Charles Hugh Smith discusses how the Air Force cannibalizes to keep the illusion of a fully functional Flightline. He also shows what’s being done to the American healthcare system through this hollowing out. You’ll undoubtedly learn something from the article. This general definition is offered. (Bold in the original.)

Cannibalize is an interesting word. It is a remarkably graphic way to describe the self-inflicted destruction of a system by stripping previously functional subsystems to sustain the illusion of system functionality.

Wall street does this all the time. Investors don’t care if a company does it because the stock price keeps rising for a time. More often, they sell the lower profit-producing business units first. But sometimes, in an act of cannibalistic suicide, they will sell the money makers and bankrupt the company. This point is well taken.

An enterprise maintains a substantial cash position even as it loses money every quarter by quietly selling off its most valuable assets. This maintains the illusion of financial strength even as the enterprise is being hollowed out.

With some tactical variation, this is more or less what Cerberus Capital Management did to Remington. The Cerberus web page touts: ” Your partner to improve performance and drive value. Learn how Cerberus creates an edge for our investors and business partners worldwide.” Uh-huh?

Turning small-scale, localized finance into centralized / globalized hyper-financialization cannibalizes finance to benefit the few with unlimited access to credit, leverage and monopoly. First you borrow vast sums at low rates of interest that are inaccessible to mere mortals, take a corporation private, indebt the company and use the funds to accumulate mountains of derivatives that leverage the debt 10-fold or even 100-fold, then take the corporation public again, goose the stock and then cash out all the leveraged gains.

The newly public company has been stripmined of core assets and burdened by debt. The financiers cannibalized the corporation to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else with a stake in the business and the future viability of the enterprise.

Food is also discussed.

Highly processed products are simulacra of food that hijack our hardwired pleasure responses to heavy concentrations of salt, sweets, fat and spice and crunchy/chewy mouthfeel. The nutritional content of these products is so low and the fat-salt-sugar content so high that they are severely damaging to health on multiple levels.

The unwary consumer who stuffs themselves with these simulacra of food (shall we call it “fud”?) feels full even as their body and brain are starved for real nutritional content and real-food fiber.

A high sugar intake means gaining weight in fat. But few understand that anything that tastes like food but delivers minimal nutrition makes people fat. The reason is that your body releases enzymes and other chemical reactions to process the food; your digestive system then looks for particular nutrients found in the food based on that taste. But, with processed food, the nutrients aren’t there, so your body ‘thinks’ that something is wrong with its ability to absorb nutrients, so it starts packing on fat. Before processed foods, this is an excellent function for the body to have. In lean years and drought, this functionality ensures the body can make it through seasons, or a year, of low-quality foodstuffs until a better harvest. Lean times may well be approaching. Understanding how your digestive system is supposed to work may come in handy.

The linked article also appeared at WRSA.