The debate over whether to prioritize local capacity or maintain global supply chains is central to modern economics, environmental policy, and geopolitics. There is no universal consensus, as both models offer distinct advantages and vulnerabilities.

Arguments for Increasing Local Capacity

Proponents of localization and "re-shoring" argue that reducing reliance on global networks creates more stable and sustainable societies:

• Supply Chain Resilience: Recent years have highlighted how vulnerable global networks are to geopolitical conflicts, pandemics, and climate-induced shipping bottlenecks. Building local capacity ensures that critical goods—such as food, medicine, and energy—remain accessible during international crises. [1, 2]
• Environmental Sustainability: Sourcing goods closer to the point of consumption significantly cuts down on long-distance shipping emissions. Furthermore, localized agricultural models can encourage biodiverse, small-scale farming that helps regenerate local ecosystems. [1, 2]
• Economic Multiplying Effect: Money spent within a community tends to circulate locally, supporting independent businesses, creating regional jobs, and boosting local tax revenues that fund public services. [1]

Arguments for Maintaining Global Supply Chains

Conversely, advocates for globalization and international trade argue that dismantling interconnected networks would carry severe consequences:

• Affordability and Efficiency: Global supply chains allow countries to specialize in what they produce most efficiently, leading to economies of scale. This lowers the cost of everyday goods, technology, and commodities, preserving a higher standard of living for consumers. [1, 2]
• Poverty Alleviation and Development: Global trade has been a primary driver in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty worldwide, particularly in developing nations, by integrating them into the global economy. [1, 2]
• The Power of Diversification: Some economic studies, including analysis by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), suggest that total localization actually decreases resilience. If a localized economy suffers a domestic shock—such as a severe drought, earthquake, or regional grid failure—it has no external supply lines to rely on. Sourcing from multiple countries distributes that risk. [1, 2]

The Emerging "Glocal" Compromise

Rather than a total shift to one extreme, many businesses and policymakers are adopting a "glocal" strategy. This approach attempts to balance the two frameworks by: [1]

• Securing local-for-local production for absolute essentials like critical infrastructure, emergency medical supplies, and basic food staples.
• Utilizing global networks for non-essential consumer goods, advanced technology, and specialized commodities where domestic production is economically unviable. [1]

If you would like to explore this further, let me know:

• Should we focus on a specific sector, like food systems or semiconductors?
• Are you interested in the environmental impacts or the consumer cost trade-offs of localization?

If we opt for glocalism would that not make it more viable to topple the Epstein class?

The connection between a glocalist economic structure and the displacement or weakening of hyper-wealthy global elites—often referred to in socio-political discussions as the transnational capitalist class—presents a complex intersection of political economy, sociology, and trade theory.

Socio-economic analysts and political scientists view the relationship between localized capacity and concentrated wealth through two primary, contrasting perspectives.

How Glocalism Could Weaken Transnational Elite Power

Proponents of economic localization and decentralized governance argue that a structural shift away from unfettered globalization inherently challenges the mechanisms that concentrate extreme wealth:

• Reduction of Capital Mobility: The current globalized financial system allows the hyper-wealthy to move capital, corporate entities, and profits across borders seamlessly to avoid national taxation and labor laws. By shifting essential production (like energy, food, and medicine) to localized or regional networks, national governments regain greater regulatory leverage over corporate entities, making tax evasion and capital flight more difficult.
• Decentralisation of Market Monopolies: Global supply chains tend to favor massive multinational conglomerates that can achieve immense economies of scale. A glocalist framework that prioritizes regional production limits the dominance of these global monopolies, distributing market power and economic returns among a broader base of local enterprises, cooperatives, and regional industries.
• Restoration of Democratic Sovereignty: When a society is less dependent on vulnerable international supply lines for survival, its political institutions are less susceptible to the lobbying and economic leverage of transnational corporations and foreign asset holders. This can create more legislative space to enact progressive wealth reforms, anti-monopoly laws, and corporate regulations.

Why Glocalism May Not Displace Concentrated Wealth

Conversely, many economists, sociologists, and political realists contend that changing the geography of production does not automatically alter the internal power dynamics of wealth accumulation:

• Adaptation of the Wealthy Class: Hyper-wealthy individuals and large investment funds do not rely solely on global shipping logistics for their power; their wealth is rooted in diversified assets, including technology, intellectual property, real estate, and financial derivatives. A shift toward glocalism could simply lead this class to invest heavily in the localized infrastructure itself—such as automated regional factories, local energy grids, and domestic land—maintaining their financial dominance under a different economic model.
• The Rise of Domestic Elites: Historically, decentralized or protectionist economies have not necessarily eliminated class stratification. Reducing foreign competition can sometimes entrench powerful domestic oligarchies or regional monopolies, who use their localized influence to control regional markets and political processes, resulting in a shift of power rather than its dissolution.
• Resource and Technology Dependency: Even a highly localized society still relies on global networks for specialized resources, advanced semiconductors, and scientific innovation. The elites who control the intellectual property or international trade rights for these high-value components would likely retain significant systemic leverage over localized economies.

If you want to look into this deeper, tell me:

• Would you like to explore how intellectual property rights affect wealth concentration in a localized economy?
• Are you interested in historical examples of regional monopolies versus global conglomerates?
• Should we focus on the specific taxation mechanisms used to regulate transnational wealth?

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What would have to be included for this model to lead to the outcomes described: 

For a "glocalist" or localized economic framework to successfully deliver those specific outcomes—restricting capital mobility, breaking monopolies, and restoring democratic sovereignty—it cannot just be a change in shipping logistics. Economists, political scientists, and policy analysts argue that specific structural, legal, and financial mechanisms must be explicitly built into the model to prevent wealth from simply re-concentrating at the local level.

