Chapter 33: Limiting Factors: Real Vs. Arbitrary

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).

We humans have virtually limitless creativity, ingenuity, and problem-solving ability. It’s widely agreed that we have barely scratched the surface. The post-Transition world will be an unprecedentedly fertile environment to explore farther than ever before.

The physical world, however, does have real limitations, such as gravity, mortality, entropy, disease, and a limited amount of forests, minerals, and other natural resources. We can’t breath underwater or in space on our own. We can’t go faster than light.

Confronted with such limitations, we frequently use our ingenuity to find ways around or past them. We build airplanes to fly. We devised scuba gear and space suits to function underwater and in space. We travel much faster than we can move on our own. We overcome diseases, build bridges, communicate over thousands and millions of miles. Nature doesn’t fine us, jail us, or otherwise punish us for finding ways around its limitations. The earth does not charge us rent, and the sun doesn’t send us a power bill.

In contrast, however, we humans often create arbitrary limitations to impose on each other. Some of them serve a practical purpose beneficial to all, such as mandating which side of the street to drive on. Yet a vast number of the made-up limitations that we place on each other are capricious, impractical and even outright harmful. Arbitrary laws and customs have, in various times and places, limited or mandated whom one may or must marry, what one can or cannot wear, consigned groups of people to slavery, exclusion or extermination, forbidden giving food to the homeless, banned growing food, and mandated that one may not occupy space or access any resource without paying for it with arbitrarily defined currency. Any who find ways to circumvent those arbitrary limitations are fined, jailed or otherwise punished by the enforcers of their societies.

For any community and the people in it to thrive and enjoy peace, freedom, and safety, there must be some universally agreed-upon guidelines, principles, and rules. We benefit from rules that ensure that drivers and pilots know what to expect from one another. We benefit from rules reducing fire and other hazards. We benefit from laws against murder, assault, rape, and enslavement. We benefit from customs that encourage mutual respect and basic civility.

Alongside such beneficial laws, limitations and norms, however, most societies have a plethora of capricious ones that actually cause harm, make life less livable, and even create a stifling, hostile and oppressive environment for some or most people in them. If we are to have a thriving community of symbiotic, thriving individuals, it is imperative that we end such laws, limitations and customs entirely.

Some social challenges have no clear-cut, absolute solutions. How to balance between the rights of neighbors who work different shifts who find themselves sleeping and noisily active at conflicting times? How to balance between the rights of a musician or carpenter to practice their craft, and the rights of their neighbors to not have to bear the inevitable noise? How to achieve equitable access to a water source for agricultural, industrial, recreational and residential needs in times of drought? Such questions must be informed by guiding principles of objective fairness, tempered by compassion and sensitivity, and resolved on a case-by-case basis. Absolute rules and laws for such cases will always do more harm than good.

When all involved parties are reasonable and seeking the mutual greatest good, resolution is certain. When one or more party are unreasonable, triggered, or thinking of self only, objective third parties may need to get involved, in order to facilitate a solution that honors the needs of all disputing parties.

Under the current socioeconomic paradigm, however, myriads of arbitrary, capricious enforced limitations, constraints, compulsions and restraints are placed on all but the modern feudal elite, who are exempt from them. They arise out of the strong reinforcers of the socioeconomic paradigm, which mandate artificially manipulated supply and demand (artificial scarcity), and the aggressive pursuit of profits, market share and stock prices above all else.

Examples of this are ubiquitous. A well-known case in point is the oil industry. The OPEC+ alliance of oil-producing states openly coordinates output cuts to hold prices up, as in its cut of 2 million barrels a day in October 2022 (Quantum Commodity Intelligence). Private companies have done it too, with no international crisis to explain it. In 2001, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found no illegal collusion behind a Midwest gasoline price spike, but did find firms "curtailing production, keeping available supply off the market" to maximize their profits (FTC, 2001). In 2024, the FTC alleged that the former head of Pioneer Natural Resources, one of the largest U.S. shale producers, had traded hundreds of messages with OPEC officials in an effort to keep American output down and prices up (FTC, 2024). He denied it, and the order against him was set aside in 2025 (MyChesCo). Consumer class actions allege that eight U.S. shale producers coordinated to restrain output; the companies deny it, but in 2026 a federal judge let the case go forward (Reuters, via BOE Report). Meanwhile, pump prices go up like rockets and come down like feathers: a classic study found that most of a rise in crude prices reaches the pump within about four weeks, while a fall takes about eight (Borenstein, Cameron and Gilbert, 1997). In 2026, after the war in Iran, the Dutch competition authority found that crude oil was back to its pre-war price, but pump prices were not (ACM). Every disaster and geopolitical crisis becomes a reason to raise prices, and the profits follow: in 2022, the five largest Western oil companies made close to $200 billion between them (Offshore Technology). The system rewards this and does nothing to discourage it.

