The Common Thread: Systems Designed to Disconnect
This is the fourth and final piece in a series exploring how fear shows up in the American healthcare system.
In the first piece, I wrote about how the healthcare system trains providers to lead with fear.1 Then, I looked at what sort of results a fear-based system produces.2 After that, I explored what the system keeps locked up. How tying healthcare to employment traps people in jobs they might otherwise leave. How the fear of losing coverage shapes decisions about risk, entrepreneurship, and purpose.3
Now I want to step back. Because as I’ve been sitting with all of this, a pattern keeps emerging. One that extends far beyond healthcare.
A few weeks ago, I was visiting friends in South Carolina. The husband is someone I deeply respect. Naval Academy graduate. Doctor. Colonel in the military. A man of profound integrity who lets his Christian faith guide how he moves through the world.
Over the course of a few days, we found ourselves in deep conversation about spirituality, faith, and how we each make sense of the world. I shared that I don’t consider myself religious or Christian, but I do feel deeply spiritual. That there’s something beyond us. Something connecting us.
At one point, I said something that had been forming in my mind for months: “I think the biggest challenge we have in the world right now is disconnection.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely. And the devil wants to keep us disconnected.”
He continued, “Because God wants us to be connected. When we’re connected, we’re powerful. Powerful as a unit, not as individuals.”
I’m not sure I would use the same language. But I can’t stop thinking about what he named.
The Pattern I Keep Seeing
For the past several months, I’ve been exploring different systems through the lens of love and fear. Healthcare. Capitalism. Prisons. Education.
I didn’t set out to find a common thread. But one keeps showing up.
These systems disconnect us.
Not as an accident. Not as an unintended consequence. Disconnection seems to be what they do. Sometimes by design. Sometimes through evolution over time. But the result is the same.
We end up separated. From ourselves. From each other. From nature. From community. From the sources of love and healing that make us whole.
Let me show you what I mean.
Healthcare: Disconnection as Business Model
Earlier in this series, I wrote about how the American healthcare system trains providers to lead with fear. How residents are hazed into emotional detachment. How the business of medicine keeps people tethered to jobs they might otherwise leave because losing health insurance could mean financial ruin or death.
The system creates classes. If you have good insurance, you get access. If you don’t, you’re on your own. When someone loses their job, they often lose their healthcare. When someone gets sick, they may lose their home.
From my perspective, this is disconnection built into the architecture. You’re separated from care based on your economic status. You’re separated from community because your survival depends on staying employed. You’re separated from risk-taking, from entrepreneurship, from following your purpose, because the cost of failure could literally become a life-or-death situation.
Capitalism: Disconnection as Accumulation
When I traced the history of capitalism, I found disconnection at the root.
It started with enclosure. In the 1500s and 1600s, elites in England began fencing off the commons. Land that had been shared for generations became private property. People were pushed off the land their families had worked for centuries.
Before enclosure, you were connected to land, to community, to place. After, you were labor. And the land, a resource. Something to be bought, sold, exploited, and extracted from.
The same pattern shows up in how money changes us. In 2006, researchers at the University of Minnesota ran a series of experiments on what happens when people are reminded of money. They found that people primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and others. In one experiment, people who had been thinking about money literally set their chairs further apart from a new acquaintance.
Just thinking about money makes us more isolated.
Tom Haslett and I talked about this in our Campfire Conversation. How money, which started as a tool to facilitate connection and trade, has become something that separates us. How accumulation replaces relationship. How we measure worth by what we extract rather than what we contribute.
Prison: Disconnection as Punishment
I’ve written a lot about prisons. About the returning citizens who showed me more love in one afternoon than I’ve felt in most settings. About Tremayne, who I met through a painting and who is now a friend.
What I keep noticing is how the prison system is designed to disconnect people from their sources of healing. Connection is how people heal. Study after study shows this. Relationships. Community. Love. These are what help incarcerated people transform and stay home when they get out.
And yet the system makes connection expensive and difficult. It costs roughly an hour of prison wages to send a single email. Phone calls are marked up. Visits require travel and time that families often can’t afford.
When someone goes to prison, their loved ones go too. Not behind bars. But into a different kind of exile.
The 13th Amendment allows slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. Corporations exploit this loophole. People work for pennies an hour. And the barrier to staying connected to the people who love them grows higher.
If connection heals, and the system makes connection nearly impossible, then what is the system designed to do?