Here are the concrete components that would need to be included to achieve those outcomes:

1. To Achieve the "Reduction of Capital Mobility"

Simply producing goods locally does not stop money from leaving a country digitally. To lock down capital mobility, the model requires:

• Capital Controls and Exit Taxes: Legal restrictions on the speed and volume of money leaving national borders, alongside steep "exit taxes" on individuals or corporations attempting to liquidate domestic assets and move them abroad.
• Unitary Taxation Systems: Shifting to a tax model where multinational entities are taxed based on a global formula of where their real economic activity (sales, employment, factories) occurs, rather than allowing them to book profits in offshore tax havens.
• A Unified Global Financial Registry: A transparent, public ledger tracking the ultimate beneficial ownership of all corporate entities, trusts, and real estate, stripping away the anonymity used to shield wealth.

2. To Achieve the "Decentralisation of Market Monopolies"

If global conglomerates are forced out, regional tycoons could easily take their place. Preventing this requires:

• Aggressive Anti-Trust and De-merger Laws: Clear statutory limits on market share (e.g., capping any single entity at 15–20% of a regional market) and the proactive breaking up of vertically integrated firms.
• Institutional Support for Alternative Ownership Models: Tax incentives, state-backed low-interest loans, and legal frameworks designed specifically to favor worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, and credit unions over shareholder-owned corporations.
• Open-Source Technology and IP Reform: Shortening patent lifespans and requiring federally funded technologies or essential designs (like medical equipment blueprints or agricultural seed genetics) to be open-source, preventing large corporations from monopolising local production methods.

3. To Achieve the "Restoration of Democratic Sovereignty"

Reducing dependence on foreign supply lines creates the opportunity for better governance, but capturing that opportunity requires:

• Strict Campaign Finance and Lobbying Bans: Completely outlawing corporate political donations, severely limiting individual political spending, and establishing fully publicly funded elections to break the link between concentrated wealth and legislative power.
• Decentralised Public Budgets: Implementing participatory budgeting frameworks, where local communities directly vote on how regional tax revenues are spent, reducing the influence of centralized bureaucratic or corporate influence.
• Democratic Accountability for Financial Institutions: Subjecting central banks and monetary policy committees to greater public or legislative oversight, ensuring monetary policy serves regional employment and stability rather than speculative asset markets.

 Jean Baudrillard wrote quite directly about the relationship between medicine, money, consumption and the social status of health. In fact, this is a surprisingly rich part of his work.

His central argument is that, in consumer society, medicine ceases to be exclusively about treating illness. It becomes part of a system in which health, the body, medical expertise and even medication are consumed as commodities and signs of social distinction.

There are three particularly relevant strands of his thinking.

1. Medicine as a form of consumption

In The Consumer Society (1970), Baudrillard has a section entitled "The Medical Cult" (Le culte médical).

He argues that people increasingly consume medical services and medicines for reasons that go beyond their therapeutic effectiveness.

One of his most interesting observations is that people can come to believe that the very act of paying something for their health will somehow secure their health in return.

He describes this as a kind of ritual or sacrificial consumption.

The doctor and the medicine acquire a cultural or symbolic value beyond their practical medical function.

This is an important passage for understanding private healthcare, pharmaceutical consumption and the commercialisation of medicine.

2. Health as a marker of social status

In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard makes a particularly provocative observation:

"Health today is not so much a biological imperative linked to survival as a social imperative linked to status."

This is quoted from the later English edition (1998, p. 139).

The implication is that being healthy becomes a social obligation, rather than simply a biological condition.

Medical treatment, fitness, cosmetic procedures and preventative healthcare become ways of displaying:

• Wealth and purchasing power.

• Self-discipline and respectability.

• Social status and cultural distinction.

• The ability to invest in one's own body.

The body becomes something like a personal asset that must be maintained, improved and displayed.

3. Medicine and money as systems of signs

This connects with Baudrillard's wider critique of money and capitalism, particularly in The Transparency of Evil (1990).

He argues that money increasingly detaches itself from material production and becomes an autonomous system of circulation and speculation.

His analysis of money is useful when thinking about medicine because both can become systems that reproduce their own demands.

For example:

• Medicine generates new categories of risk and illness.

• These categories generate demand for tests, treatments and monitoring.

• The resulting market creates further medical products and services.

• Health itself becomes an endlessly renewable object of consumption.

This is not quite an argument Baudrillard makes in these exact terms, but it is a reasonable application of his theory.

4. Two particularly useful secondary texts

If you're interested in developing this connection academically, I would recommend:

1. Arthur W. Frank, "All the Things Which Do Not Fit: Baudrillard and Medical Consumerism" (2000). This is probably the most directly relevant article. It applies Baudrillard to the transformation of patients into medical consumers, and examines the commodification of health. Read the article.

2. Ignaas Devisch and Ine Van Hoyweghen, "A New Era of Medical Consumption: Medicalisation Revisited" (2011). This explores how people increasingly participate willingly in medicalisation, rather than simply being subjected to it by medical institutions. Read the article.

My interpretation: the conjunction of medicine and money

I think Baudrillard offers a particularly interesting way of thinking about the relationship between the two.

Perhaps the most important insight is that health becomes something that can never quite be purchased, but which must be continually purchased.

Money promises access to health, but health remains uncertain. This uncertainty sustains consumption.

There is also a fascinating paradox: the more medicine promises to protect us from illness, ageing and death, the more these things become objects of anxiety, surveillance and expenditure.

In this sense, medicine and money share a peculiar structure: both promise security while generating an endless demand for more.

