There are things that reverberate and echo around my head. Are they whispers from my past rising up to combine with what I’m reading now? Or is it something I’ve always understood, but never possessed the words to express the feeling? My memories are a facsimile, a loose approximation of chemical signals, emotional content, and tales spun by parents, friends, family, or myself. It begs the question: am I my thoughts or are they me? I have always had a sense of purpose accumulating over time, culminating into who I am, yet building upon layers of who I was. The sentiment can be best described as a calling.

To be called suggests purpose. This antimetabole is not just a special case of intellectual chiasmus. A calling suggests that something beyond appetite, accident, and survival has summoned us into being. It implies that life is not merely a collision of atoms or impulses, but a uncoreographed dance toward meaning. A calling is not simply a job, a vocation, or a role assigned by society. It is the discovery that some inner necessity has begun to align with the world outside oneself. However, the antithesis of a calling is not aimlessness. Rather it is the process of culling.

To be culled suggests something much darker. Much like artificial selection, it is the process of removal and segregation of desired or undesired characteristics. It implies selection without consent, and is a mechanism for sorting, pruning, or elimination. To be culled suggests that we have not been summoned by meaning, but filtered; sifted by the tools of power. It intimates we are not chosen because we are beautiful, useful, or good,1 but because some larger system has determined which bodies, minds, desires, and behaviors are worth preserving. We like to believe we are called. Yet much of modern life suggests we are being culled.

The ancient Greek word kallos referred to beauty, but not merely in the decorative sense. Beauty was not only something to be admired from a distance. It carried the force of attraction, harmony, proportion, and meaning. Kallos invoked physical grace, nobility of character, and the harmony achieved from both outer form and inner virtue. This concept shaped the etymology of words like calligraphy (beautiful writing) and calisthenics (beautiful strength). Anyone that could balance the marriage of the physical and spiritual was considered one of the great masters. It was the art of doing the common things uncommonly well. Related to this is another Greek word, kalein, which means to call, summon, or invite. Beauty has the capacity to call us forward. It summons our attention, and it draws something out of us, inviting us to respond.

This is why purpose often feels beautiful. Not because it is easy or pleasant. Purpose may be exhausting, and even painful. But when a person is aligned with what they are called to do, something in them takes on a sense of order. Their actions begin to cohere. Their suffering is no longer meaningless. Their labor becomes more than effort, and their essence begins to radiate from within. Beauty, then, is not simply found in the face, the landscape, the painting, or the body. Beauty appears when being and action are aligned. It appears when the inner life and the outer world briefly recognize one another. It appears when a person finds their why.

But this raises difficult questions: have we been called here? And if so, by what? To which master do we answer?

For much of human history, the master was obvious, but this has evolved over time. Modern people flatter themselves by believing they have escaped imprisonment because they have escaped certain visible masters. But domination does not disappear simply because the throne has been replaced by an algorithm, or the plantation by the platform. We are chained to ideology and driven by the whips of debt to produce and consume. We are both the product and the fuel that feeds the economic engine. The disease management system that is healthcare is a perfect example. We work to purchase goods that we consume, thereby becoming chronically ill in the process. We seek remedies, but we are too tired, too busy, too poor to afford the effort, time, and money required to become healthy again. And so, we become the product for our healthcare system. It extracts value from us, as we become part of the supply chain of modern medicine. We all share the roll of master and slave, regardless of who wields the axe or throws the noose around our neck.

This is where the old arguments about free will become more than philosophical abstraction. Lucretius imagined the swerve — the tiny unpredictable deviation in the motion of atoms — as a way to preserve freedom in a universe otherwise governed by necessity. Without the swerve, all things would fall in predetermined lines. There would be no choice, agency, moral responsibility, nor room for becoming. The swerve was a metaphysical opening, a crack in determinism through which freedom might enter. And yet, have we only attained the illusion of freedom? If we’re paying attention, have we not built in guardrails to place life within those predetermined lines? Wide enough at first to create not a swerve but a gentle inward curvature, narrowing as we move further to the slaughterhouse chute. We believe there is choice, agency, and moral responsibility, but this is only a mirage. Modern neuroscience is perhaps less generous than even this idea.

Robert Sapolsky is a neurobiologist and primatologist who teaches at Stanford University. His research has mainly focused on neuroendocrinology and his early career involved studying baboons in Kenya. These primates exist in a strict hierarchical society with male dominance and displaced aggression. High ranking males within a baboon troop bully subordinates, yet these lower ranking males will displace their aggression to other lesser males and females within the troop. This unpredictable structure of abuse leads to chronically elevated cortisol levels and worse health for subordinates within the group.

We’ll come back to the baboons in a bit, but Dr. Sapolsky has also authored several books. In Determined, he explores and supports an argument against free will. His work forces us to confront the possibility that what we call choice may be the final expression of causes we neither actually make, nor fully understand. This includes a myriad of factors including genes, hormones, childhood trauma, culture, stress, poverty, inflammation, social hierarchy, sleep, hunger, fear, and history. Sapolsky’s discussion of the research demonstrates that we are never really in control because before we consider an action the body and brain were shaped by the environment long before an idea pops into our heads. This presents an uncomfortable predicament that self-determination is not real. It forces us to ask: “How am I not myself?”

So where, exactly, is the self? Where is the chooser? Where is the soul standing apart from the machinery of biology?

Perhaps we are not free in the way we imagine. Maybe freedom is not the sovereign command of an isolated will, but the fragile capacity to become aware of the forces moving through us. Is the first act of freedom then not choosing, but noticing? Detecting what has called us. Understanding what has culled us. Perceiving which desires are truly ours and which were installed by systems that profit from our confusion. This is an existential crisis on a the scale of a civilization.

The great conflict of our age is not only over territory or resources. It is also in attempts to control our consciousness. Every system of power seeks to shape it. They must, because any system cannot survive by force alone. Power whether economic, political, or cultural, needs stories, rituals, and enemies. We need an explanation for suffering and a promise of redemption. We require people to believe that hierarchy is natural, violence necessary, rewards are deserved, and our enemies are not victims, but are worthy of our vehemence and vengeance. In essence, we require coercion. We do this so that history can be labeled, categorized, and packaged into mythology and propaganda. It is done in this way so that we will fall lock step into the precise shape and form that power requires of us.

Communism claims to liberate workers, yet in practice often produced new elites who exploited labor while claiming to protect it. Democracy maintains that it represent the people, yet routinely becomes a mechanism through which the people are managed, divided, and manipulated. Capitalism is thought to reward merit and freedom, yet often converts human beings into instruments of extraction. Religion intends to orient the soul toward transcendence, yet can become a weapon of obedience and ignorance. Science asserts the pursuit of truth, yet can be subordinated to profit, hierarchy, and domination. Even revolution, once institutionalized, often becomes another throne.

The problem is not only the system. The problem is what power does when it forgets its purpose. Any system of power, once corrupted, begins to annihilate itself. It does so from above through elite decadence, insulation, and predation. From below, unscrupulous power aids in the development of popular immiseration, resentment, despair, and loss of faith. A ruling class may believe it is preserving order while it consumes the conditions that make order possible. The people may believe they are participating in a shared society, yet gradually realize they are being harvested by it. Is that the moment when calling becomes culling?

A society tells its people they are free, but leaves them too exhausted to think. We are told we have representatives but we are given choices curated by capital that we can neither control nor influence. And thus we are molded into educated consumers, not intelligent citizens. This process forces us to become responsible for our own suffering, while concealing the architecture that produces it. We are instructed to find our own purpose, while stripping the world of the conditions under which purpose can be lived. This is why the question of identity becomes unavoidable. Who or what constitutes '“the self”? This is often asked by those exploring consciousness in an attempt to remove their physical form from the material world. Yet we exist in a physical world that is changing around us while changing us in the process. Is this metamorphosis or masturbation?

Am I Theseus’ ship? Are you? Is society?

Does a ship remains the same ship if every plank is gradually replaced over time? If you then constructed a sea faring vessel from the discarded parts, which is the original? If identity survives material change, where does it reside? Is it stored in the form, the name, the memory? We ask this about objects as opposed to people, because it is safer than asking it about ourselves.

Over time, the body changes. So does the mind. Beliefs and desires change. Cells die and regenerate, while memories distort with time. The child becomes the adult, and the adult often cannot fully recognize themselves in the child they once were. Sometimes we can recall childhood memories with such clarity that we can feel the joy, sadness, embarrassment, or fear as if it were happening to us at the very moment we conjured the thought. Is that memory or are we reliving past experience? Were we ever that person? Are we that same person now? Physical or emotional trauma replaces certain planks. Love replaces others. Grief hollows out the deck. Ambition reinforces the hull. Fear changes the direction of the sail. At what point do we become someone else? And if the self is unstable, what does it mean to be called to something?

Perhaps a calling is not a fixed destination given to a fixed self. Perhaps it is the journey; the ongoing pattern that remains recognizable only through transformation. We cannot be defined by a single plank, but the entirety of form. We are not subject to one command or thought, but an accumulated orientation. There is no certainty, but more a sentiment of fidelity to the deepest idea or passion within us that keeps returning.

Societies also become Theseus’ ship. They retain names long after their substance has changed. A democracy may keep its elections while losing its representative character. A republic may keep its constitution while losing its civic virtue. A healthcare system may keep the language of healing while becoming organized around billing, throughput, and disease management. An economy may keep the language of prosperity while producing loneliness, ecological ruin, and despair. The name remains, but the planks have been replaced, and yet people keep saluting the ship.

Unsatisfactory Options

This is where Agrippa’s Trilemma enters, not as a sterile problem of epistemology, but as a wound in human certainty. This philosophical argument indicates that any claim to truth faces three unsatisfying options. It can rest on an infinite regress, where every justification requires another justification. It can end in circular reasoning, where the claim is defended by itself. Or it can stop at an unsupported assumption, a foundation accepted without proof.

Every ideology eventually confronts this problem. Why should the market rule? Because it produces freedom. How do we know it produces freedom? Because freedom is defined as market choice. Why should the party rule? Because it represents the people. How do we know it represents the people? Because opposition to the party is opposition to the people. Why should the nation dominate? Because history, destiny, security, God, blood, soil, law, civilization, yadayadayada.2

At some point, every system stops reasoning and begins demanding faith. The danger is not that humans need foundations. We certainly require some form of structure. No life can be lived in permanent suspension, and no society can function if every premise is endlessly reopened. The danger comes when provisional foundations harden into idols. When assumptions become sacred, institutions confuse their own survival with truth, leaders mistake obedience for legitimacy, and people mistake inherited beliefs for reality.3 This is where foundational aspects of our lives are swept away by mythology. If the self is perceived, then anything can be put in its place by regression, circular thought, or dogmatic belief. In this sense, how can we be called to do anything without being culled in the process?

As I have discussed in previous essays, real faith is not afraid of reason. I have insinuated that real purpose is not afraid of examination, and I have implied that real beauty does not need coercion. What calls us should be able to withstand being questioned. What culls us cannot. The great struggle, then, is perhaps not between what we’ve been led to believe. Left vs. right, religion or secularism, capitalism and communism, individualism opposing collectivism; these are important conflicts. But they remain superficial. The deeper conflict is between systems that awaken consciousness and systems that consume it.

A system that awakens consciousness helps people perceive the forces shaping them. It allows them to ask why they suffer, why they desire, why they obey, why they hate, why they work, and why they believe. It does not promise perfect freedom, because perfect freedom may not exist. But it helps expand the space in which reflection becomes possible. True self reflection that penetrates beneath the shallow pool of our desires provides opportunity to understand.

A system that consumes consciousness accomplishes the opposite. It floods attention, monetizes desire, and manufactures enemies. It reduces language to slogans and identity to markets. These systems keep people too afraid, angry, indebted, distracted, or exhausted to ask whether the life they are living is the life they were called to live. We may learn within these systems. We may gain knowledge. But we will never accumulate wisdom and we will never understand.

Called or Culled?

And so we return to the beginning. Have we been called here? Or culled here? The answer may depend on whether we can still hear anything beneath the noise.

Maybe the calling is not a voice from above, but a pressure from within. A refusal to accept that survival is enough. A suspicion that beauty and meaning are related. A recognition that the self, however determined, is still capable of awareness. A belief that even if free will is smaller than we imagined, responsibility may still begin in the act of seeing clearly. I think this is an appropriate time to discuss Dr. Sapolsky’s baboons.

The Keekorok baboon troop was similar to any baboon society, which was highly stratified through male aggression. However, when they took to foraging in a garbage dump in a tourist lodge with food that was contaminated by tuberculosis, everything changed. Fifty percent of the dominant males died and as a result the group was transformed. The remaining troop was predominantly female, and the males had low levels of aggression and high levels of social affiliation. This redefined the model of baboon behavior and culture, where this unique group completely stood out from an evolutionary standpoint. Additionally, adolescent males that joined the group adopted these new tendencies within six months of exposure, fully assimilating to Keekorok culture. What is so fascinating about this discovery includes the implications for human social interaction. If these baboons are able to transform textbook social systems supposedly engraved in stone in a single generation, we don’t have an excuse when we say there are certain inevitabilities about human social systems. With this knowledge the question for us whether we can be called to transform through understanding, or must we be culled to assimilate?

We may not be masters in the way we pretend. We may not be free in the way we were promised. We may be ships rebuilt by forces we did not choose, sailing under names we inherited, toward destinations selected by powers that do not love us. But perhaps there remains a swerve. Not the grand sovereign freedom of myth, but a small deviation. This is a pause before obedience. A question before certainty. A moment of attention before appetite. A recognition that the thing calling us toward beauty is not the same as the thing culling us for use.

And maybe that is where purpose begins. Not in domination. Not in ideology. Not in the master’s command. But in the quiet, difficult work of discerning which voice is calling us, and which one is merely sharpening the axe.

This essay is an accumulation of my thoughts up until this point. Previously I dissected, exposed, and documented systemic failure, but what follows is more a personal framing of my moral and ethical lens. It is a mechanism for me to help identify my own perspective and attempt to give it life. It’s a kind of sermon, not in the religious sense, but as a demand for ethical reckoning. The writing has been born from my frustration, shaped by grief, and driven by a belief that the catastrophes we face are not only institutional or political, but remain deeply spiritual. In part, our crisis is one of moral imagination, or a lack there of. And if we are to navigate what lies ahead, we must move beyond critique into conscience.

Based upon the subtitle, I do not wish to insinuate that this essay is the equivalent of or anywhere nearing The Sermon on the Mount ministered by Jesus Christ. That would be beyond presumptuous, vain, and sacrilegious. That is not my intent. Although, I do wish to draw some comparisons between His philosophy and my own. We exist within different worlds, yet there are aspects of that original sermon that reverberate within me today. This essay is obviously not a treatise taking apart and reassembling the words of Christ. I am not repurposing what The New Testament instructs, but I am indicating the discrepancy of those who use The Bible as a cudgel to force others to kneel when they do not follow rigid interpretations. I do not believe this is what Jesus intended. I am not a religious scholar, nor am I a Christian. But I do understand when I see the misdeeds of my fellow man using philosophy — in any form — as a weapon instead of a guidepost.

The essays leading to this point have examined ideology, power, markets, institutions, science and belief:

They have traced how systems shape behavior and how narratives shape systems. But every systemic critique eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable destination: responsibility. Not the fiction of individual responsibility, where every failure is personal. Nor the comforting belief that all blame belongs elsewhere. Rather, it comes down to the recognition that we are participants in the world we have inherited and co-creators of the world we eventually leave behind.

One of the clearest examples of this moral failure can be seen in the rise of Christian nationalism. As I explored last week in Wisdom and Insecurity, faith — which at its best invites humility over hubris and arrogance — has increasingly been repurposed as a weapon against disagreement. In this process, political opponents become enemies of God. Complexity becomes compromise, and doubt becomes weakness. Entire communities are condemned not because they have caused harm, but because they challenge an ideological orthodoxy. In this framework, faith no longer serves as a path toward wisdom. It becomes another mechanism of control.

Yet God, truth, reality (whatever language we choose) has always been larger than our attempts to contain it. To assume that ultimate reality conforms neatly to our political ideologies, economic theories, or theological doctrines is not merely presumptuous, it is spiritually absurd. Instead of working against life in pursuit of certainty, we are called to work together, not in the image of doctrine, but in the likeness of grace.

I previously examined how individualism has been weaponized and morality commodified. This process occurred over time with alterations of public policy to shift our collective psychology. It has converted citizens into consumers, while rendering democratic will subordinate to capital flows. The conclusion of this is the development of a pathological form of freedom.

“It is freedom untethered from duty. Freedom without restraint. Freedom redefined as the right to consume, refuse, deny, and indulge, regardless of the consequences to oneself or anyone else. It is the freedom to call every boundary tyranny, every obligation oppression, and every attempt at collective stewardship an assault on personal sovereignty. That is not liberty. It is compulsion with better branding.”

But I think the most devastating achievement of this process has been the conversion of moral responsibility into self-interest. This is how we have been informed that failure is personal, inequality is natural, and that empathy is weakness. That is the gospel of the self. It has taken on its own theological magnanimity with displays of the rugged individual who has conquered all odds to rise above the less deserving and the poor.

Individual Interpretation

I want to take a moment here because if you are new to my writing it may appear that I am anti-individual based upon what I’m saying. But the truth is I am anti-individualist. Those who have read my previous work will understand this. In the individualist world we have constructed, the only individuals who count are those with capital. The rest of us are told to hustle, optimize, and innovate, all while the levers of opportunity are held firmly in the hands of the politically and economically powerful. This process seems to have accelerated, but maybe that is just my perception as I came into adulthood during the 2008 financial crisis and was early in my career at the start of COVID-19. However, hindsight informs me this has been going on far longer.

My impression is that we do not practice capitalism. Sure, I have railed against Neoliberal economic policy in several essays. But this is because it demands understanding that those who endorse this policy ignore its consequences. We constantly strip protections for average individuals while securing assets for those who already have access to capital. This is socialism for the wealthy and immiseration for the masses. It is an ideology that preaches success occurs with merit while rigging the altar. As Matthew 19:24 reminds us,

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).

But those who control capital have only built a bigger needle to pass into the kingdom of their own making, serving their purpose alone and not those of the people.

This translates further into our political system, as we do not live in a representative democracy. We exist in a plutocratic oligarchy, disguised by rituals of voting and symbolic debate. Back in the 1980s, we were told the market would save us, and we believed it — not because it worked, but because we were starved for salvation from abusers of the system. Through stories of welfare queens, we substituted deregulation for divinity. We accepted greed as gospel. For fifty years, the pulpit of American economics has been manned by proselytizers preaching the sacrament of self. These snake oil salesmen convinced us that growth is the answer to all that ails us, while poisoning the very soil in which our future must be planted. These stories are no longer original, but the mythology remains as pervasive.

The Loss of Self

The crises we suffer through are not simply exploitative, they are engineered. Disaster capitalism thrives on disorientation. It creates the trauma and sells us the cure, often at the expense of public trust, shared resources, and democratic accountability. In this arrangement, controversy becomes a form of currency by captivating our attention. Fueled by outrage, we set our consciousness aflame in and act of self-immolation. Stupefied by our own anger, we became meat for the machine — ground down, divided, emotionally hijacked, and cognitively subdued by media ecosystems that flatter our intellect while triggering our fear.

This is how we eventually lost ourselves. Self-importance became narcissism masquerading as fundamentalism. We denied our interdependence and replaced it with a curated version of freedom — freedom from obligation, from restraint, from one another. And yet we ask: what is faith when what one believes is fractured or false? What is family when members can be excluded for dissenting belief? What is truth when it is siloed, marketed, and monetized into weaponized fragments?

The ease by which all information passes as truth serves to reinforce these ideas. This is how pseudoscience is used to accumulate power, because if truth is relative, then anything repeated enough times becomes true. Through this process we continue to adhere to the false mythology of “survival of the fittest.” We have mistaken dominion for domination. But this is propaganda — an excuse for extraction, exploitation, and egocentrism. We were told we had dominion over the Earth, and we took that to mean we could consume it. Through this interpretation we have mistaken stewardship for ownership. But the role of shepherd is not to conquer; it is to protect. We became irresponsible caretakers of our own misguided fate.

We have been so thoroughly co-opted by the ideology of individualism that we now confuse it for moral truth. We constantly shout: “Me, me, me. I, I, I.” There is no we. But this is an illusion. There is only us. There has only ever been us. I am nothing. You are nothing. But we, collectively, we are everything. The diversity of thought, unburdened by ego, liberated from righteous individualism and free from hatred and bigotry — this is the way forward. As we face climate collapse, public health decay, democratic erosion, and epistemic fragmentation, we have to [re]learn to stay together. To borrow a line from one of my favorite movies: “If you go, we go.” It was an expression between firefighters to indicate solidarity in the face of danger. I think this is something we need to understand to pull ourselves out of the fire.

The Responsibility of ‘We’

The false prophets of our age did not emerge solely from megachurches or political parties. They emerged from hedge funds, venture capital firms, and Silicon Valley boardrooms. They promised us liberation through markets, salvation through tech, and justice through frictionless innovation. On top of that, they demanded belief. But belief without inquiry, emotion without reflection, and certainty without humility are the cornerstones of anti-intellectualism — and that spells the death knell of democracy.

In my writing and the exploration of my own thoughts, I haven’t any easy solutions to offer up, because there are none. But I continuously seek to clarify what we are up against. This is not just about corrupted systems, but the distorted stories we have used to indoctrinate. Among them include the myth of the self-made man, the moral infallibility of markets, the spiritual authority of wealth, and the illusion of choice. These stories are a form of idolatry carved into the stone of our minds. And in so doing, we have lost our language for what is sacred. This goes unnoticed because the gaping hole within our spiritual center has been replaced by the deification of objects and the objectification of the divine.

I am not attempting to be obscure. We worship what we create, ignoring consequence, and the self-congratulatory manner in which we approach life indicates that we will continue to deify our creations to provide solutions for problems we produced. For example, we are at the tip of the iceberg for artificial intelligence. I am certain it will perform a great many tasks, but we barely stop to ask how we will afford the cost of the data centers necessary for the computing power to run the algorithms. I am not referring to the financial side of the equation, but rather the exploitation of nature. When I mentioned Mathew 19:24 earlier I was implying precisely what I think Christ intended in his sermon when referring to the wealthy. However, a new modern rendition demonstrates that our beliefs seem to imply that the destruction of ecosystems, social structure, political systems, and human health are necessary to achieve a poverty of spirituality to bring about the coming of artificial general intelligence. Perhaps that is the kingdom the impoverished of Earth will find through the eye of the needle that destroys us.

I am not implying that technology is evil. Yet our use of it does not point toward a greater good; merely a lesser bad. We lack a purpose — as individuals, nations, and a species. I think there is so much more we can accomplish. I am not implying that we will ever be free from conflict. That perfect world does not exist. Utopias are a sterile pond, devoid and unfit for life because they lack the necessary imagination to produce solutions to complicated problems.

What I am seeking is betterment while remembering that the enemy of good is not necessarily evil, but “better” (to paraphrase a surgical saying). It is the pursuit of purity that kills democracy through party loyalty and lobbyists over the people. It is the quest for certainty that extinguishes truth because truth can be subjective. Data can provide answers, but we frequently make decisions with incomplete information. Perfect knowledge doesn’t exist. We do not need to be perfect; that is impossible. We need to be present. Responsible. Honest. And together. That is how we build wisdom.

Though understanding responsibility is not without a sense of irony. I have asked myself many times, “who is to blame for this mess?” The answer is simple:

I am.

You are.

We are.

That is not intended to be fatalistic, but rather to demonstrate the beginning of hope. Because when we finally understand that the problem is us, we can then begin to rebuild a version of ourselves that does not demand conformity, but invites community. To share our differences and enjoy diversity is not a crime, providing the ideas we produce are not used for harm. However, this concept also rests on a philosophical knife’s edge, because preemptive action can be used both for pacification or genocide depending upon intent and scale.

Reclaimed Language

We must also speak of the phrases that have been twisted — words once meant to unite, now used to ensnare. “Where We Go One, We Go All.” It has become a battle cry for a conspiracy impersonating reality. The movement dresses delusion in the robes of destiny. QAnon took the language of solidarity and emptied it of substance. The community surrounding Q offered belonging, but through blind allegiance. They invoked unity, but only through exclusion. It was never “we.” It was only a mirror reflecting back the fears and fantasies of a chosen few. These believers have formed an mythology surrounding their mystical leader and the incantations they breathe in their internet drops.

This is another form of idolatry and worship where followers grow more certain in their thinking as the world becomes more uncertain. These individuals may not recognize it, but I believe they follow Q because they have lost their faith in the system just like many others. However, deeper than this, I think their hopes have been destroyed. Because people who have no hopes are easier to control. And whoever has control has the power. In this environment, Q, his priests, and Donald Trump have control. And so, “Where We Go One, We Go All” is a form of solidarity in the face of danger, but it is built around the perception and fetishization of power.

But still that phrase lingers because it touches something true. it is something we cannot abandon to those who would use it for harm. Where we go one, we do go all. That is not conspiracy. That is ecology. That is history. Within that phrase contains the truth of human consequence. When the seas rise, when the air is polluted, when streams and rivers are contaminated, when trust collapses and public health fails — it does not spare the believer or punish the skeptic. We suffer together, whether we acknowledge it or not.

So let us take back the phrase and make it honest. Not as a slogan for fantasy, but a vow to each other. Not a call to storm the institutions, but a commitment to restore them. It is not obedience to a myth, but responsibility to what is real. If you go, we go – not because we are bound by dogma, but because we are bound by biology, ecology, our planet. We are all bound by fate. So I beseech you to step out of the binary and resist the pull of outrage. Refuse the cheap comfort of tribe. Fight the seduction of ideological monoculture, and above all, remember that any vision of justice that excludes humility, any pursuit of truth that ignores community, and any faith that demands domination is no faith at all. Faith does not demand, it lets go.

No Fate

We must now imagine not only what we resist, because resistance can be an illusion.

“We believe we are fighting for freedom. But unless we understand the structures shaping that fight – how power is organized, how perception is influenced, how narratives are constructed – we risk becoming participants in the very system we seek to oppose.

The problem is not that people care too little. It is that they are being led to care in ways that change nothing. Or worse, in ways that ensure nothing can change.”

Instead, we must move towards a politics of interdependence, where dignity precedes profit, science humble enough to admit uncertainty, and spirituality that does not seek conquest, but rather communion. We have not only misunderstood what is sacred — we have misused it. But then again, misuse is not destiny.

