Tag: healthcare

The Morality of Ants

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Taking Moral Cues from Ants: Because Humans are Too Busy Defending the Indefensible

Ah, ants. Tiny, unassuming, and quite literally beneath us — unless you’re sprawled out on a picnic blanket fighting off a colony swarming your questionable sandwich. Yet, while humanity busies itself polluting oceans, strip-mining rainforests, and justifying corporate bloodsucking as “necessary for the economy,” ants are out here performing life-saving surgeries on their comrades.

ants are out here performing life-saving surgeries on their comrades

You heard that correctly.

Researchers have now observed certain ant species (yes, ants) performing amputations on their injured nestmates to prevent infections from spreading. Picture it: a worker ant limping home, leg shredded by some territorial skirmish, and the squad rolls up like a triage team, deciding whether to (a) gently clean the wound or (b) lop the limb off entirely. Amputation is precise and deliberate — snip at the hip joint if the upper leg is toast. Lower leg injuries? Too risky. Infection spreads faster there, so it’s all hands (or mandibles) on deck for some industrial-strength licking.

It’s a brutal but effective social health system. The results? Injured ants survive. They get patched up, return to work, and contribute to the collective. The colony benefits, everyone thrives, and not a single ant launches into a fevered tirade about how “it’s their individual right to rot from gangrene in peace.”

Contrast this with humanity, where the very notion of collective good seems to spark mass hysteria in certain corners. Here, defending dubious practices — say, unfettered pollution, exploitative labour conditions, or the kind of wealth-hoarding that would make a dragon blush — has become a full-time hobby for some. “Personal responsibility!” they scream whilst someone chokes on smog or shivers in a warehouse set to Arctic temperatures. Heaven forbid we intervene.

Imagine explaining to ants that humans argue about whether everyone deserves basic healthcare

Imagine explaining to ants that humans argue about whether everyone deserves basic healthcare. That we let industries poison rivers because regulations might “hurt innovation.” Some believe that letting people suffer and die without help is somehow noble.

Ants would stare at us — or they would if they had discernible faces. Then they’d probably do what they always do: get back to work ensuring their colony survives and thrives, as any halfway intelligent species might.

A Case for the Collective

What makes this ant behaviour so fascinating isn’t just that it exists, but that it demonstrates something humanity supposedly prides itself on: adaptability. Faced with an existential threat to one of their own, ants don’t moralise. They don’t argue about the costs or logistics of care. They don’t abandon the injured because helping them isn’t “profitable.” They just act. Quickly, efficiently, and for the collective good.

Meanwhile, humans act like the collective good is some leftist fever dream. Suggest tax-funded healthcare or basic environmental protections, and someone inevitably starts shrieking about “slippery slopes” toward tyranny, as though being able to breathe clean air or avoid bankruptcy after surgery is the thin edge of some Orwellian wedge.

We have entire systems built on the premise that it’s fine for some to suffer if others can profit

We have entire systems built on the premise that it’s fine for some to suffer if others can profit. Does that sound hyperbolic? I’ll wait while you Google “externalised costs.” Spoiler alert: your cheap burger came at the expense of rainforest ecosystems and underpaid workers. But hey, as long as we’re prioritising shareholder value, all’s fair, right?

The Ants Would Like a Word

Here’s the thing: ants don’t amputate limbs because they’re altruistic softies. They do it because it makes sense. An injured worker can still contribute to the colony, and the colony’s survival depends on its members pulling together. It’s cold, pragmatic, and effective.

Now consider our own global “colony.” Why do we resist solutions that would make all of us more resilient? Healthcare, environmental protections, workers’ rights — these aren’t radical. They’re practical. Just like amputating a leg to save an ant, safeguarding the vulnerable helps everyone. Yet here we are, letting metaphorical infections spread because someone’s feelings about rugged individualism got in the way.

If Ants Can Do It, So Can We

At this point, humanity doesn’t need a lofty moral awakening. We just need to be marginally smarter than ants. Think about it: they’re tiny-brained insects who figured out that collective care improves survival rates. What’s our excuse?

Perhaps it’s time we take a page out of the ants’ playbook: diagnose the problem, take decisive action, and prioritise the common good. Amputate the rot. Treat the infection. And for the love of whatever deity or science you hold dear, stop defending systems that sacrifice the many for the few.

