The Self-Serving Loop

The Self-Serving Loop

This essay examines the structural homology between religious and medical institutions as self-perpetuating ideological systems. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of power-knowledge, Illich's critique of iatrogenic harm, Kuhn's paradigm theory, and the social constructionism of Berger and Luckmann, it argues that both domains operate through self-serving loops of justification that obscure their contingent, socially constructed nature. The victims of these loops are the uncritical believers and dependent patients who surrender epistemic and moral agency to credentialed elites claiming privileged access to transcendent truths. By revealing the absence of objective truth 'out there' and exposing the conventions of understanding that collectives mistake for reality, the essay demonstrates how both religious and scientific institutions perpetuate forms of symbolic, psychological, and systemic violence while sincerely believing themselves to be instruments of salvation or healing.