History offers a plethora of warnings for situations like ours. In Rome’s decay, Germany’s descent, and every totalitarian revival in between, spiritual emptiness preceded institutional collapse. Each time, it began with the glorification of the self and the worship of purity. There was a hunger for clarity over nuance and fear over actual freedom. We are not immune to this process, but neither are we doomed. To borrow a line from another favorite movie: “The Future is not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

To understand a system is an attempt to develop a sense of responsibility for it. The further we remove ourselves from the effects of our actions — on soil, body, or neighbor — the more we mistake our knowledge for wisdom. We must recover the morality hidden within the evidence. We need to remember that discernment is not the enemy of conviction, and that disagreement is not a mental disorder. We have forgotten how to listen. Instead, we hear something, interpret it, and react. We never even realized we were being trained like Pavlov’s dog. But instead of drooling at a bell, our rage ignites to the stimulus of hearsay and conjecture. Truth is swallowed by the repetitive noise echoing on our own information silos, and we dis-associate from one another.

There is nothing wrong with disagreement, but we have forgotten how to do that without anger or hatred. Maybe we never understood that to begin with. Maybe that is another part of the human condition — to resonate back and forth between emotion and intellect. We all see and interpret things differently based upon upbringing, disposition, or education. But we were never meant to live as nodes in a network of suspicion, where every neighbor is a threat and every disagreement a betrayal. If we cannot see ourselves in the other, we will eventually become strangers to ourselves. If we can’t recover the sacredness of complexity, we will lose the integrity of the whole.

We are everything. But only if we choose to be. There is no fate.

PS: As always, extra points if you can figure out the movie references.

“As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth.”
—Alan Watts

There is something strange in the things we say we want. We want peace, but we cling to identities that require enemies. We desire quality, while demanding the lowest possible cost. We seek moral clarity, yet often confuse it with moral superiority. We seek faith, but cling to belief as if it were a possession that could save us from doubt. We demand security, but we build our lives around mechanisms that make us fearful.

This is the paradox we spend a significant portion of our lives pursuing. The harder we grasp at permanence and certainty, the more insecure we become. Our effort to push life into something dependable becomes its own form of suffering. We don’t just fear death. We fear change, ambiguity, or loss of identity. This all revolves around and is compounded by a loss of certainty. The death of the self we have spent so much time and energy constructing terrifies us. Life will never ask whether we are ready to change. And yet it changes us anyway.

To know how to die and come to life again is not a religious sentiment. It contains psychological, political, and a social overtones. It is the recognition that every identity we inhabit eventually becomes too small for the life moving through it. Maturing is to die repeatedly. Loyalties, resentments, beliefs, and how we define ourselves are certainties that all share the same mortality; pruned by growth and change.

This is certainly true for childhood and adolescence. However as adults, the tragedy is that many of us would rather defend a decaying self than endure the vulnerability required to become something more. This is how insecurity can disguise itself as conviction.

Pathology of Patriotism

Nationalists may claim to desire world peace. But this ideology doesn’t simply imply the love of one’s home. It organizes belonging around exclusion and turns the accident of birth into a moral hierarchy. Peace is conditional, and therefore becomes possible only when others accept their proper place beneath or outside the nation’s imagined fate. In the United States we have have walked along that knife’s edge and yet the nationalists choose to bury that past or forge that history into something it is not. This becomes worship of nation and it is an inaccurate expression. The lies we tell ourselves fracture the world instead of keeping it whole.

This does not mean people should not love their country. The love of one’s place of birth is natural, and gratitude for one’s culture is deeply human. That is patriotism at its core. But that love becomes pathological when it must be defended through contempt of others. Nationalism often begins as belonging and ends as possession. It cannot tolerate the insecurity of shared humanity because that condition dissolves the fantasy of our righteous destiny. That is where patriotism dissolves into the mythology of nationalism.

Quality or Quantity?

This contradiction also appears throughout society. We say we want the best quality, but we structure entire systems around the lowest possible cost. We want healthy food extracted from exhausted soil and underpaid labor, using chemical shortcuts and invisible subsidies. We want excellent care from burned-out physicians, safe products from deregulated industries, and thriving communities from economies designed to extract from them. This is the desire for durable goods produced under disposable conditions. And we are surprised when the result is mediocrity. These are issues I have written about in previous essays. Those that have read my work will recognize this, but it has begun to feel like I am beating a dead horse. I think others may feel similarly.

Lowest cost and highest quality are not natural companions. Between them lies compromise. Sometimes that compromise is reasonable. But when low cost becomes the supreme ideal, quality eventually falls. Something has to be cheapened. The materials used, the labor required, the oversight dissolved, or the future mortgaged. A society that worships cheapness should not be surprised when we produce a knockoff.

This, too, is a form of insecurity. We are afraid to pay the real cost of things because that would force us to confront the dependencies we prefer not to see. That societal shoddiness allows us to preserve our innocence. It lets us believe we are simply rational consumers rather than participants in a chain of consequences. We don’t want to know who suffered, what was degraded, what was hidden, or what was deferred so we could enjoy the illusion of a bargain.

These three essays capture the essence of how we have sacrificed political, social, economic and environmental capital. These all in turn determine the quality of our healthcare through a system that understands how to manage disease and profit from that level of extraction.

The Wisdom of Morality

Again, we witness a similar pattern emerging in morality. If we make moral superiority our ideal, we cannot avoid self-righteousness. The self that needs to be good must also need others to be bad. Moral identity becomes a theater in which judgment substitutes for transformation. It is not enough to pursue the good; one must be seen opposing evil. One must display virtue, defend virtue, perform virtue, and eventually weaponize virtue. But moral superiority is not morality. It is insecurity donned in spiritual regalia, and these days, often hiding behind a mask of virtuous indignation.

True morality requires humility because it begins with the knowledge that we are all capable of harm. It recognizes that the line between good and evil does not run neatly between tribes, parties, religions, or nations. It runs a direct path through the human heart. Any moral system that forgets this becomes dangerous, because it allows people to commit cruelty in the name of righteousness. It permits hatred as long as hatred is aimed at the approved target. The self-righteous person does not become less violent. They simply become convinced that their violence stems from purity.

It does not matter whether we are liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. We have learned to channel our anger into hatred of approved targets based upon the flag we bear through our virtuous signaling. We feel vindicated by our claims of moral purity as if to say “look at me and my beliefs. My words dictate who I am and what I stand for.” Those that know me understand I am not suggesting all words and all sentiments carry equal weight. But words have connotations and cues that can direct power. I can invoke words like the “January 6th insurrection” or declare “ANTIFA a terrorist organization” and each will produce outrage or agreement. This is the weight of the words we use and the online environment has siloed our emotions allowing our passions to take possession where we lose our wisdom and our morality.

Clinging to Belief

Faith contains an analogous paradox. If we cling to belief in God, we may lose the very thing that trust requires. I have alluded to this many times on this platform in chats and various conversations, but faith is not the same as certainty. Faith is not the desperate possession of an idea. It is not a clenched fist around doctrine. Nor is it the refusal to question or doubt. From what I have gathered in my short time on this planet, faith is much closer to surrender.

To cling to belief is to fear the abyss beneath it. But faith may be what remains when we realize we are grasping at air. It may be the willingness to fall without knowing whether we’ll be caught. I don’t mean something so trite or cliche as a “trust fall.” It is letting go of pride to absolve the arrogance of certainty. Real faith is not afraid of reason because it is not so fragile that a question can destroy it. The person who clings to belief may be less faithful than the person willing to enter uncertainty honestly.

The Wisdom of Insecurity

This is the wisdom of insecurity. I’m not suggesting that insecurity is pleasant, nor that doubt is easy. It is not that loss is good simply because it is loss. But rather life cannot be possessed - clutched at through clenched fist - without being diminished. The moment we try to turn identity, nation, morality, economy, or God into a fortress, we begin defending the fortress more than the truth it was meant to protect. This sense of security then becomes idolatry. And idolatry always demands sacrifice.

The nationalist sacrifices peace. The consumer sacrifices quality. The moralist sacrifices humility. The believer sacrifices faith. We sacrifice ourselves in order to preserve the image of what we think we are. To die and come to life again is to let these false securities collapse. It is to admit that the nation is not ultimate and the market is not neutral. It confirms that morality is not performance, no more than belief is equivalent to faith. It helps us understand that the self is not a fixed object but a process; a temporary arrangement of memory, fear, desire, and attention.

Perhaps this is why insecurity feels so threatening. It demonstrates that much of what we call identity is negotiation with ourselves over time. We are not as solid as we pretend to be. Nor are we as rational, independent, virtuous, or certain as we claim. We are contingent creatures moving through conditional systems, trying to convince ourselves that the ground beneath us is firm. But that has always been an illusion. The thing we need to stop asking is whether we can make life secure, because we cannot. The question is whether we can stop making insecurity worse by pretending otherwise.

There is freedom in this idea, though it may not feel like it at first. Often, it feels like death. The death of certainty or superiority typically does. This includes death of the false bargain, the nation as idol, the market as god, and belief as possession. But after that death, something else may become possible:

A patriotism that does not require hatred. An economy that does not confuse cheapness with value. A morality rooted in humility rather than dominance. A faith expansive enough to survive doubt. A self capable of changing without calling every shift annihilation.

To live this way is not to become passive. It is not to surrender judgment, responsibility, or conviction. It is to hold them in a different way. Less like weapons, property, or proof of one’s own worth, living becomes more like tools entrusted to a traveler who knows he will not carry them forever. This traveler ensures these tools will be kept safe, so that life can continue as the self changes.

The sorry traveler that Alan Watts refers to is not the one who questions, but the one who cannot let go. It is the act of grasping itself that becomes the prison, because belief has been mistaken for vitality. These are the people who cling to ideology like a raft long after reaching the shore. They cannot die to what was, and so they cannot come to life again. Wisdom, in this sense, begins where possession ends. Perhaps faith does too. For faith is not found in clinging to certainty, but in trusting that something truer can emerge after we have the courage to let certainty die.

I am not insinuating that I am some guru or connoisseur of empirical inner experience. I am quick to anger, at times irrational, and cling to ideas that may not have merit. I am human, but I attempt to temper my more sinister tendencies. I think we can accomplish far more together than we can independently. While this does not mean we have to agree on everything, it does mean we have to meet from a similar point of reference to solve many of our collective problems. The wisdom of insecurity is a mechanism for softening hubris. We can all point fingers at the ‘other’ who has wronged us and yet we possess a blind spot for ourselves. This cognitive bias is what can fuel moral superiority or righteousness. We all lack perspective because we have never lived a life other than our own. This is why I invoke Watts, not as a false prophet, but as a teacher that can lay a path for us to better understand ourselves and one another.

When institutions lose public trust, when expertise becomes suspect, and when social conditions become increasingly precarious, people search for alternative sources of certainty. They search for meaning. They search for belonging. They search for moral clarity. And into that vacuum step two of the most powerful belief systems of the modern era: religious fundamentalism and market fundamentalism. At first glance these ideologies appear opposed to one another. One speaks the language of God, the other the language of economics. Yet beneath their differences lies a deeper symbiosis.

There is a theology embedded in American politics, though it rarely calls itself by name. It hides in plain sight, sanctified by repetition, insulated by the rituals of public life, and cloaked in the language of freedom. Its two high priests are religious fundamentalism and neoliberal capitalism. And like any entrenched orthodoxy, it demands obedience while punishing inquiry. The result is not moral clarity, but moral monopoly: a system that insists it owns the definition of virtue, even as it leaves the body politic bruised, fractured, and diseased.

Fundamentalist religion in America has long claimed to be the guardian of moral truth. But in recent decades, that claim has metastasized into political absolutism. The literalism of the Bible has hijacked public discourse, recasting empirical debate as spiritual warfare. Conservative Christian ideology has merged with right-wing political identity so completely that to question one is to threaten the other. This merger is not accidental. It is strategic. Theocratic authority now masquerades as democratic participation. Anything contrary to this worldview – whether grounded in science, ethics, or lived experience – is cast as morally corrosive. Secular thought is dismissed as soulless, evidence as threatening, and complexity as heresy.

What does it mean when the emotional or spiritual discomfort caused by challenging someone’s beliefs is considered more damaging than the material suffering caused by those beliefs? What does it say about our values when environmental degradation, public health crises, or mass incarceration are treated as morally neutral, while comprehensive sex education or climate science are framed as existential threats to virtue? This is not morality. It is moral theater; a pageant of piety masking the abdication of responsibility.

Faith and spirituality need not be enemies of modern education or scientific understanding. Science, after all, is not incompatible with reverence. The pursuit of truth, if honest, is itself a spiritual act. To observe, to inquire, to understand. These are expressions of awe. The problem is not that religion and science exist in tension. The problem is that religion, when weaponized by power, seeks to suppress that tension altogether. And neoliberalism, as a belief system posing as economic rationalism, has proven to be a willing accomplice.

When democratic institutions cease to provide meaning, solidarity, or moral purpose, people do not stop searching for those things. Human beings are moral creatures. We seek narratives that explain suffering, define belonging, and provide a framework for understanding our place in the world. The question is never whether people will find meaning. The question is where they will find it. And when public institutions are hollowed out, privatized, or stripped of moral authority, alternative systems rush in to fill the void.

Neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism are co-dependent ideologies. Neoliberalism strips the public sphere of investment, leaving people poor, anxious, and vulnerable. It hollows out education, defunds healthcare, and replaces civic institutions with market proxies. In this void, fundamentalism offers itself as refuge. It supplies meaning where society has extracted it. It fills the moral vacuum left by austerity with strict hierarchies and eternal truths. This is not incidental as it is the architecture of spiritual capture, and austerity prepares the soul for subjugation.

But the god that neoliberalism invites us to worship is not a god of justice or love. It is the market. Its gospel is a false meritocracy. Its rituals are efficiency, competition, and scarcity. Its holy text is the balance sheet. Like fundamentalist theology, it externalizes harm while demanding internal purity. If you are sick, it is because you failed. If you are poor, it is because you were not worthy. These systems mirror each other in form and function. Both reduce moral complexity to binary judgment. Both punish the vulnerable while canonizing the powerful.

The Christian fundamentalist schools that have proliferated over the last fifty years – from preschool to graduate institutions – have not merely transmitted religious values. They have inculcated a worldview in which capitalism is sanctified, hierarchy is naturalized, and doubt is sinful. The more unequal society becomes, the more these institutions flourish. They provide not education, but insulation; a way to shield students from the cognitive dissonance of injustice. They shrink God to fit the dimensions of a political agenda.

In the absence of robust public institutions, these private ideologies become the only available maps for navigating moral life. But the cost is profound. They do not teach people to understand the world, but to fear it. They do not cultivate curiosity, but obedience. They do not reconcile faith with fact, but declare facts to be enemies of faith. This narrowing of the moral imagination leaves us intellectually starved and ethically disoriented. It is a form of “spiritual bypassing” where religious belief is used to avoid engaging with suffering, injustice, or complexity (Masters, 2010). Rather than process moral conflict, these frameworks bypass it entirely in favor of spiritual certainty.

Yet the failure of modern society cannot be explained solely by the rise of fundamentalism. Vacuums are rarely created by a single force. If one side of the cultural divide has weaponized certainty, the other has often struggled to articulate meaning. And in doing so, it has surrendered important moral terrain.

Secular elites, for their part, have not helped. Liberal technocrats often scoff at religion altogether, failing to distinguish between fundamentalist dogma and genuine spirituality. Their discomfort with theocratic overreach becomes a blanket rejection of moral language, ceding the entire terrain of virtue to the very ideologies they oppose. In their attempt to defend reason, they often abandon awe. But just as fundamentalists do not own God, secular institutions do not own truth. Spirituality need not lead to authoritarianism. But the rejection of spirituality altogether creates a vacuum that fundamentalism is always eager to fill.

The consequences are visible everywhere. The rise of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and junk thought is not merely the result of ignorance. It is the result of engineered distrust. It is the outcome of years of defunded education, hollowed-out institutions, and relentless moral posturing by those who refuse to understand the systems they inhabit. Anti-elitism grows not only from resentment, but from abandonment. And in that vacuum, even educated professionals now peddle anti-vaccine rhetoric, gender essentialism, and climate denial. Everything is cloaked in the trappings of scientific language but devoid of scientific process. A 2021 Pew Research Center report found that only 38% of white evangelical Protestants trusted scientists to act in the public’s best interest, compared with 69% of religiously unaffiliated adults – a dramatic epistemic divide shaped more by politics than theology (Pew Research Center, 2021).

When education becomes a consumer product, rather than a moral pursuit, people begin to treat belief as a matter of taste. And when knowledge becomes indistinguishable from opinion, democracy collapses under the weight of its own relativism. This is not the fault of the ignorant. It is the fault of those who profited from engineered ignorance. The rejection of scientific expertise during the COVID-19 pandemic, the normalization of algorithmic pseudoscience on social media, and the proliferation of astrologers, influencers, and conspiracy entrepreneurs are not coincidences. They are symptoms of a culture in which discernment has been replaced by digital charisma (Zuboff, 2019).

This dynamic echoes the worst chapters of American history. The same people who declared Black slaves to be intellectually inferior also made it illegal to educate them. The same voices who say women are biologically unsuited to leadership are the ones who historically denied them access to education and autonomy. This is not concern for truth. It is a strategy for power.

What is sacred has been sold. Morality outsourced. Faith commodified. Education monetized. In this system, God becomes a brand. Science becomes an enemy. And the public is left to navigate a world in crisis with tools designed to confuse rather than clarify.

We must recover a vision of spirituality that honors inquiry, a vision of science that honors humility, and a vision of morality that cannot be bought. Traditions such as liberation theology, Ubuntu, and Indigenous cosmologies offer alternative moral architectures. rooted not in fear and hierarchy, but in interdependence, reciprocity, and collective dignity (Ramose, 1999; Boff, 1997). These models do not reject truth or reverence but place them within a relational and ethical framework.

Because if we do not, then the only voices left claiming moral clarity will be those who have already abandoned both truth and love.

This is not just about religion or economics. It is about survival. Our bodies, our climate, our institutions – they cannot endure the alliance of ignorance and power much longer.

References

1. Brown W. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books; 2015.

2. Harvey D. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press; 2005.

3. Eubanks V. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Press; 2018.

4. Taylor K-Y. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; 2019.

5. Fromm E. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart; 1941.

6. Marcuse H. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press; 1964.

7. Mirowski P. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso; 2013.

8. Sen A. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2009.

9. Klein N. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books; 2007.

10. Arendt H. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt; 1951.

11. Pew Research Center. Faith and Science in the United States. 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/10/13/faith-and-science-in-the-united-states/

12. Masters R. Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 2010.

13. Zuboff S. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs; 2019.

14. Ramose MB. African Philosophy Through Ubuntu. Harare: Mond Books; 1999.

15. Boff L. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books; 1997.

History has an unfortunate habit of becoming flatter than it really was. Centuries get compressed into symbols. The steam engine becomes the Industrial Revolution. The light bulb becomes electrification. The automobile becomes modernity. The smartphone becomes the digital age. Each technological leap appears almost inevitable, remembered through the inventions that transformed everyday life while the systems and consequences that made those inventions possible quietly disappear from memory. Sometimes we forget that small, innocuous things by today’s standards were once major engineering breakthroughs. The bicycle is a perfect example, and it deserves to be remembered as something more.

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the bicycle had become one of the fastest-growing consumer products in Europe and North America. Improvements in metallurgy produced lighter steel frames, and chain-driven mechanisms made riding more efficient. But then came another innovation that transformed the experience almost overnight: the pneumatic tire. What had once been an uncomfortable machine rattling across cobblestone streets suddenly became smoother, faster, and accessible to millions. The bicycle quickly became a symbol of modernity. It also became a symbol of freedom.

Its popularity spread with astonishing speed. Bicycle clubs formed across Europe and North America. Newspapers devoted columns to cycling routes and races. Manufacturers competed to build lighter frames, stronger chains, and more comfortable rides. For the growing middle class, owning a bicycle represented something that had previously been reserved for the wealthy: personal mobility. It offered the ability to move through the world according to one’s own schedule rather than the timetable of trains or the expense of horse-drawn transportation. Weekend rides became social events. Entire industries emerged to support the new pastime, from repair shops and touring guides to hotels catering specifically to cyclists.

The excitement surrounding the bicycle is difficult to overstate. To many people living at the close of the nineteenth century, it represented exactly what every transformative technology promises: greater freedom, greater efficiency, and a future that appeared brighter than the past. Investors recognized opportunity. Entrepreneurs rushed to establish manufacturing companies. Engineers devoted themselves to continual refinement. Newspapers celebrated each improvement as another step toward modern civilization. The bicycle was not simply purchased; it was wholeheartedly embraced by society.

Looking back from the twenty-first century, it is easy to forget how extraordinary this moment was. Today the bicycle appears almost timeless, an object so familiar that it scarcely invites a second thought. But for those living through its rapid adoption, it was evidence that the world itself was becoming faster, more connected, and full of possibility. It embodied the optimism of an age increasingly convinced that human ingenuity could overcome nearly any obstacle placed before it.1

For women especially, the bicycle represented something profoundly new. It expanded the physical boundaries of daily life in ways that had previously been reserved almost exclusively for men. A woman could travel without relying upon a father, husband, or carriage driver. She could commute farther for work, participate more fully in civic life, visit friends independently, or simply experience movement through the world on her own terms. Even clothing began to change. Restrictive corsets and heavy dresses gave way, however controversially, to more practical attire as women adopted bloomers and other garments suited for riding. Yet not everyone celebrated these changes.

Many critics viewed the bicycle as a threat to the social order itself. Clergy warned that it encouraged moral decline. Physicians invented dubious medical explanations for why cycling might damage women’s bodies or reproductive health. Newspapers questioned whether such independence would undermine marriage and femininity. The objections sound strangely familiar. Every expansion of human freedom has produced those convinced that the old boundaries existed for a reason.

History remembers the bicycle because those arguments ultimately failed. It remembers Susan B. Anthony’s observation that bicycling had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” The bicycle represented progress. What it remembers far less often, though, is what made that progress materially possible.

The history of the bicycle reminds us that progress rarely arrives with unanimous applause. Expansions of human autonomy have almost always been accompanied by predictions of social collapse. Families would weaken, morality would erode, and civilization itself would suffer. The particulars change from one generation to the next, but the pattern remains remarkably familiar. Yesterday it was the bicycle. Before that it was women’s education. Later it would be the right to vote, to own property, and to pursue professions long reserved for men. History has a curious way of settling these debates. What once appeared radical gradually becomes ordinary. But history doesn’t simply determine what survives. It also determines what is remembered. We remember the bicycle as a symbol of freedom, ingenuity, and progress. We remember far less about the materials that made that progress possible.

Material Revolution

Every technological revolutions not only begin with ideas, but also with materials. We tend to remember inventions through the brilliance of the people who imagined them. We remember inventors, patents, engineering breakthroughs, and the finished objects that eventually transformed everyday life. Rarely do we remember the substances that made those inventions possible in the first place.

Materials occupy a curious place in history. They are essential to every technological revolution, yet almost never become part of its public memory. Steel made skyscrapers possible, but we remember the skyline. Silicon made modern computing possible, but we remember the computer. Concrete reshaped cities, yet our attention is drawn to the buildings rather than the material holding them together. Perhaps this is because inventions tell stories of human ingenuity, while materials seem simply to exist, waiting to be discovered, extracted, refined, and incorporated into something larger than themselves.

Every invention begins long before the inventor. It begins in the earth, in forests, in rivers, and in landscapes that most consumers will never see. Before a material can become part of an object, it must first become part of a supply chain. Long before it reaches a laboratory or an assembly line, it passes through countless hands, institutions, and landscapes, each leaving traces that often disappear by the time the finished product arrives in ours.

Steel transformed bicycle manufacturing, but it was rubber that transformed the bicycle itself. Pneumatic tires required natural latex harvested from equatorial forests of the Amazon and Congo. As millions of Europeans and Americans embraced cycling, demand for rubber accelerated with astonishing speed. Inventors improved tire design. Engineers refined manufacturing techniques. Investors financed factories. Merchants opened bicycle shops. Bankers supplied capital to an expanding industry that increasingly appeared to represent the future of transportation itself. In so doing, entire professions were transformed.

Botany, long associated with naturalists cataloging plants and gentlemen assembling collections of pressed flowers, suddenly became something far more consequential. Tropical plants were no longer simply objects of curiosity. They became strategic resources. Botanists traveled across continents studying rubber trees, latex yields, tropical diseases, soil conditions, fungal blights, and the cultivation of commercially valuable species. Scientific journals filled with discussions that today seem almost quaint: methods of transporting seedlings, improving latex production, and protecting fragile plantations from disease.

It was exciting work. Entire careers were built around understanding plants that most Europeans would never see. To many young scientists, botany represented one of the last great frontiers of discovery. Much of the world’s flora remained undocumented by European science. Expeditions returned with specimens unlike anything growing in the botanical gardens of London, Paris, Berlin, or Brussels. New species were described with astonishing regularity. Universities expanded their botanical collections. Museums competed to catalogue the diversity of life arriving from tropical forests. Scientific journals carried reports from distant expeditions alongside careful observations about plant physiology, fungi, insects, soils, and climate. There was genuine beauty in the work.

A botanist studying a rubber tree was not simply studying commerce. They were studying evolution, ecology, chemistry, and the remarkable adaptability of life itself. The questions they asked were the same questions scientists continue to ask today. How does a plant resist disease? Why does one species flourish where another struggles? How might a fragile seed survive an ocean voyage? Every answer expanded human knowledge, whether or not it ever produced economic value.

Yet the nineteenth century was also an age in which scientific curiosity increasingly intersected with industrial ambition. Knowledge that had once been pursued simply because it was interesting now carried enormous commercial potential. A healthier rubber tree meant more reliable latex production. Better methods of transporting seedlings meant new plantations. Improved understanding of tropical ecosystems promised more stable supplies of increasingly valuable commodities.

Science itself had not become less curious. It had become more economically consequential. Thousands of miles away, another change was unfolding. It was not a revolution of invention. It was a one of extraction.

Extraction All the Way Down

Long before rubber became a polished tire wrapped around a steel wheel, it existed as a milky latex flowing through vines and trees scattered across equatorial forests. Harvesting it required patience more than machinery. A vine would be cut, the latex collected as it slowly bled from the incision, then allowed to coagulate before beginning the long journey toward distant factories. The finished tire bore almost no resemblance to its origin.

For the communities who had lived within these forests for generations, rubber was simply one part of a far more complex landscape. The forest provided food, medicine, shelter, and trade. Rivers served as roads long before European maps gave them names. Knowledge of seasons, wildlife, and plants had accumulated across generations in ways that no scientific expedition could quickly reproduce.

To the rapidly industrializing nations of Europe, however, the forest increasingly came to represent something different: inventory.

The transformation happened gradually, almost invisibly. A forest ceased to be understood primarily as an ecosystem and became a reserve of commercially valuable materials. Trees became future timber. Rivers became transportation corridors. Plants became commodities waiting to be catalogued, harvested, and shipped. The landscape itself was quietly translated into the language of industry.