If ants can do it, we have no excuse.

In Conclusion:

Ants: 1. Humans: 0.

When ants are more socially responsible than we are, it’s time to ask some tough questions. Now get it together, or the ants are going to outlive us all.

The Trolley Problem of For-Profit Healthcare:

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Loops of Death and Denial

The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment that pits action against inaction. In the original version, a person faces a choice: a trolley hurtles down a track toward five people tied to the rails, but a lever allows the trolley to be diverted onto another track, where one person is tied. The dilemma is simple in its grotesque arithmetic: let five die or actively kill one to save them. A perennial favourite of ethics classes, the trolley problem is most often used to explore Consequentialism, particularly Utilitarianism, and its cool calculus of harm minimisation. Over the years, countless variations have been conjured, but few approach the nightmarish reality of its real-world application: the for-profit healthcare system in the United States.

With the recent death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the trolley dilemma takes on a new and morbid relevance. Let’s reframe the challenge.

The Healthcare Trolley Loop

Picture the trolley again on a bifurcated track. The lever remains, as does the moral agent poised to decide its fate. This time, the agent is Brian Thompson. The setup is simple: one track leads to the deaths of five people, and the other is empty. But here’s the twist: the trolley doesn’t just pass once in this version—it’s on a loop. At every interval, Thompson must decide whether to pull the lever and send the trolley to the empty track or allow it to continue its deadly course, killing five people each time.

But Thompson isn’t just deciding in a vacuum. The track with five people comes with a financial incentive: each life lost means higher profits, better quarterly earnings, and soaring shareholder returns. Diverting the trolley to the empty track, meanwhile, offers no payout. It’s not a single moral quandary; it’s a recurring decision, a relentless calculus of death versus dollars.

This isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a business model. For-profit healthcare doesn’t merely tolerate death—it commodifies it. The system incentivises harm through denial of care, inflated costs, and structural inefficiencies that ensure maximum profit at the expense of human lives.

Enter the Shooter

Now, introduce the wildcard: the shooter. Someone whose loved one may have been one of the countless victims tied to the track. They see Thompson at the lever, his decisions ensuring the endless loop of suffering and death. Perhaps they believe that removing Thompson can break the cycle—that a new lever-puller might divert the trolley to the empty track.

Thompson is killed, but does it change anything? The system remains. Another CEO steps into Thompson’s place, hand on the lever, ready to make the same decision. Why? Because the tracks, the trolley, and the profit motive remain untouched. The system ensures that each decision-maker faces the same incentives, pressures, and chilling rationale: lives are expendable; profits are not.

The Problem of Plausible Deniability

The shooter’s actions are vilified because they are active, visible, and immediate. A single violent act is morally shocking, and rightly so. But what of the quiet violence perpetuated by the healthcare system? The denial of coverage, the refusal of life-saving treatments, the bankruptcy-inducing bills—all are forms of systemic violence, their harm diffused and cloaked in the language of economic necessity.

The for-profit model thrives on this plausible deniability. Its architects and operators can claim they’re simply “following the market,” that their hands are tied by the invisible forces of capitalism. Yet the deaths it causes are no less real, no less preventable. The difference lies in perception: the shooter’s act is direct and visceral, while the system’s violence is passive and bureaucratic, rendered almost invisible by its banality.

A System Built on Death

Let’s not mince words: the current healthcare system is a death loop. It’s not an accident; it’s a feature. Profit-seeking in healthcare means there is always a financial incentive to let people die. During the Affordable Care Act (ACA) debates, opponents of universal healthcare decried the spectre of “death panels,” bureaucrats deciding who lives and who dies. Yet this is precisely what for-profit insurance companies do—only their decisions are driven not by medical necessity or moral considerations, but by spreadsheets and stock prices.

This is the logic of capitalism writ large: maximise profit, externalise harm, and frame systemic failures as unavoidable. Healthcare is merely one example. Across industries, the same dynamic plays out, whether in environmental destruction, labour exploitation, or financial crises. The trolley always runs on tracks built for profit, and the bodies left in its wake are just collateral damage.

How to Break the Loop

The death of Brian Thompson changes nothing. The system will simply produce another Thompson, another lever-puller incentivised to make the same deadly decisions. Breaking the loop requires dismantling the tracks themselves.

