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Executive Summary
Human societies today face an apparent paradox: while medical knowledge and technological capacity are more advanced than at any previous time in history, preventable chronic diseases now account for the majority of illness, disability, and premature death worldwide. This condition is commonly misattributed to individual lifestyle choices, but this framing obscures the systemic causes of harm. The environments in which people eat, work, move, relate, and make meaning are increasingly designed by commercial systems whose profitability grows as consumption intensifies, even when these patterns degrade health.
This paper explains how and why this occurred.
It shows that in contemporary global systems, value is defined by profit-growth, while the conditions required for human wellbeing are treated as externalities — unmeasured and unprotected. The resulting structural misalignment shapes not only physical health, but psychological orientation, social cohesion, political capacity, cultural meaning, and the individual’s relationship to self.
The erosion of health sovereignty — the capacity of societies to determine and protect the conditions necessary for life — occurs through six reinforcing constraints:
- Epistemic constraint: harm is misframed as individual choice.
- Legal constraint: corporate interests are shielded from accountability.
- Economic constraint: import and debt dependencies limit policy freedom.
- Institutional constraint: public capacity is outmatched by private power.
- Cultural constraint: harmful environments become normalized.
- Existential constraint: individuals lose internal orientation and coherence.
Restoring health sovereignty therefore requires structural realignment, not behavior messaging or isolated interventions. The path forward is organized into a coherent framework:
- Foundational Conditions: epistemic integrity, legal defensibility, economic resilience.
- Governance Mechanisms: policy guided by life-value rather than profit-growth, exclusion of conflicts of interest, regional coordination.
- Cultural-Ethical Orientation: re-centering belonging, sufficiency, meaning, and coherence as the basis of human flourishing.
The conclusion is clear:
Health sovereignty is not a special agenda of public health; it is the rational foundation of a society that chooses to live.
Knowledge must now be made known, and institutionalized, so that life can once again be the measure of value.