Every industrial revolution begins with such a translation. Before a resource can be extracted, it must first be reimagined as a resource. Only then can it become a commodity.

In 1885, following the Berlin Conference, King Leopold II secured international recognition of the Congo Free State, not as a Belgian colony but as his personal possession. Publicly, Leopold presented himself as a humanitarian committed to ending the East African slave trade, introducing Christianity, and bringing civilization to Central Africa. Privately, the Congo became one of the largest extraction enterprises the modern world had yet witnessed.

As global demand for rubber intensified, villages throughout the Congo were assigned production quotas that could not reasonably be met. Men disappeared into the forests for weeks harvesting wild vines. Women and children were frequently held hostage until sufficient rubber had been delivered. Soldiers of the Force Publique enforced compliance through terror. Failure to meet quotas could result in beatings, executions, the burning of villages, or the severing of hands, a practice that has become one of the defining images of Leopold’s rule. The brutality became infamous. What is easier to overlook is the economic logic that sustained it.

More than a century later, Leopold’s Congo is often remembered through its most horrifying images. The severed hands have become symbols of the regime. Yet symbols have a way of flattening history. They preserve the violence while obscuring the ordinary routines through which that violence was sustained.

A quota was not simply a number written in a ledger.2 It determined how long a father remained in the forest searching for vines that had already been harvested by others. It determined whether a mother waited each day wondering if her husband would return before soldiers did. It determined whether children grew up with parents or in villages hollowed out by absence. Entire communities found themselves reorganized around the rhythms of extraction. Seasons were no longer measured only by rain or harvest but by the demands of distant markets whose consumers would never know the names of the villages producing the rubber they purchased.

This was the peculiar genius of the system. Violence was never an end in itself. But it functioned as an instrument for maintaining production. Every beating, every hostage taken, every village burned ultimately pointed toward the same objective: ensuring that rubber continued moving downriver toward waiting steamships, across the Atlantic, and eventually into the factories fueling Europe’s industrial expansion.

That is what makes the story so unsettling. The terror was not irrational. It was administrative, organized, and served an economic purpose. Rubber prices were rising. Factories demanded more. Consumers wanted bicycles. Investors expected returns. No single participant could see the entire system.

A cyclist purchasing a new bicycle in London was almost certainly not imagining a Congolese family waiting in a forest clearing while soldiers counted baskets of latex. A woman experiencing unprecedented independence on two wheels bore no responsibility for Leopold’s crimes. Neither did the engineer improving tire design, the botanist studying rubber trees, or the shopkeeper selling bicycles from a storefront in Manchester.

For nearly two decades, I have found myself returning to this point. It is the understanding that the system did not depend upon millions of cruel people. It depended upon millions of ordinary ones. That may be the most uncomfortable lesson the Congo still has to teach us.

History is often narrated through extraordinary individuals. We search for heroes and villains because they give events clear beginnings, endings, and meaning. Leopold was unquestionably responsible for constructing and sustaining one of the most brutal extraction economies of the modern era. Yet the system he created could never have functioned through his will alone. It depended upon thousands of people, most of whom never wielded the authority to shape the system itself.

Some organized river transport. Others maintained shipping records. Some negotiated commercial contracts. Others designed machinery. Scientists studied tropical plants. Engineers refined manufacturing techniques. Bankers financed expansion. Merchants sold finished products. Investors supplied capital to growing industries. Consumers purchased bicycles because they genuinely improved everyday life. Each participant occupied only a small corner of an increasingly complex world.

Complex systems rarely require monstrous people. They require ordinary people performing extraordinary levels of specialization, each seeing only enough of the system to accomplish their own work, but never enough to see the whole machine. That observation is not an accusation, but neither is it absolution. It is merely description.

These systems are not governed by intention alone. They are governed by the cumulative consequences of millions of individual actions that, taken together, produce outcomes that almost no participant fully anticipates and few would consciously choose. Perhaps that is why systems of extraordinary complexity can endure for so long. Responsibility becomes distributed across so many institutions, professions, and individuals that it gradually becomes difficult to identify where it truly resides. Each individual or group can honestly describe the small part they played. While almost no one can fully describe the whole.

What We Remember

As reports from missionaries, diplomats, journalists, and reformers slowly emerged, the atrocities became increasingly difficult to deny. Men such as E. D. Morel and Roger Casement documented what was occurring inside the Congo Free State, while photographs of mutilated children and eyewitness testimony reached audiences throughout Europe and North America. Public outrage eventually forced Belgium to annex the territory from Leopold in 1908, ending his personal rule.

History remembers this as a humanitarian victory. In many respects, it was. Yet even here there is another lesson.

The story is often told as though public awareness suddenly arrived and justice naturally followed. The historical record is less comforting. Missionaries wrote letters. Journalists published investigations. Diplomats filed reports. Photographs circulated among readers who had never imagined such things possible. Piece by piece, a picture emerged that became increasingly difficult to dismiss.

The evidence was not absent. It was competing against industries experiencing extraordinary growth, investors financing what appeared to be the future, and consumers whose lives were genuinely improving through industrialization. Once factories had been built, investments made, and entire economies organized around rubber, changing course became extraordinarily difficult. Recognition alone could not overcome institutions that had already become dependent upon the prosperity the system produced.

Perhaps that is why reform so often arrives slowly. Not because societies fail to recognize suffering altogether, but because recognition alone rarely overcomes the structures through which prosperity has already been organized.

History remembers the reforms more readily than the decades during which the evidence accumulated. That, too, is part of how history becomes flatter than it really was. Perhaps that is the true innovation of the modern supply chain.

It separates prosperity from proximity.

It allows one society to experience technological liberation while another absorbs much of the environmental, physical, and human cost of producing it.

This story would later find its way into literature. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness emerged directly from his experience navigating the Congo River under Leopold’s regime. Seventy years later, Apocalypse Now3 transplanted Conrad’s moral landscape into the Vietnam War, becoming one of the defining films of the twentieth century. Millions recognize the film. Far fewer remember the historical reality that inspired the novel beneath it. Perhaps this is how civilizations remember themselves.

We preserve the invention and gradually lose sight of the conditions that made the invention possible. We remember the work of art while forgetting the history that inspired it. We celebrate the reform while allowing the suffering that necessitated reform to fade quietly into the background.

Memory is selective. It has to be. No society can carry every story with equal weight. We simplify the past into narratives that are easier to inherit. The bicycle becomes a story about engineering. Women’s emancipation becomes a story about expanding rights. Heart of Darkness becomes a work of literature. Apocalypse Now becomes a masterpiece of cinema. Each of those stories is true. None of them is complete. The rubber tree disappears beneath the tire. The forest disappears beneath the rubber. The villages disappear beneath the forest. By the time history reaches us, the finished object often remains while the human landscape from which it emerged has quietly vanished.

Progress naturally draws our attention toward what has been created. Looking backward requires a different kind of effort. It asks us to begin not with the invention but with the landscape from which it emerged. Remembering is therefore more than an act of historical curiosity. It resists the comforting belief that stories like these belong only to the past.

After all, King Leopold II is gone. The Congo Free State no longer exists. Colonial concessions have disappeared. The bicycle has long since ceased to symbolize the technological frontier. It would be comforting to believe that the architecture which produced such extraordinary suffering disappeared along with them, and in many ways, it did.

Much has changed since Leopold’s Congo. Colonial empires dissolved. International law evolved. Human rights acquired greater legal recognition. Consumers became more informed, and corporations faced levels of public scrutiny unimaginable a century earlier. To deny those changes would be to misunderstand history.

Yet the relationship between innovation, prosperity, distance, and moral responsibility has not changed as completely as we often assume.

The Flattened Curve of History

Today the bicycle has given way to the smartphone, the electric vehicle, the semiconductor, and the data center. The botanist has become the materials scientist, the plant geneticist, the battery chemist, and the artificial intelligence researcher. The banker has become the institutional investor. The bicycle shop has become the multinational corporation. The rubber concession has become a global supply chain stretching across continents. The participants remain remarkably familiar. The resemblance does not lie in the technologies themselves, but rather in the structure of participation.

Modern civilization depends upon levels of specialization almost unimaginable to previous generations. Scientific knowledge has become so expansive that entire careers are devoted to questions so narrow that only a handful of people in the world fully understand them. Engineers spend decades refining battery chemistry. Agronomists study drought resistance. Artificial intelligence researchers optimize algorithms capable of performing increasingly complex tasks. Physicians devote entire careers to understanding a single organ system. Economists build models of financial markets. Supply chain managers coordinate production across continents.

Each discipline represents an extraordinary achievement of human knowledge. Yet every advance also narrows the field of vision. Expertise requires focus. Focus necessarily excludes much of the surrounding system. The battery chemist need not understand international finance. The investor need not understand mineral extraction. The software engineer need not understand agriculture. The physician contributing to a retirement account need not investigate every company represented within an index fund. Each person performs their work competently, ethically, and often with the sincere hope of improving the lives of others.

Each person contributes one piece to an enterprise so large that no single individual can fully comprehend its entirety. Responsibility, like expertise, becomes distributed. The resulting system acquires a kind of collective intelligence that exceeds the understanding of any one person participating within it. This is not just an economic observation. It is also a human one.

Modern civilization asks each of us to trust countless systems that we cannot personally verify. It is an unavoidable feature of complex societies. The difficulty arises when distance becomes indistinguishable from invisibility. The further responsibility is distributed, the more difficult it becomes to recognize where consequences originate, where accountability resides, and where moral responsibility ultimately begins.

I don’t think most people set out to exploit another human being. Like the botanists who once devoted their lives to understanding rubber trees, they are specialists pursuing knowledge within systems far larger than themselves. The same is true today when many of us are saving for retirement while others are living paycheck to paycheck. We rarely think about the supply chains that ultimately generate returns. We are doing what financially responsible people are encouraged to do. Our investments become one more fragment of an economic system whose full consequences remain largely invisible to any individual participant.

The bicycle expanded human freedom in ways that deserve celebration. That achievement should never be dismissed because of the suffering that accompanied the rubber economy. But neither should the suffering disappear because the bicycle represented genuine progress. Both histories exist simultaneously. That tension is uncomfortable precisely because it refuses the simplicity we often seek from history. It would be easier if progress were always virtuous. It would be easier if every technological revolution could be celebrated without qualification. It would be easier if suffering belonged exclusively to the past, committed by people whose values bore no resemblance to our own. But history offers no such comfort.

Instead, it presents a more difficult truth. Human flourishing and human suffering have often advanced together, connected through systems so vast that those benefiting from them seldom recognized the full extent of the costs being borne elsewhere. The expansion of freedom in one place has not always required the deliberate oppression of another, but it has often depended upon relationships that remained largely invisible to those experiencing the benefits.

That is why remembering matters. Not because memory allows us to assign guilt across generations. Not because it requires us to reject the genuine achievements of science, engineering, medicine, or industry. But because memory restores complexity to stories that have gradually become too simple. When we only know the invention, we risk mistaking progress for inevitability. When we remember only the atrocity, we risk overlooking the extraordinary human creativity that transformed societies for the better. Maybe being human requires understanding both stories at once so we can avoid the trap of progress at the expense of others. It is unlikely that we can remove all forms of suffering. But to ignore the exploitation of fellow humans risks devolving into necessary pseudospeciation to commit atrocities to extract wealth in the name of progress.

The bicycle deserves to be remembered. So do the forests that give life, the botanists whose curiosity expanded human knowledge, the engineers whose ingenuity transformed transportation, the women who discovered new forms of independence on two wheels, the Congolese families whose lives became entangled in a global economy they neither designed nor controlled – whose lives are still entangled in that economic web today.

Only when all those stories occupy the same memory does history begin to recover the depth it once possessed. Perhaps civilizations should be remembered not only by the inventions they create, but by whether they possess the courage to remember where those inventions began. History has an unfortunate habit of becoming flatter than it really was. Our responsibility is not merely to remember the finished machine. It is to remember what touched the ground. That is the lesson the Congo still has to teach us. The greatest danger is not that civilization produces technology. It is that civilization becomes so captivated by what technology allows us to do that we stop asking what it required us not to see.

References

Atrocities in The Congo Free State. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State

Conrad J. Heart of Darkness. Penguin Books. R. Hampson & O. Knowles, Eds. 2007. (Original work published 1899).

Harford, T. The Horrific Consequences of Rubber’s Toxic Past. BBC. 23 July, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48533964

McWilliams D. The History of Money: A Story of Humanity. Henry Holt and Company. 2025

Red Rubber: Atrocities in the Congo Free State in Confidential Print: Africa. AM. 16 Dec, 2010. https://www.amdigital.co.uk/insights/news/red-rubber-atrocities-in-the-congo-free-state-in-confidential-print-africa

I. When “Science” Serves the Strong

There is danger in pretending not to understand. But there’s an equal danger in pretending that understanding gives you license to dominate. In the previous essay, I argued that modern societies increasingly outsource moral judgment to systems: markets, algorithms, technologies, and institutions that claim neutrality while encoding particular values and priorities. But moral abdication is rarely presented as moral abdication. It is typically justified through a claim that existing hierarchies are natural, rational, scientific, or inevitable. That claim has a long history.

Again and again, power has sought legitimacy not merely through force or tradition, but through appeals to science. The language changes. The measurements change. The institutions change. Yet the underlying argument remains remarkably consistent: those at the top deserve to be there, those at the bottom deserve their condition, and any attempt to alter the arrangement violates some deeper law of nature.

Darwin never said the strongest should rule. He observed that species adapt, compete, and cooperate in a constantly shifting landscape. His argument was that survival was not guaranteed, and evolution had no fixed direction. But within a generation, his work was hijacked by those eager to convert biological observation into political doctrine.

Herbert Spencer, the Victorian philosopher and early champion of laissez-faire capitalism, took Darwin’s ideas and twisted them into a brutal rationalization for economic inequality. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” – not Darwin. And it remains a pervasive idea today. In Spencer’s hands, it meant that poverty was proof of inferiority, and wealth was evidence of evolutionary success.

He argued that helping the poor interfered with nature and that government protections were moral hazards. He believed that tariffs, welfare, education, and healthcare were unnatural obstructions to the sacred process of social selection. It was not just cruel ideology; his claims were theological in tone. He cleared a path for secular gospel of suffering, necessary to preserve the sanctity of the market.

This wasn’t science. It was a bastardization – pseudoscience dressed in Victorian attire – and it gave the Gilded Age robber barons exactly what they needed: a divine excuse to plunder.

II. The New Priesthood: Eugenics and the Genetics of Superiority

The religion of social Darwinism gave way to something darker – eugenics. Where Spencer’s philosophy blamed the poor for being unfit, eugenics sought to erase them. It was never just about genes, but rather, it was about hierarchy and control, and it declared who deserved to exist.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience of moral sorting. It offered a laboratory justification for the oldest social sins: racism, classism, and xenophobia. It echoed the same theological bigotry used by slave owners and segregationists – only now it possessed the veneer of science. And so, melanin was pathologized. Immigrants were biologically suspect. Poverty was a heritable defect (sound familiar?)

Behind this quackery was a quiet but pervasive idea: those who are poor deserve to be poor. Those who are disabled, incarcerated, addicted, or non-white are a threat to the future of the species. They are not “unlucky” – they are “unfit.” This ideology has survived today despite undisputable evidence to the contrary. Never mind that race is a social construct, not a biological category. Never mind that intelligence is not heritable in the way eugenicists claimed. Yes, cognitive potential is shaped by environment – but in unequal societies, the inheritance is not genetic, it’s structural.

Children born into poverty inherit underfunded schools, inadequate nutrition, chronic stress, and limited access to enrichment – all of which impair cognitive development and life opportunity. What gets passed down isn’t inferior DNA, but inferior conditions. And yet, these outcomes are too often misread as evidence of biological inferiority rather than societal failure.

Scientific racism provided the new gospel of supremacy. And it found adherents across continents and ideologies – from polite progressives in Boston to fascists in Berlin. The tragedy is that systems built around hierarchy often mistake short-term dominance for long-term fitness. They assume that what succeeds today must therefore be adaptive tomorrow. History suggests otherwise.

III. Maladaptive Progress: Cyanobacteria and the Human Trap

Nature does not guarantee survival. It guarantees consequence. And in that regard, human society is not exempt from biology. We are merely its most complex experiment, or more precisely, we are part of the divine experiment of life itself. Biology is not merely chemical processes – it is the architecture of creation. And that architecture, in whatever language we use to describe it – evolution, entropy, adaptation – is inseparable from the sacred. If God is the author of life, then biology is His syntax.

That is why society cannot escape biological consequence. No economic theory, no ideology of dominance, no technological advance can override the laws that govern life on Earth. What we do to ecosystems, to bodies, to the atmosphere, we ultimately do to ourselves.

Roughly 2.4 billion years ago, Earth was dominated by cyanobacteria – simple organisms that, through photosynthesis, released oxygen as their waste product into the atmosphere. At first, this was a boon. It created new forms of life, reshaped the oceans, and expanded the biosphere. But eventually, the oxygen levels became toxic to many anaerobic species, including the cyanobacteria themselves. Their own evolutionary success altered the planet so drastically that they triggered a mass extinction.

They thrived for hundreds of millions of years until the oxygen they produced eventually led to their own decline. Their successful adaptation, over a geological timescale, became their collapse.

We like to imagine evolution as a story of upward progress. But sometimes, what appears to be adaptation is actually maladaptive. Sometimes survival strategies have long-term consequences that lead to destruction, not because the system malfunctioned or collapsed, but because its evolutionary pathway produced consequences beyond its adaptive scope.

Human beings are on a similar trajectory, but on a much shorter timescale. Our intelligence, industry, and competition have allowed us to dominate the planet. But we are also changing our environment – socially, economically, ecologically – at a pace we do not fully understand. Inequality is deepening, the climate is destabilizing, and our tools of survival have become engines of harm. Social Darwinism never accounted for this. It preached the gospel of winners and losers, of so-called ‘fitter’ and ‘unfit,’ but failed to ask: what if the traits that allow you to win in the short term destroy the conditions needed for survival in the long term?

Herbert Spencer never considered that greed could be maladaptive. That an economy with no brakes could overheat. That a civilization organized around extraction – of labor, of land, of meaning – might eventually consume itself. We are the first species that can destroy itself through knowledge and be aware of it as we watch it happen, all while we mistake that destruction for success.

IV. Meritocracy and the Modern Mask of Pseudoscience

We like to think we’ve outgrown eugenics. That the bad science of the past has been discredited and buried. But its logic still haunts us, dressed now in the neutral language of meritocracy, efficiency, and personal responsibility.

In this version of the story, we no longer speak openly of superior races or unfit classes. Instead, we talk about “deserving winners” and “personal choices.” Success is recast as evidence of moral character and failure becomes pathology. The pseudoscientific language has been stripped away, but the structure remains: those who rise must be more capable, more disciplined, more evolved. While those who struggle must be doing something wrong.

This logic finds its home in the modern economy. The wealthy are portrayed as visionaries and job creators. The poor are seen as drains on public resources. It becomes an article of faith that the market rewards talent and punishes laziness, even when the data show otherwise. And so, inequality is not seen as a failure of the system, but as a reflection of natural order. It is, in this framing, not only inevitable but just.

But meritocracy ignores the scaffolding. It ignores the inherited advantage – the schools, networks, nutrition, healthcare, stability – that allow some to succeed before others even begin. It ignores the environmental insults and structural barriers that constrain so many lives from the very start. It ignores that the same society claiming to reward merit does not distribute opportunity evenly.

When we tell the story of success without accounting for the conditions that produce it, we aren’t describing reality. We’re reinforcing myth. And myths, when mistaken for truth, become ideology. Today’s meritocracy relies on performance metrics, standardized tests, productivity quotas, and cost-benefit calculations to sort people into winners and losers – then justifies their placement as earned. It assumes value is measurable, talent is quantifiable, and worth is proven through competition.

Yet the problem is not with recognizing exceptional outcomes or individual achievement. Outliers like J.D. Vance, Thomas Sowell, Oprah Winfrey, or Andrew Carnegie did rise from poverty to enormous success. But meritocracy uses these exceptions to obscure the rule. These examples become proof that anyone can succeed, when in truth they are statistical anomalies. They are wielded to uphold the illusion of equal opportunity while ignoring the overwhelming probability of failure for those born into poverty with few or no pathways of escape.

The goal of justice is not to erase every difference between people, but to reduce the inequalities that prevent human potential from flourishing. The normative purpose is to reduce the gap between potential and opportunity. That is the current failure of meritocracy: not that it celebrates success, but that it accepts inequality as a fair filter for it.

If worth is competition, then humanity is reduced to a market. And if life is a market, then there is no room for the vulnerable, the sick, or the unprofitable. They are not failed by the system. They are the failure. This is the quiet cruelty of modern pseudoscience. It no longer needs to shout. It simply functions.

V. Policy, Punishment, and the Persistence of Eugenic Logic

Pseudoscience, once loudly proclaimed, now works behind the scenes – embedded in policy, design, and default settings. It doesn’t need to prove its case. It just needs to shape the rules.

We see this in how society allocates punishment and support. In how it funds schools, designs housing, distributes healthcare, and criminalizes poverty. The logic of meritocracy, descended from eugenics and social Darwinism, tells us that suffering is earned. And if suffering is earned, then punishment is not only acceptable, it is fair.

This mindset explains why the poorest neighborhoods have the worst-funded schools. This is why food deserts persist, or why Medicaid is harder to access than private insurance. It is why universal childcare, free education, or housing-first models face resistance. This is because to offer them universally would acknowledge that not all outcomes are purely merit-based. It would call the entire framework into question.

Even the criminal legal system reflects this logic. Wealth protects and insulates while poverty exposes and criminalizes. Bail, fines, fees, or mandatory minimums are not just technical mechanisms. They are moral signals. They say: if you were better, you wouldn’t be here. If you had merit, you wouldn’t need help. This is not to say that we abandon criminal justice or prison systems.

But inequality is not an accident. It is built, brick by brick, through policies that reward capital and punish vulnerability. And the lie that holds it all together is the same one eugenics whispered a century ago: some lives are simply worth more.

What makes this modern iteration more insidious is that it hides behind data. The language of “outcomes,” “risk scores,” and “predictive analytics” has replaced talk of bloodlines and breeding. But the function is identical: to sort, to rank, and to justify.

We no longer need racial purity laws or sterilization campaigns. We have zoning codes, standardized tests, sentencing algorithms, and economic policy. The ends are gentler in appearance, but the machinery is still at work. And it delivers the same result: a society that believes inequality is rational, and that justice is simply the efficient application of hierarchy.

This is not to argue against standards, hierarchy, or the existence of consequences. Societies must establish norms and systems of accountability. But what becomes clear in highly unequal societies is that punishment is not distributed evenly, and standards are not reached equitably. In such societies, incarceration rates rise, and the distance between failure and redemption grows wider. Those born into poverty are more likely to fail, not because they lack ability, but because they inherit disadvantage. This includes malnutrition, underfunded education, chronic stress, and lack of access to basic support. The issue is not whether standards exist, but whether people are given a fair chance to meet them.

Freedom of religion does not mean freedom to rule by religion. In a pluralistic democracy, belief is protected, but domination is not. The ideal of a republic is to balance the will of the majority with the protection of minority rights and individual liberties. And yet, that ideal is fraying. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 68% of white evangelical Protestants said that the Bible – not the will of the people – should have more influence on U.S. laws. This is not merely a personal conviction. It is a call to reorder government according to sectarian doctrine. But while this group holds considerable political power, it remains a minority of the population. The danger, then, is not just in the imposition of belief, but in the erosion of democratic structure under the illusion of moral mandate.

This logic extends beyond policy, it has been institutionalized in our technologies. Algorithms now decide who gets bail, who gets hired, who gets insured. Credit scores, test scores, background checks, and risk assessments form a modern infrastructure of moral ranking. What was once done through phrenology is now done through predictive modeling and automated sorting. These systems do not erase bias – they encode it. They do not replace human judgment, but instead reproduce past injustice under the guise of objectivity.

The same missteps haunt medicine. We chase genetic explanations for disease while ignoring the social and economic forces that shape health. We say diabetes runs in families when poverty does. We explore precision therapies for rare disorders while denying communities access to clean water or prenatal care. The myth of genetic destiny remains powerful, even when evidence points elsewhere. It allows us to blame biology for suffering rather than admit to structural neglect.

And while the misuse of scientific theory has often belonged to the oppressor, science has not. There has always been a counter-tradition. W.E.B. Du Bois exposed the myth of racial inferiority with data. Richard Lewontin dismantled the idea of discrete human races through population genetics. Stephen Jay Gould revealed how intelligence tests were used not to measure capacity, but to reinforce hierarchy. These thinkers – and many others – remind us that science can serve justice, but only when guided by conscience. Medicine and economic theory must be balanced as an art based in science with an understanding of morality and ethical restraint.

Science does not liberate or oppress. People do. Its instruments reflect our values. Its tools magnify our intentions. Whether we use it to heal or to dominate, to include or to exclude, depends entirely on who holds the microscope – and why.

And yet, the deeper irony is this: it is neither the Bible nor the people’s will that truly governs our laws. What governs is the unspoken religion of our age – the market. The theology of deregulation. The sacrament of competition. The silent creed of neoliberalism. It sanctifies inequality, canonizes profit, and cloaks power in the language of freedom. It is a faith without pulpits but with policy. And like many historical empires cloaked in divine legitimacy, it has usurped the moral vocabulary of Christianity while discarding its substance. Neoliberalism invokes the sanctity of personal responsibility while forsaking compassion. It preaches individual freedom but abolishes collective obligation. It claims moral clarity, but its altar is profit. It rules over us all and cares not for any other ideology or belief unless it serves its overarching purpose, while externalizing the consequences. It is the latest evolution of pseudoscientific thinking and in classic fashion parasitizes its host: the body politic. In so doing, it entrenches power through financial values that have become imbued into our republic and so we fail to see the difference between its version of morality or freedom for the tyranny it is.

Let me know what you think in the comments

Part of the path leading to medical school requires certain hoops to leap through, certain boxes to check, and specific classes to take. One of those undergraduate prerequisites is organic chemistry. Unlike many on that journey, I enjoyed this particular trial by fire. I found the structure of compounds and the way they interacted within biological systems fascinating. I remember learning about electrons “jumping” to form bonds, generating attraction and repulsion within the aqueous environment of the body. Beneath the memorization and reaction mechanisms was something strangely philosophical: order emerging from invisible interactions.

One concept that continues to fascinate me is chirality. Certain compounds possess identical chemical compositions yet exist as mirror images of one another. The idea is often described as “handedness” (fitting, perhaps, for someone who would later become a hand surgeon. The irony is not lost on me).