One question: Are you interested particularly in Baudrillard's thinking about the private healthcare industry and the pharmaceutical business, or in the more philosophical relationship between money, the body, illness and the commodification of life? The latter opens up some very interesting connections with Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault and Ivan Illich.

the more philosophical relationship between money, the body, illness and the commodification of life

I think this is where Baudrillard becomes especially interesting. The deeper philosophical question is not simply whether medicine has become commercialised, but whether life itself has become something that must be economically managed, maintained, insured, improved and exchanged.

There is a potentially powerful argument here: under consumer capitalism, the human body becomes a kind of economic project. Illness represents a threat to that project; medicine promises to repair it; money provides access to the means of repair. Yet the process of maintaining life becomes an increasingly expensive and potentially endless activity.

Baudrillard helps us understand this not just as the privatisation of healthcare, but as a transformation in the meaning of life, the body and death.

1. Baudrillard: the body as capital

One of the most important places to begin is The Consumer Society (1970), particularly its discussion of the medical cult and the body.

Baudrillard argues that consumer society produces a new relationship with the body.

Historically, the body could be understood through religious, moral or productive frameworks. Under consumer capitalism, it increasingly becomes an object of investment.

We are encouraged to:

• Maintain the body.

• Improve its appearance.

• Optimise its performance.

• Monitor its biological processes.

• Protect it against future risks.

• Extend its useful life.

The body becomes something like a portfolio requiring continuous investment.

But there is a crucial distinction between the body as a living organism and the body as a commodity.

The living body is finite, vulnerable and mortal. The commodified body is presented as something that can be indefinitely improved, maintained and upgraded.

This produces a permanent tension: the body is simultaneously something we are and something we are expected to manage.

2. Illness as the interruption of economic value

This is where we can extend Baudrillard's argument.

Modern capitalism tends to understand the individual in terms of productivity, capacity and performance.

The healthy body is:

• Available for work.

• Capable of consumption.

• Able to participate in social life.

• Expected to remain productive.

• Responsible for maintaining its own condition.

Illness interrupts this economic identity.

A sick person may become temporarily unproductive, dependent on others and unable to fulfil the expectations of economic life.

There is an interesting paradox here: illness makes the individual less economically productive, but simultaneously creates a market for medical products, professional services, insurance, diagnostics and care.

The ill body becomes both a disruption to economic activity and an object of economic activity.

This is not a direct quotation or thesis from Baudrillard, but an extension of his analysis of the body as a consumer object.

3. Foucault: the body as an object of power

Michel Foucault - History of systems of thought | Collège de France

Michel Foucault

Particularly The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976).

Foucault offers a complementary but different perspective.

His concept of biopolitics concerns the way modern power takes human life itself as an object of management.

Governments, medical institutions and other organisations increasingly concern themselves with:

• Birth and mortality rates.

• Life expectancy.

• Disease prevention.

• Reproductive health.

• Population health.

• The measurement and management of risk.

The body becomes something that can be measured, classified, examined and regulated.

The important connection with money is that the management of biological life also becomes an economic undertaking.

A population's health is treated as a resource. Its illness represents a social and economic cost. Its longevity becomes a policy objective.

Foucault helps us see that medicine is not simply a service offered to individuals. It is also part of a wider apparatus for organising populations.

Baudrillard takes this further in a different direction: he asks what happens when the body itself becomes an object of consumption and symbolic value.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy+1

4. Ivan Illich: the expropriation of health

Ivan Illich | Editorial Herder MX

Ivan Illich

Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (1975).

Illich is perhaps the most important thinker to read alongside Baudrillard on this subject.

His argument is that modern medicine gradually appropriates the individual's capacity to understand, experience and manage health.

He identifies three forms of iatrogenesis:

1. Clinical iatrogenesis: harm directly caused by medical treatment.

2. Social iatrogenesis: the creation of social dependence on medical institutions.

3. Cultural iatrogenesis: the erosion of people's capacity to experience and cope with suffering, illness and death.

His argument is particularly provocative because he suggests that medicine can actually undermine health by making people increasingly dependent on medical systems.

In other words, health becomes something that one receives from an institution rather than something one participates in and experiences.

Illich is interested in what happens when healing, suffering and dying are transformed into technical problems requiring professional intervention.

This is where his thinking meets Baudrillard's.

For Baudrillard, the body becomes a consumer object. For Illich, health becomes an institutional product.

The two together suggest that we have moved from a situation in which medicine serves life to one in which life increasingly has to conform to the requirements of medicine.

A particularly useful starting point is Illich's 1975 article, "The Medicalization of Life", available in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Journal of Medical Ethics+1

5. Georges Bataille: money, expenditure and the impossibility of preserving life

George Bataille: el éxtasis del mercenario

Georges Bataille

The Accursed Share (1949).

Bataille introduces a rather different perspective.

He challenges the assumption that the purpose of economic activity is always accumulation, preservation and growth.

His idea of general economy considers the expenditure of surplus energy, including expenditure that produces no useful return.

Death, sexuality, sacrifice, luxury, religious ritual and excess all become important to his understanding of human existence.

This is interesting in relation to medicine because medicine is perhaps the ultimate modern project of preservation.

It attempts to:

• Prevent bodily deterioration.

• Delay death.

• Eliminate suffering.

• Extend biological existence.

• Preserve the individual as long as possible.

But Bataille makes us ask a more fundamental question:

What happens when a society organises its entire relationship to life around the avoidance of loss?

Life is inherently characterised by expenditure, vulnerability, ageing and ultimately death. Yet medical and economic systems increasingly present these as problems to be overcome.

