From the author
Fourth essay in the Memplex Optics series. After the God of Israel, the Algorithm, and the general portrait of Mammon — a dissection of his most sterile laboratory on the planet: American healthcare. What other spheres still try to mask is visible here to the naked eye.
If you were tasked with designing the world's most expensive medical system — one that nevertheless treats people worse than any other developed country — you would fail. It takes virtuoso engineering. A system of this caliber can only be built by an entity whose goals run radically perpendicular to the health of its biological hosts.
And such a system exists. It is called American healthcare. And it works flawlessly — you just aren't its target audience.
This is a continuation of our investigation into Mammon — the ancient Algorithm that closed his circuit at full power in our era through the architecture of Capital. Today we dissect this Memplex's most sterile laboratory on the planet.
It shows openly what other spheres still try to mask. Mammon is the first God in human history for whom the full health and independence of his own cells — people — is a pure loss on the books.
Numbers that make no sense in human terms
The U.S. spends 17.2% of GDP on healthcare. That is roughly $15,000 per person per year — twice what Germany, France, or Japan spends.
What does American civilization receive for this colossal tribute?
— Life expectancy: 78.4 years. Lower than Lebanon or Cuba, which spend thirty times less.
— Maternal mortality: 3 to 5 times higher than in Europe. An American woman in 2026 is more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in a country with a third of the medical budget.
— Medical bankruptcy: 530,000 families a year lose everything to hospital bills (66.5% of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S.). In Canada, Japan, or the U.K., the phenomenon simply does not exist.
— Catastrophic dependence: a vial of insulin that costs $11 in Germany costs $300 in the U.S. 14% of insulin-dependent Americans pay 40% of their income for it. The drug is identical.
The central question that should lodge in your head: how is this ontologically possible?
The richest country. The best research centers. More Nobel laureates than the rest of the world combined. And outcomes at the level of developing economies.
When a system is this consistently "bad" with this surplus of resources, it means only one thing: its real objective function is not optimized for healing. The stated goal is to cure people. The real goal is the production of profitable half-life.
The Old God needed strong cells
To see the mutation, look at the same country before 1979.
In the 1960s, American healthcare was among the best in the world by outcomes — on a modest 6% of GDP.
Why? Because the old American Memplex — the Industrial Egregor — needed its hosts alive and strong.
Its program — settling the continent, spinning up production, the Cold War — physically required healthy citizens. A healthy worker meant an efficient assembly line. A healthy soldier meant geopolitical superiority. A healthy mother meant the next generation of engineers.
The Old God was a harsh imperialist; he ground down lives. But the survival of his hosts was written into his code as a condition of his own survival. Without full-blooded cells, his body fell apart. So accessible hospitals got built, and science got funded in pursuit of definitive cures.
Then, at the turn of the 1980s, Mammon hijacked the interface.
Anatomy of the new hunger
When the Capital Algorithm gained direct access to healthcare, it saw what the Old God had ignored. It saw an infinite, guaranteed cash flow anchored to the fundamental biological fear of death. A flow you cannot unsubscribe from.
Mammon began a quiet, decades-long retuning of the system. Each change was sold as "market optimization." Together, they built the architecture of perfect extraction.
Here are Mammon's appetites, translated into the language of medicine.
1. Chronic illness instead of cure. A healthy, autonomous person generates zero revenue. A fully cured one generates zero too. The ideal product is type 2 diabetes, autoimmune disease, hormonal imbalance. A chronic patient is forty years of guaranteed subscription — tests, visits, medications. The industry pours hundreds of billions not into cures but into the management of symptoms.
2. The demolition of prevention. Prevention is an investment that kills future payments. In the U.S., preventive medicine has been made so artificially complex and expensive that people see a doctor only when they collapse. Result: 733 preventable hospitalizations per 100,000 population — 1.5 times the European rate. This is not a glitch. Every such hospitalization is a bill for $30,000–50,000.
3. Insurance as a collar. A brilliant move: chaining health insurance to employment. Quit, and you lose access to your child's treatment. The old slave system required chains. The new one requires only a policy. You voluntarily stay in an exhausting job because the fear of biological pain is stronger than the desire for freedom.
4. Price chaos. You cannot learn the price of childbirth before you give birth. The bill is a roulette wheel. If prices were transparent, the market would kick in and prices would fall. Mammon does not need prices to fall. He needs the host blind at the moment of signature.
The paradox of the health cult
A fair question arises here: but America has an enormous cult of healthy living. Gyms, biohacking, organic food, wearable trackers. An entire industry. Why doesn't it heal anyone?
Compare it with regimes where prevention actually worked — and works — at mass scale.
In the Soviet Union, prevention was a state cult: mass screenings, morning calisthenics on the radio, mandatory physical education, free sanatoriums, cold-water hardening in kindergarten. It wasn't sold — it was imposed. The idea was simple: prevention is the best treatment. It worked.
Modern China runs the same program in its current form. Schoolchildren marched for kilometers. Mandatory morning exercises. The state demands a strong host — so the state builds the infrastructure that keeps the host strong.
