From the author
Fourth essay in the memeplex optics cycle. 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, here is visible to the naked eye.
If you were tasked with designing the most expensive medical system in the world, one that nevertheless treats people worse than any other developed country — you wouldn't manage it. It takes virtuoso engineering. A system of this quality can only be built by an entity whose goals are radically perpendicular to the health of its biological hosts.
And such a system exists. It is called American healthcare. And it works flawlessly — its target audience is just not you.
This is a continuation of our investigation into Mammon — the ancient algorithm that finished closing his circuit in full force in our era through the architecture of Capital. Today we dissect the most sterile laboratory of this memeplex on the planet.
It shows 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) has become a pure loss on the books.
Numbers that make no sense in human logic
The U.S. spends 17.2% of GDP on healthcare. That's about $15,000 per person per year — twice as much as Germany, France, or Japan.
What does American civilization receive for this colossal tribute?
— Life expectancy: 78.4 years. Lower than in Lebanon or Cuba, which spend thirty times less.
— Maternal mortality: 3 to 5 times higher than in Europe. An American woman in 2026 has more chance of dying in childbirth than a woman in a country with a third of the medical budget.
— Medical bankruptcy: 530,000 families a year lose everything because of hospital bills (66.5% of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S.). In Canada, Japan, or the U.K. this 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 the same.
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 so consistently "bad" with an excess of resources, it means only one thing: its real target function is not tuned to treatment. The stated goal is to heal people. The real goal is the creation 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 one of the best in the world by outcomes, taking up a modest 6% of GDP.
Why? Because the old American memeplex — the Industrial Egregor — needed vital hosts.
Its program — settlement of the continent, launch of production, the Cold War — physically required healthy citizens. A healthy worker — an efficient assembly line. A healthy soldier — geopolitical superiority. A healthy mother — the next generation of engineers.
The Old God was a harsh imperialist, he ground down lives, but the survival of his hosts was sewn into his code as a condition of his own survival. Without full-blooded cells his body fell apart. So accessible hospitals were built, and science was funded for the sake of final cures.
Then, at the turn of the 1980s, Mammon hijacked the interface.
Anatomy of the new hunger
When the Capital algorithm got direct access to healthcare, it saw what the Old God ignored. It saw an infinite, guaranteed cash flow tied to the fundamental biological fear of death. A flow you cannot unsubscribe from.
Mammon began a quiet decade-long retuning of the system. Each change was sold as "market optimization." In sum they created the architecture of perfect extraction.
Here are Mammon's appetites translated into the language of medicine.
1. Chronicity instead of healing. A healthy, autonomous person generates zero revenue. A fully cured one — also. The ideal product is type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, hormonal imbalances. A patient with a chronic condition is forty years of guaranteed subscription to tests, visits, and medications. The industry directs hundreds of billions not toward cures, but toward the administration of symptoms.
2. Destruction of prevention. Prevention is an investment that kills future payments. In the U.S. preventive medicine has been artificially made so complex and expensive that people see a doctor only when they collapse. Result: 733 preventable hospitalizations per 100,000 population — 1.5 times more than in Europe. This is not a glitch. Each such hospitalization is a check for $30,000–50,000.
3. Insurance as a collar. A brilliant move: tying medical insurance to the employer. Quit — and you lose access to your child's treatment. The old slavery system required chains. The new one requires only a policy. You voluntarily stay at an exhausting job because the fear of biological pain is stronger than the desire for freedom.
4. The chaos of pricing. You cannot find out 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's blindness at the moment of signing the contract.
The paradox of the cult of health
Here a legitimate question arises: but America has an enormous cult of healthy living. Gyms, biohacking, organic food, wearable trackers. An entire industry. Why doesn't it heal?
Compare with regimes where prevention really worked and works at the mass level.
In the Soviet Union prevention was a state cult — mass medical screenings, morning exercise 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 form of treatment." It worked.
