Unfortunately for consumers

“It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.” – Voltaire

Corporations, peddling everything from apps to ziti, understand dopamine is the key to addicting customers to their products. The rewards are so substantial, businesses are investing fortunes to learn how to turn consumers into dopamine puppets.

Fortunately for the corporations, consumers aren’t interested in investing minutes to learn how a powerful neurotransmitter is being used to manipulate us.

The similarities and differences between the puppeteers (funding dopamine research) and the puppets (who don’t want to know why we don’t want to know) can be explained in terms of the only thing that matters to all primates — maintaining (i.e. protecting and triggering) dopamine flow.

Who’s pulling whose strings?

“Just relax. I’ll take care of the squealing, wretched, pinhead puppets of Gotham!” – The Penguin

The executives backing the research are money, power, and status addicts triggering dopamine with expectations of market shares, profits, bonuses, recognition, power, status, money, and sex. The marketers and scientists pimping their talents to miscreants do what they do to feed dopamine-induced cravings for food, sex, acceptance, approval, esteem, status, drugs, gambling, and money. Meanwhile, the DIMwits being duped don’t care because, like junkies (and other slaves to the same dopamine), we depend on suppliers/pushers to keep the brain chemicals flowing.

Ironically, most executives, marketers, and researchers only think they understand dopamine. If they actually did, they’d realize they don’t care about destroying consumers’ health or lives because they too are dopamine puppets. Like the clueless consumers they exploit, the master manipulators don’t want to know how dopamine works because they aren’t interested in any information that threatens approval, esteem, cash, and dopamine flow.

A classic no-brainer

“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” – Socrates

Ignoring and denying puppet status protects esteem / dopamine flow and ensures future dopamine-triggering opportunities. Admitting to irrational, immoral, embarrassing, addictive behaviors (to score the same dopamine squirts that keep junkies misbehaving) threatens dopamine flow because honesty comes with expectations of lost approval, esteem, and dopamine-triggering opportunities.

Even would-be do-gooders can’t admit to suspicious preferences for dopamine maintenance over making a difference. If that weren’t the case, they’d figure out the most effective way to foster positive change is to expose the root cause of all man-made problems — dopamine-induced madness and addictions to customs, traditions, and behaviors sick societies consider normal, acceptable, and admirable.

Honesty isn’t an option because honesty comes with the very real risk of exposing addictions and few concerns are more threatening to safety, esteem, and dopamine flow.