a whole.

Below please see quotes from the Goldman Sachs report cited above:

"The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

Richter cited Gilead Sciences' treatments for hepatitis C, which achieved cure rates of more than 90 percent. The company's U.S. sales for these hepatitis C treatments peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015, but have been falling ever since. Goldman estimates the U.S. sales for these treatments will be less than $4 billion this year, according to a table in the report.

"GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients," the analyst wrote. "In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg. in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk sustainability of a franchise."