Your government spends 604 (90% CI: 453-888) more on weapons than on curing disease, and you think that's a political problem. It's not. It's a hardware problem. You're running 200,000-year-old software optimized for hoarding rocks and fearing strangers, and you've given it nuclear weapons. This chapter is the owner's manual for the brain that's trying to kill you.

There is no line between smart people and the other kind. There is a ladder, from snails up to perfect knowledge, rationality, and logic, and every human who ever lived (the geniuses, the presidents, all of us) is bunched together near the bottom of it, squinting up. Which means a large fraction of what we believe, what we voted for, and what we are angry about is probably wrong.

Optimized replacements for the systems identified in the failure analysis

Your military-industrial complex solved coordination for killing: weapons manufacturers, generals, politicians, and factory workers all profit from the same budget, so they all show up. Disease has no such coalition. Your Decentralized Institutes of Health builds one. It does three things: receive treaty funds, allocate them via patient choice and wishocratic voting, and pay based on results instead of grant applications. It's SHAEF for the war on disease. Same selfishness as the military-industrial complex, but pointed at biology instead of each other. Nobody gets paid for writing essays about why they should be allowed to try curing things. They get paid for curing things.

How to let billions of people say whether the next marginal public dollar should buy another nuclear weapon system or fund another pragmatic clinical trial, without routing the answer through lobbyists, committees, and middlemen.

You type in what's wrong with you, see what worked for everyone else, and try it. The outcomes get recorded automatically. We've had this for millennia. Your decentralized FDA is the same thing, built with technology you already have. It's an open protocol that connects treatments to patients, records what actually happens, and publishes the results. Consumer Reports, but for not dying. It cuts trial costs from $41,000 to $929, expands capacity from 1.9 million patients/year to 23.4 million patients/year (90% CI: 9.21 million patients/year-93.7 million patients/year), and replaces your 40-page drug inserts with Outcome Labels that tell you what actually happened to real humans who took the pill.

Pharmaceutical companies make more money treating you forever than curing you once. Military contractors earn $1,425 per lobbying dollar. Nobody is evil. The incentives are. Rearrange the profit motive so curing disease pays better than causing it, and watch capitalism accidentally save your species.

War bonds, but backwards. Your grandparents funded WW2 at roughly 3% returns. You fund disease eradication at 272%. Same structure, fewer Nazis, better spreadsheet.

Suboptimal governance costs you $12,600 a year and will get you and everyone you love tortured and murdered by diseases that have no cure because the money that would have found one is a missile. Earth Optimization Services fixes this.

You grow a whole suffering animal to extract a few molecules you could brew directly. The optimized civilization deletes the animal, keeps the molecule, and gets most of the planet back.