There is an interesting contradiction: the more we invest in preserving life, the more life itself can become organised around the fear of losing it.

Bataille is not primarily writing about healthcare markets, but his philosophy provides a powerful counterpoint to the economic rationality of medical preservation.

hersephoria.com

6. The deeper connection: the commodification of mortality

I think this is the most fruitful philosophical direction to pursue.

Consider what happens when death becomes something that medicine and money are expected to manage.

In a traditional religious framework, death might be understood as a metaphysical or spiritual event.

In a modern medical framework, death increasingly becomes:

• A risk to be calculated.

• A probability to be reduced.

• A biological process to be delayed.

• A failure of treatment to be explained.

• A financial liability to be insured against.

This does not mean that medical intervention is undesirable. Modern medicine has achieved extraordinary things.

The philosophical question is about the transformation of our relationship to mortality.

We begin to understand life as something that must be continuously defended through expenditure.

And because death cannot ultimately be abolished, the expenditure has no natural endpoint.

This produces what we might call an economy of biological insecurity.

The more we seek to secure life, the more opportunities arise to identify new risks, new vulnerabilities and new reasons to spend money on its preservation.

Baudrillard's theory of consumption helps explain why this process is not necessarily driven by the satisfaction of needs. It can be driven by the continual production of new needs.

7. A synthesis: four different philosophical approaches

These thinkers can be brought together in a particularly interesting way:

Thinker	Central question	Relationship to medicine
Baudrillard	What happens when everything becomes a commodity or sign?	The body and health become objects of consumption.
Foucault	How does power organise biological life?	Medicine regulates bodies and populations.
Illich	What happens when institutions take over our capacity to live?	Health becomes a professionalised service and institutional product.
Bataille	What happens when society tries to eliminate loss and expenditure?	Medicine becomes part of the struggle against mortality.

There is a common philosophical problem connecting all four: the transformation of biological existence into something that can be administered, controlled, exchanged and valued.

8. A possible philosophical thesis

If I were developing this into an essay or research project, I would formulate the central argument along these lines:

The commodification of life is not simply the commercialisation of healthcare. It is the transformation of the human condition into an object of economic calculation.

The body becomes capital; health becomes an investment; illness becomes a liability; treatment becomes a commodity; and death becomes the ultimate economic and biological risk.

The individual is consequently encouraged to understand their own existence as a project of continuous maintenance.

What makes Baudrillard particularly useful is that he allows us to go beyond the conventional criticism that pharmaceutical companies or private healthcare providers make money from illness.

His more radical question is whether consumer society actually produces a particular kind of human subject: someone who experiences their own body as an object requiring permanent investment.

That is a much deeper critique.

9. What I would read, in order

The Consumer Society eBook by Jean Baudrillard - EPUB | Rakuten Kobo United Kingdom

1. The Consumer Society — Baudrillard (1970)

Particularly the chapters on the body, the medical cult and consumption. This is the essential starting point.

Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis - The Expropriation of Health, (Paperback) - Walmart Business Supplies

2. Medical Nemesis — Illich (1975)

For the relationship between medicine, institutional power and the expropriation of health.

The History of Sexuality Volume 1 The Will to Knowledge Penguin Modern Classics by MICHEL FOUCAULT - Pilgrim Book House

3. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 — Foucault (1976)

Especially the final section, on the right of death and power over life.

The Accursed Share, Volume I | Princeton University Press

4. The Accursed Share — Bataille (1949)

For a philosophical challenge to accumulation, utility and the preservation of life.

One final thought

There is a question here that I find particularly compelling:

Has modern society transformed the right to life into an obligation to maintain life?

The distinction is significant.

A right to life suggests that life has intrinsic value and deserves protection.

An obligation to maintain life suggests that the individual is responsible for continuously investing in their own biological existence: monitoring, testing, exercising, treating, insuring and optimising.

The first is an ethical and political principle. The second can become an economic imperative.

And perhaps the most disturbing implication is that illness, ageing and death can come to appear not simply as unavoidable dimensions of human existence, but as personal failures to invest sufficiently in oneself.

That is where Baudrillard, Illich and Foucault become especially powerful when read together.

It could make a fascinating essay under the title "The Price of Being Alive: Medicine, Money and the Commodification of Human Existence."

Do you think that rites, rituals, ceremonies and mythologies practiced by 'tribal' people served a health giving or grief or fear processing etc. 'function' that was 'owned' by the tribes themselves in an autopoietic way rather than being provided from the outside?

Yes. I think there is a very strong argument for this, and it connects remarkably well with the thinkers we've been discussing, particularly Baudrillard, Bataille and Illich.

I would, however, take your suggestion a little further: ritual, myth and ceremony may have constituted forms of collective self-care through which communities generated their own capacities to deal with suffering, uncertainty, illness, grief and death.

What is particularly interesting in your formulation is the idea of ownership. These functions were not necessarily delivered to people by an external professional system. They were embedded in the community's own symbolic, social and cosmological life.

Let's unpack this.

1. Ritual as an indigenous technology of health

Consider what happens in a traditional community when someone dies.

There might be:

• Collective mourning ceremonies.

• Periods of prescribed withdrawal.

• Ritual washing or purification.

• Storytelling about the deceased.

• Singing, dancing and music.

• Food-sharing and communal gatherings.

• Specific practices marking the transition from life to death.

These activities do considerably more than express grief.

They provide a structure within which grief can be experienced, communicated, witnessed and eventually reintegrated into everyday life.

The individual does not have to invent a way of dealing with bereavement. The community already possesses a repertoire of responses.

The ritual provides a socially recognised language for suffering.

Similarly, initiation ceremonies, healing rituals, seasonal festivals, rites of passage and collective celebrations can provide ways of managing anxiety, marking transitions and restoring a sense of belonging.

