Survival Is Not Living: Power Is Rewriting the Rules of Engagement

I ground my theory of power in the human being who constitutes and inhabits a habitat. Power controls every condition of survival. It uses people's capacity to sustain its order while targeting their capacity to change its purposes. I argue that power places the corporation in the constitutive position and uses state authority to give corporate conditions binding force. It redefines individuals and society without necessarily changing their being or substance. Decision health names the capacity to formulate and evaluate purposes, decide, act, refuse, revise decisions and reconstruct common conditions. The Reality Paradigm connects planned impositions across life's domains to the consumption of the whole person and Homovictimus: power depletes the supports of intervention and treats constrained tactical action as free choice or fault.

I trace power from victim to perpetrator through historical records, testimony, judicial decisions, corporate documents and experiments. Institutional commercialisation subordinates social purposes to investment; unaffordable access charges turn provision into exclusion. An urban-rural thought experiment exposes dependence on purchasing power. Agrifood research separates output, nutritional composition and social costs that market prices omit.

South Africa's SASSA-CPS relationship exposes corporate authority over payment and product conditions alongside continuing public responsibility. Organised support helps Sophia recover money; judicial intervention constrains corporate discretion; a subsequent public transition establishes an alternative payment route. These interventions delimit claims of constitutive substitution and show how demands regain force.

AI partnerships across the Global North and South extend the inquiry to public infrastructure and practicable alternatives. I challenge narratives that present loss of control over AI as natural evolution, allowing power and technology owners to retain ownership while distancing themselves from responsibility.

Cytopolitics examines power's intervention through cells and hormones; optogenetics establishes technical capacities and therapeutic possibilities. Disability and LGBTI+ experiences sharpen the distinction between supporting a person's purposes and imposing an approved body or identity. Equal worth does not depend on unaided action. I connect corporate purpose-setting, state mediation, institutional redefinition and the material supports of refusal. Power's use of human life grants it no right to determine, on its own, the purposes of that life.

The discussion centres on constitutive authority, decision health, and the conditions under which refusal can change common life. Please identify the section or claim you are addressing and connect your objection to evidence or a counterargument.

1. When does a corporation move from providing a service to determining its purposes and conditions? Which decisions, contracts and forms of state mediation establish that shift? (§§2, 6)
2. Which material supports make refusal effective? How do time, bodily strength, care, income and practicable alternatives sustain decision health? (§§4–5, 11)
3. How do organised support, judicial intervention and the public payment alternative in the SASSA-CPS case delimit claims of constitutive substitution? (§6)
4. How can narratives of inevitable loss of control over AI displace responsibility while ownership and authority remain in place? What would accountable purpose-setting require? (§§7, 10)
5. Where is the boundary between supporting a person's purposes and imposing an approved body or identity? What distinguishes technical capacity, therapeutic use and coercive intervention? (§8)
6. Who bears the costs of development, destruction and reconstruction, and how can those affected regain authority over the life they sustain? (§§9, 11)

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