The petroleum industry has also expended vast resources to suppress the development and proliferation of alternative, sustainable technologies. They’ve used lobbyists to influence lawmakers to serve their interests, pushing arguments to the effect that alternative technologies will put people out of work, when the opposite is true. They have acquired control of promising competing technologies and then kept them from the market. In the 2000s, Chevron came to control the key patents on the large batteries that powered early electric cars; it sued Toyota and its battery supplier, and the confidential 2004 settlement restricted the batteries’ use in electric vehicles (Institute for New Economic Thinking). In the 1970s and 1980s, oil companies bought up many of America’s pioneering solar companies, then redirected or abandoned them when profits did not come quickly enough (Jerneck, Science Advances, 2017). In 2026, Michigan’s attorney general sued BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, alleging decades of collusion to hold back electric vehicles and solar power (Michigan Public); a federal judge dismissed the case in September on legal grounds, without ruling on whether the history was true (AJOT). The companies deny suppressing anything. But why would a company acquire a promising technology that threatens its main product, and then keep it from the market? The simplest explanation is the obvious one. They’ve slandered and discredited people who were a threat to their hegemony, and some have relied on armed security forces accused of beating, torturing and even killing local people, as in the case brought by villagers in Aceh, Indonesia, against ExxonMobil, which the company settled in 2023 while denying responsibility (Al Jazeera, 2023). All of this is the inevitable result of functioning under this paradigm.

Though petroleum companies have known for many decades of the devastating impact of continued global use and dependence on petroleum products on our climate and environment, they’ve expended vast efforts and resources to suppress and cast shadows of doubts upon the data. ExxonMobil’s own scientists, for example, accurately projected the warming we have since seen, while the company publicly cast doubt on climate science (Supran, Rahmstorf and Oreskes, 2023). Though these companies know that their operations will likely lead to global catastrophe, they chose to go full speed ahead in service of profits, market share and stock prices. This follows the classic pattern of addiction. A person caught in an addiction will pursue its object, even at the expense of their own survival. Yet in the distorted perception of the modern feudal paradigm, this addictive behavior is perceived as “business as usual” or “good business practice.”

The pharmaceutical industry is another salient example. Life-critical drugs are kept scarce with prices out of reach for all but the modern feudal lords. Prices bear little relation to development and production costs. Examples abound of drug companies maneuvering to gain all rights to a drug that they didn’t develop, only to raise the price by thousands of percents. Many of these mega-corporations have spent as much or more on sales and marketing as on research and development, yet they officially claim that drug cost is meant to cover development costs. The reason why they get away of this is, again, the pernicious “law of supply and demand.” When a life is at stake, or someone’s ability to function, or chronic pain, demand is extremely high. Manufacturers methodically exploit this demand by jacking prices as high as “the market will bear.” Some people will have to sell their homes, take on crippling debt, or expend their life’s savings to afford a non-optional treatment, but they’ll do it, and pharmaceutical companies have no compunction about putting people in that position. The imperatives of the paradigm functionally mandate it.

In this paradigm, it’s not unheard of for food to be destroyed, though people are hungry, to drive prices up (Bolotova, Connor and Miller, International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2008; Lustrin, Pallett-Vasquez and Drescher, "Price Fixing in the Food Industry", National Law Review, 2018). Millions of houses and apartments in the United States are vacant while about three-quarters of a million people are homeless on any given night (Congressional Research Service, 2026), and people speak of the “housing shortage” though in fact there are many times more vacant homes than homeless people, even allowing for the many that are seasonal or in the wrong places.