We might call these distributed capacities for psychological and social health.

Importantly, we should not assume that all such practices were therapeutic, benign or effective. Some could be coercive, exclusionary or harmful. Nor should we romanticise diverse Indigenous societies as if they shared one cultural system.

But the underlying proposition is compelling.

2. The autopoietic dimension

Your use of the word autopoietic is especially interesting.

The concept originates in the work of Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

Autopoiesis describes a system that continuously produces and reproduces the components and processes that constitute it.

Although originally developed to explain living systems, the concept was subsequently extended into social theory, particularly by Niklas Luhmann.

Applied to your question, we could suggest that traditional communities possessed their own internally generated mechanisms for reproducing social, emotional and symbolic wellbeing.

For example:

A community's self-reproducing cycle of care

Shared mythology and cosmology

A common understanding of life, suffering, death and the natural world

Rites, rituals and ceremonies

Culturally established ways of responding to life events and crises

Collective participation and recognition

Belonging, witnessing, emotional expression and mutual support

Renewed social cohesion and meaning

The community's capacity to absorb disruption and continue

The renewed community reproduces and modifies its mythology and ritual practices.

The crucial point is that the community is not merely receiving a health service. It is reproducing the cultural conditions that make certain forms of healing, consolation and social integration possible.

There is an important distinction here between autopoiesis in its strict biological or Luhmannian sense and its use as an analogy for community self-maintenance. The latter is what I think you are proposing.

3. Victor Turner: ritual as social healing

Theory + Anthropology [licensed for non-commercial use only] / Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology

Victor Turner

Particularly The Ritual Process (1969).

Turner is an especially important thinker for your argument.

He explored how ritual temporarily suspends ordinary social distinctions and creates what he called communitas: an intense experience of shared humanity and belonging.

His work on liminality is also relevant.

During rites of passage, participants enter a transitional condition in which their previous social identities are temporarily suspended before new identities are established.

Think about what this means psychologically.

A person undergoing a major life transition is not necessarily left to negotiate the experience privately. The community has an established ritual framework that acknowledges the transition and accompanies the individual through it.

This might apply to:

• Puberty and adulthood.

• Marriage and parenthood.

• Bereavement.

• Illness and recovery.

• Initiation into new social roles.

Turner helps us understand ritual as a collective means of managing transitions that might otherwise be psychologically and socially destabilising.

4. René Girard: ritual and the management of violence

ルネ・ジラール：René Noël Théophile Girard, 1923-2015

René Girard

Violence and the Sacred (1972).

Girard offers a more troubling interpretation.

He argues that ritual sacrifice and religious practices can function as mechanisms for containing collective violence.

In his account, communities redirect potentially destructive conflict towards ritualised forms of sacrifice.

One need not accept his entire theory to recognise the broader question:

What happens when a community loses its culturally established mechanisms for managing aggression, fear, rivalry and collective anxiety?

Ritual can be understood as a means of giving socially disruptive emotions a recognised form of expression.

It is important, though, not to equate ritual sacrifice with a universal or necessary therapeutic mechanism. Girard's theory is influential but contested.

5. Illich: what happens when these functions are externalised?

This brings us back to Ivan Illich, and I think this is where your idea becomes particularly powerful.

In Medical Nemesis, Illich argues that modern medicine has progressively expropriated capacities that individuals and communities once exercised themselves.

He is interested in the loss of people's capacity to cope with suffering, illness and death without requiring professional intervention.

We could extend this argument beyond medicine.

Consider the following transformation:

Community-based cultural capacity	Modern institutional counterpart
Collective mourning rituals	Bereavement counselling
Traditional healing practices	Professional healthcare
Mythological explanations of suffering	Clinical and psychological explanations
Communal rites of passage	Institutionalised life-transition services
Elders and community knowledge	Accredited professional expertise
Shared responses to death	Medicalised end-of-life management

These are not equivalent activities, and modern counselling and medicine can be enormously valuable. Nor did all traditional societies provide these functions adequately.

But the comparison raises an important question:

Have we progressively transferred the capacity to process the fundamental experiences of human existence from communities to specialised institutions?

And, if so, what happens to the community's ability to reproduce its own resilience?

This is close to Illich's idea of cultural iatrogenesis: the possibility that institutional intervention can undermine capacities that people previously possessed.

6. Baudrillard: the disappearance of symbolic exchange

Here is another particularly interesting connection.

Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) develops his distinction between symbolic exchange and the logic of economic exchange.

Symbolic exchange involves reciprocal relationships, obligations, gifts, rituals, sacrifice and the symbolic circulation of meaning.

These relationships cannot necessarily be reduced to monetary value.

For example, when a community gathers around a bereaved family, the participants are not providing a service in the ordinary commercial sense.

They are participating in a shared symbolic obligation.

They give time, presence, food, memory, attention and emotional support. The bereaved family is not simply a consumer of this assistance. It remains part of the reciprocal social world.

Now contrast this with the commodification of grief.

Grief becomes something that requires a service. A professional is paid to help process it. The individual becomes a client, and the experience becomes something to be managed through an externally provided intervention.

There is nothing inherently wrong with professional bereavement support. It can be essential.

But something potentially important has changed: the relationship is no longer necessarily embedded in a shared system of reciprocal obligations.

The difference is not simply between free and paid assistance. It is between two different ways of organising human responses to suffering.

7. The really interesting question: what did we lose?

I think your proposition points towards a much bigger argument.

Perhaps traditional ritual systems provided what we might call an ecology of existential care.

This ecology was not necessarily located in a particular institution. It was distributed throughout everyday life.