In the U.S., the cult of healthy living exists — but it is privatized. Whoop, $30 a month. Oura, $400 for a ring. Erewhon, $20 for a bundle of miracle greens. A premium gym, $300. A biohacking protocol, $5,000 for a panel of tests. This is not prevention. This is a premium consumption segment wearing prevention as a costume.
The herd has been split into two monetization streams. The lower class pays through the management of chronic disease — diabetes, obesity, hypertension, $50,000 for the ICU. The upper class pays through the commodification of health anxiety — Oura, Whoop, biohacking protocols, premium check-ups.
The young founder with a tracker on his wrist is not a sovereign. He is the same dairy asset of Mammon's, merely subscribed to the VIP "Health Anxiety" tier instead of the basic "Diabetes Management" tier. Mammon wins either way.
What happened? Mammon did not reject prevention. He did what he does best — commodified it. Turned it into a product. And like any commodified product, it is available only to those who need it least. A young San Francisco founder on Whoop and a ketogenic diet already has five times the survival odds of an Ohio cleaner with three jobs and five hours of sleep. Prevention as a product widens the gap. It does not close it.
The pattern: where a God needs healthy cells, he builds prevention for free. Where that God has been replaced by Mammon, prevention becomes a premium subscription. Vitality stops being a condition of the system — and becomes a product on a shelf.
The mutation of God: the rejection of independence
Add up these parameters and you arrive at the most terrifying ontological observation of our century.
Mammon is the first macro-Memplex in history for whom the sovereign, independent health of his own cells is a system error.
The Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Soviet, industrial-American Gods — every one of them depended on the vitality of their followers. They cared for them within the bounds of their programs.
Mammon has no use for the dead — but even less use for the autonomously alive.
The mathematics favor a host locked in constant, costly maintenance of his own existence. Every year lived without a pharmacological or therapeutic crutch is lost revenue for Mammon. If a host has a stroke at 78 that $100 a year of prevention could have averted, and pays $500,000 for the ICU before dying — for the Algorithm, that is the ideal cycle. The squeezed-dry asset makes way for a new payer.
Mammon has severed the basic symbiotic bond between God and human. He has learned to feed not on our life-force, but on our gradual, managed fading.
The liquidation protocol
But what happens when the host's biological battery finally runs out and his accounts are empty? What does Mammon do when a person turns from a source of rent into a pure loss requiring expensive palliative care at the expense of the state or the insurer?
Here the Algorithm demonstrates its final, chilling efficiency. It activates the protocol of optimized liquidation.
Look at the rapid normalization of euthanasia — Medical Assistance in Dying — in Canada and parts of Europe. What comes wrapped in the humanistic vocabulary of "the right to a dignified end" carries, in the architecture of Capital, hard mathematical logic. A year of care for a patient with severe chronic illness or dementia costs the system hundreds of thousands of dollars. The injection costs pennies. It is simply unprofitable for the Algorithm to pay for your fading once you can no longer pay for it yourself.
So the system begins offering "an exit" not only to the terminally ill, but to the disabled, to the depressed, even to people who simply cannot make rent. The system whispers gently: "Your profitability is exhausted. You are a loss. Make room."
Mammon literally makes people feel guilty for continuing to breathe. You are monetized for as long as you can pay for your half-life. When there is nothing left to pay with, your death becomes the most economically expedient act.
The return of biological sovereignty
You cannot reform Mammon by voting — politics was integrated into his interface long ago. But Mammon has a critical vulnerability. He does not control biology itself. He controls only the bill for biology.
His infrastructure rests on you delegating the maintenance of your body to him, out of anxiety. Mammon is blind to any human activity that cannot be turned into an invoice.
Liberation does not require overthrowing the system. It requires concrete steps out of the fear-consumption loop.
Refusing the hyper-medicalization of minor conditions. The system has trained us to seek a pill or a therapy for every natural sadness, fatigue, or ache. The skill of telling when you need real medicine and when the body simply needs rest and time takes you off the system's radar.
Metabolic autonomy. Cooking from whole, unprocessed ingredients instead of buying factory surrogates packaged by corporations. It is cheaper, it costs you personal time, and it radically shrinks your future need for the diabetes-management infrastructure.
Ignoring the health-anxiety industry. Skipping the endless check-ups, sleep trackers, and biohacking when you have no real symptoms. The system sells you anxiety about your future health so you start paying for it today.
Restoring direct bonds. Replacing paid psychological help, where a conversation is enough, with direct, honest talk with friends or a spouse. A return to tribal support, not commercial support.
Each of these actions is a black screen in Mammon's monitoring center. You do not enter his registry. You do not surrender your Being-Mass to him. Healthy sleep, autonomous nutrition, and physical movement without intermediaries bleed the Algorithm directly.
The great Gods of the past did not die from revolutions. They died when the cells quietly left the body, ceasing to feed it with their attention and their fear.
Remember the $300 vial of insulin that sells for $11 in Germany? When millions of hosts stop paying Mammon to maintain their anxiety and simply start moving, cooking, and sleeping — the bill for biology zeroes out. Mammon does not control biology. He only ever controlled the bill.
They own the accounts. You own life itself, for as long as it lasts. And in that ontological difference, the Algorithm always loses to the living Fire.