For most of the twentieth century, the high price of diamonds was engineered by De Beers, a company controlled by one South African family, the Oppenheimers, which at its peak controlled most of the world’s rough-diamond trade, stockpiled stones to keep them scarce, and ran a hugely successful marketing campaign (“A Diamond Is Forever”, 1947) to elevate diamonds to an almost mythical status as the ultimate symbol of love (Epstein, The Atlantic, 1982), while keeping the supply severely restricted (Friedman, The Atlantic, 2015; Goldschein, Business Insider, 2011).

In airports, after the 9/11 attacks, it became forbidden to bring liquids including water through security. Ever since then, the price of bottled water in terminals has soared to unheard-of levels. This, once again, is the behavior that is strongly reinforced by the dominant socioeconomic paradigm.

That said, physical resources are finite on our world. There is only so much land, water, minerals, energy, air, forest etc. Yet, if managed effectively and efficiently, there should be enough to sustain us indefinitely. These real limitations rarely match the artificial, arbitrary shortages created by economic entities under the current modern feudalism.

Unfortunately, under the current paradigm, resources are not, nor will they be, managed in such a way to make them sustainable and ensure that they are deployed for the benefit of each and all of us. This is because resources are controlled by massive corporations headed by modern feudal lords, whose prime imperatives are profitability, market share, and stock price. In service of those priorities, it is necessary to overproduce short-lived goods for sale and ensure that people will have to keep buying new ones when they break, which is often. This is the self-devouring cycle in which the depletion of resources, pollution of the environment, and build-up of waste are drastically accelerated with no limit or end in sight. This is unsustainable and can only lead to global catastrophe, yet as long as the current paradigm is operating, that outcome is all but assured.

After the Transition, the self-devouring cycle will end once and for all. Goods and services will be produced at the highest quality and robustness, designed to last and be upgradeable, for the good and well-being of all of us. Resources will be managed with the goal of sustainability, renewability, and universal access for the benefit of each and all. The only limitations taken into account will be actual, physical or practical limitations. Pollution will plummet, waste will decline dramatically, and quality of life will rise tremendously. There will be no artificial shortages.

When there is an actual, physical shortage, decisions and solutions will be made among peers with the goal of achieving the best outcome for each and all, whatever that is in each situation. No person or entity will control such resources and thus block access from others. No person or social entity will be privileged above or below another.

Of course, the post-Transition world will not be free of limitations, conflicts and disputes. In contrast to the current paradigm, resolutions won’t be arbitrary or unjust. Each party will be treated with mutual respect. Communication skills will necessarily evolve in the new paradigm, far beyond their typical level under the current paradigm. The goal will be to honor and support the good of each party in the most equitable way possible for mutual benefit.

Under the current paradigm, our position on the socioeconomic pyramid is by far the biggest determinant of our options, degree of freedom, the degree of respect we’re given, and ability to attain our dreams. For people low on the pyramid, hard work, determination, and ability are rarely enough to overcome the disempowerment inherent in that position. For those few modern feudal oligarchs at the top, the lack of ability, hard work or determination is rarely a hindrance to pursuing their dreams and goals.

Those who argue for the current paradigm claim, and maybe believe, that ability, work ethic and determination are the main determinants of a person’s success. They point to anecdotal success stories as proof. They typically claim that anybody who doesn’t “make it,” deserves what they get due to some moral or character flaw. Such arguments are circular at best, and rags-to-riches stories are presented in a misleading way. For every such story, there are thousands or millions of people who possess the same qualities as the successful protagonists but never “make it.” These showcase stories are inspiring to be sure, but rather than prove the thesis that ‘anybody can make it,’ in the bigger context they only illustrate how rare such successes are. Yet those who don’t “make it” are culturally judged as “losers.”

The reason for this is that the dominant socioeconomic paradigm must function as a pyramidal wealth-and-power structure, in order to function at all. The system would collapse if all, most, or even a large percentage of people became billionaires. It is structurally impossible. While it’s true that anybody could “make it” (theoretically), in practice very few can or will, even with all else being equal.