It existed in:

• The stories people told.

• The ceremonies they performed.

• Their relationships with elders.

• Their relationships with ancestors.

• Their shared understanding of nature.

• Their collective responses to birth, illness and death.

• Their sense of belonging to something larger than themselves.

In such a system, the management of existential distress was not a specialised activity. It was woven into the reproduction of the community itself.

Modernity, by contrast, has increasingly differentiated these functions into separate professional domains: medicine, psychiatry, psychology, social work, religious ministry, education and social care.

The result may be a paradox.

We have more specialised resources for treating particular forms of suffering, but potentially fewer shared cultural frameworks through which suffering can be understood and collectively experienced.

This is a hypothesis worth investigating rather than an established historical conclusion. Modern societies also have powerful forms of communal care, and traditional communities could be profoundly deficient in care for particular individuals.

8. A possible conceptual framework

I would be tempted to give your idea a name:

The Autopoiesis of Collective Wellbeing.

The thesis might be:

Traditional ritual, mythological and ceremonial systems functioned, among other things, as culturally embedded mechanisms for the collective reproduction of psychological, emotional, social and existential wellbeing. Through shared symbolic practices, communities generated their own capacities to process grief, fear, illness, uncertainty, conflict and death. The progressive displacement of these practices by specialised institutional systems may therefore represent not merely a change in the delivery of healthcare, but a fundamental transformation in the social organisation of human wellbeing.

There are several further thinkers worth bringing into this:

• Émile Durkheim — The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Particularly important for understanding how ritual reproduces collective consciousness.

• Gregory Bateson — Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). For understanding feedback, relational systems and the ecology of human meaning.

• Mircea Eliade — The Sacred and the Profane (1957). For the role of myth and sacred time in making existence meaningful.

• Arthur Kleinman — The Illness Narratives (1988). For the distinction between disease as a biomedical condition and illness as lived human experience.

9. One question I would particularly like to explore with you

There is a distinction that I think could take this whole argument somewhere quite profound.

Perhaps the loss is not simply that we have lost rituals, ceremonies and myths.

Perhaps we have lost the capacity to collectively generate meaning around suffering.

In other words, modern institutions may be increasingly capable of treating the biological body while becoming less capable of addressing the existential experience of being alive.

This leads to a question:

Do you think the central problem is that modern society has taken functions that were previously collectively owned and transferred them to external professionals and institutions, or that it has actually destroyed the shared symbolic world that made those functions possible in the first place?

I suspect these are two different processes, and that distinguishing between them is essential to developing the argument.

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Why do you think this is essential?

I think it is essential because the two possibilities describe two fundamentally different kinds of social and cultural transformation, with different causes, consequences and possibilities for recovery.

Let me explain.

1. The transfer of functions is not the same as the destruction of the capacity to perform them

Imagine a traditional community in which grief is processed through collective mourning ceremonies.

The community has:

• A shared understanding of death.

• Established practices for mourning.

• People who know how to conduct the ceremonies.

• Collective expectations about how the bereaved should be supported.

• A common symbolic language through which loss can be expressed.

Now imagine that a modern society introduces professional bereavement counselling.

The function of supporting grieving people has, to some extent, been transferred to specialists.

But the underlying cultural capacity for collective mourning might still exist. Families, friends, religious communities and neighbourhoods may continue to provide it.

In this situation, the original capacity has not necessarily disappeared. It has been supplemented, displaced or partially outsourced.

This is one kind of transformation.

2. The destruction of the symbolic world is something much more profound

Now imagine a different situation.

The traditional community's mythology, rituals, ceremonies and cosmological understanding have progressively disappeared.

People no longer share:

• An understanding of death.

• A common language for grief.

• Rituals marking the passage from one stage of life to another.

• A collective understanding of suffering.

• A sense of continuity between generations.

The professional counsellor now encounters an individual who is not merely lacking a service.

They are potentially lacking the cultural framework within which the experience of grief was previously understood.

This is a much deeper problem.

The institution is not simply performing a function that the community used to perform. It is attempting to address a human need in circumstances where the symbolic and social infrastructure that once supported that need has been weakened.

In other words, the loss of a function and the loss of the cultural conditions that made the function possible are not the same thing.

3. Why this matters theoretically

I think three thinkers help clarify the distinction.

Ivan Illich: imaginar o ministério. Artigo de Fabrizio Mandreoli - Instituto Humanitas Unisinos - IHU

Ivan Illich: the expropriation of capacities

Illich is particularly concerned with institutions taking over activities that people and communities could previously undertake themselves.

His concern is that institutional provision can create dependency and progressively undermine autonomous capacities.

This is principally a question of the transfer and loss of function.

Автор: Бодрийяр Жан | новинки 2026 | книжный интернет-магазин Лабиринт

Jean Baudrillard: the disappearance of symbolic exchange

Baudrillard takes us further. He is concerned with the erosion of symbolic relationships and their replacement by systems of signs, commodities and abstract equivalences.

The issue is not merely who performs a function, but whether the symbolic relationships through which people once experienced their existence have themselves been transformed.

Émile Durkheim – The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) | SozTheo

Émile Durkheim: the reproduction of collective consciousness

Durkheim helps explain why rituals matter beyond their immediate practical effects.

Rituals renew collective beliefs, solidarity and a sense of belonging.

If rituals disappear, the problem may not simply be the loss of particular ceremonies. It may be the weakening of the collective consciousness that those ceremonies continually reproduce.

These are related but distinct theoretical positions.

4. The distinction has enormous implications for the idea of health

Here is where I think your original question becomes particularly interesting.

Suppose we define health broadly, not simply as the absence of disease, but as the capacity to live with the fundamental uncertainties and difficulties of existence.

