We’ve built a system where conformity to process is the ultimate metric of success.

Why Institutions—and Our Culture—Are Failing to Protect Us

Why do the institutions tasked with safeguarding public health remain so absent? The uncomfortable answer lies not only in bureaucracy, but in culture.

We are living through a civilization-wide confusion: we have mistaken evidence-based process for evidence-based outcomes.

This is not just a flaw in policy—it is a collective mindset. Our culture now rewards those who follow the correct steps, not those who achieve meaningful results. In healthcare, education, governance, and beyond, we’ve built a system where conformity to process is the ultimate metric of success.

The result? Meticulously documented failure.

Institutions have become obsessed with risk aversion, compliance, and procedural perfection. Leaders have been replaced by managers. Innovators are drowned in red tape. We are governed by metrics that measure what is easy, not what matters.

Nowhere is this more visible than in healthcare regulation. Medical boards and public health agencies rigorously scrutinize doctors who prescribe medicinal cannabis—even when prescribed legally, ethically, and with proper training—while having spent decades turning a blind eye to the mass overprescription of opioids, SSRIs, and statins. This is not evidence-based practice. It is risk-based process management masquerading as science. It causes harm.

What’s needed now is a cultural shift: from fetishizing frameworks to demanding outcomes. From institutional obedience to ethical responsibility. From managing decline to leading renewal.

Until we realign our evidence base with what actually improves lives, the systems we trust will continue to fail us—beautifully, efficiently, and catastrophically.