Capitalism reimagined

The case for a system that is both profitable and human

Every few months, another institution announces it has been “reimagined". Reimagined strategy. Reimagined leadership. Reimagined work. Reimagined status quo. We keep reimagining everything inside the system.

So I started to wonder: If we’re willing to rethink tactics, structures, and behaviors endlessly, why is the system itself treated as untouchable?

Here is my cornerstone belief, stated again: If something was human-made, it can be human-remade. Capitalism is not a law of the universe. It is not weather. It is not divine will manifested.

It is a design. Yes, markets may emerge organically, but capitalism, as we practice it, is a rule-bound system layered on top of them. And there is a whole set of rules, incentives, measurements, and stories we agreed to, and then forgot we agreed to. Not because we were stupid, but because we were never fully intentional. Capitalism, as we practice it today, is less the result of conscious design and more the accumulation of reactions: to opportunity, scarcity, technological leaps, power struggles, and fear.

Nothing illustrates this better than the endless trail of afterthought regulations attempting to contain unintended consequences:

• antitrust laws after monopolies formed,

• food safety regulations after people got sick,

• child labor laws after exploitation became visible,

• environmental regulations after ecosystems collapsed,

• social media restrictions after psychological damage was undeniable.

  
  

We didn’t design guardrails first. We installed them after people and the planet started to break.

All of this leads to the uncomfortable realization: The only thing preventing us from doing things differently now is the belief that it’s not up to us.

It is. So let’s sit down like adults and reflect.

The single-metric problem at the heart of modern capitalism

Modern capitalism has collapsed its success criteria into a single dominant metric: profit. Not usefulness. Not sustainability. Not long-term human wellbeing. Not system health. Profit. Innovation, efficiency, scale, “disruption”, all of it is subordinate to that metric.

There is a distinction that matters though.

Profit is not evil. And it would be naive, not to mention reckless, to pretend we could simply abandon profit overnight without triggering systemic collapse. Our societies depend on functioning markets.

But profit as the primary and overriding goal is corrosive. Metrics shape behavior. Always. What you measure determines what you reward. What you reward determines what survives.

So let’s ask a question we almost never allow ourselves to ask: What if we collectively decided that the human matters more than profit? Not instead of profit. Above it.

What if profit stopped being the north star and became a constraint? A side effect of well-functioning systems. Something that must be achieved without degrading human bodies, minds, or ecosystems?

What if whatever we produce or sell had to meet a basic standard:

• genuinely useful,

• ecologically sustainable,

• non-harmful to human health,

• designed for quality and durability rather than speed and disposability?

  
  

This is not a moral fantasy. It is a design choice. And crucially: every tool needed to make this shift already exists. There is precedent. There is data. There are partial examples everywhere.

What’s missing is not capability. It’s willingness.

Let’s make this concrete.

Case study I: Food — when optimization eats us

At some point, humanity realized something obvious: To feed billions of people, we needed scale. Mass production. Distribution. Efficiency.

That was not the mistake. The mistake was what we optimized under the logic of capitalism. The dominant question stopped being: “What nourishes the human body?”

And became: “How do we produce more, cheaper, faster,  and sell it better?” So the food industry evolved inside a fog of optimization, marketing, and margin extraction.

A few decades later, the outcome is no longer debated:

• ultra-processed food dominates global diets,

• rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic disorders exploded,

• public healthcare systems are overwhelmed by preventable chronic illness.

  
  

This isn’t controversial. It’s epidemiology.

And yet, we keep producing it. Because people keep buying it. Because the incentive structure rewards it. And let’s not pretend, that consumers are well-informed, reflective adults making conscious choices with infinite financial freedom. They are not. So explaining ourselves with “consumer demand” after we artificially amplified it, made sure they are addicted to our product and used the full force of emotional manipulation is not an argument that stands. Hell, one of the first areas where we applied neuroscience was marketing. And for what? More profit?

At this point, moral outrage becomes unavoidable.

How dare we build entire industries on the systematic erosion of human health, and call it success?

But rage alone doesn’t change systems. So let’s keep thinking.

Imagine this not as a fairy tale, but as a directional shift:

What if the food industry’s primary R&D mandate became:

“Develop scalable, profitable food systems that actively support human health.”

Not overnight. Not voluntarily across the board. But gradually, through regulation, incentives, and redirected innovation. A conversion of assets, talent, and research away from extraction and toward nourishment.

Would profit disappear? No.

Would it look different? Yes.

And here’s the key point that kills the inevitability myth: Every obstacle we imagine here is not technical. It is self-imposed.

Case study II: Pharma — when sickness is more profitable than health

Now let’s look at another industry that shapes human wellbeing even more directly.

Pharmaceutical innovation today largely rewards symptom management over prevention. Again, not because doctors or scientists are malicious, but because incentives matter.

By the time symptoms appear, especially in chronic disease, the system has already failed upstream. We know this. And as long as success is measured quarterly, prevention will always lose.