In modern China — the same in current form. Schoolchildren are made to walk kilometers. Mandatory morning exercises. The state demands a strong host — the state builds the infrastructure for the host to be 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 bunch of miracle salad. Premium gym $300. Biohacking protocol $5,000 for a panel of tests. This is not prevention — this is a premium consumption segment masquerading as prevention.
The herd is split into two monetization streams. The lower class pays through the management of chronic illness — diabetes, obesity, hypertension, $50,000 for the ICU. The upper class pays through the commodification of anxiety about health — Oura, Whoop, biohacking protocols, premium check-ups.
The young founder with a tracker on his wrist is not a sovereign. He is the same Mammon dairy asset, simply subscribed to the VIP "Health Anxiety" tier instead of the basic "Diabetes Management" tier. Mammon wins in both cases.
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 already 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 narrow it.
The pattern: where God needs healthy cells, he builds prevention for free. Where God has been replaced by Mammon, prevention becomes a premium subscription. Vitality stops being a condition of the system — and becomes a product on the shelf.
The mutation of God: the rejection of independence
Add up these parameters, and you get the most terrifying ontological observation of our century.
Mammon is the first macro-memeplex in history for whom sovereign, independent health of his own cells is a system error.
The Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Soviet, industrial-American Gods — all of them depended on the vitality of their followers. They cared for them within the bounds of their programs.
Mammon does not need the dead, but he needs the autonomously living even less.
It is mathematically profitable for him that the host be in a state of constant, costly maintenance of his existence. Every year lived without a pharmacological or therapeutic crutch is lost revenue for Mammon. If a host at 78 has a stroke that could have been prevented for $100 a year of prevention, and pays $500,000 for the ICU before death — for the algorithm this is the ideal cycle. The squeezed-dry asset gives way to 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, controlled fading.
The liquidation protocol
But what happens when the host's biological battery runs out for good, 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 insurance?
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 countries like Canada or in Europe. What is packaged in the humanistic vocabulary of "the right to a dignified end" has, in the architecture of Capital, hard mathematical logic. A year of caring 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 if you can no longer pay for it yourself.
So the system begins to offer "the way out" not only to the terminally ill, but to the disabled, to those in depression, and even to those who simply cannot pay rent. The system gently whispers: "Your profitability is exhausted. You are a loss. Make room."
Mammon literally makes people feel guilty for continuing to breathe. You are monetized 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 has long been integrated into his interface. But Mammon has a critical vulnerability. He does not control biology itself. He controls only the bill for biology.
His infrastructure rests on the fact that you delegate to him the maintenance of your body, giving in to anxiety. Mammon is blind to any human activity that cannot be digitized into a check.
Liberation does not require overthrowing the system. It requires concrete steps to exit the loop of fear consumption.
Refusal of hyper-medicalization of mild conditions. The system has trained us to look for a pill or a therapy for any natural sadness, fatigue, or pain. The skill of distinguishing when you need real medicine and when the body simply requires rest and time — this is leaving the system's radar.
Metabolic autonomy. Cooking food from primary, unprocessed ingredients instead of buying factory surrogates packaged by corporations. It is cheaper, it requires your personal time, and it radically reduces the future need for diabetes-management infrastructure.
Ignoring the Health-Anxiety industry. Refusing endless check-ups, sleep trackers, and biohacking if you have no real symptoms. The system sells you anxiety about your future health so that you start paying it today.
Restoration of direct ties. Replacing paid psychological help with direct, honest conversation with friends or spouses where appropriate. A return to tribal, not commercial, support.
Each such action is a black screen in Mammon's monitoring center. You don't enter his registry. You don't surrender your being-mass to him. Healthy sleep, autonomous nutrition, and physical movement without intermediaries — this is a direct bleeding-out of the algorithm.
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 fear.
Remember the $300 vial of insulin at $11 cost? When millions of hosts stop paying Mammon for the maintenance of anxiety about their health and simply start moving, cooking, and sleeping — the bill for biology zeroes out. Mammon does not control biology. He controlled only the bill.
They own the accounts. You own life, while it goes on. And in this ontological difference the algorithm always loses to the living Fire.