Imagine two entrepreneurs: one from a wealthy family and one from a poor or lower middle class family. Imagine they both have the same idea at the same time, independently of each other. The wealthy one does not need to work and has virtually unlimited access to resources: bottomless wells of capital, personal connections to other wealthy and powerful people, lawyers on retainer, and automatic deference and respect when seeking a loan. Their non-wealthy counterpart is working fulltime or more to make ends meet, has very limited time and money, has no powerful connections, can’t afford an attorney, and will almost certainly be turned down for a loan by just about any bank. Whose business idea do you predict will ever come to fruition?

Thus initiative and innovation among those low in the socioeconomic pyramid are effectively suppressed. There are just enough exceptions to keep people engaged in trying to win by playing the game. The psychological mechanisms are precisely the same ones that keep gamblers playing until most of them lose catastrophically.

In education, we see the same pattern. Children of the feudal lords and their vassals are only limited in their studies, by their ability, discipline, and drive, and sometimes not even that. Psychologically they have a background of usually getting their way by default. Poor and middle-class children share those limitations, but are further limited by lack of funds, by the need to work while studying, often lack of robust primary and secondary education, need to take on crushing student loans, and are inhibited by a life experience of disempowerment and exclusion by default. When the budding young feudal lord graduates, they don’t have to worry about getting a job that pays enough to live on and pay back their loans. They’re under no pressure. The budding serf or peasant, on the other hand, must find a job, fast. Without a salary, they’ll be unable to ransom their life and buy temporary permission to exist and occupy space, and they will be increasingly marginalized, excluded, disempowered, and unable to thrive. The longer you go without a job, the harder it becomes to get one: in one U.S. field experiment, employers’ callbacks for interviews fell by about 45% between one and eight months of unemployment (Kroft, Lange and Notowidigdo, 2013).

In societies under the current paradigm, currency, a made-up thing with no intrinsic value of its own, is kept scarce for all but the handful of modern feudal lords, who use it as a tool to control who has access to what, and who doesn’t. Keeping money relatively scarce is, in fact, ordinary central-bank practice: as a standard finance reference puts it, “the central bank tends to keep the money supply relatively scarce” (Investopedia, 2026). This arbitrary construct becomes compulsorily the only way to access any resource. Medical care is a poignant example.

Billionaires and their immediate vassals will always receive the best medical care. They have functionally limitless currency so no expense is spared. There is no medical treatment that they can’t easily afford.

Many of the rest of us peasants and serfs struggle to afford even basic medical care, much less care for complex, chronic or severe medical conditions; more than 100 million people in America carry medical debt (KFF Health News, 2022). Most of it is out of reach without coverage, so we pay every month for health insurance. When we call upon the insurance company to cover a medical treatment, we often find that our standard of care, or even whether or not we get care, is decided not by medical professionals, but by financial professionals, accountants and “adjusters” whose mission is to maximize the bottom line monetarily. When the best medical option conflicts with the best financial option, the financial overrides the medical. People are routinely denied care, given inferior or suboptimal care, and put through arduous bureaucratic obstacle courses if they wish to contest a denial of coverage, which amounts to trying to win against the dealer in a rigged game with a stacked deck while suffering from a rattlesnake bite. When all is said and done, many people are left buried under medical debt that becomes a huge stone around their neck for decades or even the rest of their lives. Others are simply buried, as they don’t get the care that they need, in time to make a difference.

The cost is measured in years of life. The richest 1 percent of American men live 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1 percent, and the richest women 10.1 years longer (Chetty et al., JAMA 2016), and the gap is widening: for men, the difference in life expectancy at 50 between the top and bottom fifth of earners grew from 5.1 years for those born in 1930 to a projected 12.7 years for those born in 1960 (National Academies, 2015). A 2025 review of the research concludes that the evidence “now unequivocally supports the conclusion that health insurance improves health” (Levy and Buchmueller, Annual Review of Public Health 2025). That is not a sign that insurance is our friend. It shows how tightly survival is bound to money, because how much coverage a person has, and how good it is, depends largely on what they can afford. Insurance is a parasitic industry that exists only because medical care has been priced out of reach for most people, and it is the insurer, not the doctor, who decides what kind of treatment you get and how much of it; if you cannot pay for what they will not cover, you do not get it. Meanwhile workers pay more for less, decade after decade. The average worker’s share of a family premium rose from $3,515 in 2009 to $6,015 in 2019 (KFF, 2019) and $6,850 in 2025 (KFF, 2025), while the average deductible, which must be paid before most coverage even begins, rose 162 percent from 2009 to 2019 alone and has risen another 43 percent over the last ten years (KFF, 2019; KFF, 2025).

