Good and Evil in Marketing

The core takeaway of this text is dead simple: marketing is essentially an autopsy theatre where businesses dissect human vulnerabilities, only to decide whether to stitch up the hernia or deliberately poke around in the open wound while charging extra for every single bandage.

Translated into the language of pure cynicism and dark humor, here is how the circus actually operates:

• “The client’s pain” is a gold mine.

A decent business spots a genuine issue and fixes it—like finding a babysitter who won't feed your toddler to wolves. Masterclass marketing, however, breaks your kneecaps first and then sells you a subscription for crutches. Why sit around waiting for a customer to feel miserable? Just convince them that a belly fold makes them genetic trash, and that lacking a six-figure income by age thirty means it is time to wrap themselves in a bedsheet and crawl toward the nearest cemetery. Panic manufactured; the victim is now primed to pay for temporary anesthesia.

• Holy gurus versus filthy hedonists.

Society loves to label light comedy and erotica as degenerate evil, while treating philosophy salons and mindfulness retreats as pure, radiant virtue. Reality is far more sinister. In adult entertainment, ethics boil down to basic brass tacks: informed consent, humane production standards, gatekept access, and consumer fallout—the genre label alone proves neither malice nor saintliness. Meanwhile, a "spiritual awakening" club can butcher you like cattle: "The meditation didn't cure your depression? That’s just your ego resisting truth; wire another grand to unlock Stage Two of enlightenment." It's the ultimate grift: an infallible service where every single failure is blamed entirely on the dead patient.

• Mouse-trap UI design.

Signing up for a recurring subscription takes a drunken sneeze, but canceling it requires a quest through Dante’s inferno while deciphering light-gray text on an off-white background. In one specific experiment, aggressive interface traps nearly quadrupled consent rates, but that snapshot under glass is hardly a guarantee of eternal revenue or a law forcing every exhausted brain into submission. A manipulative mousetrap can genuinely tilt human choice in the moment, yet treating sleazy design as an infallible golden goose is wishful thinking for amateurs.

• The invisible hand has no moral compass.

The fairy tale claiming "evil businesses will go bankrupt while honest ones inherit the earth" belongs strictly in kindergarten storybooks. In the wild, integrity guarantees neither victory nor poverty, and manipulation guarantees neither endless cash piles nor inevitable ruin. You can burn cash chasing cheap viral outrage, or you can quietly turn a steady profit preying on quiet terrors. Unfettered market competition doesn't magically cure scumbags either: when every competitor hides fees in the fine print, being the only transparent guy in the room looks uncomfortably like commercial suicide.

• Boring virtue dies broke.

If your high-minded philosophy club is bleeding money in a damp basement, your poverty doesn’t prove your sainthood, nor does it definitively brand you an incurable bore. Perhaps your depth is genuinely hard to unpack, or perhaps your pitch is clear as mud, your prose reads like a sedative, and joining is a logistical migraine. Human emotions, sharp hooks, provocative narratives, and recurring payments are completely healthy commercial anatomy—provided the delivered value is real and the customer has an exit door that doesn't brand them a traitor on the way out. Good intentions must learn how to grab attention, or they will simply rot in their self-righteous ivory tower without saving a soul.

The definitive post-mortem test for any founder comes down to this: what happens to your revenue if your client suddenly gets smarter, heals their neuroses, and becomes fully self-reliant?

If your bottom line fundamentally depends on keeping the client chronically ashamed, perpetually confused, and terrified of taking a breath without your supervision, you are a toxic parasite feeding on ongoing vulnerability, not a legitimate service wrapping up a job well done. If an empowered customer still pays you willingly with their eyes wide open, you’ve managed to turn a profit without wading through human sludge. Then again, morticians have it easiest of all: their clientele is guaranteed never to get any smarter, let alone crawl out of the coffin demanding a refund.