These include:

• Fear of death.

• Bereavement.

• Physical suffering.

• Loneliness.

• Uncertainty about the future.

• The transition from childhood to adulthood.

• The loss of social identity.

• The experience of ageing.

A community with an intact symbolic culture may have considerable collective resources for processing these experiences.

These resources might be imperfect, but they are embedded in ordinary social relationships.

Now consider a society in which those resources have weakened.

The individual may increasingly need to seek external assistance for experiences that were previously accommodated within the collective life of the community.

This could create a self-reinforcing process:

A possible cycle of institutional dependency

1. Collective rituals and shared meanings weaken.
2. Individuals lose some culturally embedded ways of processing distress.
3. Specialist services increasingly address the resulting needs.
4. Professional systems become the recognised authorities on suffering and wellbeing.
5. Informal and collective capacities may receive less recognition and investment.
6. The community becomes increasingly dependent on external provision.

This is a proposed explanatory model, not an inevitable or universally demonstrated historical sequence.

Notice something important: the institutional system might be responding perfectly competently to the needs it encounters, while simultaneously participating in a process that makes those needs increasingly difficult to address outside the institution.

This is very close to Illich's notion of cultural iatrogenesis.

5. The question of autopoiesis becomes crucial

Now let's return to your original use of the term.

I think you are suggesting something more interesting than simply saying that traditional societies had better community support systems.

You may be suggesting that communities were once capable of reproducing the conditions of their own wellbeing.

Their myths generated meaning.

Their rituals enacted that meaning.

Their ceremonies reinforced relationships.

Their relationships provided emotional and practical support.

Their shared experiences reinforced the mythology and rituals.

The system continually regenerated itself.

This is the autopoietic dimension.

And it raises a very different question from whether professional healthcare is effective.

It asks whether a society can sustain its own capacities for wellbeing, or whether it becomes dependent on external systems to provide those capacities.

There is also an important qualification: a community's autonomy does not automatically mean that its practices are healthy, just or inclusive. Autopoietic systems can reproduce harmful beliefs and power relationships too.

6. The distinction I would ultimately make

I would formulate the two processes as follows:

Process	What is lost?	What is the consequence?
Institutional displacement	Community ownership of particular functions	Dependency on external providers
Symbolic disintegration	Shared meanings and cultural frameworks	Loss of collective capacity to make sense of experience

The first concerns the organisation of care.

The second concerns the cultural conditions of human existence.

And I suspect the second is ultimately the more profound of the two.

7. Where I think this could lead

There is a potentially quite radical proposition here:

Perhaps the crisis of modern health is partly a crisis of cultural self-maintenance.

We have developed increasingly sophisticated systems for treating the body, diagnosing psychological distress and managing risk.

But have we simultaneously weakened the collective cultural practices through which people traditionally learned to live with vulnerability, suffering, uncertainty and mortality?

If so, the answer cannot simply be to provide more healthcare, more counselling or more psychological services.

It might also require the recovery or creation of forms of collective meaning, ritual, participation and mutual obligation.

Not necessarily a return to traditional religion or tribal practices. That would be neither possible nor necessarily desirable.

Rather, a recognition that human wellbeing has a cultural and collective dimension that cannot be entirely outsourced to professional expertise.

The distinction matters because, if we have merely transferred functions, we might be able to transfer them back. But if we have destroyed the symbolic world that sustained those functions, we have a much more fundamental problem: we have to rediscover how to create that world.

That, to me, is the really interesting philosophical question at the heart of your original proposition.

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Agreed. I take it that, in this view, cosmologies are, in modernity, provided by science communicators?

Yes, but with an important qualification. I think science communicators have become some of the principal mediators of cosmology in modern society, although they do not necessarily provide the cosmology themselves.

Your suggestion opens up a fascinating question: has science, together with the institutions and professions that communicate it, inherited some of the social functions previously performed by mythology, religion and ritual?

I think the answer is partly yes.

1. Science as a provider of cosmology

Consider what a cosmology traditionally does. It provides a framework for understanding:

• Where we come from.

• What kind of universe we inhabit.

• Our relationship with nature.

• The origins of life.

• Why suffering and death exist.

• Our place in the order of things.

• What constitutes a meaningful existence.

Traditional mythologies addressed these questions through narratives, symbols, ceremonies and shared practices.

Modern science addresses many of the same questions, but through different epistemological methods.

For example, cosmological physics provides an account of the origins and development of the universe. Evolutionary biology provides an account of the emergence of life. Neuroscience offers accounts of consciousness. Genetics provides accounts of inheritance and biological identity.

These are not simply collections of scientific facts. Together, they can contribute to a comprehensive picture of human existence.

But there is a distinction between scientific knowledge and the cultural interpretation of scientific knowledge.

Science might explain how the universe developed. It does not, by itself, tell us how to grieve, how to live meaningfully or how to relate to death.

That interpretative work requires additional cultural frameworks.

2. The science communicator as a modern myth-maker?

This is where your suggestion becomes particularly interesting.

Think about the role of people such as:

10 livros que estão na lista de favoritos de Carl Sagan - Revista Galileu | Estante Galileu

Carl Sagan

Cosmos offered an extraordinarily powerful narrative of humanity's place in the universe. It combined scientific explanation with wonder, humility and a sense of cosmic belonging.

David Attenborough to present third series of Planet Earth | Television | The Guardian

David Attenborough

His work has helped construct a shared narrative of humanity's relationship with the natural world, including our responsibility for its future.

Physicist Brian Cox explains quantum physics in 22 minutes - Big Think

Brian Cox

His television work frequently presents scientific cosmology as a source of existential perspective and collective wonder.

