Dear reader,
What fascinates me is how much of our daily life runs on autopilot, while we go on believing ourselves to be rational beings. The truth is, our subconscious is often at the wheel. When we think we are carefully weighing a decision, more often than not our conscious mind is simply inventing a neat little story to justify what our subconscious has already decided.
That’s worth pausing on. The subconscious is not some infallible machine: it’s riddled with biases, blind spots, outdated instincts, mental relics from a world very different from the one we live in now. This mismatch explains why so many of our decisions feel misguided: our minds just weren’t built for the informational labyrinth we’ve constructed for ourselves.
And because of that, we’re vulnerable. When you dig into your own beliefs, things you’re sure are “common sense,” even scientific, you often find they were planted by someone with a vested interest. Trace them back and, in some cases, you can pinpoint the very company or individual who manufactured the idea and sold it to the world.
A lie repeated long enough becomes tradition. Once it reaches that stage, it no longer needs its original sponsor; it sustains itself, unquestioned, like a cultural parasite.
Think diamond engagement rings: to us, they seem like a timeless tradition, practically synonymous with proposals; but the custom was engineered. In the 1930s, with diamond sales collapsing, De Beers hired the ad agency N.W. Ayer. They coined the slogan “A Diamond is Forever” in 1947, pushed it through Hollywood and celebrity culture, and even worked it into school curricula. The result is a ritual that feels ancient, but is barely older than television.
That example is fairly harmless, unless you count the financial pain of buying overpriced carbon; but the same trick has been used in far more consequential ways.
Health, for example. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” wasn’t handed down from medical sages: it was a Kellogg’s slogan. The classic American breakfast of bacon and eggs is also a marketing stunt, this time from the Beech-Nut company, which hired the PR pioneer Edward Bernays in the 1920s to boost bacon sales. A cultural norm, fabricated from thin air.
And this manipulation doesn’t stop at the individual level: entire economic doctrines have been shaped by similar campaigns. Think of the mantra that “cutting taxes for the wealthy benefits everyone by stimulating growth.” This idea was sold by politicians, think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, and echoed endlessly by sympathetic media. The evidence for it has always been shaky, but the repetition worked: it embedded itself into mainstream policy debates worldwide.
I find this both disturbing and strangely fascinating. Many things we accept as obvious truths are, in fact, carefully manufactured illusions. Sometimes you can even point to the exact moment and the exact person who set the illusion in motion. And yet, long after their intentions have faded, the beliefs march on as if they were eternal truths.
That’s why skepticism is vital: not just toward flashy slogans, but toward the invisible assumptions that structure our daily thinking. Without it, we risk acting against our own interests, or worse, carrying out the agenda of voices that vanished decades ago.
Vale,
Davide