PLASTIC MONEY, PLASTIC WORLD

If money is energy, the corruption of money inevitably leads to the corruption of the vital energy that sustains us. The equation is savagely simple and terrifying in its implications: plastic money equals a plastic world, where we eat plastic, wear plastic, cook on plastic, and heal ourselves with plastic-derived drugs.

The birth of the petrodollar was not merely a geopolitical maneuver to save American financial hegemony after the betrayal of 1971; it was the catalyst for an artificial environment that has declared war on human biology. When Nixon severed the dollar's link to gold, he removed the natural restriction on the economy, demanding infinite growth in a finite world. To maintain profit margins in this new inflationary system, industry was forced to slash costs drastically, substituting real quality for cheap chemistry. The result was the monetization of every drop of the oil barrel, transforming toxic waste into the fundamental building blocks of our daily existence.

The genesis of this omnipresent toxicity lies in industrial efficiency carried to the extreme. During the crude oil refining process, known as cracking, the industry obtained the fuels that moved the world but was left with enormous quantities of byproducts considered useless, such as naphtha, ethylene, and various light gases. In the past, these residues were flared off in torches because they were dangerous trash. However, the logic of the parasite wastes nothing that can be turned into profit.

The petrochemical industry discovered that, through polymerization, this waste could be transformed into moldable, eternal materials. Thus the age of plastic was born, not out of real consumer demand, but out of a need for supply to offload its surplus. The global economy was flooded with synthetic materials that replaced glass, paper, wood, cotton, and metal, simply because the raw material—petroleum waste—was obscenely cheap. The industry had to indoctrinate the population into the "throwaway culture," celebrated by magazines like Life in the 50s, convincing society that throwing things away was synonymous with freedom and modernity, when in reality it was submission to a cycle of toxic consumption.

This petrochemical invasion did not stop at packaging or toys; it colonized our plates and our bodies through our food supply. The most sinister connection is found in seed oils, such as soy, corn, canola, and sunflower—products that did not exist in the human diet before the 20th century and are, essentially, edible plastics.

Unlike an olive that releases its oil through natural pressure, these seeds require baths in hexane—a petroleum solvent similar to gasoline—to release their fat. To make them stable and solid, they undergo hydrogenation, a violent process that changes their molecular structure until they are just one atom away from being plastic. The boom of these industrial oils in the 70s coincided perfectly with the acceleration of the petrodollar and rampant inflation; they were the cheap alternative to the natural animal fats that had nourished humanity for millennia.

The introduction of the official Food Pyramid, gestated from the McGovern Report, legitimized this mass poisoning, demonizing butter and tallow to promote the consumption of subsidized grains and industrial lubricants, creating a perfect feedback loop between petroleum-dependent agriculture and the processed food industry. The biological consequences of ingesting and inhabiting this petroleum-derived environment have been catastrophic, manifesting in a generalized metabolic collapse.

Obesity

The obesity epidemic that shot up vertically since 1980 responds not simply to an excess of calories, but to cellular intoxication. Omnipresent plastics release chemical disruptors like Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates, obesogenic substances that hack the metabolism, instructing the body to create fat even in the absence of excessive food. Simultaneously, the massive consumption of seed oils loaded with linoleic acid destroys the integrity of mitochondrial membranes, breaking the energy engine of our cells and forcing the body into a state of hibernation and fat storage.

Added to this is the silent element in our kitchens: Teflon. Massified in the 70s, this non-stick material introduced "forever chemicals" (PFAS) directly into the fire where we prepare our food, bioaccumulating in our blood and linking directly to kidney and hormonal damage. Cancer, fueled by the glucose of the pyramid diet and detonated by the oxidative stress of rancid oils and plastics, has become the modern plague of a systemically inflamed body.

Even more alarming is the reproductive collapse that threatens the very continuity of our species. Petroleum and its plastic derivatives are chemically xenoestrogens, hormonal impostors that the body mistakes for natural estrogen.

In men, this chemical invasion has caused a drop of more than 50% in sperm counts and a constant generational decline in testosterone, resulting in feminized bodies and testicular atrophy.

In women, artificial estrogen dominance has unleashed epidemics of polycystic ovaries, endometriosis, and precocious puberty. Involuntary infertility has skyrocketed because the modern uterus is a chemical soup hostile to conception. This silent sterilization is not accidental; it is the inevitable result of saturating human biology with industrial byproducts that mimic and block our fundamental endocrine signals.

The assault of the plastic world also extends to the physical architecture of our brain, causing unprecedented neurological and mental health collapse. The human brain, composed mostly of fat, requires cholesterol and stable saturated fats to build its structure. By replacing these noble materials with unstable, oxidized vegetable oils, we have built chronically inflamed brains.

This neuroinflammation, added to the destruction of the gut microbiota by glyphosate and antibiotics, has broken the gut-brain axis where the majority of serotonin is produced. The result is a population mired in depression, anxiety, and suicide, attempting to patch a structural problem with antidepressants that, ironically, are also petrochemical derivatives. The modern pharmaceutical industry, born from coal tar dyes, closes the loop of the parasite: it creates diseases with food and a plastic environment, only to sell synthetic "cures" derived from the same source of petroleum.

But the toxicity of the petrodollar transcends the material to infect the systemic environment and the rhythms of life itself. The energy hegemony of the dollar brought with it the cheap, constant energy that allowed for the destruction of biological connection with natural cycles.

Artificial and digital lighting, with its blue light peaks, has created an "eternal day" that suppresses melatonin production, fragmenting sleep and deregulating nocturnal cellular repair systems. We live isolated from the electrical ground of the earth, walking with insulating rubber soles on petroleum-derived asphalt, immersed in a soup of electromagnetic radiation necessary for the flow of the "Data Dollar," keeping us in a state of inflammation and permanent static positive charge. The autocentric urban design, the child of cheap fuel, forced sedentarism and muscle atrophy, disconnecting the human from their need for movement.

Finally, the financial structure of the petrodollar, based on fiat debt and structural inflation, has locked the population in a hamster wheel of chronic stress. The need to work ever harder to maintain a declining standard of living, combined with the constant devaluation of savings, keeps the modern human in a permanent state of "fight or flight."

This excess cortisol destroys the hippocampus, suppresses the immune system, and annihilates the sense of vital purpose. The "financialization" of human existence has replaced real value creation with speculation, leaving an existential void that, combined with a hostile biological environment, explains record rates of despair.

The petrodollar did not just corrupt the economy; it created an alien environment for our ancestral biology, where plastic money built a plastic world inhabited by human beings who are increasingly sick, sterile, and disconnected from natural reality.