Education: Disconnection from Our Genius
I recently read a book called Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck.4 In it, she describes a study that really landed with me.
In the 1960s, NASA commissioned researchers George Land and Beth Jarman to develop a test that could identify creative geniuses. They wanted to find their most innovative thinkers for space-related projects. The test worked well. So, Land and Jarman got curious. Where does creativity come from? Are some people born with it, or is it learned?
They gave the same test to 1,600 children between the ages of three and five. 98% scored at the creative genius level.
They tested the same children five years later. The number had dropped to 32%.
Five years after that, it was 10%.
When they gave the test to 200,000 adults, only 2% scored as creative geniuses.
The researchers blamed a school system and social environment that, in Beck’s words, “actively teaches us not to be the geniuses nature intended.”
We start life as creative geniuses. The system un-teaches it.
We get disconnected from our own brilliance. From the imaginative capacity we were born with. From the part of us that sees possibilities instead of problems.
The Common Function
I keep coming back to what my friend said in South Carolina.
The devil wants to keep us disconnected. Because when we’re connected, we’re powerful. Again, I don’t know if I’d use those exact words. But I understand what he’s pointing to.
These systems, whether through intention or evolution, share a common function. They separate us from the things that make us whole.
Healthcare separates us by class and keeps us tethered through fear of losing coverage.
Capitalism separates us from land, from community, and even from each other through the very act of thinking about money.
Prisons separate people from their loved ones and make the connections that would help them heal nearly impossible to maintain.
Education separates us from our own creative genius, teaching us to be productive members of society rather than integrated, self-knowing humans.
Kevin Hancock writes about this in his book Not for Sale, drawing on Lakota wisdom. To work collectively, to be truly interdependent, you first have to find yourself. You have to understand and be guided by your own inner purpose.
Our systems are not doing that. They’re doing the opposite.
What Would Connection Look Like?
I don’t have a program to propose. This is a discovery year for me. I’m listening and learning and sharing what I find.
But I keep thinking about what Elmer Moore and I talked about in our Campfire Conversation, that “connection is the most powerful currency.”
And what Kerem Durdag told me: “Physical proximity is our essential oxygen.”
If disconnection is what these systems produce, what would it look like to design from connection instead?
Not as utopia. Not as a perfect blueprint. But as a question worth sitting with.
What would healthcare look like if it were designed to keep people connected to care regardless of employment status?
What would our relationship with money look like if we measured wealth by connection rather than accumulation?
What would prisons look like if they were designed to strengthen the connections that help people heal and stay home so they can contribute to their communities?
What would education look like if it protected the creative genius we’re born with instead of teaching it out of us?
I certainly don’t know the answers. But I think the questions matter.
Because if the systems we’ve built are disconnecting us, and if connection is what makes us powerful and whole, then maybe the most radical thing we can do is stop. Look around. And start working in community to rebuild systems that connect.
This is the final piece in a series on healthcare and fear. The earlier pieces in this series are “Trained to Lead with Fear,” “What Does a Fear-Based Healthcare System Produce?,” and “What a Fear-Based Healthcare System Can Keep Locked Up.” For more on capitalism and money, see “The Story of Capitalism,”5 “What is Money,”6 and my Campfire Conversation with Tom Haslett.7 For more on prisons, see “There’s Room on the Porch for Everyone”8 and the four-part Lawrenceville series.9101112
Sources:
George Land and Beth Jarman’s creativity research is described in Martha Beck’s Beyond Anxiety (2024) and their book Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today (1992). Land also discussed the findings in his 2011 TEDx Talk, “The Failure of Success.”
The money priming research is from Kathleen Vohs, Nicole Mead, and Miranda Goode, “The Psychological Consequences of Money,” Science 314 (2006): 1154-1156. A 2015 review by Vohs in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that across 165 experiments in 18 countries, people reminded of money are consistently “less interpersonally attuned” and “eschew interdependence.”
Kevin Hancock’s exploration of Lakota wisdom and self-knowledge appears in Not for Sale: Finding Center in the Land of Crazy Horse (2021).
https://adventure.heart-strong.org/p/trained-to-lead-with-fear
https://adventure.heart-strong.org/p/what-does-a-fear-based-health-care
https://adventure.heart-strong.org/p/what-a-fear-based-healthcare-system
https://marthabeck.com/beyond-anxiety/