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This paper reframes the crises of our age — climate breakdown, inequality, institutional decay — as expressions of an underlying racket logic. We define a racket as an organized system in which dependency is engineered, harm is normalized, and profit is extracted from disabling life systems. Unlike criminal rackets, today’s racketeering is legal, institutionalized, and celebrated as efficiency or innovation.
The paper introduces a four-layer causal cascade:
- Surface mechanisms — visible practices like monopoly, opacity, and regulatory capture.
- Structural drivers — institutional architectures such as shareholder primacy, debt-based money, and intellectual property regimes.
- Meta-structural grammars — cultural stories of scarcity, inevitability, and discounted futures.
- Axiological roots — the foundational mis-specification of value as profit growth rather than life coherence.
Through case studies (opioids, housing, climate, vaccines), we show how rackets are reproduced across all layers. We then expand the analysis to fourteen domains, including education, science, religion, media, technology, law, warfare, culture, and care systems, revealing the universality of racket logics.
The paper proposes regenerative redesign:
- At the surface: transparency, antitrust, accountability.
- Structurally: wellbeing metrics, public options, monetary and corporate reform.
- Culturally: reframing scarcity into sufficiency, and inevitability into possibility.
- Axiologically: re-anchoring value in life coherence, ensuring non-substitutable life goods are prioritized above symbolic metrics.
The conclusion emphasizes that rackets persist because they convince populations that dependency is inevitable. Yet regenerative alternatives already exist, from wellbeing budgets in New Zealand to agroecological farms in India. The task is to recognize, connect, and scale these seeds of coherence into a systemic compass. What has been designed can be redesigned — for life rather than for profit.