Our left and right hands mirror one another, yet they are not interchangeable. The left hand cannot become the right, nor the right the left. Molecules behave similarly. Chiral compounds, called enantiomers, may share identical mass, density, and chemical composition while behaving very differently inside biological systems. Life itself is spatially selective. Enzymes, receptors, proteins, and DNA recognize orientation as much as composition. A molecule can be nearly identical to another and still produce profoundly different consequences because biology depends not merely upon what something is, but how it interacts.

Medicine provides sobering examples of this reality. Enantiomers can contribute not only to therapeutic benefit but also to toxicity and side effects. Thalidomide remains one of the most infamous examples. One enantiomer possessed antiemetic properties useful for treating morning sickness, while its mirror image contributed to devastating teratogenic effects. Worse still, the compound underwent spontaneous chiral inversion in vivo, allowing one form to convert into the other within the body itself. Chemical purity became irrelevant because the system itself transformed the molecule.

That complexity is part of what makes pharmacology and drug development so difficult. Even when we believe we understand a compound, biological systems often reveal interactions we failed to anticipate. Another example that comes to mind is Viagra. When initially being studied, the compound was being tested for hair loss, but an interesting side effect began to…emerge. And so, treatment for erectile dysfunction blossomed, all from attempting to treat male pattern baldness.1 Yet chirality represents only one layer of molecular complexity. Another concept I found equally compelling was polymorphism.

Polymorphic compounds share identical chemical composition but crystallize into different structural arrangements. The molecules themselves remain the same; what changes is the architecture of how they pack together. These altered crystal lattices can dramatically change density, solubility, stability, and bioavailability. In medicine, those differences can determine whether a drug dissolves effectively, remains stable on a shelf, or functions properly in the body There is a recent video I highly recommend curated by Veritasium that discusses this in detail, describing the issues surrounding the manufacture of the HIV medication Ritonivir. However, what fascinates me about polymorphs is that the distinction is not rooted in identity but in organization.

During crystallization, molecules settle into various energetic states. Some arrangements are fragile and easily disrupted. Others become remarkably stable, requiring immense energy to break apart once formed. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine, a fictional crystalline form of water capable of freezing entire oceans through simple contact. The catastrophe in Vonnegut’s story is not maliciousness, but rather stability carried to its logical extreme.

But the purpose of this essay is not really to discuss organic chemistry, nor even Vonnegut, tempting as that may be. What interests me is the unsettling possibility that these concepts may extend beyond molecules and into humanity itself. The question I find myself asking is: What if human nature is chiral? What if civilization behaves less like a coherent moral structure and more like a racemic mixture – competing mirror images of thought interacting within the same social system?

We often describe people, ideologies, and institutions as inherently good or evil. Chemistry offers a more uncomfortable possibility. Molecules are not moral. Their consequences depend upon context, orientation, and interaction. A compound beneficial in one environment may become destructive in another. Perhaps human behavior operates similarly. Perhaps what we perceive as virtue or vice is often relational rather than intrinsic. Two individuals may possess nearly identical beliefs yet produce entirely different outcomes depending upon how those beliefs orient toward other human beings. The difference may not lie in composition, but in configuration.

Civilization itself may be a kind of ideological chromatography – a constant separation, recombination, and interaction of competing forms of human thought. We interpret morality through the mass spectrometry of personal experience, culture, and history, attempting to identify patterns within an enormously complex mixture of social reactions (science nerds, can I get an amen?!).

Polymorphism may offer an equally troubling parallel. Human beings crystallize around ideas the way molecules crystallize around energetic states. Some social structures remain fluid and adaptable. Others harden into rigid ideological lattices resistant to disruption even when they become destructive. Nations, religions, political movements, economic systems, and cultural identities all exhibit this tendency. The strength of these structures depends upon the bonds reinforcing them. Some dissolve easily when exposed to evidence or suffering. Others require enormous social energy to destabilize. The activation energy necessary to alter collective belief can become so high that societies remain trapped inside harmful configurations long after their failures become visible.

Crowds may function similarly. Most social systems exist in relatively stable energetic states until sufficient activation energy accumulates to reorganize collective behavior. A peaceful protest can remain orderly for hours, even days, until some threshold is crossed – anger amplified through rhetoric, fear, provocation, perceived injustice, opportunism, or emotional contagion.2 Then the physical structure of the group changes. What emerges afterward is often difficult to explain through the behavior of isolated individuals alone.

People who might never independently vandalize a building, assault another person, or participate in destruction may suddenly crystallize around the emotional architecture of the crowd itself. Individual identity partially dissolves into collective momentum. The social lattice reorganizes in real time. This transformation does not necessarily require malice.

In chemistry, phase transitions occur because systems naturally seek energetic configurations. Human beings may behave similarly under sufficient emotional, political, or social pressure. Fear, outrage, humiliation, economic desperation, ideological reinforcement, and tribal identity all contribute energy into the system until collective behavior reaches a critical threshold. Once formed, these collective states can become self-reinforcing.

Crowds feed upon their own momentum. Emotion spreads through human networks much the way crystallization propagates through a supersaturated solution: one stable structure acting as a nucleation point for others around it. History is filled with examples. Revolutions, market bubbles, religious fervor, genocides, nationalist movements, moral panics, and even online outrage cycles all display similar properties. The underlying human material remains largely unchanged. What changes is the arrangement, orientation, and energy of the system.

Perhaps that is one of the great tensions of civilization: stability and truth are not always the same thing. Human systems, like crystalline structures, may become dangerously durable simply because they are energetically favorable, socially reinforced, or psychologically comforting. When the racemic mixture of community loses equilibrium, consequences emerge not merely socially or politically, but morally and biologically as well. And like polymorphic compounds, societies built from the same basic human material can ultimately solidify into radically different forms.

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In the previous essay, I argued that resistance can be redirected. People can act sincerely, passionately, and even sacrificially while reinforcing the very structures they seek to oppose. But what happens after resistance is neutralized? What happens when citizens lose faith not only in specific institutions, but in the very idea that collective institutions can serve a moral purpose? Increasingly, the answer has been to outsource responsibility itself.

Functions once understood as public obligations are transferred to private markets. Democratic deliberation is replaced by technocratic management. Moral judgment is replaced by algorithms, contracts, and financial incentives. The promise is always the same: greater efficiency, greater neutrality, greater freedom from politics.

But politics does not disappear. Morality does not disappear. Responsibility does not disappear. It merely changes hands. The language of innovation often arrives cloaked in neutrality. Efficiency, transparency, decentralization are terms that sound technical and detached from politics or ethics. But embedded within these terms are choices about values, priorities, and power.

The question is not whether technology can improve governance. It can. The question is whether technology can replace governance. Increasingly, proposals that promise decentralization are not merely offering new tools. They are offering substitutes for institutions, democratic accountability, and public responsibility. The appeal is understandable. If institutions are captured, inefficient, or untrustworthy, why not replace them altogether? Yet this response often mistakes the failure of particular institutions for the failure of collective governance itself.

When Brian Domitrovic – historian of supply-side economics – argues that blockchain technology could solve the U.S. debt crisis by enabling a private market for “risk-free” debt, he is not simply proposing a technical solution. He is resurrecting a central tenet of neoliberal orthodoxy: that the private sector should replace the public sector in managing core societal functions, even those foundational to democratic governance, such as the issuance of sovereign debt [1].

To understand the implications of this proposal, we must examine what is being replaced, what is being introduced, and what values are being encoded. U.S. Treasury bonds are not merely financial instruments. They represent the full faith and credit of a democratically accountable government. They function as the global benchmark for safety and liquidity, not only because of the technical structure of the debt, but because of the institutional stability and legitimacy of the United States itself. To suggest that blockchain-based private bonds could assume this role is to ignore the historical role of the state in underwriting financial trust [2].

Blockchain technology, while promising in certain applications, is not a moral actor. It is a tool. And tools reflect the priorities of those who wield them. The proposal to replace public debt with private, blockchain-based debt rests on the belief that markets are more trustworthy than states, and that automation can substitute for governance. But this belief is not empirically validated, it is ideological. It draws from the neoliberal conviction that markets, left unregulated, are not only efficient but virtuous [3].

Technologies like blockchain are not neutral scaffolding but are embedded with the values, exclusions, and assumptions of their designers. Just as markets are not apolitical, neither are the architectures that claim to support them [12]. The framing of blockchain as a neutral infrastructure – like so many technocratic tools before it – obscures its political and ethical implications. Neoliberalism often advances under the guise of technocratic management, presenting deeply moral and political decisions as matters of efficiency and calculation. This framing disarms public debate by treating complex political decisions as purely technical. It shifts governance from the democratic arena to the domain of “experts,” where dissent is recast as irrational or unscientific [12,5].

This conviction was central to the deregulatory movements of the 1980s and 1990s. It justified the creation of complex financial instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, which abstracted and privatized risk in the name of innovation. These instruments were lauded for their technical brilliance until they precipitated the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 [4]. What blockchain now offers is not a fundamentally new model, but a technological veneer for an old idea: that risk can be redistributed without consequence if done efficiently enough. This, too, is a fantasy.

The fantasy persists because it is ideologically useful. When morality would normally constrain economic outcomes, neoliberalism asserts that economics is a neutral science. When empirical evidence reveals market failures, neoliberalism appeals to moral authority: the discipline of the market, the virtue of competition, or the punishment of inefficiency [5]. It is a system that simultaneously denies and demands morality, depending on which is more convenient.

But markets are not moral systems. They are mechanisms for exchange, shaped by laws, norms, and power relations. To outsource traditionally public responsibilities to markets is not to depoliticize them, but to remove them from democratic accountability.1 A blockchain bond market, even if technically sound, would be answerable only to its architecture and participants, not to a broader citizenry [6].

Even as neoliberal advocates demand the rollback of public obligations, the private institutions they empower remain deeply dependent on public infrastructure to enforce contracts, adjudicate disputes, and stabilize markets. There is no private financial system that functions without public law, regulation, courts, and backstops. The notion that we can sever these ties without consequence is a profound delusion [13]. As Mariana Mazzucato has shown, even the most celebrated innovations in Silicon Valley and Wall Street rest on decades of public investment in infrastructure, education, and technology [13]. Yet these same actors demand austerity and deregulation, refusing to acknowledge the debt they owe to public foundations.

This raises a fundamental question: if we divest from moral government, are we prepared to entrust moral agency to corporations? The modern corporation, by design, is obligated to maximize shareholder value. Its ethical behavior is incidental, contingent on profitability and occasionally on public pressure. To suggest that corporations can replace the moral role of the state is to fundamentally misunderstand the structure of corporate governance [7].

Just as market fundamentalists reject regulation in the name of economic liberty, constitutional originalists reject democratic evolution in the name of legal purity, cementing the privileges of the past in perpetuity. Both frameworks claim to preserve freedom but instead preserve hierarchy, exclusion, and structural rigidity. Together, they form an ideological shield against redistributive justice [14]. These ideologies converge in their selective invocation of purity and discipline. Where originalism binds law to the imagined intentions of 18th-century elites, market fundamentalism binds policy to the invisible hand of an unaccountable market. In both cases, the result is the preservation of power, not principle [14].

And yet, in the United States, this transition is already well underway. Government functions have been steadily outsourced to private contractors, from military operations to prison systems, from water management to health insurance. Regulatory agencies are captured by the industries they oversee. Elections are financed by corporate interests. The result is a system that still bears the formal markings of a constitutional republic, but functions in practice as a plutocracy with a constitution [8,9].

This arrangement serves the interests of capital, not the public. It strips democratic institutions of their moral authority while burdening individuals with moral decisions they are unequipped to manage alone. The decision to take on debt for medical care, to accept predatory terms for housing, or to navigate privatized education systems is framed as personal responsibility, even as the structures offering these choices are rigged in favor of profit extraction [10].

This is not a failure of innovation. It is a failure of values. Blockchain is not inherently corrupt, just as the internet was not inherently extractive. But when technologies are introduced into systems already distorted by inequality and captured governance, they magnify those distortions. They do not fix broken systems. They make them more efficient at failing [11]. In the absence of regulation, smart contracts risk becoming tools of programmable inequality, baking exclusion and bias into immutable code that offers no recourse or appeal [15]. As political scientist Virginia Eubanks documents, automated systems already sort individuals into categories of deserving and undeserving. In blockchain ecosystems, this sorting becomes immutable: a missed payment could automatically trigger eviction or credit loss, without context, forgiveness, or recourse [15].

The moral role of government, however imperfect, is to act in the interest of the collective good. This includes regulating markets, redistributing resources, and providing stability in times of crisis. It is not a romantic ideal. It is a requirement for democracy. To surrender this role to private systems is not decentralization. It is dehumanization.

If we believe in democratic values, we must reclaim the moral functions of government. This means resisting the seduction of moral outsourcing – the belief that code can replace judgment, or that markets can replace justice. The future of finance, and of governance, depends not on how efficiently we can transact, but on how fairly we can live.

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We are not a passive population. We are not asleep, apathetic, or disengaged. We are, in many ways, more politically activate than ever; more angry, vocal, and convinced that something fundamental has gone wrong. And yet, despite this awareness, despite this energy, despite this constant state of resistance, the outcomes do not change. If anything, they accelerate in the wrong direction. Power concentrates, institutions erode, trust collapses. And the conditions people are fighting against including economic precarity, corporate dominance, and political capture continue to worsen.

This is the paradox we are living inside:

We are not failing to resist the system.
We are resisting it in ways that reinforce it.

To understand how this happens, it helps to begin by clarifying what this argument is not. This is not an indictment of capitalism as an abstract concept, any more than it is an endorsement of communism or socialism as ideological absolutes. Markets can allocate resources. Governments can overreach. Both can fail. But we are not living in some neutral or balanced version of capitalism. We are living in a specific configuration of economic and political power. One in which corporate influence has systematically embedded itself within the structures meant to regulate it.

In such a system, the question is no longer whether markets or governments are the greater threat. The question is what happens when both are shaped by the same underlying interests. That convergence did not happen accidentally. It was built.

In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell – who would later become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court – wrote what has come to be known as the Powell Memo. Addressed to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the memo argued that the American system of free enterprise was under threat from academics, media, and political movements, and called for a coordinated response from the business community. Powell outlined a strategy for corporate America to reassert influence over public life through think tanks, media, academia, and the legal system. It was not simply a defense of markets, but rather a blueprint for influence. And in that sense, it succeeded, and perhaps more completely than Powell himself could have anticipated.

What is often overlooked is that Lewis Powell was not writing in abstraction. At the time, he sat on the board of Philip Morris, one of the most powerful tobacco companies in the world; an industry already engaged in organized efforts to shape public perception around the health risks of its products.

What was framed as a defense of free enterprise emerged, in part, from a corporate environment that had already begun refining what we would now recognize as modern perception management with strategies designed not only to influence policy, but to shape public belief, delay regulation, and manufacture doubt. The tools used to defend harmful products did not disappear, they scaled. Over time, this approach expanded far beyond any single industry. What began as a defensive posture became something far more expansive: a coordinated effort to shape not only policy, but perception itself. The goal was no longer simply to win elections or pass legislation. It was to shape how people think about markets, government, and freedom. And in that sense, it succeeded.

The consequences of that success are visible everywhere, particularly in the strange and persistent contradictions that now define public discourse. People express deep distrust of concentrated power, and yet consistently direct that distrust toward the wrong targets. They fear government overreach, while placing extraordinary faith in private corporations that operate with far less transparency and accountability. They condemn monopolists of the past such as Carnegie or Rockefeller, while opposing the very regulatory frameworks that were created to limit such concentrations of power. They call for the dismantling of central banking systems like the Federal Reserve, only to place their hopes in decentralized financial technologies that replicate many of the same power dynamics in new forms.

They believe they are resisting control. But they are often reinforcing it. This is not because people are unintelligent or uninformed. It is because the framework through which they interpret reality has been shaped in advance. The language remains familiar – freedom, rights, autonomy – but the structure underneath it has shifted.

We have seen this pattern before, in domains where the consequences were easier to measure. The tobacco industry did not survive decades of mounting scientific evidence by confronting it directly. It survived by reshaping the conversation by funding doubt, amplifying uncertainty, and reframing regulation as an assault on personal liberty. The same playbook has appeared elsewhere. Fossil fuel companies, aware for decades of the risks associated with carbon emissions, invested heavily in campaigns that emphasized uncertainty and individual responsibility over systemic accountability. Even in healthcare, pharmaceutical and food industries have shaped narratives around personal choice and lifestyle while resisting structural changes that would reduce long-term disease burden.

In each case, the strategy is similar: redirect attention away from systems and toward individuals. Reframe structural risk as personal responsibility. Recast regulation as oppression. Much of modern political thought is framed in the language of rights and duties. We believe we are acting according to moral principles: defending freedom, resisting tyranny, protecting individual rights. But what happens when those moral intuitions are not entirely self-generated? What happens when they are influenced – subtly but persistently – by systems of media, messaging, and economic power?

If the values we use to interpret the world are shaped by the same forces we are attempting to resist, then resistance itself becomes programmable. The language remains the same, but the direction changes. People fight passionately for principles that, in practice, move power further away from them. If power can shape the way people interpret events, it does not need to suppress opposition outright. It only needs to direct it. The goal is not to eliminate dissent, but to fragment it. A divided opposition spends its energy fighting over symptoms while leaving underlying structures untouched. In this way, resistance becomes predictable, manageable, and ultimately non-threatening.

This helps explain why division feels so constant and so unavoidable. It is not simply a byproduct of disagreement. It is a structural feature. A population divided into ideological camps is far less capable of recognizing shared conditions. Economic insecurity, environmental degradation, healthcare costs, and political disenfranchisement are experienced as individual or group-specific failures rather than systemic outcomes. Instead of questioning the architecture of power, people are encouraged to question one another.

The result is a kind of horizontal conflict where energy is directed sideways rather than upward. Anger becomes tribal, accountability becomes selective, and the system that produces the conditions of frustration remains largely intact. When economic and political systems align in ways that concentrate power, maintaining that concentration requires not only control over policy, but fragmentation of perception.

What makes this dynamic even more difficult to recognize is that it is not confined to any one political ideology. It exists across the spectrum, often within the same individuals. People express a desire for strong leadership, decisive government, and institutional stability, especially in moments of crisis. At the same time, they support or tolerate the systematic weakening of the very mechanisms that would allow those institutions to function in their interest.

This contradiction has persisted for decades. There is a recurring impulse to demand authority while eroding accountability; to call for order while dismantling the structures that ensure that order serves the public rather than entrenched power. It is not limited to one party, one ideology, or one era. It is a pattern.

The underlying issue is not simply disagreement over policy. It is the consolidation of power itself. Whether that power is corporate, political, cultural, or even religious is, in some sense, secondary. What matters is the degree to which these forms of power begin to overlap and reinforce one another. When that happens, the system becomes increasingly resistant to disruption. The form of power may change, yet the function remains the same. Efforts to challenge it are not absorbed – they are redirected. And when redirection is not enough, they are neutralized.

This containment does not always require direct suppression. More often, it operates through rapid classification and dismissal. Individuals or movements that challenge entrenched power are quickly labeled communist, socialist, anti-capitalist, or anti-American. Terms that function less as descriptions and more as signals to disengage. The content of the critique becomes secondary to the category it is assigned.

The fastest way to defeat an argument is not to refute it, but to label it.

A similar pattern appears across other domains. Appeals to collective responsibility or structural reform are reframed as ideological extremism. Arguments rooted in ethical or even religious traditions emphasizing stewardship, restraint, or shared obligation are dismissed as naïve, unscientific, or irrelevant in a modern economic context. Conversely, critiques grounded in secular analysis can be rejected outright as lacking moral foundation.

In each case, the effect is the same: engagement is replaced by reflex. The argument is not examined. Instead, it is sorted, labeled, and neutralized. In this way, resistance is not only misdirected, but also preemptively contained.

Over time, this process produces a predictable outcome: consolidation of power. Institutions that were once intended to balance one another – Executive, Legislative, Judicial – begin to reflect similar underlying influences. Regulatory bodies weaken, public oversight diminishes, and decision-making shifts further from the people it affects. At that point, more overt forms of centralized authority no longer appear as radical departures. They appear as solutions.

Ideas that once would have been dismissed outright such as strongman governance, technocratic control, or corporate-state alignment begin to feel plausible, even necessary to populations exhausted by dysfunction. But these ideas do not emerge in a vacuum. They are the culmination of a long process in which systems were hollowed out, trust was eroded, responsibility was redirected, and resistance was misapplied.

The most concerning aspect of this system is not that people are passive. It is that they are actively participating in its reinforcement.

They vote, protest, argue, and advocate, but often within a framework that limits the scope of what can be imagined or achieved. They defend structures that undermine their own autonomy. They reject interventions that might restore balance. They interpret their own disempowerment as the price of freedom. This is not apathy. It is misdirection.

In two of my previous essays, we explored the concept of responsibility: what it means to act as a moral agent within complex systems.

That responsibility does not disappear simply because systems are flawed or captured. But this suggests something more difficult to confront: responsibility can be redirected. Not eliminated, but guided. When that happens, individuals can act with conviction, with sincerity, even with sacrifice, and still move the system in the wrong direction.

That is the illusion.

We believe we are fighting for freedom. But unless we understand the structures shaping that fight – how power is organized, how perception is influenced, how narratives are constructed – we risk becoming participants in the very system we seek to oppose.

The problem is not that people care too little. It is that they are being led to care in ways that change nothing. Or worse, in ways that ensure nothing can change.

But ideology alone is not enough to sustain a social order for half a century. People must also internalize it. They must come to see its constraints as natural, its failures as inevitable, and their own disempowerment as personal rather than structural.

This is where the illusion of choice emerges.

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The success of neoliberalism was not merely economic or political. It was psychological. Over time, its assumptions became embedded within public consciousness. Citizens came to interpret structural problems as personal failures, market outcomes as natural outcomes, and economic insecurity as an individual responsibility rather than a systemic condition. The result was not the elimination of democratic choice, but the narrowing of what people believed was possible.

The mythologization of American social mobility – the idea that hard work and determination can lift anyone up the socioeconomic ladder – has long served as a powerful narrative to legitimize inequality. But in reality, the conditions that once supported social mobility have eroded. Wage stagnation has left generations of workers earning no more, or even less, in real terms than their parents did at the same stage of life. Labor has become increasingly precarious (as mentioned, union protections have been dismantled, full-time employment with benefits has given way to gig work and contract jobs, and secure pensions have disappeared). Meanwhile, wealth has concentrated at the top, where those already wealthy can leverage their position to secure further advantages – in education, housing, healthcare, and political influence – that they can pass on to their children. The result is a society where birth, not effort, increasingly determines destiny. Far from being the land of opportunity, the United States now exhibits lower intergenerational social mobility than many of its peer nations. The promise of meritocracy has become a cover for an entrenched aristocracy of wealth.

The system exploited tribalism masterfully. It redirected legitimate anger sideways rather than upward. A modern form of indentured servitude emerged, one in which people were tied to low-wage jobs and crushing debt, unable to escape or challenge the conditions imposed upon them. Political choice did not disappear. It became constrained. Citizens were offered competing personalities, competing narratives, and competing cultural identities, but increasingly fewer competing economic visions. Elections offered stylistic or cultural variation, but rarely structural alternatives. And when the public sought change, they often found that both parties largely served the same economic interests – differences on social policy concealing alignment on protecting concentrated wealth.

This dynamic was no accident. The United States was designed as a constitutional republic intended to prevent tyranny – whether of the majority or of demagogues – but also to protect property and privilege. While voting rights expanded over time, the economic structure remained intact: capital reigned supreme, and democracy became, in practice, majority consent to policies shaped by economic elites. What we call democracy is often majority rule in service of minority wealth.

Further reinforcing this illusion is the role of psychological and behavioral mechanisms that lead people to defend the very system that oppresses them. System justification theory demonstrates that individuals often rationalize existing inequalities to preserve a sense of stability and meaning, even when those systems directly harm their own interests. Add to this the effects of loss aversion, which makes people more afraid of potential losses from systemic change than hopeful for gains, and learned helplessness, which teaches entire populations that their efforts to improve conditions are futile. These psychological patterns, reinforced by corporate media and political elites, help normalize dysfunction as “just the way things are.” Media messaging plays a critical role in amplifying these effects by continuously portraying systemic inequality as natural, portraying the wealthy as deserving, and framing poverty as a personal failing rather than a structural issue. This constant reinforcement shapes public perception and stifles the imagination of alternative social arrangements.

Adding to this psychic capture is the financialization of the economy – a transformation in which wealth accumulation has shifted away from productive investment and toward extractive mechanisms like debt, speculation, and rent-seeking. Profit increasingly comes not from making things or paying workers well but from manipulating financial instruments, buying back stock, or exploiting monopolistic control. Healthcare, housing, education, and even water have become sites of speculation rather than guaranteed rights. For example, the explosion of student loan debt has turned higher education into a long-term revenue stream for banks and loan servicers, often with little return in terms of upward mobility.1 In healthcare, medical billing practices and hospital system consolidations have made basic care unaffordable for many while enriching investors. As corporations have focused on maximizing shareholder value, worker wages have stagnated while executive compensation and wealth inequality have soared.

The education system has also played a pivotal role in sustaining this economic and ideological regime. The dominance of neoclassical economics in business and policy schools has trained generations to see markets as rational, neutral, and efficient, while ignoring power dynamics, inequality, and ecological limits. Simultaneously, the decline of civics education and erasure of labor history from curricula have left the public unaware of the collective movements that once built the middle class and secured democratic gains. Privatization of public schools and the proliferation of charter networks has further embedded market logic into the very institutions that were once designed to cultivate democratic citizens. These reforms have often been driven by corporate interests and philanthropic foundations that promote competition, standardized testing, and performance-based funding, aligning educational goals with market values rather than democratic or civic ideals.

This system has not only depended on ideological and institutional tools but also on the manipulation of racial divisions to fragment resistance and maintain hierarchy. The legacy of redlining, segregated schools, unequal access to public resources, and targeted economic exclusion has ensured that race and class remain deeply intertwined in American political economy. Political rhetoric has repeatedly weaponized race to weaken public support for universal programs – from the Southern Strategy to “welfare queen” narratives – framing poverty and social failure as racial rather than structural problems. These divisions serve a dual purpose: they pit working people against one another, and they justify the denial of public investment in communities most harmed by extractive capitalism. This disinvestment is further reflected in broader systemic patterns, such as the rise of mass incarceration as a response to social inequality and the abandonment of urban infrastructure and services, disproportionately affecting communities of color. These mechanisms function not only to punish poverty but to sustain the very economic hierarchies that neoliberalism seeks to protect.