Our understanding of health is increasingly systemic:

• trauma impacts immunity,

• lifestyle shapes chronic disease,

• stress reshapes physiology,

• social context affects outcomes as much as medication.

And yet, our dominant innovation model still treats the human body as a collection of isolated malfunctions.

This is not anti-medicine.

This is pro-biology.

Imagine if pharmaceutical development were structurally incentivized toward:

• prevention,

• long-term outcomes,

• system-level health,

rather than recurring symptom suppression.

Yes, this would disrupt revenue models. Yes, it would be uncomfortable. But discomfort is the only way towards change. Nothing ever changed without discomfort.

And once again, the barrier is not scientific understanding. It is how we reward success.

Case study III: Politics — when power is the least screened role

We cannot talk about capitalism without talking about governance.

Here’s a question that should make us deeply uneasy:

Why do people need multiple interviews, assessments, and psychological evaluations to land a management role while positions of national power are won through marketing, popularity contests, and emotional manipulation?

How is it, that the most significant jobs can be attained without any screening?

Democracy was partly established to prevent in-bred half-mad and incompetent rulers from inheriting the throne and exercising power. And yet we created something that allows psychologically unstable people to lead nations and negotiate wars. Are we insane?

This is not an argument against democratic choice, but against pretending that popularity is the same as competence. If we design systems where the least screened roles hold the most power, instability is not a bug. It’s an outcome.

This logic is not accidental. It’s inherited. But let’s not enter into what actually led here, because this article would never end.  What is important for us to observe is that something is shifting.

Governments are not helpless. They are hesitant, but our current reality started to propel them into action.

France restricting ultra-fast fashion, Australia banning social media under sixteen, the EU regulating AI, data extraction, addictive design, and planned obsolescence.

These are far from being solutions. But they are signals.

They point to a realization we avoid naming: The role of government is not to obediently play along with economic rules. It is to set them.

All laws, regulations, and agreements were created by us.

Which means they can be recreated.

Case study IV: When incentives change, behavior follows

At this point, a reasonable objection appears: “This sounds nice, but it wouldn’t work at scale.”

Except it already does.

Companies that come closest to a human-centered operating logic share something important in common, and it’s not ideology. It’s structure.

Danone, one of the world’s largest food producers, legally embedded long-term health and sustainability into its corporate mandate. Not as branding, but as governance. The result wasn’t collapse. It was continued profitability under different constraints.

Novo Nordisk, a global pharmaceutical giant, operates under a foundation-owned model that protects long-term health outcomes from short-term market pressure. Its most successful products target chronic disease management and prevention. Precisely because the company is not forced to optimize exclusively for quarterly extraction.

Cooperative food systems like Patagonia Provisions or Arla are telling the same story from a different angle: when ownership is aligned with producers and communities, quality, sustainability, and resilience stop being “nice-to-haves” and become profitable strategies.

These organizations are not charities. They are not anti-market. They are proof that when incentives, ownership, and time horizons change, behavior changes. Even inside capitalism.

The obstacle, then, is not feasibility. It is design.

These examples don’t prove that every company can or will behave this way tomorrow. They prove something more important: that behavior follows incentives, not intentions. When structures change, outcomes change. When they don’t, we keep blaming people for doing exactly what the system rewards.

The missing mechanism: reflection at scale

Zoom out and a pattern emerges.

At the individual level, growth requires reflection. At the collective level, the same rule applies.

We cannot change what we refuse to see. Our current reality is not accidental. It is the accumulated result of unconscious patterns playing out at scale. And yes, this requires a massive mindset shift. But mindsets do not change in a vacuum.

They change when environments change. Beliefs follow incentives. Culture follows structure. Consciousness follows context. If we want different thinking at scale, we must redesign the conditions that produce thinking.

If you strip everything above down to its essence, the problem is not complexity.

It’s avoidance.

We already know what the shift is.

We just refuse to make it.

Here it is.

The shift we keep avoiding

Here is the pivot we still refuse to make:

What if innovation and system design were primarily directed toward human wellbeing, not maximum extraction?

What if success were measured not only by growth, but by:

• resilience,

• health,

• coherence,

• long-term survivability?

This is not anti-capitalist.

It is post-naive capitalist.

We don't need a revolution. But we do need to start moving. One human-centered shift at a time.

The oldest lesson, restated

Across thousands of years, across myths, religions, and philosophies, one message keeps repeating:

Your fate is in your hands.

And yet we keep outsourcing responsibility to abstractions: “the market”,“human nature”,“the invisible hand”.

Here is the part we must remember: We created this system. We can recreate it.

Not instantly. Not cleanly. Not without discomfort. But deliberately.

I’m not claiming to have blueprints. I’m challenging the assumption that the rules are fixed. They are not.

Nobody is coming to save us. Which means: whether we like it or not, the responsibility is ours. You may disagree. But you can no longer say, that we have no choice.