The Unregulated Engine: Why Sectoralism's Core Logic Guarantees a Broken World

Institute of Area Management, Iba, Zambales Philip G Camara September 17, 2025

Our cascading global crisis erupts from a single, devastating design flaw in our ruling ideology. This ideology, Sectoralism—the shared operating system of both Capitalism and Communism—is missing the most critical component for any sustainable system: an inherent self-regulating mechanism.

By allowing each "part" of our world to act for its own benefit without regard for the "whole," Sectoralism has created an engine with a thousand accelerators but no central brakes or steering. Its inevitable destination is the systemic breakdown we are now experiencing. Here is why this failure is not an accident, but a guaranteed outcome of its core logic.

1. The Tyranny of Blind Metrics

Sectoralism works by assigning each "sector" a single, overriding goal. For the economic sector, the metric is profit and GDP growth. For the political sector, it is power. For the agricultural sector, it is yield-per-hectare.

The problem is that these metrics are functionally blind. A rising GDP, the ultimate measure of success in a Sectoralist economy, tells us nothing about the health of the system that produced it. It can rise while rivers are being poisoned, communities are fragmenting, topsoil is eroding, and the population's mental health is collapsing.

The system is designed to maximize the metric, not the well-being of the whole. It is like judging a person's health solely by their weight, ignoring the cancer consuming them from within.

2. The Invention of "Externalities": Pushing Costs onto the Whole

To maintain the illusion that each sector is independent and profitable, Sectoralism invented a powerful accounting trick: the "externality."

When a factory pollutes a river, the cost of that pollution—cancer, loss of fisheries, clean-up expenses—is not registered on the factory's balance sheet. It is "externalized," pushed onto the public health sector, the environment, and future generations. This allows the economic sector to post a profit, a "success" according to its metric, while simultaneously creating a massive, unaccounted-for debt for the whole system.

Our world is now drowning in these "externalized" costs. Climate change is the ultimate externality, the accumulated debt of centuries of economic activity that refused to pay its ecological bills. Sectoralism has no mechanism to prevent this because, in its logic, these costs are someone else's problem.

Instead of the so-called "tragedy of the commons" foisted by Sectoralists but debunked by Elinor Ostrom, Sectoralism gives us the "tragedy of the dominating parts" each acting only for their maximisation until "marginal revenue = marginal cost" for their particular product.

3. The Severing of Natural Feedback Loops

In any living system—a forest, a coral reef, the human body—health is maintained by constant, complex feedback loops. When the body overheats, the nervous system tells it to sweat. When a fox population grows too large, the rabbit population declines, which in turn limits the growth of the foxes. This is the essence of self-regulation.

Sectoralism actively severs these vital feedback loops.

The farmer is disconnected from the soil. Instead of responding to the soil's health, they respond to the commodity market's price signals, applying chemical fertilizers that degrade the very asset they depend on.

The consumer is disconnected from the producer. We have no idea if our purchase contributed to the health of a community in Zambales or to its exploitation.

The CEO is disconnected from the ecosystem. The quarterly report, the legal basis of their decision-making, contains no data on aquifer depletion or biodiversity loss caused by their supply chain.

Without feedback, there can be no regulation. The system becomes a "dumb" machine, executing its simple, extractive programming even as it destroys its own foundation.

Conclusion: The Inevitable Overshoot

A system with no holistic goal, no accounting for its true costs, and no feedback loops is not a sustainable system. It is a runaway train. Its only possible outcome is to overshoot the carrying capacity of the foundational systems that support it—the environment and a cohesive society.

This is the deep hole in which we find ourselves. Sectoralism's failure is not a matter of bad policy or corrupt leaders; it is a failure of the ideology itself. Its lack of a self-regulator is not a bug to be fixed but a core feature of its design.

This is precisely why the shift to Areaism is so fundamental. By making the health of the whole system—the well-being of households within the ecosystem's carrying capacity—the primary metric, Areaism is the self-regulating mechanism.

It re-establishes the severed feedback loops, forcing every economic and political decision to answer for its impact on the integrated reality of a place. It replaces the blind, unregulated engine with a form of collective intelligence capable of steering us toward a regenerative future.