“The system is broken.”
That is the refrain, repeated each time rent spikes, ambulances fail to arrive, or billionaires prosper while public infrastructure decays.
But what if it is not?
What if the suffering is consistent not because of mismanagement, but because the system is performing according to design? Not to serve the many, but to maintain leverage for the few. Not to promote well-being, but to preserve obedience.
Cruelty mistaken for accident obscures function. This article pulls back the curtain, not to fix what is broken, but to name what is working exactly as intended.
The Myth of Incompetence
When systems harm, the most charitable explanations arise:
“They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“They’re just bad at their jobs.”
“They mean well,they’re just overwhelmed.”
Yet these narratives collapse under scrutiny.
If a system’s outcome is predictable, repeated, and directional, it is not failure; it is function. Chronic cuts to public funding, deregulated industries, billionaire-drafted tax codes, and surging inequality are not evidence of incompetence. They are evidence of orchestration.
In a truly broken system, those at the top would also suffer. But the inverse is true. Portfolios swell, lobbying expands, narratives dominate.
This is not a bug. It is a business model.
Scarcity by Design
Scarcity is the engine. But not natural scarcity manufactured scarcity.
There is no absolute shortage of food, shelter, or knowledge on this planet. What exists is a system that restricts access, hoards resources, and enforces gatekeeping through price.
The logic is simple: Scarcity creates dependency. Dependency creates compliance. Surveillance is accepted to preserve employment. Dissent is silenced to afford rent.
In a world of artificial scarcity, nothing is free. Not time. Not trust. Not care—if it can be metered, it will be sold.
A system that withholds life’s essentials not due to absence, but because profitability depends on their scarcity is functioning as intended.
Feedback Loops of Control
Systems are not static; they evolve, learn, and defend themselves.
Consider this loop:
- Public service is cut.
- People suffer.
- Private companies intervene.
- Those companies lobby to maintain privatization.
- More public systems are cut.
This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop a cybernetic system consolidating control with each cycle.
Not by force, but by iterative extraction.
Such loops appear throughout:
- In healthcare: where sickness feeds markets.
- In media: where fear feeds engagement.
- In debt: where poverty feeds capital.
What registers as chaos is often recursive design. The machine learns which levers sustain compliance and repeats them.
Who Benefits?
This is the question rarely posed by mainstream media:
Who benefits from housing instability?
Who benefits from rising anxiety, division, burnout?
Who benefits from the belief that there is no alternative?
The system benefits those who shape it. And those who shape it are not the public, but owners of capital. Systemic fairness is not the objective—stability for those in power is. As long as the majority remain fatigued, divided, and scraping by, the structure endures.
This is not conspiracy. It is configuration.
Naming the Design
Error-thinking prevails:
“Fix the healthcare system.”
“Reform the education system.”
“Patch the broken economy.”
But what if these systems are not malfunctioning?
Healthcare is expensive because it is lucrative. Education sorts workers instead of empowering minds because that serves market logic. The economy crashes cyclically because crisis is profitable for certain interests.
Reform cannot alter what is functioning. Only reconfiguration is possible.
That process begins with accurate naming: not as broken, but as engineered.
The Next Layer
When the logic of design becomes clear, further analysis becomes possible.
Subsequent sections explore the recurring patterns of this system the logic it follows, the narratives deployed, the distractions cultivated.
Headlines that pretend to inform while sustaining control are dissected.
A living archive of documentation develops not only to diagnose the present, but to begin conceptualizing a systemic future oriented toward life.
The system is not broken. It operates against the many, by design.
Recognizing that fact is the first step toward systemic transformation.