Globalization further amplified these dynamics. Trade agreements like NAFTA and institutions like the WTO enabled capital to move freely across borders while labor remained immobile and vulnerable. Jobs were offshored, environmental protections were circumvented, and labor standards eroded, all in the name of “competitiveness.” This free movement of capital undermined local labor movements and diminished workers’ bargaining power, making it more difficult to demand fair wages or protections in the face of threats to relocate production overseas. Domestic policymakers, under pressure from global markets, dismantled social protections and weakened regulatory regimes to attract or retain investment. The result was not shared global prosperity but a global race to the bottom in wages, rights, and environmental protections.

The final tool in this system’s self-preservation is its use of crisis. Milton Friedman himself articulated the strategy: only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. And the actions taken depend on the ideas “lying around” at that moment. Neoliberal elites ensure that those ideas are ready and waiting. Natural disasters, financial crashes, pandemics, and wars become pretexts for privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and social program rollbacks. We have seen this pattern play out repeatedly: Hurricane Katrina cleared the way for school privatization and no-bid contracts; the 2008 financial collapse protected Wall Street while imposing austerity on the public; COVID-19 enabled massive wealth transfers to tech giants while small businesses and workers bore the brunt of the crisis. Rather than moments of renewal, crises become tools to deepen the power of the few. A recent example illustrates this dynamic with chilling clarity.

In July 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an emergency ruling, allowed the Trump administration to proceed with mass firings of Department of Education civil servants – including staff from critical offices such as Special Education and English Language Acquisition – before any appeal had been heard. The unsigned decision effectively granted the executive branch the authority to dismantle a congressionally established agency by fiat, setting a precedent for crisis-enabled privatization. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent described the move as “indefensible” and warned of the dangerous constitutional precedent it sets. This ruling is a textbook case of neoliberal crisis governance: using judicial cover to implement structural rollbacks under the guise of executive efficiency, further eroding democratic institutions and public accountability.

This is why change feels impossible. Every lever of formal power – executive, legislative, judicial – has aligned to protect wealth. The public votes, but within a rigged framework. Media keep citizens focused on cultural battles while real material power escapes scrutiny. And each crisis, rather than opening the door to reform, reinforces the very structures that caused it.

But history offers a reminder: no system, however entrenched, is eternal. The robber barons of the Gilded Age seemed untouchable until the Progressive Era challenged their grip. The Great Depression birthed the New Deal. The civil rights movement broke through barriers once thought immovable. Each of these moments required mass recognition that the system itself, not individual villains or cultural scapegoats, was the source of injustice. Each required coalitions willing to see past division, and new ideas ready to replace the old order when its failures became undeniable.

Today we are at risk of repeating the cycle of crisis as a tool of further neoliberal domination. But the potential for something better remains. The work ahead lies in unmasking the system, rejecting its narratives, and rediscovering our collective power to choose a different future.

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There is something almost theological about the modern supply chain. We are trained to see only the finished object while remaining blind to the sacrifices required to produce it. The smartphone arrives polished and weightless in the palm of the hand, appearing almost detached from the Earth itself. But hidden within it are cobalt, tantalum, copper, gold, tin, lithium, and tungsten pulled from landscapes most consumers will never see and extracted by people whose lives remain largely invisible to the global economy they sustain.

The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies much of the world’s cobalt, a mineral essential for batteries, electronics, and the infrastructure underlying the technological future. Much of this extraction occurs through artisanal mining, where individuals and families dig by hand through unstable earth in conditions defined by poverty, toxic exposure, violence, and exploitation. The word artisanal evokes craftsmanship, something almost quaint or romantic. The reality is closer to economic desperation.

In parts of Katanga and other mining regions, children work underground or sort ore at the surface while exposed to arsenic, cadmium, lead, and uranium. Dust from crushed ore settles into lungs and drinking water alike. Researchers studying mining communities in the Congo have found elevated concentrations of heavy metals in the blood and urine of both miners and nearby residents, including children who never enter the mines themselves but live beside tailings piles or contaminated streams. Prolonged exposure has been linked to respiratory disease, neurological damage, birth defects, kidney failure, developmental disorders, and cancers that often go untreated in regions with little meaningful access to healthcare.

The labor itself is brutally physical. Miners descend into narrow hand-dug shafts vulnerable to collapse, often without protective equipment, ventilation, or structural reinforcement. Fatal cave-ins are common and frequently underreported. Injuries that would be survivable elsewhere become life-ending in areas lacking trauma care or basic medical infrastructure. Life expectancy in heavily exploited mining zones can fall dramatically below national averages, not only because of toxic exposure and workplace accidents but because extraction economies destabilize nearly every surrounding social institution.

Mining camps attract transient populations overwhelmingly composed of men with little economic security and almost no regulatory oversight. Around these camps, sexual violence proliferates with horrifying regularity. Women and girls are frequently coerced into transactional sex for food, transport, protection, or access to mining sites themselves. Human rights investigations have documented rape, trafficking, forced prostitution, and sexual abuse committed by armed groups, security personnel, and miners alike. Children are particularly vulnerable. Some work directly in the mines; others are exploited in the informal economies that emerge around them. In many communities, school attendance collapses because families depend on mining income to survive, pulling children permanently out of education and into cycles of labor and exploitation that can persist across generations.

Environmental contamination compounds the damage. Rivers become polluted with runoff from ore processing. Forests are stripped for fuel and expansion. Agricultural land degrades, making subsistence farming increasingly difficult and forcing even more people into dependence on extraction work. Entire local economies become reorganized around mining because extraction is often the only viable path to survival, even as it steadily destroys the conditions necessary for long-term social stability.

Yet even this framing remains incomplete because mining itself does not exist in isolation. The mine expands into the forest. Roads cut deeper into previously undisturbed ecosystems. Informal settlements appear around extraction sites, thereby displacing wildlife. There are no local stores or settlements, so hunting increases. Human beings end up entering ecological spaces that previously maintained a degree of separation between viral reservoirs and civilization. This is where the story of cobalt converges with Ebola.

Cross Pollinations

Is our demand for smartphones and semiconductors making Ebola worse?

“This it the big story, really. If you look at it at face value, this is another outbreak that is going to go over 1,000….Why has it changed from a few hundred to a few thousand now? And it is pretty clear to me. It fits the exact pattern that we’ve been talking about for years.” -disease ecologist Peter Daszak…

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3 months ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Sonia Shah

We often discuss outbreaks as though they emerge from nature independently of human systems, as though viruses simply erupt from the wilderness without cause. But ecological disruption alters the boundaries between species. Deforestation, mining expansion, forced migration, and resource extraction increase contact between humans and animal hosts while simultaneously weakening public health infrastructure through instability and poverty.

The Congo Basin is not only one of the most resource-rich regions on Earth. It is also one of the planet’s most important ecological stabilizers. And increasingly, it is being carved apart in service of global demand for technological infrastructure. The same economic system demanding renewable energy transitions, battery production, cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence expansion, and semiconductor manufacturing is also accelerating the destruction of one of the most biologically complex regions in the world.

The contradiction is difficult to ignore. The modern world increasingly speaks the language of sustainability while externalizing the environmental and human cost of sustaining itself. But the logic of extraction does not stop with minerals or forests; it extends to people themselves.

Recent reports have documented Russian recruitment operations targeting vulnerable populations across Africa with promises of employment, education, security work, or migration opportunities. Many recruits reportedly discover only later that they are being transported into the machinery of war in Ukraine. Some are coerced into military contracts written in languages they cannot read. Others are trapped by debt, confiscated documents, or false promises of citizenship and employment. Once again, desperation becomes infrastructure.

The same conditions that drive individuals into artisanal mines—poverty, instability, weak governance, debt, unemployment, and the collapse of opportunity—also create populations vulnerable to trafficking and military exploitation. Human beings become another extractable resource within geopolitical competition. Just as multinational corporations extract cobalt from Congolese soil while externalizing the consequences onto local communities, powerful states increasingly extract labor and bodies from economically fractured regions to sustain distant conflicts.

None of these crises exist independently. The child sorting cobalt ore, the miner clearing forest for extraction, the village facing viral spillover, and the trafficked recruit arriving on a Ukrainian battlefield are all connected through systems that convert vulnerability into economic utility. This is what modern externalities look like.

They are not abstractions on a balance sheet. They are ecological collapse displaced across borders. They are diseases emerging from destabilized ecosystems. They are children abandoning school to enter toxic mines. They are human beings trafficked into war under false pretenses. They are entire regions forced to absorb the hidden costs of maintaining the consumption patterns, geopolitical ambitions, and technological acceleration of the developed world. The part that continues to frustrate me is not merely that these systems exist. It is that they are functioning exactly as designed.

For decades, neoliberal globalization has operated on the assumption that efficiency is synonymous with morality. If markets optimize production, then whatever emerges from the market must represent progress. But markets optimize for extraction just as efficiently as they optimize for innovation. They reduce forests into timber reserves, rivers into industrial inputs, minerals into commodities, and eventually human beings into labor pools, migration statistics, or military assets. The result is a civilization increasingly incapable of distinguishing technological advancement from civilizational health.

We celebrate the electric vehicle while ignoring the mining camp. We celebrate semiconductor independence while ignoring the forests being fragmented to acquire rare earth minerals. We discuss artificial intelligence as the future of humanity while entire populations remain trapped in conditions resembling colonial extraction economies. And then we express surprise when outbreaks spread, ecosystems collapse, governments destabilize, and violence proliferates outward across borders. But these are not interruptions of the system; they are products of it. Eventually, even the soul becomes an economic externality.

It is extraction all the way down.

Sources

• Tsurukawa, N., Prakash, S., & Manhart, A. (2011). Social impacts of artisanal cobalt mining in Katanga, Democratic Republic of Congo. Öko-Institut e.V. and BGR.
  https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=107498

• Banza Lubaba Nkulu, C., Casas, L., Haufroid, V., et al. (2018). “Sustainability of artisanal mining of cobalt in DR Congo.” Nature Sustainability, 1, 495–504.
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6166862/

• World Health Organization (WHO). Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus, Democratic Republic of the Congo & Uganda. June 8, 2026
  https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2026-DON606

• Africa Center for Strategic Studies. “Russia’s Deceptive War Recruitment Ensnares Africans.”
  https://africacenter.org/spotlight/russia-deceptive-war-recruitment-ensnares-africans/

• Reuters. “More than 1,700 Africans fighting for Russia in Ukraine, Kyiv says.”
  https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/more-than-1700-africans-fighting-russia-ukraine-says-2026-02-25/

• Burrows E and Hinnant L. Takeaways from an AP investigation of Russia recruiting Africans to make drones for use in Ukraine. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-drones-foreign-workers-d127d67314768ecabf2691b725b08e6a

• Ostrovsky S, Patin K, and Kopelev S. Ukraine says Russia is recruiting African mercenaries to fight in its war. PBS News Hour. Nov 13, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ukraine-says-russia-is-recruiting-african-mercenaries-to-fight-in-its-war?fbclid=IwY2xjawSUFqNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE4T0pRaE9UMW5QekhxNDlOc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHj-Kn-CX_TvuutLB89xAcuU9pprsmytqVMXLtNUcdGjA5f9zgSq14Zi25_6f_aem_K-YgoTiSGsVD15yLXGx8gg

• Deforestation in the Congo. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo

• Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Tackling the drivers of deforestation in the Congo Basin
  https://www.fao.org/gcf/news-and-events/news-detail/tackling-the-drivers-of-deforestation-in-the-Congo-Basin/en

Have we gone too far with neoliberal policies – or not far enough? This question forces us to confront a fundamental confusion in modern political economy: whether neoliberalism should be understood as a pragmatic set of economic tools or as an ideological belief system that shapes how we see the world. The short answer is that neoliberalism has evolved far beyond a technical policy agenda. It now functions primarily as a belief system that resists empirical challenge because it frames its prescriptions as moral common sense rather than as propositions subject to evidence.

This economic philosophy began as a policy project, advocating for deregulation, privatization, fiscal austerity, free trade, and a diminished role for government beyond protecting property rights and enforcing contracts. From the 1970s onward, neoliberal thinkers and policymakers championed the view that the market was the most efficient and just mechanism for distributing goods, services, and opportunities. Governments, in this view, should only intervene to enable markets – not to override them. Policies that included price controls, tariffs, or subsidies were seen as distortions of natural market forces, hindering the efficiency and prosperity that free markets promised to deliver.

Neoliberalism did not emerge in a vacuum. Its ascendancy in the late 20th century followed the collapse of postwar Keynesian consensus in the face of stagflation, oil shocks, and a perceived crisis of state overreach. The elections of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the United States marked key turning points, ushering in a wave of policies that reduced taxation, privatized public assets, and dismantled labor protections. Internationally, institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank promoted the idea through structural adjustment programs imposed on developing nations, making access to loans contingent on liberalization, privatization, and austerity. In Chile, these principles were imposed at gunpoint during the Pinochet regime, with the assistance of economists trained under Milton Friedman’s tutelage.

Free Markets and Captured Culture

Yet the real-world practice of neoliberalism was always more selective. While markets were “freed” where it benefited capital, government intervention persisted in forms that protected corporate interests: agricultural subsidies that favored agribusiness, tariffs justified by geopolitics rather than economic theory, and tax incentives for industries deemed strategically important. The result was not a pure free-market system but a hybrid in which the state was reshaped to serve private capital. Despite this, proponents insisted that where policies failed – whether in addressing inequality, ensuring stability, or fostering shared prosperity – the answer was always the same: the market had not yet been made free enough.

Over time, neoliberalism transformed from a set of policy proposals into a dominant cultural logic. It became not just an economic doctrine but a moral framework that defined how we understand human worth, social responsibility, and the role of the state. The market came to be seen not simply as a tool but as the ultimate arbiter of value and justice. Market outcomes were framed as natural and right, while government intervention was cast as suspect or corrupt. This belief system permeated not just economic thought but education, healthcare, social services, and even personal identity. Competition, self-interest, and individual responsibility were elevated as the highest virtues, crowding out notions of collective well-being or shared obligation.

A striking contradiction underlies this evolution. Neoliberal economists – especially those influenced by the Chicago School and Austrian School traditions – worked vigorously to position economics as a hard science, akin to physics. They developed complex mathematical models that purported to reveal universal laws of human behavior: rational choice, utility maximization, and market equilibrium. The market itself was framed as a natural system, governed by laws as immutable as gravity. This intellectual move served to depoliticize economic policy. If economics was a science, then its prescriptions could be presented as technically correct rather than morally or ideologically driven.

But this analogy is fatally flawed. Physics describes the orbital mechanics of planets without moral consequence; biology reveals the workings of cellular function without passing moral judgment. Economics, by contrast, is inescapably moral because its theories and policies shape human lives. Economic decisions determine how resources are allocated, who thrives, who suffers, and who is left behind. They are not morally neutral, no matter how much mathematical rigor is applied. Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has argued, every economic choice reflects a vision of justice and human flourishing.

Moreover, economics is not a natural science – it is a social science. It studies human behavior embedded in historical, cultural, and political contexts. Unlike gravitational force or mitosis, human economic behavior is not fixed, predictable, or universal. Assumptions such as rational actors, perfect information, and equilibrium are not observations of the world but abstractions from it. This makes economic modeling useful for generating insights but inadequate for dictating policy. When these models are treated as gospel, they obscure the ethical stakes of decisions that shape the lives of billions.

Failure of Discipline or Principle?

Neoliberalism’s claim to scientific status collapses under scrutiny because it fails on both empirical and moral grounds. Empirically, its predictions have repeatedly been contradicted: deregulated markets have produced financial crises, growing inequality, and environmental destruction. Productivity has risen while wages stagnated; capital has been rewarded while labor has been disciplined. Wealth concentration has reached levels unseen since the Gilded Age. In the United States, life expectancy has declined for certain groups due not only to so-called “deaths of despair” linked to economic insecurity and social isolation, but also to widening healthcare disparities, unequal access to preventive care, environmental exposures, chronic disease burdens, and the commodification of health itself.

Yet neoliberalism resists these empirical challenges by reframing failures as the result of insufficient market discipline or residual government interference. Morally, neoliberalism denies the harm it causes by framing its policies as value-neutral expressions of scientific truth. The moral consequences of economic decisions are ignored or dismissed as externalities beyond the scope of economic reasoning. This failure is most clearly visible in the sectors where the ethical stakes are most direct including healthcare, education, and environmental policy. These are not mere economic activities; they are battlegrounds over the very meaning of justice and human dignity.

Nowhere is the tension more acute than in healthcare. Neoliberalism treats health as a private good – something to be bought and sold – rather than a public right. This logic pervades insurance markets, where access to care depends on the ability to pay, not on need. Hospitals consolidate into for-profit systems, insurance companies prioritize shareholders, and patients are burdened with astronomical medical debt. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the catastrophic consequences of this approach: public health infrastructure was underfunded, hospitals lacked surge capacity, and the poorest communities bore the greatest burden of illness and death. Care was treated not as a universal obligation but as a commodity to be rationed.

In education, the neoliberal worldview has redefined students as consumers and institutions as service providers. Policies such as charter schools, school vouchers, and performance-based funding mechanisms were designed to inject competition into education, assuming that market pressures would drive quality. In higher education, rising tuition, declining public investment, and a massive student debt crisis have transformed universities into debt-financed gateways to a precarious labor market. Educational institutions chase rankings, branding, and profitability, often at the expense of mission and equity. As a result, education no longer serves as a social equalizer but increasingly reproduces inequality. Knowledge itself becomes commodified, and access becomes stratified along class and racial lines.

Environmental policy further illustrates the moral blindness of neoliberalism. The ideology treats ecological degradation as a technical problem solvable through market mechanisms – carbon trading, emissions pricing, or corporate self-regulation – rather than as a profound failure of human stewardship. Regulation is framed as an economic burden rather than a moral imperative. Meanwhile, extractive industries continue to receive subsidies, environmental health is externalized onto marginalized communities, and future generations are saddled with the consequences of inaction. Climate change, the existential threat of our time, is often addressed with economic models that discount the lives of people not yet born, simply because they fall outside present market value. The result is policy paralysis dressed up as rational calculation.

Economic Sovereignty and Democratic Shackles

Neoliberalism’s power is not just institutional – it is linguistic and moral. It captures and reframes the language we use to talk about justice. “Choice” becomes synonymous with freedom, even when choices are constrained by poverty or geography. “Efficiency” is elevated as a moral good, even when it sacrifices care, equity, or sustainability. “Freedom” becomes the freedom of capital to move and accumulate, not the freedom of people to live well. In this moral sleight of hand, suffering becomes a sign of poor choices, not systemic failure.

Democracy itself is not immune to neoliberalism’s reach. In many cases, economic reforms have hollowed out democratic processes by transferring decision-making power from elected bodies to technocratic agencies, trade tribunals, and corporate lobbies. Policies affecting millions are made by institutions like central banks or investor-state dispute panels, beyond the reach of popular accountability. As economist Dani Rodrik has argued, there is a growing incompatibility between hyper-globalized markets, national sovereignty, and democratic legitimacy. When markets are treated as smarter than voters, democracy becomes not a means of collective self-rule but an obstacle to be managed.

Medicine offers a useful counterexample. In healthcare, scientific knowledge about disease and treatment is applied within a moral framework: the duty to care, to do no harm, to treat patients with dignity. Cost-benefit analyses are part of medical decision-making, but they do not displace the moral commitments that define the practice of medicine. In contrast, neoliberal economic policy affects medicine profoundly – through the design of insurance systems, the funding of hospitals, the pricing of drugs – but it does so while denying its moral dimension. By treating healthcare as a market commodity rather than a social good, neoliberalism undermines the ethical foundations of medical practice.

We do not randomly plan space missions simply because physics allows us to predict orbital windows. We plan them for human purposes. Similarly, economic policy is not about what is technically possible or efficient – it is about what kind of society we wish to create. To pretend otherwise is to abdicate moral responsibility and allow harm to be disguised as necessity.

Neoliberalism has become not just an economic theory but a hegemonic belief system. It resists empirical falsification by redefining failure as insufficient purity of its own principles. It resists moral critique by insisting that it is value-neutral and the natural order of things. In doing so, it fails both as science and as ethics. To challenge this ideology, we must not only propose better policies but also confront the moral and cultural logic that has made it seem like common sense. The task before us is to reclaim moral language in public policy – to judge success not by GDP or shareholder value, but by health, justice, sustainability, and the capacity of all people to live with dignity.

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References

Brown W. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press; 2015.

Case A, Deaton A. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2020.

Harvey D. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005.

Klein N. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books; 2007.

Klein N. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster; 2014.

Giroux HA. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books; 2014.

Maani N, Galea S. COVID-19 and Underinvestment in the Public Health Infrastructure of the United States. Milbank Q. 2020;98(2):250-259.

Mirowski P. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso; 2013.

Rodrik D. The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy. New York: W.W. Norton; 2011.

Sen A. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 2009.

I keep a list of thoughts on my phone. It’s not an organized group of thoughts. These thoughts are not polished ideas. They are certainly not the kind of thing that makes me appear more coherent than I actually am. They’re just fragments, sentences, or quotes. They are lines from books, movies, scripture, philosophy, video games, or my own sleep-deprived brain at some ridiculous hour when I should have been doing something more useful, like sleeping.

Some of them are beautiful. Some are strange. Some are probably nonsense. Some sound profound until I read them again the next morning and realize I may have simply been tired, angry, over-caffeinated, under-fed or some combination of the above. But nevertheless, they stay with me. And that matters, because a thought does not have to be complete to be true. Sometimes the incomplete thought is more honest than the finished one. The finished thought has been cleaned up for public consumption. It has put on a tie. It has learned how to behave in polite company. The unfinished thought is still barefoot in the kitchen at midnight, staring into the refrigerator, trying to decide whether hunger is physical, spiritual, or just simply boredom.

That is usually where I find myself. Somewhere between appetite and meaning. And so this essay is an attempt to draw a narrative line through the myriad of random ideas running through my head. The text in bold are the chaos of thoughts. What surrounds them is the entropy of writing (not order).

I am illusion married to a futility.

I have no idea if that is good or terrible. It may be both. But I know why it appealed to me. Because there are days when consciousness feels like a trick. We wake up inside a body we did not choose, with instincts we did not design, in a world we did not create, surrounded by systems we barely understand, and then spend the rest of our lives pretending we are in control. We build identities, careers, families, reputations, arguments, grudges, bank accounts, institutions, religions, and political ideologies around the terrifying possibility that none of this belongs to us. Not even ourselves.

The only thing that exists is empty space and you. And you are but a thought. That one stayed with me too. There is something strangely comforting about being reduced to a thought. A thought can change. A thought can be corrected. A thought can be interrupted before it becomes an action. A thought can be watched. It can be held up to the light and examined before it burns the house down.

Maybe that is why I have always been drawn to the tension between faith and reason. Not faith as certainty. Certainty is easy. Certainty is usually ego with a better wardrobe. I mean faith as humility before the unknown. Faith as the courage to stand at the edge of what can be proven and still refuse to lie about what cannot.

Real faith is not afraid of reason.

If faith is true, reason cannot destroy it. Reason may refine it. Reason may strip away superstition, vanity, tribal inheritance, and fear. Reason may force faith to grow up. But it cannot destroy what is real. Only what is brittle. This is probably why the line from Matthew has followed me around:

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”1

I do not read that as a celebration of childishness, because adults are already childish enough. Just watch any form of political discussion for five minutes if you need evidence. I read it as a command to recover the posture of the child before the world teaches performance. The child does not yet understand status. The child asks questions without knowing they are supposed to be embarrassed. The child can still be amazed by a rock, a bug, a puddle, a cardboard box, or a story told with conviction. To become like a child is not to become ignorant. It is to become unarmored (and unmoored from dogma or belief). And that is harder than it sounds.

Armor is useful. Anyone who has lived long enough knows this. I do not believe in walking through life as though everyone is good simply because I wish it were true. That is not virtue. That is poor threat assessment. My job has made me practical. Trauma makes people practical. Human beings are capable of tenderness, courage, sacrifice, grace, and astonishing stupidity. They are also capable of cruelty, cowardice, deceit, exploitation, and violence.

So, I try to live by another sentence I wrote down:

Guard against the worst in people while still expecting them to be good.

That may be the closest thing I have to a functional moral philosophy. Expecting goodness is not naivety if you are still paying attention. Guarding against harm is not cynicism if you do not let it become hatred. The trick is to remain open without becoming defenseless. To stay kind without becoming a mark. To remain vigilant without becoming paranoid.

Eternal vigilance may be the price of liberty, but it can also become the death of peace if it is turned inward too aggressively. There is a version of vigilance that protects freedom. There is another version that devours the person trying to remain free. Anxiety lives there in that moment.

Kierkegaard noted that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. That phrase feels almost clinically accurate. Anxiety is not simply fear. Fear has an object. Fear points to the snake, the tumor, the financial problem, the angry email, the missed diagnosis, the phone call at 2 a.m. “Fear is the mind killer.”2

Anxiety is different. Anxiety is the vertigo of possibility. It is the awareness that life can go in too many directions at once and that every decision closes a door you may later wish had remained open.

Freedom is intoxicating until you realize it comes with responsibility. Then it becomes nausea. I think this is why people flee into certainty. Ideology is easier than freedom. Tribe is easier than conscience. Outrage is easier than grief. Hatred is easier than thought. But I do not hate because hatred dissolves reason.

That does not mean I do not get angry. I get angry all the time. Sometimes too easily. Sometimes with justification. Sometimes because my New York, red-headed, surgical personality has mistaken inconvenience for injustice. I am working on this. Slowly. With variable success. But hatred is different from anger. Anger can clarify. Hatred corrodes. Anger may say, “This is wrong.” Hatred says, “You are no longer human to me.” Once that happens, reason does not stand a chance. It has already been escorted out of the building.

This is where I struggle with words. Because my words carry violence even when my actions do not. That is a difficult thing to admit, but it is true. I like sharp language. I like forceful language. I like the clean cut of a sentence that gets to the bone. There is satisfaction in it. Surgical satisfaction, maybe. But words do not remain where we place them. They travel. They get picked up by people who did not understand the restraint that existed behind them. They can inspire courage. But they can also inspire cruelty.

My words can be used to inspire violence.

But I will not ignite the flame.

At least that is the standard I am trying to hold myself to. This is also why I keep returning to the difference between posture and power. Posture is what we perform when we are afraid people will not believe we have power. Power does not need to announce itself so loudly. Posture pounds the table. Power listens. Posture humiliates. Power disciplines. Posture threatens. Power decides. Posture is usually insecurity wearing boots. I know posture because I have used it. I know pride because I have mistaken it for principle. And, in the immortal words of Marcellus Wallace, “that’s just pride fucking with you.”3

Pride is sneaky because it does not always feel like vanity. Sometimes it feels like justice. Sometimes it feels like self-respect. Sometimes it feels like “I will not let them get away with this.” But if I am honest, a lot of the time it is just the ego trying to preserve a fiction. The fiction that I am owed recognition. That I am owed control. That I am owed a certain outcome because I worked hard, meant well, or saw the situation clearly. But peace comes when you know nothing belongs to you.

