Why do so many people distrust science in an era built on reason, data, and expertise? Why has the promise of liberal freedom given rise to anxiety, alienation, and backlash? And how did the same technologies that sell us sneakers begin to shape our beliefs, our votes, and our view of reality?
The answer lies in something both obvious and uncomfortable: we are far more predictable than we like to admit.
In The Consuming Instinct, behavioral scientist Gad Saad argues that much of what we do—what we eat, buy, desire, and fear—is not simply a product of culture, but of biology. Our craving for fat and sugar, our attraction to beauty and power, our urge to belong and to signal status—these are not modern inventions, but ancient instincts shaped by natural selection.
Liberal democracies, with their emphasis on individual freedom and market choice, gave these instincts room to express themselves. In Saad’s view, the market doesn’t manipulate our desires; it mirrors them. Advertising succeeds not because it tricks us, but because it resonates with who we are at a deep, evolved level.
But in the digital era, something changed. Our consumer behavior—tracked, analyzed, and monetized—was no longer confined to the marketplace. It became a tool for reshaping our political behavior. Social media platforms, powered by algorithms and fed by behavioral data, began to function not just as communication tools, but as persuasion machines.
What began as targeted advertising became something more insidious: targeted influence. Political campaigns, ideological groups, and opportunistic actors began using the same psychological insights that sell fast food and fashion to sell narratives, conspiracies, and candidates.
As journalist Carole Cadwalladr revealed in her investigation into Cambridge Analytica and the Brexit and Trump campaigns, this wasn't simply marketing—it was a new form of psychological warfare. Her chilling conclusion: “It’s a coup.” Not with tanks or guns, but with microtargeted ads, emotion-driven content, and digital manipulation that preys on instinct, not reason.
The irony is that the very scientific insights into human nature—insights developed to better understand behavior—are now being used to bypass deliberation altogether. Emotional triggers, identity cues, and tribal language are deployed to provoke rather than persuade, to reinforce rather than challenge.
Gad Saad has long warned that science faces resistance when it challenges ideological narratives. In earlier decades, this resistance came from progressive academic circles uncomfortable with evolutionary explanations for behavior. But today, the rejection of science comes just as often from populist and authoritarian movements that deny climate change, discredit vaccines, or undermine epidemiological expertise. What unites both is not a disagreement over facts, but an unwillingness to accept them when they contradict belief or identity.
In this climate, science becomes political not because it has changed, but because our tolerance for inconvenient truths has collapsed. We no longer debate findings; we attack their implications. We no longer confront our biases; we feed them through curated information streams. And the more we do so, the more manipulable we become—not despite our nature, but because of it.
Suppressing or ignoring scientific insights into behavior does not protect us—it exposes us. The less we understand about what drives us, the easier it becomes for others to use that knowledge for their own ends. The algorithm doesn’t care whether it serves commerce or politics; it simply optimizes for engagement. And that engagement, more often than not, rewards the content that taps into our fears, our vanity, our need to belong.
We need more than fact-checking and better media literacy. We need a cultural reckoning with who we really are: instinctive, emotional, social, vulnerable to manipulation—and yet capable of reflection. Liberal societies can only endure if they are built on an honest view of the human animal. Science must be free to follow the evidence, and politics must learn humility in the face of our evolutionary limits.
The Consuming Instinct is not a celebration of consumerism, nor a rejection of progress. It is, interpreted in the current times, a warning: if we fail to understand what drives us, others will not hesitate to exploit it. And when they do, the result isn’t just a distorted marketplace. It’s a distorted democracy.
In the age of the algorithm, the consumer and the voter have become one. And the truth is no longer something we seek—it’s something we're fed.