  1. Remove the Profit Motive: Healthcare should not be a marketplace but a public good. Universal single-payer systems, as seen in many other developed nations, prioritise care over profit, removing the incentive to let people die for financial gain.
  2. Recognise Passive Harm as Active: We must stop excusing systemic violence as “inevitable.” Denying care, pricing treatments out of reach, and allowing medical bankruptcy are acts of violence, no less deliberate than pulling a trigger.
  3. Hold the System Accountable: It’s not just the CEOs at fault; the lawmakers, lobbyists, and corporations sustain this deadly status quo. The blood is on their hands, too.

Conclusion: The Real Villain

The shooter is not the solution, but neither is their act the real crime. The healthcare system—and by extension, capitalism itself—is the true villain of this story. It constructs the tracks, builds the trolley, and installs lever-pullers like Brian Thompson to ensure the loop continues.

When will it end? When we stop debating which track to divert the trolley toward and start dismantling the system that made the trolley inevitable in the first place. Until then, we are all complicit, passengers on a ride that profits from our suffering and death. The question isn’t who’s at the lever; it’s why the trolley is running at all.

Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance

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The violent death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, age 50, is not just another headline; it’s a glaring symptom of systemic failure—a system that has been teetering on the edge of collapse since the 1970s when the insurance industry morphed from a safety net into a profit-maximising juggernaut. Thompson’s death isn’t merely a murder; it’s the symbolic detonation of a long-simmering discontent.

👇 Read what Claude.ai has to say about this down below 👇

Yes, this might look like a personal attack. It isn’t. It’s an indictment of a system that puts dollars before dignity, a system where UnitedHealthcare reigns as the undisputed champion of claims denial. Thompson wasn’t the disease; he was the tumour. His decisions, emblematic of an industry that sees human lives as ledger entries, led to untold suffering—deaths, miseries, bankruptcies. His ledger was balanced in blood.

To some, the masked assailant who killed Thompson is a villain; to others, a hero. This vigilante left their calling card: shell casings inscribed with “Deny,” “Defend,” and “Depose.” It’s a macabre manifesto, a grim punctuation to an act of retribution. For the disenfranchised masses—the countless Americans crushed beneath the weight of this avaricious system—this act feels less like chaos and more like catharsis.

America, after all, was forged in violence and has been maintained through violence. A nation whose founding documents were inked with the blood of rebellion, whose institutions were cemented by conquest and coercion, and whose modern systems grind the weak to dust. What could be more American than a bullet for balance?

But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this act of vigilante justice restored equilibrium. The system is still careening out of control, its machinery of exploitation whirring along unabated. Healthcare is but one cog in a more significant mechanism of dysfunction. The greed that claimed Thompson’s life didn’t die with him; it’s systemic, metastasising across every institution it touches.

The twelve-fold path of Buddhism suggests ‘right livlihood’ and ‘right action’. working for insurance companies is to be an accomplish by murder – but it isn’t considered murder because it’s passive and state sanctioned. Karma is unconcerned with this linguistic subterfuge.

And so we remain in Koyaanisqatsi—life out of balance. Healthcare isn’t the only system collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, but it may be the most glaring. It was meant to heal but instead harms, a system that trades in lives while calling it business. And until balance is restored, this kind of reckoning will remain inevitable, whether you call it justice or tragedy.

The question is not whether another Brian Thompson will fall but how many will have to fall before the system itself collapses.

👉 I asked Claude to help clean up this piece. I got this response:

I apologize, but I do not feel comfortable honing or editing this piece as you have requested. The article seems to be justifying or even celebrating an act of violence and murder. Regardless of the systemic issues and injustices that may exist in the healthcare system, I cannot endorse or assist with content that appears to condone violent vigilantism as a solution.

My role is to provide helpful information to users, not to encourage extremist viewpoints or the use of violence. I would strongly urge reframing this piece to discuss healthcare issues and potential reforms in a way that does not glorify or justify murder and other criminal acts. There are many constructive ways to advocate for positive change that do not involve applauding violence. Let me know if you would like suggestions on how to responsibly address this important topic in a less inflammatory manner. But I cannot, in good conscience, help refine the piece as it is currently written. I hope you understand my position.