Not the outcome. Not the praise. Not the credit. Not even the self-image you have spent years building. Pride seeks to keep all that is not its. It clings. It hoards. It narrates reality in its own defense. Courage is different. Courage scoffs at outcome. '“Never tell me the odds.”4 “The action is the juice.”5

That last line is ridiculous, and I love it. Because it is true. There is a kind of peace that comes when the action itself is enough. Not the applause. Not the success. Not the measurable return. Just the act. This is where Christianity and Eastern philosophy start speaking to each other in ways that interest me. Matthew tells us to give without letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing.6 The act should disappear even from the ego performing it. In the Bhagavad Gita, as I understand it, there is a related idea: act without attachment to the fruits of action. Do the work because the work is yours to do. Do not turn every act into a transaction with the universe.

This is hard for modern people because we have been trained to measure everything. Productivity, impact, engagement, revenue, weight, steps, sleep, likes, outcomes, value. Even morality gets dragged into the marketplace and asked to justify its reimbursement rate. But some things lose their meaning the moment they become visible.

Giving in secret protects the recipient from humiliation, but it also protects the giver from vanity. The right hand does not need to know because the ego does not need another trophy.

This is probably what I admire most in the idea of ikigai. Not the Instagram version where someone draws four circles and turns purpose into a branding exercise. I mean the quieter version. The thing that gives life value because it gives shape to action. The reason you keep showing up. The reason you remain curious. The reason you continue to learn, teach, tinker, repair, argue, read, write, and try again.

You can’t love what you’re doing unless you know who you are. And knowing who you are is not the same as knowing your job title. I am a surgeon. But I am not only a surgeon. Surgery is one expression of something deeper: the need to solve, repair, interpret, create, and help. I’ve mentioned this before, but if my hands stopped working tomorrow, I would mourn them. I would mourn them deeply. But I would still be me. I would still need to learn. I would still need to teach. I would still need to make sense of the world by taking it apart and trying to put some piece of it back together.

Maybe that is why tsundoku appeals to me too. Unread books piled around the house are not failures. They are evidence of curiosity. They are futures waiting patiently on shelves. They are little monuments to the fact that some part of me still believes I can become larger than I am now. Of course, “no book can ever be finished. While working on it, we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.”7

That sentence feels especially true now that I have started writing publicly. Every essay is obsolete the moment I publish it. Not because it was wrong, necessarily, but because the act of writing it changed me. By the time the thought is expressed, I am no longer the same person who needed to express it. This is maddening. But it is also the point.

A finished piece of writing is not proof that I have arrived somewhere. It is evidence that I passed through. “A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.”8 I used to love that line because it was funny. Now I love it because it describes the impossible arrogance and humility of timing. We spend so much of life believing we are late. Late to success. Late to understanding. Late to maturity. Late to peace. Late to becoming the person we thought we were supposed to be. But maybe we arrive when we are capable of arriving. Not before. Not after.

I do not mean that in a passive way. I am not advocating drift. I respect discipline and effort. I respect the body, the work, the blade, the page, the practice, the repetition. I respect what can be built through flesh. I respect The Infinite. But I carve my own path in flesh. That sentence may be the closest I can get to my relationship with God without lying.

God becomes and God unbecomes. God may only be our name for it, and the closer we get to it, the more it ceases to be God. That is not atheism. It is not exactly theism either. It is probably closer to reverence without possession. I do not distrust religious language, but I distrust the human desire to trap the infinite inside our preferred vocabulary. The moment we name God, we begin to confuse the name with the thing itself. The closer we move toward mystery, the more our words fail. And maybe they are supposed to. Maybe faith begins where language becomes embarrassed.9

This does not mean morality disappears. Quite the opposite. I think we must moralize politics, not politicize morals. Politics without morality becomes machinery. Morality swallowed by politics becomes tribal ammunition. Both are dangerous. The prevention of pain, suffering, and injustice remains the eternal problem of public morals.

Not the elimination of all pain. That is impossible. Not the guarantee of happiness. That is childish. But the prevention of unnecessary suffering, needless cruelty, preventable harm, and institutionalized indifference. That is where morality has to enter public life. Not as sermon. Not as party branding. Not as domination disguised as virtue. But as responsibility.

It is our duty to help those we can. But it is not our duty to make them happy. That distinction matters. Helping another person does not mean controlling their outcome. It does not mean absorbing their suffering until it becomes your identity. It does not mean confusing compassion with ownership. You can offer the hand. You cannot force peace into the person who takes it. That may sound harsh, but I do not think it is. I think it is the only way to keep helping without becoming resentful.

All fear is rooted in vanity. I am not sure that is completely true, but I understand why I wrote it. Fear often begins with the imagined loss of something we believe is ours: status, safety, identity, love, control, certainty, or life itself. Some fears are biologically necessary; I am not interested in pretending otherwise. But the fears that own us are often built around attachment. What will happen to me? What will they think of me? What will I lose? Who will I become if this thing is taken?

Pride precedes the fall because pride cannot bend. Humility can. And perhaps that is the point of becoming like a child. Not ignorance. Not obedience. Not weakness. Flexibility. Wonder. The ability to be corrected before the fracture becomes complete. I am trying to become that kind of person. I am failing often enough to know the effort is real.

For now, these fragments remain fragments. A thought about God. A quote from scripture. A joke from a movie. A Japanese word for unread books. A wizard from Tolkien. A Danish philosopher staring into the abyss. A surgeon trying not to confuse fatigue with wisdom. A father. A husband. A reader of books. A thinker of thoughts. A doer of deeds. A fixer of hands. A work in progress. An illusion married to futility, perhaps. But still here, still acting. Still trying not to let the left hand know. Still guarding against the worst in people while expecting them to be good. Still carving a path through flesh toward something I do not know how to name.

Why Healthcare Interoperability Is a Moral, Technical, and Political Failure

There is a peculiar absurdity familiar to anyone who works in medicine: a patient arrives after receiving care at another facility. They’ve had blood work, imaging, a CT scan, and maybe even an MRI. They casually mention the study was done yesterday, last week, or last month at the hospital across town, assuming you can see it. And why wouldn’t they? This is the twenty-first century. Their bank detects a suspicious out-of-State purchase in seconds and their effortlessly remembers where they parked. Social media platforms can infer what they want to buy, what they fear, what they believe, and what will keep them scrolling. So why wouldn’t you - the person they trust with their life - be able to access vital information about their health?

That a physician cannot see an X-ray performed just three miles away is as concrete a reality as the radiation itself. Since the systems are blind to each other, the test is repeated, causing a cascade of side effects: the patient waits, the cost rises, and radiation exposure accumulates (especially for CT scans). Meanwhile, the physician wastes precious time reconstructing a medical history that already exists somewhere else, locked behind another portal, another vendor, another login, another institution, another wall. And most of the time, that record isn’t even properly digitized with clean tables, numbers, or standards; instead, it’s trapped in an unindexed digital silo or a physical folder where nobody cares to look. This goes deeper than mere digital friction and cannot be treated anymore as an engineering oversight: it is the inevitable outcome of a digital infrastructure that treats data as property rather than public health infrastructure, proving that our systems have plenty of computing power, but absolutely no shared conscience.

I have argued that the United States does not really have a healthcare system in any true sense of the word; it operates a disease-management marketplace that is fragmented, reactive, expensive, administratively bloated, and structurally misaligned. Electronic medical and health records (EMRs and EHRs) were supposed to correct some of this dysfunction , but the chaos is visible in the vocabulary alone. We use two different terms to describe the exact same concept - a superficial semantic debate rather than a unified design. This confusion is actively maintained for the sake of profit: one vendor markets a new “EHR” with exclusive features, while a competitor pushes an update to its “EMR” architecture just to check a regulatory box. Instead of fixing the underlying system, we simply digitized the dysfunction. We did so without establishing universal protocols; instead, every state, every region, and every corporate hospital conglomerate decides on standards for itself. Modern frameworks like value-based care, MIPS,1 quality reporting, and population health metrics blindly assume that clinical data moves fluidly and meaningfully. In reality, most systems remain mutually blind, leading to repeated tests, frustrated patients, lost time, and clinical inefficiency.

This matters because interoperability is not simply the ability of one computer to send data to another; that is merely the shallow, technical version. In a recent paper on the relevance of clarifying the role and meaning of interoperability, “Defining Interoperability: A Universal Standard”, Lalli points out that more than 117 different definitions of interoperability exist across fields, producing fragmentation even before implementation begins. To resolve this, the author proposes a universal, two-part definition emphasizing the capacity of diverse systems to seamlessly exchange information, services, and data, and then utilize that content in a meaningful, effective, and efficient manner.

Healthcare serves as the central case study precisely because ambiguities here directly threaten human lives: sapping diagnostic accuracy, compromising medication safety, and derailing care coordination. True interoperability moves beyond a narrow technical definition to encompass technical, semantic, syntactic, legal, organizational, operational, enterprise, electronic, and data dimensions. Therefore, a healthcare system is not interoperable simply because it possesses a programmable interface. It becomes interoperable only when data can move structurally (syntactic), carry shared meaning (semantic), achieve its intended clinical effect (pragmatic), and be properly regulated across institutional boundaries (legal).

This distinction is crucial because American healthcare possesses countless digital organs, yet it lacks a coherent digital nervous system. Like the human body, the medical landscape is made of structurally independent entities: hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, laboratories, insurers, and software vendors. The tragedy is that these organs do not communicate like parts of a coordinated biological system. Without a unifying nervous system, healthcare cannot function as an integrated organism. Instead, it behaves like a primitive, single-celled creature—complex in its internal mechanics, yet clumsy, isolated, and painfully limited when compared to its multicellular cousins.

Why We Do Not Have an Integrated Healthcare System

As mentioned above, the failure of interoperability is usually accounted as a technical problem. But it is more a political economy problem wearing a technical costume. There are technical barriers, of course. Electronic health record systems are built on incompatible . internal databases, forcing them to store information in different formats and display data in ways that only make sense within that specific vendor’s proprietary ecosystem. Furthermore, because so much data is inserted manually, these databases are plagued with clinical duplicates, coding errors, and junk data.

To bridge these gaps, digital medicine relies on a handful of core standards designed to establish a shared grammar:

Together, these protocols form the technical foundation of a connected framework. But standards alone do not solve the problem. A language can exist and still be spoken poorly. Different vendors implement the exact same standard in slightly different ways. Health systems routinely customize fields, use local codes, omit clinical context, or bury vital data in scanned PDFs and unindexed free-text notes. A medication list may transfer but fail to indicate whether the patient is actually taking the drug. A diagnosis may clutter the chart long after it has resolved An outside operative report may be technically available, but practically impossible to find.

This is the precise illusion that Lalli’s work exposes:interoperability is not achieved simply because data moves. Information can be transmitted and still completely lose its clinical meaning during transitions of care. A technical success can still be a total clinical failure if the receiving physician cannot easily locate, understand, trust, or act upon the information. In medicine, that distinction is a matter of life and death. A corrupted social media algorithm is an annoyance; a corrupted medication history is a lethal hazard. So, when we say healthcare lacks interoperability, we are not lamenting the lack standards. We are pointing out that the pieces of the language exist, but the conversation remains broken.

Hospitals benefit from patient capture. Insurers profit from opacity. Software vendors thrive on proprietary ecosystems. In the capitalist market, large health systems benefit from systemic complexity because complexity naturally favors scale. Smaller practices, rural clinics, and safety-net institutions are left drowning, trying to comply with reporting requirements designed for corporate giants with entire departments devoted to billing, analytics, compliance, and EHR optimization. While massive hospital networks can easily absorb this administrative burden, smaller practices experience it as coercive surveillance, relentless documentation pressure, and obvious financial risk. This is why interoperability remains perpetually almost here: it threatens too many entrenched business models.

A truly integrated network would reduce duplicate testing. It would pull back the curtain on the black box of prior authorization. It would allow physicians to see medication histories, outside imaging, operative reports, pathology results, and comprehensive care plans without being forced to beganother institution for a fax. It would expose structural waste, make quality measurement honest, and clearly reveal where care is delayed, denied, repeated, or poorly coordinated. In a rational health system, such outcomes would be desirable. In a fragmented revenue system, they are dangerous – exposing patients and society to health and financial risk.

The United States consistently mistakes digitization for integration. We created electronic records without shared meaning, and portals without continuity. We generated an endless sea of billing codes, compliance dashboards, quality measures, patient satisfaction scores, and documentation templates, but skipped the foundation: a unified architecture of care. As a result, clinicians are conscripted to serve as the human tape holding incompatible machines together, and the patient is left to play the courier.

The Patient as Data Mule

One of the most revealing failures of American healthcare – and indeed, of any capitalistic model that treats healing as a competitive market commodity - is that patients are still expected to carry their own information across the system. They bring crumpled medication lists on paper. They show unindexed lab results on their phones. They try to recall the name of the antibiotic prescribed at an urgent care clinic weeks before. They call imaging centers to to beg for physical discs, sign endless releases, and wait in bureaucratic limbo. Crucially, they are forced to repeat their medical histories over and over again whilesick, injured, frightened, or overwhelmed. This is not patient empowerment; it is a systemic exploitation of a vulnerable person’s fractured memory to perform a technical task that belongs to an integrated network. If it is not outright institutional abandonment, it certainly borders on it.

There is an important difference between authentic patient data ownership and forcing a patient to take responsibility for a structural system failure. True ownership cannot exist if data is handed over without the education and tools needed to understand or use it. While individuals should absolutely control their health information, and commercial exploitation of their records must be heavily restricted, patient control should never mean that a sick person is conscripted as an unpaid, full-time health information manager. The ultimate design goal should be patient-governed interoperability, not patient-burdened interoperability.

Gordon and Catalini’s work on patient-driven interoperability, cited by Lalli, proves useful here. They argue that technologies such as blockchain could theoretically support patient-centered data exchange through digital access rules, data aggregation smart contracts, and immutable registries. However, they also warn that massive real-world hurdles like data scalability, high computational costs, platform standardisation, and strict compliance with privacy laws like GDPR and HIPAA must be solved before these architectures can ever work at a systemic scale. The point is not that blockchain is the answer. The point is that healthcare data should follow the patient in a controlled, secure, usable way. The point is that it proves an essential technical reality: a highly secure, fluid ecosystem where data follows the patient safely is entirely possible. It represents a vital attempt to expand the degrees of data freedom that patients desperately need.

Achieving this freedom cannot be reduced to consumer choice. Healthcare is not online shopping. A trauma patient arriving unconscious at an emergency department cannot comparison-shop for a hospital based on its data architecture. A diabetic patient should not be required to understand competing syntactic or semantic data standards to ensure that an endocrinologist can view an outside lab report. A cancer patient should not be forced to act as a project manager to coordinate pathology, imaging, oncology, surgery, insurance approval, and follow-up. If the system requires heroic effort from sick people just to execute basic communication, that system is fundamentally broken.

The App Economy Chose Addiction Over Care

This raises another important question: why have so many brilliant software engineers built systems that optimize advertising, social comparison, search ranking, influencer metrics, delivery convenience, financial speculation, and algorithmic addiction, while healthcare remains so technologically primitive at the point of care?

The answer is not that engineers are immoral or uninterested in health. Many are deeply interested. The answer is that our economic system rewards some forms of technical brilliance more than others. It is easier to build the next app than to rebuild the operating system of American healthcare. Consumer technology offers rapid iteration, massive user bases, low regulatory friction, scalable monetization, and direct access to behavioral data. Social media platforms can test design changes on millions of users in real time. They can optimize for attention because attention is monetizable. They can exploit dopamine loops, social comparison, outrage, fear of missing out, and identity reinforcement because those behaviors increase engagement.

Healthcare is different. It has privacy rules, liability concerns, institutional procurement cycles, reimbursement barriers, legacy systems, professional licensing, clinical risk, fragmented stakeholders, and entrenched vendors. The person who benefits from an innovation is often not the person who pays for it. The physician may save time, the patient may receive better care, the hospital may lose revenue from fewer repeated tests, the insurer may capture savings, and the software company may struggle to monetize the improvement. That is not a technology problem. It’s a problem of misaligned incentives.

Healthcare systems reward reaction over prevention, intervention over integrity, and extraction over long-term wellbeing. Healthcare interoperability fits this pattern exactly. Better data sharing would improve care, but it does not necessarily generate a proprietary revenue stream for the actors positioned to build it. So, we get innovation at the edges, including scheduling apps, patient portals, billing automation, AI scribes, revenue-cycle optimization, wellness dashboards, wearables, risk scores, chatbots, marketing tools, and other consumer-facing health products. Some of these are useful. But many are just bandages placed over a festering wound, and the core system remains broken.

Interoperability Is a Public Health Intervention

A truly interoperable healthcare system would not exist merely to make doctors’ lives easier; it would be the fundamental pillar of public health. When health information systems are disjointed and inaccessible, they become a breeding ground for redundant, disorganized data that directly compromises the quality of medical care and aggressively wastes shared resources (from Torab-Miandoab and colleagues work) For the public, this fragmentation is never abstract. It strikes citizens directly in their daily lives, manifesting as:

• critical care failures: undetected medication errors, missed life-threatening allergies, and incomplete medical histories during emergencies;

• systemic waste: duplicated laboratory tests, delayed specialist referrals, repeated radiation exposure from unnecessary imaging, and entirely avoidable hospital readmissions.

Interoperability is not an IT luxury, rather it is basic social infrastructure. It is as fundamental to modern medicine as paved roads are to ambulances, electricity is to operating rooms, or clean water is to infection control. Recognizing this public crisis, the federal government has historically stepped in to lay down a series of digital ground rules.

To force a heavily siloed marketplace to cooperate, federal agencies have designed a framework aimed at tearing down proprietary digital walls:

These federal rules are necessary, but we must understand that digital proclamations do not automatically guarantee systemic success. An API is entirely useless if both sides cannot agree on what is being exchanged, if the transmitted data is inaccurate, or if the incoming information enters a clinician’s screen in a completely unreadable format. This is the exact wall where compliance splits from actual care. Federal mandates can lay the pipes. They can create the plumbing. But plumbing alone does not guarantee clean water. We can see this clearest in the realm of prior authorizations. A physician may know exactly what a patient needs to survive, yet life-saving care is routinely delayed while an insurance company demands endless paperwork, phone calls, and faxes. If we use advanced APIs simply to process these bureaucratic barriers faster, we have not achieved healthcare reform—we have merely digitized our existing dysfunctions. A faster, automated denial from an insurance algorithm is still an administrative barrier. A standard can mandate that data be made available. It cannot guarantee that the data is easy to find, clinically useful, semantically consistent, or governed with a true ethical conscience. True interoperability is never just a technical standard; it is a moral obligation to ensure that our technology is being used to make care more continuous, transparent, and profoundly humane.

The Missing Layer: Ethical Interoperability

One of the most important critical reflections in Lalli’s article appears in the discussion, where the author acknowledges that even the proposed universal framework does not explicitly include social or ethical interoperability. Lalli notes that to foster true trust and long-term sustainability, systems must deeply respect patient consent, actively promote equity, and adhere strictly to ethical data standards. This omission from mainstream frameworks is not a minor oversight; it is a symptom of a deeper intellectual vacuum. There is an absolute drought of research investigating how society—and we, the human actors within it—are supposed to structurally cooperate to achieve maximum public good. Because we lack the vocabulary for this collective social responsibility, interoperability remains stunted, treated merely as an IT protocol rather than a tool for societal welfare.By failing to recognize interoperability as a vital social infrastructure, we strip it of its power. We push it to the sidelines, making it easy for predatory market forces to capture, neglect, or weaponize it. We have treated data exchange as a purely technical baseline rather than a binding moral standard. But we must ask ourselves: what is a connected system actually designed to achieve?

• An interoperable framework that allows corporate insurers to execute automated prior authorization denials with maximum efficiency is not progress.

• A network that enables mega-hospitals to seamlessly optimize their billing cycles while leaving patients bankrupt and confused is not progress.

• A pipeline that feeds massive datasets into proprietary, commercial AI models without explicit, meaningful patient consent is not progress.

• A infrastructure that elevates the quality of care exclusively within wealthy, urban healthcare monopolies while forcing underfunded rural hospitals to starve is not progress.

Interoperability must be judged by the human realities it makes possible. If we are to measure its success, these are the social questions we must force the industry to answer: Does it reduce duplication? Does it improve diagnosis? Does it protect patient dignity? Does it reduce clinician burden? Does it support continuity? Does it improve access for the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the medically complex, and the geographically isolated? Does it strengthen public health surveillance without turning patients into commercial data mines? Does it make care more humane?

If our technology cannot answer these questions, then we have done nothing more than build a faster, more predatory machine to exploitsame broken system.

Integration Requires Different Incentives

The United States will not achieve meaningful healthcare interoperability through software alone. It requires a different theory of value. Right now, the system rewards ownership of fragments. Hospitals own fragments of care; vendors protect fragments of data architecture; insurers hoard fragments of payment logic; pharmacies control fragments of medication histories. The patient is left to own the consequences.

True integration cannot occur while data remains locked in these isolated proprietary silos. A better system must treat health information as a protected public utility governed by patient rights, clinical need, and democratic accountability. This does not mean nationalizing every EHR or eliminating private innovation. It means establishing a baseline social contract: the basic movement of health information is not a luxury feature, a competitive advantage, or a vendor-controlled toll road. It is part of the public infrastructure of medicine. This would require several principles:

The System Must Learn to Speak

One of the major tragedies of American healthcare is not that we lack intelligence, technology, or resources. We have extraordinary physicians, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, engineers, scientists, and public health professionals. We have advanced imaging, robotic surgery, genomics, artificial intelligence, and pharmaceutical innovation. We have enough technical capacity to build systems of staggering complexity. But we have not built a healthcare system that can reliably speak to itself. That failure reflects our priorities - and our priorities are legible in what we chose to optimize.

We optimized billing before healing, competition before coordination, proprietary control before shared meaning, documentation before understanding, and compliance before care. We built a system where the fragments are profitable and the whole is sick. Interoperability will not solve every problem in healthcare. It will not reverse chronic disease by itself. It will not fix food deserts, poverty, environmental exposure, medical debt, or physician burnout alone. But without it, every serious reform becomes harder. Prevention, public health, care coordination, patient autonomy, and research all require data. Trust requires that information move where it is needed, when it is needed, without being distorted, withheld, or monetized against the patient’s interest. A healthcare system that cannot communicate cannot heal.

The goal, then, is not simply to connect machines. It is to restore coherence to a system that has mistaken fragmentation for freedom. True interoperability is not a software upgrade. It is not a software upgrade. It is a design principle and an ethical commitment. We have to recognize that medicine is not a collection of isolated transactions, but a shared human infrastructure. The body thrives because its systems communicate. Healthcare must learn to do the same.

I want to give a special thanks to Giada Lalli for writing this with me. Her insight and work on this subject was invaluable!

Some patients present with disease.
Others present with the accumulated consequences of neglect.

This is one of those stories.

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Three Fingers, Two Legs, and a Failing System

He was 36 years old, and already missing half his hand, both his legs, and soon, two more fingers. He presented with an already advanced infection. Diabetes and dialysis had left him vulnerable, and now his thumb and index finger were black, necrotic, and unsalvageable. The middle finger was already gone, taken during a previous amputation just a year earlier after a similar event. He had arrived via helicopter from a rural part of Arizona, presenting from one of the Native American reservations. He was quiet and already resigned to his fate.

I wish I could say this was rare.

Steal Phenomenon

The patient was on dialysis for end-stage renal disease (ESRD), caused by uncontrolled diabetes. His access site was a fistula - a surgical connection of an artery and vein - in his right forearm. During treatment, a phenomenon called “steal” occurred, where blood is diverted through the fistula toward the dialysis machine, and is pulled away from the hand. Diabetes already contributed to poor circulation, damaged peripheral nerves, and impaired immunity. Adding physical alterations of blood flow during dialysis increases the risk of gangrene and infection.

In this case (and many others like it) the infection spread quickly. Necrotic tissue advanced across multiple fingers, becoming osteomyelitis - a dangerous infection of the bone. The only treatment was amputation. But what cut deeper than the scalpel was the predictability of it all. This was not a sudden catastrophe. It was a slow-motion failure of prevention, of access, and of basic infrastructure.

Structural Neglect and Medical Invisibility

In medicine we are taught to treat every patient equally. But healthcare doesn’t happen in a vacuum—it happens in a context shaped by history, geography, and power. This patient came from a reservation where food deserts are the norm, not the exception. There is no grocery store with fresh produce within a reasonable distance. There are no full-time specialty clinics nearby. Transportation options are limited. Follow-up care is essentially impossible without helicopter evacuation or family sacrifice to drive long distances - sometimes up to six hours away.

How do we speak of compliance or individual responsibility in such a setting?

It is ethically incoherent to ask people to manage chronic diseases under conditions we would never tolerate for ourselves. We don’t question whether insulin will be available, or if we can refrigerate it, or how we’ll get to the lab for monitoring. But many patients on reservations do. We hold them to the standards of a system that has systematically failed them. And this happens often in the rural setting.

When Poverty Is Pathologized

Too often, patients like this are discussed as case studies in noncompliance, as if their diseases were self-inflicted. But there’s a deeper moral failure in that framing: it ignores context, erases history, and recasts systemic injustice as personal irresponsibility. This is partially discussed in Dr. Zed Zha’s book, Consented

Diabetes doesn’t develop in isolation. It thrives in environments of processed food, economic scarcity, and historical trauma. Rates of diabetes in Native American communities are nearly double those of the general U.S. population.1 Amputation rates from diabetic complications are also significantly higher.2 We act as if this is unfortunate, but not unacceptable. That’s the moral wound.

And in this case, it wasn’t just fingers that were lost. It was the ability to work, to cook, to write. And with both legs already gone, the stakes of independence were shrinking by the hour. We patch and discharge, knowing full well the patient will return again, worse off.

Economic Fallout

It costs tens of thousands of dollars to airlift a patient from a reservation to a hospital that can treat them. Multiple amputations, dialysis, intensive antibiotics, rehabilitation, all reimbursed at a steep cost to Medicaid or Indian Health Service (IHS). But there is no economic model that makes this care efficient, because we are always treating the aftermath.

Prevention, including regular primary care, food access, early wound care, glucose monitoring, would have cost a fraction. But the funding doesn’t flow to prevention. It flows to interventions. The U.S. government spends approximately $4,000 per capita on Native American healthcare through IHS.3 That is often less than what is spent on healthcare for incarcerated individuals, which ranges from $2,000 to $20,000 per year depending on the state.45

We provide more consistent access to care for those we have chosen to confine than for those we have long chosen to ignore. This is not just inefficiency. It’s planned obsolescence for human beings. I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be treating prisoners, but it is important to highlight how we treat vulnerable populations.

