Ever wondered how deep the marketing-industrial-complex goes?
Market researchers have psychologically engineered every single element of the shopping experience. Visual, audio, spatial. It is called sensory marketing.
Using red and yellow colours because they trigger hunger. Slow music makes you browse longer in stores, increasing purchases. Even the entrances and exits always force you past maximum products. Essential items are always in the back: Milk, bread, eggs placed far from entrance so you pass temptations. FOMO induced checkout displays, the last chance to grab impulse purchases when your resistance is lowest. In-store bakeries, the smells manipulate your emotions and appetite
Every. Single. Step. Calculated.
And you thought you had free will when you went grocery shopping.
This is documented, peer-reviewed science. Now apply this logic to online shopping, news media, social media algorithms, political campaigns, and educational curricula. Still think you’re thinking for yourself?
There is a sense that something is fundamentally wrong. That truth itself has become negotiable. We can hardly trust anything anymore. That’s an epistemological crisis. A collapse in our collective ability to know what’s true.
The foundation for determining truth is corrupted, everything built on that foundation becomes corrupted too. Coercion at a societal scale.
Look at our education system. We’ve erased 700 years of divine contributions to science, philosophy, and economics, then wonder why our solutions don’t work. When you systematically delete half of human knowledge, you’re solving problems with incomplete information.
Or the social system. We measure success using “econometric growth”. By this logic, disasters, man-made or natural become acceptable for the economy. This is what happens when your epistemology says “value equals money generated” disasters become profitable and hence, desirable.
Technology? When your epistemology is purely materialistic, AI systems optimise for engagement and profit without wisdom. Result is algorithmic manipulation, social fragmentation, and mental health epidemics.
Or the ecological crisis. Brands manufacturing plastic bottles. So they can use them to claim they have recycled plastic bottles. Because actually pulling out plastic from the ocean is not cost effective. Pause. And think about that for a second.
We’re drowning in information but starving for wisdom. We can access infinite data but can’t distinguish fact from fiction. We’re connected to billions of people but have never been more isolated in our own echo chambers. Most people today are stuck in what scholars called “compound ignorance”, they think they know, but they’re wrong. This is worse than plain ignorance. At least when you know you don’t know, you’re open to learning.
But when you think you know (and have been taught wrong), you’re unteachable. You’re a liability to yourself and everyone around you.