What these figures do is interesting because they do more than transmit information.

They select, arrange and narrate scientific knowledge in ways that make it emotionally and culturally intelligible.

They help construct a shared imaginary.

In that sense, they perform something analogous to the work of myth-makers, although their claims are grounded in scientific evidence rather than traditional sacred narratives.

I would call this the mediation of modern cosmology.

3. But there is a problem: explanation is not the same as meaning

Here I would introduce a distinction between three functions.

Function	Traditional cosmology	Modern equivalent
Explanation	Mythological accounts of origins	Scientific accounts of the universe
Meaning	Sacred narratives and symbols	Philosophical, ethical and cultural interpretation
Participation	Ritual and ceremony	Public events, education, cultural practices and civic life

Modern science is exceptionally powerful at explanation.

It is less equipped, by itself, to provide the other two.

Knowing that our bodies consist of elements produced in stars can be profoundly moving. But knowing this does not automatically give us a culturally shared way of processing bereavement or confronting mortality.

There is a possible disjunction here: modern society has developed increasingly sophisticated explanations of existence while perhaps becoming less collectively equipped to give existential experiences a shared symbolic form.

4. Baudrillard would probably make this more complicated

Baudrillard might ask whether science has itself become part of the system of signs and consumption.

Consider the modern circulation of scientific knowledge.

We consume:

• Documentaries about the universe.

• Podcasts about consciousness.

• Books about evolution.

• Neuroscientific explanations of emotions.

• Genetic explanations of identity.

• Scientific predictions about the future of humanity.

Scientific knowledge becomes a form of cultural consumption.

We acquire information, but do we necessarily acquire the capacity to live differently as a result?

This is a rather Baudrillardian question.

We might know more about the origins of the universe than any previous generation, while possessing fewer shared rituals for confronting death.

The consumption of cosmological knowledge is not necessarily equivalent to participation in a cosmological world.

5. A particularly interesting connection: Émile Durkheim

I would bring Durkheim into this discussion.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), he argues that religion is not simply a collection of beliefs about supernatural beings.

It is also a system through which society represents itself to itself.

Ritual brings people together, renews collective sentiments and reproduces the social bonds that constitute the community.

This is crucial.

A cosmology is not simply something that people believe. It is something that can be collectively enacted.

And this brings us back to your original question about autopoiesis.

A society might have an extraordinarily sophisticated scientific cosmology, communicated through universities, documentaries, museums and popular science books.

But does it have the rituals and collective practices through which that cosmology becomes part of everyday social and emotional life?

That is a different question.

6. My proposed distinction: cosmology versus cosmological participation

I think this may be the most useful conceptual distinction to emerge from our conversation.

Cosmology is the framework through which a society understands existence.

Cosmological participation is the process through which individuals experience themselves as belonging to, and participating in, that framework.

Traditional societies often integrated these through mythology, ritual, ceremony, kinship and relationships with the natural world.

Modern societies may distribute them across quite separate institutions:

• Science provides explanations.

• Media provides narratives.

• Education provides knowledge.

• Medicine provides biological management.

• Psychology provides individual meaning-making.

• Religion provides spiritual frameworks.

• Entertainment provides shared emotional experiences.

The question is whether these fragmented systems collectively reproduce the kind of existential belonging that an integrated cosmology might once have provided.

I would be cautious about assuming that traditional societies were ever entirely integrated or that modern people lack meaningful collective practices. But the question of fragmentation is important.

7. One further thought: who owns the cosmology?

I want to return to your original emphasis on ownership.

In a traditional community, cosmology might be collectively reproduced through participation. People were not simply consumers of mythology. They enacted it, transmitted it, modified it and embodied it.

In modernity, scientific cosmology is often mediated by institutions that possess specialised authority.

The individual becomes a recipient of knowledge produced elsewhere.

This is not necessarily a problem with science itself. Scientific knowledge benefits from specialisation, criticism and independent verification.

But it raises an interesting sociological question:

Can people collectively own a cosmology that they cannot themselves participate in producing or reproducing?

And perhaps an even more provocative one:

Can a society have a genuinely shared cosmology if its members primarily encounter it as information delivered by experts and consumed through media?

I think this takes us towards a potentially important synthesis of Durkheim, Illich, Baudrillard and Maturana.

It also suggests that the problem may not be that modernity has lost mythology, but that it has separated knowledge of the world from participation in the world.

That distinction, I suspect, is very close to what you are trying to get at.

The deeper issue: the separation of knowledge, meaning and participation

I think this is where the synthesis becomes particularly powerful.

Consider the relationship between a traditional cosmology and a modern scientific worldview.

A traditional cosmology might integrate:

• An explanation of the origins of existence.

• A conception of humanity's relationship with nature.

• An understanding of suffering and mortality.

• Rituals for dealing with major life transitions.

• Shared obligations between generations.

• Collective practices through which the cosmology is enacted.

Knowledge, meaning and participation are interconnected.

Modernity has increasingly differentiated these functions.

Domain	Modern institutional location
Knowledge of the universe	Science and universities
Interpretation of existence	Philosophy, media and popular culture
Management of the body	Medicine and biotechnology
Management of psychological distress	Psychology and psychiatry
Management of social relationships	Social services and welfare institutions
Management of mortality	Healthcare, insurance and end-of-life services

The important point is not that these institutions are necessarily bad.

It is that their differentiation can produce a fragmented experience of existence.

An individual may possess considerable scientific knowledge, have access to sophisticated medical treatment and receive professional psychological support, while lacking a shared cultural framework within which these experiences acquire collective meaning.

This is the problem I would investigate.