I learned this from the inside. When my wife was fighting cancer, we were living in Taiwan, where our national health insurance does not pay for treatment abroad, so we faced the prices any uninsured patient faces. We searched for a clinical trial in the United States that might offer her a chance that standard treatment could not, and contacted some of the most respected cancer centers in the country. In several cases we uploaded her medical records and CT scans and completed their forms, and only well into the process did the costs appear. One center wanted $30,000 for a single remote consultation to tell us whether it had a suitable study. Another required at least ten pathology slides, at $5,000 each to examine. Another quoted $10,000 to $12,000 for each day in its hospital. Another explained that the trial would pay for the experimental drug, but not for treating its side effects or for any other costs, and another said its trial patients’ expenses typically ran from $150,000 to $1 million.

There were no exceptions and no compassionate appeals. When I said that this meant my wife would go without care, and might die, because we did not have the money, the staff defended the policy. No one I spoke with treated it as a moral question; within the system, it was simply how things are done. The only suggestion offered was international health insurance at $1,500 to $2,500 a month, out of reach on our fixed income, and with no guarantee that it would have covered much of anything. Clinical studies in the People’s Republic of China presented the same wall. People who look for a clinical trial have usually exhausted standard treatment, and they accept real risks, including harm, death, or a placebo that does nothing, for a chance at help. A system that prices that chance beyond most people’s reach leaves those who might have been helped to suffer and die because they cannot pay.

The barrier is not only for patients abroad. In the United States, the trial’s sponsor generally pays for the experimental treatment and research tests, while the patient or their insurer pays for routine care, extra visits and treatment of side effects, and the patient pays for travel, lodging and meals (OncoLink, Penn Medicine). Patients paying their own way must first put down a deposit before they are even evaluated (MD Anderson, international patients). In a study of patients in early-phase cancer trials, nearly half were paying $1,000 or more a month out of pocket, half had travelled more than 300 miles, and fewer than a third had any of their travel costs reimbursed (Huey et al., The Oncologist 2021). Only 12 percent of cancer patients with household incomes below $50,000 took part in trials, against 17 percent of those with higher incomes (Unger et al., JAMA Oncology 2016). The treatments of tomorrow are tested mostly on those who can afford to be tested, and the poorest are shut out even of the gamble.

Within the United States, the law has improved: since 2014, most private insurance plans must cover the routine care of patients in trials for cancer and other life-threatening diseases, though not the experimental treatment itself. Yet in a survey of cancer centers, nearly two-thirds reported insurers denying those costs anyway, and centers that needed the insurer’s prior approval saw three times as many denials (OncLive, 2015). Patients are told they can appeal. But a patient sick enough to be searching for a clinical trial is in no condition to fight an insurer, and the family caring for them is usually already stretched past its limits in money and time. An appeal can take many hours on the phone and knowledge that almost no one outside the hospital and insurance systems has, from staff with little inclination to explain it; appeals are thrown out for a missed deadline, or because the insurer does not accept the proof supplied. In effect, such denials are opportunistic: they rely on the fact that most people in that situation cannot realistically fight them. And they are rarely fought. In the federal insurance marketplace in 2021, consumers appealed less than two-tenths of 1 percent of denied in-network claims, and insurers upheld 59 percent of the denials that were appealed (KFF, 2023). Most patients never reach the door at all: for more than half of cancer patients no trial is available, and only about 8 percent ever enroll (Unger et al., JNCI 2019). And what it costs a patient to be evaluated is kept out of view. Leading centers set their deposits privately, case by case, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology has itself named the lack of transparency about these costs as a barrier to treatment (Winkfield et al., Journal of Clinical Oncology 2018).