The System Isn’t Broken. It’s Performing as Designed

For this patient, as with all others presenting in this fashion, I operated. I removed what was already dead. I documented the wound. I coordinated with case management. I prescribed antibiotics. But I couldn’t fix what brought him to my OR in the first place.

This patient required a helicopter to obtain care after the consequences of disease already took hold. What he really needed was a grocery store, a doctor nearby, a transportation voucher to get to a city, a clinic with the ability to follow up, and a system that didn’t wait for disaster to intervene. Not all of this is possible within these remote areas. But there is a lot we can do in order to improve health, increase access, and limit cost before irreversible consequences occur. This is not only true of our Native American population, but for the marginalized and underrepresneted; the rural and the urban; the poor and the wealthy.

This man lost not only his digits and his legs, but also his future. It was not simply the result of disease. It was the inevitable conclusion of a system designed to react, not to prevent. Unfortunately, he is not an outlier. He is the outcome.

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This week, I want to move away from systems and return to the individual. If the first half of this discussion focused on how responsibility became fractured, the second half asks a more difficult question: what does it actually mean to be responsible in a world where human beings remain divided, imperfect, and deeply uncertain?

Civilization now faces challenges that extend far beyond the capacity of individual nations, political parties, religions, or economic systems to solve independently. For most of human history, civilizations operated within relatively localized ecological and geopolitical boundaries. Empires rose and fell regionally. Wars, famines, and collapsing economies, while devastating, were often geographically contained. Today, however, human systems have become so interconnected that the actions of one region increasingly influence the stability of the entire planet.

Climate change represents perhaps the clearest example of this transformation. Industrialization, fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, large-scale agriculture, and resource extraction have altered atmospheric chemistry itself. Carbon emitted in one country affects weather systems, ocean temperatures, agricultural productivity, biodiversity, and ecological stability globally. Therefore, rising temperatures intensify droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires, and sea-level rise regardless of political borders. Nations may disagree over ideology, economics, or governance, but the atmosphere does not recognize nationality. Ecological systems operate according to biological and physical realities rather than political narratives

At the same time, global financial systems have become deeply interconnected in ways previous civilizations could scarcely imagine. Banking systems, debt structures, supply chains, and currency markets now bind distant populations through webs of dependency so complex that disruption in one region can rapidly destabilize entire economies elsewhere. Financial crises cascade globally. Commodity shortages ripple across continents. Energy disruptions alter political stability thousands of miles away.

Technological change accelerates this interconnectedness further. Artificial intelligence, automation, biotechnology, surveillance systems, and digital communication networks are reshaping labor markets, governance, warfare, and social interaction simultaneously across the globe. These technologies create extraordinary opportunities for scientific advancement and productivity, but they also destabilize institutions faster than many societies can adapt.

Entire industries may disappear within decades. Information ecosystems can be manipulated at planetary scale. Political institutions designed for slower industrial societies increasingly struggle to govern rapidly evolving technological realities. Yet beneath these crises lies the same underlying reality: human civilization now operates as a single interconnected system without developing equivalent systems of shared responsibility. Climate, finance, information networks, pandemics, supply chains, and ecological stability now transcend political borders faster than governments or populations have psychologically adapted to comprehend. Humanity remains emotionally and politically fragmented while the systems we created have become planetary.

Nations continue competing for economic advantage while destabilizing the ecological systems upon which all economies depend. Political systems remain trapped within election cycles while climate systems evolved over centuries. Corporations maximize quarterly growth within systems generating long-term social and environmental instability. Humanity possesses unprecedented technological power, yet its moral and political frameworks remain fragmented. The systems responsible for many of these crises were not created by a single nation or generation acting alone. They emerged collectively through industrial expansion, colonial extraction, economic competition, innovation, and global consumption patterns. Responsibility for addressing them must therefore also become collective. This realization requires a fundamental shift in perspective.

The problem is not that human beings form groups. Belonging gives life meaning. Local identity, religious tradition, national loyalty, family, culture, and political affiliation all help individuals locate themselves within a larger story. The danger emerges when these identities become the outer limit of moral concern rather than one layer within a broader web of obligation. A framework that once helped small communities survive becomes inadequate when human systems operate at planetary scale.

From a biological and ecological perspective, the boundaries we treat as absolute are far more fragile than we often imagine. We all belong to the same species, shaped by the same evolutionary history and dependent upon the same planetary systems for survival. Political borders may divide territories, but they do not divide oceans, freshwater systems, biodiversity, atmospheric chemistry, or climate stability. Human beings remain ecologically interconnected whether they acknowledge it or not.

In this sense, humanity’s greatest conflicts have never truly been us versus them. They have always been us versus ourselves. The environmental degradation destabilizing the planet is human-driven. The financial systems generating instability were human-designed. The technologies amplifying division and misinformation were human-created. The wars, inequalities, and extractive systems shaping modern civilization are not external forces. They are products of human behavior, incentives, institutions, and choices. Recognizing this does not eliminate disagreement or conflict. Diversity itself is not the problem. The danger arises when inherited forms of belonging blind societies to shared dependence and mutual vulnerability. Expanding responsibility does not require abandoning local identity or national belonging. It requires recognizing that those identities exist within larger systems of interdependence.

No nation can permanently insulate itself from ecological collapse elsewhere. Wealth cannot fully shield populations from destabilized climate systems, pandemics, resource depletion, or global economic fragmentation. Societies remain dependent upon ecological systems they cannot fully control. This shift in perspective may ultimately represent one of the central moral challenges of the modern era. The survival of modern civilization may increasingly depend upon whether we can expand the circle of moral responsibility faster than the systems we have created continue to expand the scale of potential harm.

Lessons from Philosophy and Spiritual Tradition

Philosophical and spiritual traditions across cultures have wrestled with these questions for centuries. Despite profound differences in theology and historical context, many arrive at remarkably similar conclusions: human beings possess the capacity for both cruelty and compassion, and meaning emerges neither from power nor comfort alone, but from how individuals respond to suffering, uncertainty, and moral obligation.

Viktor Frankl arrived at this conclusion through some of the darkest conditions imaginable. Writing about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps in Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that individuals who retained a sense of meaning — through love, faith, responsibility, or moral conviction — were often more psychologically resilient in the face of unimaginable suffering. He concluded:

“The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

For Frankl, meaning was not abstract philosophy detached from reality. It was survival. Individuals stripped of possessions, status, certainty, and even physical freedom still retained the capacity to choose how they responded internally to suffering.

Friedrich Nietzsche expressed a similar insight from a different philosophical direction:

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

Purpose helps shape endurance. Human beings can survive extraordinary hardship when suffering is connected to something meaningful beyond immediate pain. Without meaning, however, even materially prosperous societies can drift toward alienation, nihilism, and fragmentation. Modern societies increasingly reveal this paradox, where technological advancement and material abundance have expanded dramatically. Yet anxiety, loneliness, distrust, and psychological distress continue to rise across many populations. Human beings appear to require more than consumption and efficiency alone. They require meaning, belonging, and moral orientation.

Frankl extended Nietzsche’s insight further by suggesting that life itself constantly asks questions of us. Meaning does not arise from what we expect from life, but from how we respond to the challenges life presents. Responsibility therefore becomes central to human existence. This theme appears repeatedly across philosophical and spiritual traditions.

The Bhagavad Gita explores similar questions through the moral crisis of the warrior Arjuna. Standing on the battlefield before a catastrophic war, Arjuna becomes overwhelmed by the realization that the conflict will require him to fight against his own kin, teachers, and community. Krishna responds not by glorifying violence, but by teaching that action must be guided by duty, wisdom, restraint, and detachment from selfish reward. The emphasis is not conquest alone, but ethical conduct within conflict.

Many spiritual traditions attempt to provide similar restraints against humanity’s destructive impulses. Buddhism emphasizes compassion and detachment from destructive craving. Confucian philosophy stresses humility, social harmony, and ethical governance. Stoic thinkers argued that individuals should cultivate self-mastery and virtue rather than obsessing over circumstances beyond their control. Indigenous traditions across the world often emphasized reciprocity between human communities and the natural world, framing responsibility as ecological and intergenerational rather than merely individual. Across these traditions, a common pattern emerges where societies become unstable when restraint and moral obligation are overwhelmed by avarice, envy, ego, tribal tendencies, or attachment to domination.

Technological advancement changes the scale of human power, but not necessarily the structure of human psychology. Modern societies possess nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, global financial systems, and instantaneous communication networks, yet continue to struggle with many of the same impulses that shaped earlier civilizations. This tension becomes especially important within the context of modern ecological and social crises. Climate change, biodiversity collapse, political polarization, technological disruption, and economic inequality certainly involve technical and institutional failures. But they also force societies to confront deeper questions about restraint, sacrifice, responsibility, and collective obligation. The challenge is not simply whether humanity possesses the intelligence to solve these problems, but whether it possesses the moral maturity to respond to them without endlessly reproducing the same destructive patterns through new systems and technologies.

We increasingly possess the power to alter planetary systems themselves, yet moral development has not necessarily kept pace with technological capacity. The philosophical and spiritual traditions that endured across centuries recognize this danger not by intuitive means, but through lived experience. This is why their message remains profound. Civilization depends upon moral frameworks and ethical conduct capable of restraining destructive impulses while encouraging cooperation and responsibility. In doing so, these traditions offer a counterweight to the fragmentation that repeatedly threatens society.

Responsibility Revisited

What, then, does it mean to be responsible?

Responsibility cannot simply mean loyalty to tribe, nation, ideology, religion, or economic class. Human history repeatedly demonstrates the dangers of defining moral obligation too narrowly. When responsibility applies only to those within one’s immediate group, outsiders become easier to ignore, exploit, dehumanize, or sacrifice. Yet responsibility also cannot mean the elimination of disagreement or conflict. Human beings differ profoundly in many ways. Conflict itself is not necessarily evidence of failure. In many cases, disagreement reflects the reality that human beings are attempting to navigate difficult moral and political questions under conditions of uncertainty.

The challenge, therefore, is not how to eliminate conflict entirely, but how to confront it without allowing fear, tribalism, and self-interest to completely overwhelm ethical judgment. Responsibility demands that human beings approach disagreement with honesty rather than hatred, curiosity rather than certainty, and humility rather than absolute moral self-confidence. This is extraordinarily difficult because human psychology gravitates naturally toward certainty. It is comforting to believe one’s own group possesses the correct answers while opponents are ignorant, immoral, or dangerous. But civilizations become unstable when populations lose the capacity for self-examination.

Democracies fracture when compromise becomes viewed as betrayal. Religious systems become oppressive when questioning is treated as heresy. Economic systems become extractive when efficiency is valued above human dignity and ecological stability. Political movements become dangerous when loyalty to ideology overrides loyalty to reality itself. This is why Frankl’s insight about love remains so important. Love represents more than affection or sentimentality. At its deepest level, it reflects recognition of another person’s humanity despite difference, imperfection, or conflict. It resists the instinct to reduce human beings into abstractions, enemies, stereotypes, or economic units. Love expands the boundaries of moral concern.

But love alone is insufficient without understanding. Compassion detached from critical thought can become naïve or easily manipulated. Responsibility therefore requires something more demanding: the willingness to question assumptions, examine institutions honestly, and confront the possibility that our own beliefs may be incomplete or flawed. This applies not only to individuals, but to societies themselves.

Nations must examine the consequences of their policies honestly rather than filtering history through myths of righteousness alone. Economic systems must confront the long-term social and ecological costs hidden beneath short-term prosperity. Religious and ideological movements must acknowledge their own capacity for exclusion, hypocrisy, and abuse of power. Media systems must recognize the consequences of amplifying outrage and division. Responsibility requires introspection at every scale of civilization. However, responsibility does not demand perfection.

Civilization functions as a complex web of interconnected human relationships that offers both empowering benefits and inherent struggles. Within that web, we are shaped by biology, emotion, culture, and circumstance. What matters is whether we can create societies with moral and institutional frameworks capable of restraining our impulses rather than endlessly rewarding them. Each individual confronts this challenge differently because each life presents unique circumstances. Some inherit privilege and stability. Others inherit violence, poverty, displacement, or oppression. Yet regardless of circumstance, human beings continually face choices about how they respond.

Frankl captured this reality when he argued that life itself continually asks questions of us. We do not always control the conditions we encounter, but we retain responsibility for how we respond within them. Sometimes responsibility requires courage – the willingness to confront injustice, challenge corruption, defend vulnerable populations, or speak honestly despite personal risk. Sometimes responsibility requires restraint. War, ecological collapse, and atrocity emerged from societies unwilling or unable to restrain immediate appetites for power, vengeance, consumption, or domination. And yet sometimes responsibility requires humility, which is perhaps one of the rarest virtues within advanced societies. Humility requires recognizing that no ideology, institution, nation, or civilization possesses complete understanding. Scientific knowledge evolves. Political systems contain unintended consequences. Economic models simplify realities they cannot fully predict. Moral certainty becomes dangerous when combined with power.

Humility becomes increasingly important within a civilization capable of altering ecosystems, manipulating information systems, engineering biological systems, and potentially reshaping the conditions of human life itself. Technological advancement does not guarantee moral advancement, as a civilization capable of extraordinary innovation may still remain psychologically vulnerable to appetite and self-deception. Responsibility therefore becomes the central organizing question of civilization itself.

Civilizations rise and civilizations fall. Religions evolve. Economies transform. Technologies reshape human life repeatedly across generations. Yet beneath these changes, one question persists: What do we owe one another?

Embedded within that question are nearly all the tensions defining human history. This is the balance between freedom and obligation, individual desire and collective survival, competition and cooperation, power and restraint. How humanity answers that question may ultimately determine whether the next chapter of human history is defined primarily by fragmentation, distrust, and perpetual conflict. Or instead, by a broader recognition that survival itself increasingly depends upon cooperation across the boundaries we once believed separated us all.

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Before enlightenment, chop wood and gather water. After enlightenment, chop wood and gather water.

The saying is often misunderstood as resignation, as though wisdom changes nothing. But perhaps the point is precisely the opposite. Enlightenment does not free us from the world. It frees us from the illusion that we were ever separate from it. I think about this often in hand surgery.

The work itself is strangely primitive beneath all the technology. Bone, tendon, nerve, artery. Flesh split open under light. The smell of cautery. The slow choreography of repair. There is no transcendence in the operating room. No revelation descending from the heavens. There is only attention. Hands returning other hands back to the world. A flexor tendon does not care about ideology. A crushed nerve is indifferent to political tribalism. Ischemia does not pause for philosophy. The body remains stubbornly real no matter how abstract society becomes. And perhaps that is why the work matters to me philosophically.

Martin Heidegger wrote that modernity increasingly pulls us away from authentic Being by transforming the world into a standing reserve, a collection of objects to optimize, consume, and manipulate. Everything becomes instrumentalized. Efficiency replaces meaning. Human beings themselves become resources within systems designed for extraction. Yet handy work retained something sacred for Heidegger because it resisted abstraction. The craftsman does not merely observe the world. He dwells within it. The hand reveals a relationship with reality that cannot be mediated entirely through detached cognition.

When repairing a hand, you are confronted with this directly. Human existence ceases to be theoretical. The patient is no longer an argument, demographic, ideology, or political category. They are vulnerability incarnate. A father who cannot hold his child. A mechanic terrified he will never work again. A woman whose fingers no longer obey her thoughts. A laborer whose identity has been shattered because his hands were the means through which he understood himself.

And sometimes the confrontation is more uncomfortable still. There are patients I do not want to treat. Men with swastikas tattooed across their chests. Symbols of the Waffen-SS carved into skin as declarations of hatred. Prisoners shackled to hospital beds after acts of terrible violence. In ordinary life, it is easy to imagine morality as distance, to believe evil belongs to some separate category of human being. Medicine complicates this instinct. The moment the hand lies open beneath the light, abstraction begins to collapse again into artery, nerve, tendon, bone. We are all constructed of the same material. The body remains stubbornly human regardless of the stories attached to it.

This does not absolve cruelty or erase responsibility. But it reveals how quickly civilization deteriorates once human beings become reducible to symbols alone. Every ideology eventually tempts us toward this simplification. To see people less as human and more as embodiments of categories, tribes, or beliefs.

The modern world teaches us to hide within these embodiments. To live increasingly inside symbols, simulations, and identities. Yet suffering has a way of dragging us back into the immediacy of existence, as pain collapses abstraction. Emmanuel Levinas understood something terrifying about existence itself. The “il ya” – the anonymous “there is” – describes existence stripped of identity and meaning. Not nothingness, but an inescapable presence without form. A suffocating persistence of being. Anyone who has sat awake at three in the morning after tragedy understands this feeling intuitively. The room remains. The world remains. Existence itself hums like static: anonymous, impersonal, and indifferent.

Society attempts to drown this silence with noise. Ideology, entertainment, outrage, tribalism, optimization. We fill every moment because stillness risks confrontation with ourselves. The ancient injunction nosce te ipsum – know thyself – sounds simple until one genuinely attempts it. To know oneself is not merely to inventory preferences, beliefs, or ambitions. It is to confront the unstable terrain beneath them. To recognize how much of what we call identity is inherited or constructed in response to the anxieties of existence itself. Most people do not fear silence because silence is empty. They fear it because silence removes distraction. In stillness, the stories we tell ourselves begin to dissolve. One is forced to encounter not only mortality, uncertainty, and contradiction, but also the terrifying possibility that many of our convictions are less the product of reason than of emotional discord.

What remains unexamined within ourselves is often projected outward onto others. Fear becomes suspicion. Alienation becomes resentment. Internal chaos seeks external explanation. The “other” becomes a vessel into which we pour anxieties we cannot tolerate within ourselves. Perhaps this is why ideological movements so often provide emotional relief before they provide understanding. They offer clarity where introspection offers discomfort.

Maybe this is why modern life feels so relentlessly loud. Constant stimulation protects us from introspection. Outrage substitutes for self-examination. Ideology becomes a refuge from ambiguity. We cling to tribes, movements, and identities because they spare us from the burden of wrestling honestly with ourselves. To know thyself requires a form of humility that modern culture increasingly resists. It demands recognition that we are not purely rational creatures ascending steadily toward enlightenment, but fragile beings capable of wisdom one moment and self-deception the next.

But the operating room can become strangely clarifying. The endless distractions disappear. There is only task and attention. Reduction and fixation. Tendon repair. Microsurgical anastomosis. Before enlightenment, chop wood and gather water. After enlightenment, chop wood and gather water. The work does not save you from existence. It anchors you within it.

There is, however, a danger in romanticizing labor itself. History has already shown how easily work can be transformed from dignity into domination. Arbeit macht frei – “work sets you free” – hung above the gates of Auschwitz as one of the cruelest perversions of meaning ever constructed by man. Labor alone does not redeem the human condition. Work can liberate, but it can also dehumanize when severed from agency, dignity, and moral responsibility. The assembly line, the camp, the bureaucracy, and the machine all reveal how human beings can disappear inside systems that reduce existence to pure function.

And yet many survivors of catastrophe spoke not of transcendence, but of the necessity of maintaining some form of inward orientation amidst absurdity and horror. Viktor Frankl wrote that those who survived the camps were often not the physically strongest, but those capable of preserving some fragment of meaning, responsibility, or future-directed purpose even when the surrounding world had collapsed into mechanized nihilism. This was neither optimism, nor denial; but orientation. This was a refusal to surrender entirely to the void. The smallest acts – sharing bread, comforting another prisoner, preserving memory, imagining reunion with a loved one – became assertions of humanity against annihilation. There is something profoundly human in this refusal. This is not triumph. Nor is it naïve optimism. This is merely the decision to continue orienting oneself toward responsibility and existence despite horror, uncertainty, and suffering. To persist without guarantees. To act without certainty that the act itself will ultimately redeem the world.

Perhaps that is the distinction. Enlightenment is not found in work itself, but in the manner through which one inhabits existence while working. Labor becomes dangerous when it dissolves the self into ideology, production, or obedience. But work can also tether us to reality when everything else threatens to become abstraction. The surgeon repairing a tendon, the laborer building a home, the parent preparing food, the farmer tending soil. These acts do not solve the absurdity of existence. They instead refuse to abandon one another within it.

Albert Camus perhaps understood this best. The absurd is born from the collision between humanity’s hunger for meaning and the universe’s indifference toward our demands. Yet Camus rejected both nihilism and false transcendence. The answer was neither despair nor fantasy, but revolt – a conscious decision to continue living and acting despite uncertainty. Through his book The Myth of Sisyphus, one imagines Sisyphus happy not because the burden disappears, but because he accepts the burden without illusion.

There is something deeply absurd about medicine itself. We reconstruct the hand knowing the body will eventually decay anyway. We preserve function temporarily against entropy. We fight losing battles against time. Yet this does not make the act meaningless. If anything, it grants it dignity. The problem arises when enlightenment becomes confused with escape from the human condition altogether.

Every ideology eventually promises this. Political extremism, religious fanaticism, utopian economics, aesthetic radicalism. They all attempt to transcend the ambiguity of existence by imposing absolute certainty upon the world. The appeal is understandable, because certainty relieves anxiety. It offers orientation within chaos. But certainty is also dangerous because it transforms other human beings into obstacles to perfection.

Soren Kierkegaard understood the terrifying dimensions of faith through Abraham and Isaac. Faith was not comfort; it was dread. Abraham becomes isolated precisely because no one can understand what he was prepared to do. Yet this same suspension of ethics in pursuit of transcendent purpose opens the door to horror when transferred into politics or ideology. History is filled with movements convinced they were constructing heaven while producing hell instead. Every extremist believes they have left Plato’s cave. They believe they have transcended to know “The Truth,” as if there is only ever one answer. That is the irony.

Everyone believes they alone have seen reality clearly while others remain trapped in illusion. The revolutionary, the nationalist, the technocrat, the zealot, and the conspiracy theorist, all perceive themselves as awakened. Yet human beings are astonishingly skilled at constructing narratives that justify appetite while disguising it as virtue. Plato feared democracy because he believed the masses would succumb to irrationality and desire, eventually inviting tyranny. But Plato’s own solution – the philosopher king – merely relocated tyranny beneath the assumption that reason itself could remain pure and incorruptible. It cannot, because no ideology escapes the gravity of human appetite.

This is why I increasingly distrust movements obsessed with purification. They seek to clean the canvas completely, believing destruction is necessary before beauty can emerge. But societies are not blank canvases. They are living organisms composed of fragile relationships, inherited traditions, obligations, imperfections, and competing needs. Sweeping attempts to purify culture, politics, economics, or morality usually destroy the very conditions necessary for human flourishing.

Gabriel Marcel described modern alienation as crispation – a tightening or hardening of the self against the world. I see this everywhere now. People retreat inward into ideological fortresses because uncertainty feels intolerable. We become rigid precisely because we are anxious. Certainty hardens into a form of psychological armor. The more unstable the world feels, the more people cling to identities, doctrines, and tribes that promise orientation. Ambiguity begins to feel intolerable and complexity becomes threatening. Slowly, the ability to encounter another person openly, without immediately sorting them into categories of ally or enemy, begins to disappear. Tribal identities replace genuine community. The “other” becomes demonized because complexity is exhausting and ambiguity frightening. And yet enlightenment may require the opposite movement entirely. Not withdrawal from humanity, but deeper responsibility toward it.

Levinas believed ethics begins in the face of the Other. Before ideology, before systems, before theory. The mere encounter with another person places a demand upon us, as responsibility precedes certainty. Perhaps that is what hand surgery has taught me more than anything else. Not mastery. Not transcendence. Responsibility.

The patient arrives frightened, broken, vulnerable, often angry. Their suffering interrupts my own internal monologue. And for a moment, my abstractions collapse. I am returned to the immediacy of another human being who needs attention. And afterward? I still wake up the next morning. I still go to work. I still repair tendons. Before enlightenment, chop wood and gather water. After enlightenment, chop wood and gather water. The difference is not the task itself. The difference is how one inhabits the task.

Perhaps wisdom is not escape from the cave, but humility regarding how little certainty we actually possess once outside it. Perhaps enlightenment is not transcendence beyond ordinary life, but reconciliation with its impermanence, ambiguity, and responsibility. Not freedom from labor, but freedom from the illusion that labor alone can save us. Not the abandonment of the world, but participation within it without surrendering entirely to ideology, despair, or false certainty. The world remains fractured. Human beings remain contradictory. Systems remain corruptible. Mortality remains undefeated.

And still, the hand must be repaired, and so too the world.

This week I have a two-part essay on the concept of responsibility. Today, I want to focus on how that concept has evolved into some of the crises we are witnessing. I will continue the second half next week to better understand how to break down the boundaries we have constructed in order to become a more responsible global civilization. I will never argue for utopia, and I am not naive enough to believe that humanity will exist without conflict. Those of you that have read my work before will understand that there are no simple solutions to complex problems. That is not what I offer. My hope is that through conversation we can start to acknowledge our problems in an attempt to build a better world.1

As always, my work is completely free. I have no plans to monetize what I have to say or the ideas I share.

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Civilizations rise and civilizations fall. History makes this appear inevitable, but collapse is rarely as simple as destruction followed by replacement. More often societies evolve through assimilation. When civilizations decline, their ideas rarely disappear. Instead they are absorbed, reshaped, and inherited by those that follow.

The Roman Empire inherited philosophy and political theory from Greece. Medieval Europe preserved Roman law through church institutions. Enlightenment thinkers revived classical republican ideals while simultaneously developing new concepts of rights and governance. Ideas move through history much like genes move through generations: they recombine, mutate, and adapt to new environments.

Human thought evolves through this process. No philosophy emerges in isolation, and every intellectual tradition builds upon those that came before it. Yet beneath this continuous reshaping of human civilization lies a recurring principle that appears in nearly every moral, political, religious, and economic system: Responsibility.

Human civilization depends upon cooperation, yet repeatedly constructs systems that narrow the boundaries of responsibility. The central tension of history is not simply conflict between nations or ideologies. It is the question of who human beings believe they owe obligations to, and who falls outside that circle.

The Origins of Responsibility

Long before written law or formal institutions, human survival depended upon cooperation. Early humans learned that hunting collectively improved success rates. Sharing food reduced starvation risk. Group defense increased protection from predators and rival tribes. In this sense, responsibility emerged as a survival strategy before it became a moral philosophy.

This dynamic is not unique to humanity. Bees maintain complex hive structures. Wolves hunt cooperatively in packs. Ant colonies demonstrate sophisticated labor specialization. Schools of fish move in coordinated formations to avoid predators. In many biological systems, individual behavior becomes inseparable from collective survival. Humans, however, developed something different: self-awareness.

With consciousness came the ability to question, reinterpret, and reshape the “natural order.” We no longer simply adapted to ecosystems; we began altering them. The development of agriculture marked a profound turning point in this transformation. When we shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering toward settled agriculture, we fundamentally altered our relationship with nature. Rivers were redirected for irrigation, forests were cleared for farmland, plants and animals were domesticated, and permanent settlements emerged. In many ways, humanity domesticated itself and then began attempting to domesticate the planet.

But larger societies created new problems. Small tribal groups could rely upon instinctive social bonds and direct interpersonal relationships. Agricultural civilizations containing thousands or millions of people required more complex forms of organization. Shared survival instincts alone were no longer sufficient to maintain order at scale. To stabilize increasingly large societies, humans developed systems of law, governance, religion, and economic exchange. These systems attempted to formalize responsibility within the group. However, they also introduced one of the most enduring patterns in human history: that of division into “the other.”

The Birth of “Us vs. Them”

When groups with different systems of responsibility encountered one another, conflict became almost inevitable. Each believed its customs, hierarchies, beliefs, and moral frameworks were correct and legitimate. Tribal identity became intertwined with moral identity. At its core, tribalism was likely adaptive. Early human populations survived through tightly coordinated cooperation under dangerous and resource-constrained conditions. Loyalty improved group cohesion, and suspicion of outsiders reduced vulnerability to violence, theft, or disease. But the same psychological instincts that once protected small tribes became increasingly destructive as societies expanded into kingdoms, religions, empires, and nation-states. Tribalism did not disappear with civilization. It scaled upward alongside it.

Religion became one of the earliest and most powerful mechanisms for organizing both cooperation and division. Shared belief systems unified populations across geography and language, creating common moral structures and social cohesion. But they also created outsiders. The Crusades framed warfare not merely as political conflict, but as sacred obligation. Catholics and Protestants slaughtered one another during the Thirty Years’ War. Hindu-Muslim tensions during the partition of India displaced millions and fueled mass violence rooted in identity and fear. Once opponents became viewed not simply as rivals, but as heretics or enemies of God, compromise became far more difficult.

The same pattern emerged through race and ethnicity. We assign[ed] moral and political meaning to superficial biological differences, constructing elaborate hierarchies around skin color, ancestry, and physical appearance. European colonial powers relied increasingly upon pseudoscientific racial classifications to justify conquest, slavery, and extraction. The transatlantic slave trade transformed millions of human beings into economic commodities while simultaneously creating ideological frameworks portraying entire populations as inferior. These distinctions were not rooted in meaningful biological realities so much as political and economic incentives. Race became a mechanism through which exploitation could be morally rationalized while preserving internal cohesion within dominant groups.

Economic systems intensified these separations further. Nearly every civilization developed hierarchies concentrating wealth and power within relatively small segments of society while relegating others to subordinate roles. Slave societies, feudal structures, caste systems, and modern forms of wealth inequality all reflect assumptions about whose suffering mattered and whose labor could be extracted. The divide between master and slave, noble and peasant, owner and laborer was never purely economic. It shaped moral responsibility itself.

Even national borders reinforced these divisions. Arbitrary lines drawn through war, colonization, or political negotiation transformed neighbors into foreigners. Colonial borders across Africa and the Middle East often ignored ethnic, linguistic, and ecological realities entirely, contributing to instability that persists today. National identity became another extension of tribal identity, or a way of defining who belonged within the circle of obligation and who remained outside it.

This contradiction sits near the center of civilization itself. Societies depend upon cooperation to survive, yet the systems created to organize cooperation frequently intensify division. Religions unify believers while dividing faiths. Nations create solidarity while competing against outsiders. Economies generate wealth while stratifying populations into classes with conflicting interests. Political systems coordinate societies while concentrating power.

As civilization expanded, our technological and economic systems increasingly outpaced the moral boundaries of tribal thinking. Humanity now operates within interconnected systems of trade, finance, migration, energy production, agriculture, and ecological impact. Climate change, pandemics, pollution, and biodiversity collapse do not recognize national borders or ideological identity. Yet humans continue responding to planetary-scale problems with political and psychological frameworks shaped by instincts evolved for small-group survival.

We have become globally interconnected without becoming globally responsible.

Belief and the Architecture of Responsibility

Belief is the glue that holds large societies together. We are not organized solely through laws or force. Societies require narratives explaining why individuals should cooperate, sacrifice, obey rules, and care for something larger than themselves. Long before modern nation-states existed, religions unified populations across tribes and regions through shared rituals, moral codes, and stories. Religious institutions often reinforced charity, social stability, family structure, and moral accountability. For many individuals, belief also provided psychological comfort by offering meaning during suffering and uncertainty. Yet the same mechanisms that create cohesion within groups can also generate exclusion toward those outside them.

Religious communities frequently define themselves through adherence to doctrine and moral codes. Once belief becomes intertwined with identity, disagreement is no longer interpreted as simple difference of opinion. It becomes moral corruption, disloyalty, or existential threat. History repeatedly demonstrates how easily this dynamic can be weaponized.

The Salem witch trials emerged from a volatile mixture of fear, paranoia, religious extremism, and social instability. Accusations of witchcraft became mechanisms through which communities projected anxiety onto vulnerable individuals while preserving internal cohesion through the identification of enemies within.

Centuries later, the McCarthy era reproduced a remarkably similar structure. Although framed politically rather than religiously, ideological conformity became a test of loyalty. Individuals accused of communist sympathies were treated not merely as political opponents, but as existential threats to the nation itself.

Modern extremist movements continue exploiting this tendency. Religious narratives, nationalist ideologies, and revolutionary political movements all demonstrate the capacity to divide humanity into morally righteous insiders and dangerous outsiders. Politics increasingly operates through the same psychological architecture. Democratic systems often assume voters evaluate candidates through policy knowledge or governance expertise. In reality, political behavior is frequently driven by identity, symbolism, and emotional affiliation. A candidate’s language, cultural signaling, religious identity, or ability to reinforce tribal belonging often matters more than technical competence or long-term policy outcomes. Political identity increasingly functions like tribal identity, where opposing viewpoints are not simply viewed as incorrect, but morally illegitimate.

Belief mobilizes people because it simplifies complexity. It transforms uncertainty into clarity and provides individuals with meaning, identity, and belonging. But belief can also blind societies to contradiction, corruption, and institutional failure when preserving group identity becomes more psychologically important than confronting reality itself.

Economic Systems and the Narrowing of Responsibility

Economic systems shape responsibility just as profoundly as religion or politics. Every economic structure reflects assumptions about who benefits, who bears risk, and whose suffering remains acceptable. Modern capitalism has generated extraordinary technological advancement and productive capacity. It accelerated industrialization, expanded trade, increased life expectancy, and produced unprecedented material abundance. Yet it also contains structural incentives that narrow responsibility rather than expand it.

In practice, modern economic systems often prioritize obligations to shareholders, investors, and short-term financial performance above broader obligations to workers, communities, public health, or ecological stability. Markets reward what can be measured financially in the present. They are far less capable of accounting for long-term social and environmental consequences that remain politically diffuse or economically delayed. Corporations routinely externalize environmental damage by shifting ecological and public health costs onto the broader population. Industrial pollution contaminates rivers while surrounding communities absorb the risk. Fossil fuel extraction generates enormous wealth while climate costs accumulate across generations. Deforestation increases quarterly profits while destabilizing biodiversity and ecological resilience. In each case, the transaction appears profitable because many of the real costs are transferred elsewhere.

Financial systems amplify this fragmentation of responsibility further through increasingly speculative forms of capital allocation. Over recent decades, major sectors of the global economy shifted away from productive investment toward highly abstract financial activity. Complex derivatives, leveraged speculation, and short-term trading strategies generated enormous wealth while simultaneously increasing systemic fragility. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the instability embedded within these arrangements. Risky lending practices, excessive leverage, and speculative financial engineering triggered a collapse that devastated households globally. Millions lost homes, jobs, savings, and economic security despite having played little role in creating the crisis itself. Yet many of the institutions most responsible for generating those risks were ultimately rescued through public intervention funded by taxpayers. The crisis exposed a profound asymmetry within modern capitalism, where profits remained privatized during prosperity, while losses became socialized during collapse.

This dynamic continues to shape public distrust toward modern institutions. Wealth inequality has expanded dramatically. Housing, healthcare, education, and economic security increasingly feel unattainable despite rising productivity and technological advancement. At the same time, governments face mounting fiscal strain from aging populations, climate-related disasters, infrastructure deterioration, healthcare expenditures, and geopolitical instability. Yet political systems often remain trapped within short-term electoral cycles hostile toward long-term investment and planning. The result is growing institutional distrust. Governments, corporations, financial systems, media organizations, and democratic institutions increasingly appear unresponsive or captured by concentrated interests.

Societies are not destabilized by inequality alone. Human civilizations have always contained hierarchies. What destabilizes societies is the perception that sacrifice is no longer shared equally, accountability is inconsistently applied, and responsibility changes depending upon wealth, status, or political influence. Modern economic systems are therefore not merely mechanisms for allocating resources. They are moral systems defining whose risks are protected, whose suffering is tolerated, and whose future remains expendable.

Media, Information, and the Fragmentation of Reality

If belief shapes responsibility, media increasingly shapes belief itself. For most of human history, information moved slowly through oral tradition, religious institutions, newspapers, and broadcast networks. While propaganda and misinformation certainly existed, the speed of dissemination remained constrained by physical infrastructure and human limitations. Digital communication fundamentally altered this relationship. Information now moves instantaneously across globally interconnected networks capable of reaching billions of people within seconds. In theory, this democratized access to knowledge and expanded participation in public discourse. But the transformation of media during the 2010s and 2020s also introduced entirely new forms of instability.

Social media platforms are not neutral systems for distributing information. Their architecture is designed to maximize engagement because engagement drives advertising revenue, data collection, and platform growth. Algorithms increasingly determine what billions of people see and emotionally respond to each day. These systems are optimized not for truth or social cohesion, but for attention. Human psychology makes this especially dangerous. Emotionally stimulating content – outrage, fear, anger, tribal conflict, humiliation, and moral condemnation – reliably generates stronger engagement than calm analysis or nuance. As a result, digital platforms systematically amplify emotionally provocative content because such material spreads more efficiently through networks.

Echo chambers emerge as algorithms continuously reinforce existing beliefs and emotional patterns. Individuals become increasingly insulated from competing viewpoints while simultaneously becoming more confident in the moral legitimacy of their own communities. False narratives therefore spread with extraordinary speed. Rumors, propaganda, manipulated images, conspiracy theories, and emotionally charged misinformation can circulate globally within hours. The architecture of virality frequently favors emotional intensity over empirical accuracy.

At the same time, many traditional institutions responsible for investigative journalism and public accountability have weakened dramatically. Local newspapers collapsed across much of the United States and other advanced economies as advertising revenue migrated toward digital platforms. Communities increasingly became “news deserts,” where local governance, corruption, and civic dysfunction receive little sustained scrutiny. Into this vacuum emerged a fragmented information ecosystem dominated by partisan commentary, influencer culture, algorithmically curated feeds, and personality-driven media. Expertise and factual rigor now compete directly against speculation, outrage, and performative identity signaling. The consequences have become increasingly visible.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation regarding vaccines, masks, public health measures, and the origins of the virus spread rapidly online. Public health recommendations became entangled with tribal identity and political affiliation. Basic mitigation measures were transformed into symbols of ideological loyalty. Election cycles revealed similar vulnerabilities. Domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns exploited digital platforms to manipulate public perception, inflame polarization, and erode trust in democratic institutions. Simultaneously, conspiracy theories gained traction across ideological communities as distrust toward governments, media institutions, corporations, and scientific expertise intensified.

However, conspiracy thinking does not emerge solely from irrationality. It often grows in environments where trust has already eroded due to visible institutional failures, elite hypocrisy, economic instability, and political polarization. The danger is not simply that false information exists. These narratives have accompanied civilization for centuries. The deeper problem is that digital communication systems now allow misinformation to spread faster, farther, and more efficiently than at any previous point in human history while simultaneously weakening the institutions historically responsible for evaluating credibility. The result is a fragmentation of shared reality itself.

Individuals increasingly inhabit entirely different informational worlds shaped by identity, emotion, and algorithmic reinforcement. Scientific expertise becomes politicized. Objective reporting competes against emotionally satisfying narratives tailored to tribal affiliation. And when societies lose the ability to agree upon basic facts, collective responsibility becomes extraordinarily difficult to sustain. Complex civilizations require some degree of shared reality in order to govern institutions, coordinate responses to crises, and make long-term decisions together. Without that shared foundation, cooperation deteriorates into competing tribes defending incompatible narratives rather than confronting common problems collectively.

The systems we created to organize civilization have become extraordinarily powerful. But many increasingly reward tribalism, short-term thinking, outrage, and fragmentation rather than long-term responsibility. And in that sense, the crisis confronting modern civilization is not merely political, economic, or technological. Rather it is fundamentally moral.

Civilization has always depended upon the ability of human beings to expand the boundaries of responsibility beyond immediate self-interest. Yet many of the systems governing modern life increasingly reward the opposite: fragmentation over solidarity, consumption over restraint, certainty over humility, and tribal loyalty over shared obligation. Humanity now possesses extraordinary technological power, but power alone cannot stabilize societies that no longer trust one another or recognize their mutual dependence. The deeper crisis is not simply political, economic, or technological. It is a crisis of moral imagination, of whether human beings remain capable of seeing themselves as participants in something larger than tribe, nation, ideology, or market identity alone. The systems we have created are now global in scale, but our sense of responsibility often remains painfully narrow. And as the consequences of that imbalance continue to intensify, civilization may increasingly be forced to confront the oldest and most enduring question of all:

What do we owe one another?

If my writing conflicts or resonates with your concepts of responsibility and its distortions, please comment or message me to start a conversation

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“I’m a duck on a pond.” This was my response to a creative writing teacher from high school. She had asked me, “Who is Josh?” She cut to the core with a question that was intentional, and curious. My answer was immediate - a reflex - disconnected from executive function. As if it were stored somewhere else in the spinal cord’s ventral horn. My mouth knew the answer before I did. At the time, I was a 16 year old kid, but apparently Duck Syndrome is a thing I didn’t realize until I tried finding an image suitable for this post. I’ve been describing myself this way for a quarter of a century!

A classmate once quipped that I was a nerd disguised as a jock. I was the person in high school whose peers came to when they needed to understand something better. I was the dependable teammate, putting his head down to get the job done. Outwardly, I was calm, poised, driven – the duck relaxing on the water. On the inside though, my thoughts and emotions collided. Below the surface, my feet were churning to get me where I wanted to be through stress, anxiety, and insecurity.

Sports helped to calm the ripples in my mind. They always had. That was their purpose for me: to channel negative emotions into something more productive; preventing those ripples from becoming tidal waves of distress crashing down on me. The cliché of “leave it on the field” rang true in my life. The outside world – school, family, friends – did not exist when I stepped on the turf. Mind and body cooperated instead of competed. And I mean this beyond my psychological state.

Competition, from my perspective, was not against my teammates, it wasn’t even really against the other team. It was always about competing with myself. Maybe I’m looking back on my life and misinterpreting experience. But I don’t think I undercut others to succeed. My success was predicated on trying to be better than who I was yesterday (which still applies today). One of the major principles of athletics is that actions speak louder than words. Who you were, who you helped, and how you pushed yourself determined the outcomes. Sure, talent helps. But talent gets outplayed most of the time by dedication.

Competition in this sense also structurally limited time. Daily practice and weekly games or matches created a time crunch for all other aspects of life. For me, this didn’t raise pressure, it built focus, determination, and drive. I measured success based on what I accomplished without comparison to others. The more I completed tasks effectively, the more I added to my plate academically and athletically. This is the thought process I applied in high school and perfected in college. This didn’t eliminate negative self-talk nor the churning of anxiety. They certainly snaked their way into my thinking. But I was able to keep them at bay because of the foundation I had built.

Medical school created new challenges and obstacles. Focus had to be narrowed, which meant that certain areas had to shrink to create time for what “mattered.”1 Athletics – everything that helped build my focus – had to be put on hold. This was the first time since high school that this happened. While the duck on the surface appeared calm, those feet continued to churn. I had to learn to get by without sports, and had to develop a new productive physical and emotional outlet. Running and weightlifting substituted where sports had to be put on the sideline of my life.

But then came residency. The chaotic time schedule, high stress environment, and demand to always be present cut away my resolve like a drunk surgeon haphazardly excising tissue. The systems I built to maintain my personal homeostasis flat-lined as I reached the emotional equivalent of multi-system organ failure. This strain on my mind and body with the combination of intermittent or limited outlets created more churning under the surface. Adding insult to injury, I became more frustrated by the healthcare system. As I have alluded to, this led me down a path of self-discovery and a quest2 for knowledge outside of my specialty. To the outside world, I was the Rock of Gibraltar: stable, a welcoming beacon, and resolute. Internally, my negative self-talk burrowed into my psyche, threatening to overwhelm.

And so, I retreated inward into a chrysalis and a dense mesh of habits. This made it difficult to be present with others. I was closed off to new experiences. I even recall sketching in a journal while out to brunch one day with acquaintances and titling it “The banality of breakfast conversation.” I couldn’t bring myself to call them friends because I was too closed off. This was what philosopher Gabriel Marcel called crispation and it is the death of openness with oneself and others.3

I hid these sentiments away, but I’m sure some noticed. In an attempt to maintain my sanity (and simultaneously managing control), I trained for various events. I learned to embrace the inconsistency of my schedule in terms of sleep, exercise, meals, and downtime.4 This was not easy and every day was different. But as difficult as this was, it laid the foundation for my career and where I am today. I have not yet found the words, nor do I fully understand how I abandoned this internal tension. All I can say for now is that “I chose” to do so. Habits form through enough repetition that a behavior becomes involuntary. Over time, I coached myself out of this nature, emerging from my shell. This didn’t eliminate my inner critic, but silenced him enough for me to function as a semi-well adjusted individual.

I have already described aspects of what I do and the insane work schedule I keep. The anxiety and negative self-talk remain below the surface. But I’ve learned to accept it as a safeguard against hubris. Residency helped me embrace intermittent activity as an outlet. Combined with embracing personal relationships over time, I am now able to reflect back on my life with multiple perspectives of someone that understands and appreciates the negatives and the positives of my thought processes.

My outward appearance was never a front. It never hid who I was or who I am. What you see is genuine, but so is what lies beneath that surface. Just because you never saw it, does not mean it isn’t there. It simply means I never shared that with you. I am fairly emotionally transparent when it comes to my mood (at least I used to be. I’ve learned to hide it better with age - some would disagree). But I am absolutely opaque when it comes to insecurity, anxiety, or fear. This is not because I am concerned with what is perceived about me. It is because those aspects are more personal and deserve an intimate audience, one that is familiar, safe, and free of judgement. I have only recently decided to begin sharing my experiences publicly to demonstrate those struggles exist regardless of what is apparent on the outside. My hope is that my experiences will act as a guide and not a blueprint. Our lives, experiences, and perspectives may be different. I make no claims that I have chosen the “right path.” But I think through honest conversation we can all pause, reflect, and learn something from one another.

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Lusus Naturae

While nature does not make jumps, it certainly cheats. Bacteria, for instance, use scaffolding systems that allow them to share nutrients, resist antibiotics, and survive extreme conditions by building cooperative communities. These are primitive, elegant cheats that favor survival. Other forms of microbial cheating include quorum sensing interference, where certain strains signal cooperation without actually contributing to shared tasks like biofilm formation, exploiting the benefits of the group while minimizing their own costs. In slime molds like Dictyostelium discoideum, individual cells may withhold themselves from becoming part of the reproductive stalk, thereby increasing their chances of becoming spores and passing on their genes. This is a “selfish” strategy hidden within apparent “cooperation.”

Even in multicellular organisms, certain cancer cells evade growth controls, consuming disproportionate resources and damaging their host to ensure their replication. Cheating, in this biological sense, is a subversion of cooperative systems for self-gain. And in this regard, humans are no different. We are only more elaborate in our tools and more dangerous in our consequences. But where bacteria cheat with structure, we cheat with ideology. We conjure far more complicated ways to manipulate, cooperate, and exploit through laws, beliefs, markets, and narratives.

This dual nature – our ability to cooperate and to cheat – has given rise to some of our greatest achievements and our deepest failures. Among the most tragic is our capacity for self-destruction. Nature, too, holds examples of destructive force. Cyanobacteria, some of Earth’s earliest life forms, dramatically altered the atmosphere through photosynthesis, producing oxygen and triggering a mass extinction. But what distinguishes human destruction is not its scale alone, but rather our refusal to acknowledge it. Whether out of cognitive dissonance, willful ignorance, or systemic inertia, the consequences of our actions are persistently disavowed.

And yet, there’s something undeniably seductive about destruction. Storm chasers risk their lives to film tornadoes. People watch wildfires from ridgelines, transfixed. Hurricanes, tsunamis, and flash floods terrify us, but also mesmerize us. Their beauty lies not in the devastation, but in the raw power, the choreography of chaos, the revelation that nature is still in charge. This is not sadism, nor is it pathology. Rather it is our spiritual proximity to the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. There is beauty in decay when it promises renewal. But when humans mimic this destruction without the regenerative counterpart, we do not become nature. We become its saboteur.

“Natural” Dominion

Some describe our domination of nature as rape or pillage; a violent conquest for gain. But to me, this is humanity at its most masochistic. As Quentin Tarantino’s villain might muse, we find perverse satisfaction in our own suffering. And if we turn to Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, we realize that masochism implies the presence of a sadist. That sadist today is the system: the faceless interplay of demagoguery, algorithm, and economic compulsion. It offers us escape from freedom, from accountability, from truth.

Why do we relinquish our agency? Because we are insecure – not only in material terms, like wages or housing – but existentially. We are unsure of our purpose, our belonging, our role. Fear proliferates through stagnating wages, chronic disease, militarized borders, tribal identity politics, collapsing institutions. The pressure builds, not as an act of nature, but of design. It is artificial selection, engineered through economic policy and media manipulation. As Naomi Klein has shown, disasters are now a tool of governance; trauma repurposed for profit and control.

This artificial selection is through industrial orchestration and the weaponization of uncertainty. And like a scene from The Fifth Element, the illusion is seductive. John Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg, the corporate villain, explains that destruction begets productivity. He smashes a glass and watches robots clean it up; an elegant metaphor for disaster capitalism. Jobs, industry, and growth rise from ruins. “Thus, adding to the great chain…of life,” he says. But it’s not life he’s promoting, it’s dependency. The only life being extended is that of the system itself.

In this system, we are fed, but poorly. We are given water, but poisoned. We are treated, but rarely healed. Finance thrives on volatility. Healthcare is built on disease management. Education trains compliance. Environmental policy bows to extractive logic. Each domain becomes a self-reinforcing loop where destruction is not a failure but a feature. We extract, pollute, marginalize, and then monetize the fallout.

And still, we convince ourselves that destruction is generative. We romanticize collapse. But nature cannot make leaps, and neither can we. We are outrunning the resilience of every system: ecological, economic, political, medical, psychological. We are burning the scaffold beneath our feet and expecting future generations to climb from the ashes.

Civilization’s Failure

This was the visceral message of an art exhibit I encountered in a 2004 summer semester in Barcelona: La Bellesa del Fracàs. El Fracàs de la Bellesa—The Beauty of Failure / The Failure of Beauty. One of the main pieces in the gallery was somewhat of an interactive experience showing a deconstructed McDonald’s, with bloodied hamburgers, collapsing walls, and overhead TVs showing war footage from Iraq. The emotional tone of the exhibition was a physical slap in the face. Yet, what might look like anti-Americanism to some was in truth a diagnosis: a clear demonstration of corporate capture of politics and the use of force to maintain power. 22 years later we have only accelerated this philosophy. The externalities of corporate greed and profit motive through economic principles have only expanded.

The increased power of hurricanes, the frequency and scope of wildfires, the once in a generation floods that occur multiple times a year are not beautiful to watch. The chronic disease that I witness daily, the burnout and suicide of fellow physicians, individuals going bankrupt from medical bills, the use of military force to round up dissenters and immigrants, loss of worker protections and consumer rights, the loss of natural fisheries, oceanic dead zones, colony collapse disorder, food deserts, defunded education, and suspension of WIC and SNAP programs are symptoms of an ailing system. There is no beauty in this kind of failure. Two decades later, this exhibit feels prophetic. This is not entropy. It is engineered decay. It is empire eating its own young.

We are a civilization marred by its magnificence and captivated by its capacity for self-consumption. What then do we do with the auto-cannibalized corpse? The Earth will be fine. She has existed long before and will exist far after we are gone. But like the Cyanobacteria, we are making this planet inhospitable through our own industrial waste, while we dance on the pyrite of digital currency and accumulated resources. But we cannot take this failure and lean into desperation. This solves nothing and there is no beauty in it.

But even in collapse, nature teaches another lesson. Destruction clears ground for renewal. Fires give way to nutrient-rich forests. Floods deposit fertile silt. Death nourishes the next cycle. Our failure could become that fire, but only if we allow the regeneration that must follow. Instead, we double down. We build monocultures of agriculture, of economics, of ideology. Diversity becomes dangerous, a dirty word. Consensus becomes conformity.

The Reformation

We must fall back to the beauty of nature. Just as beautiful as those destructive natural forces are, they are equally as regenerative. Yet, here lies our true betrayal of nature: we have a society of profound homogeneity. This uniformity of mind and action is inimical to nature and evolutionary processes. Nature thrives by diversity. So too do institutions. Diversity isn’t a threat, it is cross pollination of people, ideas, and beliefs. We have artificially selected for a singular economic ideology. We have become dogmatic in our pursuit of profit. That is Social Darwinism in action, not natural selection.

Survival of the fittest is a pseudoscientific idea that we have bred into the fundamentalism of economics using violent means to achieve violent ends. We need to move beyond this belief system and allow our constitutional republic to flourish, free from the restrictions of captured politicians and corporate lobbyists. This is not a call for revolution. Nor is this a desire to invoke modern heresy and call for socialism or communism. But I am looking for a form of capitalism that serves the people and not just the wealthy. One that can function side by side and is not afraid of a strong Federal or State system. I am looking to build a society that is not limited by diversity of thought, but strengthened by it.

I am looking to build a society that is not fearful of the separation of church and state, but openly accepts discourse between secular and religious thought while avoiding the tendency towards extremism on either side. I am looking to build a government that can function with a separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and does not seek to make all three the unified boot of oppression for the economic will of the wealthy. I am not seeking a utopia as stagnant ponds are not fit for life. But I wish to embrace the beauty of nature, not simply for its destructive capacity, but for its ability to teach us the lessons held within 13 billion years. We should not be looking for the biblical Revelations or Apocalypse; this self-immolation lacks any form of intellectual or spiritual beauty. Yet we are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of selective intellectual breeding and self-induced destruction. Instead, we should be open to the Unveiling1 of nature: truth, responsibility, and shared survival. These observations should provide a revelation for the path forward, creating the beauty in the escape from our own failure.

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