This is part and parcel of the paradigm in operation. Simple “supply and demand” is in play in medical, dental, and legal fields. Health, dental care, and our freedom are not optional commodities a tummy tuck or a tourist trip to space. Demand is inevitably high, as the stakes are high; so suppliers take advantage of this demand by raising prices as high as they can get away with, as high as “the market will bear.” Most people would never mortgage their house, sell their car, or take a second job to afford a yacht, a private jet, or a piece of expensive jewelry. Most people who have the option, would go to those lengths to save the life, limb or freedom of themselves or their loved ones or to get them out of chronic pain. The fundamental principles of the socioeconomic paradigm guarantee that high-stakes goods and services like medical, dental and legal care, living spaces, and other vital commodities will be priced prohibitively high.

In the new post-Transition paradigm, these limitations will fade into historical footnotes. Every one of us will have equal access to the best medical care available, with priority set by medical need alone. Medicines and equipment will be kept in a little more than sufficient supply, with reserves to cover unforeseen large-scale emergencies. Nothing will be artificially scarcified to keep supply lagging demand to drive prices up. With no financial barriers blocking access to medical training, many will become healthcare professionals who would never be able to under the current paradigm. Thus the number of providers will expand considerably. The disappearance of insurance bureaucracy will also free medical practitioners to devote themselves purely to medicine.

The reinforcers in the new paradigm will strengthen very different behaviors than the current paradigm does. Production and supply of all goods and services, in every sector, will adjust to fulfill people’s authentic needs and desires, which will no longer be artificially induced and manipulated through advertising, marketing and other forms of manipulative propaganda. Ethics and the healing ethos will reassert themselves among healing professionals, freed from the conflicting constraints and pressures of financial “realities.”

In cases of actual, physical or technological shortage or limitations, decisions involving distribution will be made from only humanitarian perspectives. None will have automatic priority over others due to social or economic status. Difficult decisions will most likely have to be made according to similar principles to those used by EMT’s and emergency room doctors when they triage patients, with the goal of most effectively helping and treating the most people in the best possible way. At last, medical providers will be free to honor their oath to do no harm.

Under the current paradigm, even the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives are bound, limited and restricted by economic limitations. Countless families delay marriage or cohabitation and childbearing, having to wait until they can afford to do so. In the post-Transition paradigm, such shackles will evaporate. With currency and the need for it ended and universal access to goods and services, people will be able to marry and have children when they are humanly ready.

In the current paradigm, governments often charge exorbitant fees for immigration processing, to exclude less affluent immigrants from coming and possibly becoming a “burden” on the host country. Because of this, multinational families often suffer prolonged separation, anxiety and privation. In the new paradigm, such barriers will disappear, and the concept of people being a burden to one another will become meaningless.

It is fact that under the current feudalistic socioeconomic paradigm, we are by default denied access to just about everything, including medicine, education, transportation, communications media, clothing, tools, and even food, water, and a place to take up space. In order to survive, we must constantly come up with carefully scarcified currency to ransom our existence and buy a temporary reprieve from the negation of our right to be. We are thus multiply harnessed to generate ever-growing wealth for the modern feudal lords: first by being obliged to produce the goods and services which generate their profits and drive their companies’ stock prices, and doing so for whatever they choose to pay us; second, by buying those same goods and services from them for whatever they choose to charge us. Note here that we, the serfs and peasants, are both the producers and consumers of goods and services, while the corporations and feudal lords siphon off the wealth and power that we generate, but contribute little to nothing to production or distribution. It is not their fault. They are playing the game as designed.

The current paradigm is fundamentally unworkable. It generates an environment which elevates a very few to positions of dictatorial power over the vast majority of us, pits us against one another, and leads to conditions where one person’s loss is literally another person’s gain. The gain of the feudal lords comes at our perennial loss. Your promotion is my loss. My bonus is your loss. In the new paradigm, the win of one will be the benefit of all, and the loss of one will be the loss of all, not just poetically or philosophically, but in practice. The behaviors that will be reinforced will make it inevitable.