And so has yours. Trust me on this. Because if they can get to me….

I’m a very canny and suspicious kind of guy. I have been keenly aware of all the bullshit ways corporations try to hack your mind and bend you to their will.

I mean, when you think about it, that is whatl advertising is all about. People get paid a lot of money to come up with ways to reprogram your mind into buying the product. It’s really an arms race between their applied psychology and your sales resistance, and the srtakes are high because your entire mental integrity is on the line.

It gets away with this because our culture ibnsists that we are all autonomous invidividuals in full control of our lives and our minds, and free to make – and be responsible for – whatever choice we want, without outside influence.

Ergo, while advertising clearly works – businesses wouldn’t spend so much on it if it didn’t – you will never find anyone to admit it works on them.

It’s always other people it works on. It is damned near social suicide to admit that you have been influenced by anything other than your own mind on anything in modern democratic cosumerist culture.

It’s akin to admitting you have been raped in that it means admitting to having been violated in a deep and terible way and not only do you run a high risk of people blaming the victim – like it only happened because you are weak mninded, unlike ME – but, quite wrongly and unfairly, it will make people look at you differently.

Like you have a contagious form of stupidity and they have to quaranatine themselves away from you lest you make them stupid too.

And like with rape, this denial of the possibilitity of it happening to YOU (and the obviou corollary that whoever it does happen to has something wrong with THEM) alklows the perpretators of the act to do it with impunity.

This runs so deep that most people are not even aware of the struggle. It takes a certain kind of ferocious (and possibly insane) metaconsciousness to be able to see the fishhook lurking in that tasty worm and refusing to bite it.

Most people either can’t see the hook because they lack metacognitive skill or they do not want to see it because that would make their world seem far more dangerous and ievil than they want to admit.

That’s why it takes freaks like me who never shy away from the darkness to look out for that kind of thing and do our best to warn the rest of the fish.

It’s an uphill swim.

Well this is one mental mutant who is not afraid to admit they have been manipulated by big business and that it happened so easily and so smoothly that it has been happening for over a decade and I just figured it out today.

What can I say,  it took them a while, but they finally figured out how to crack my code.

And they did it with math, the bastards. What I am talking about is the phenomenon I will call “multiple pricing” and it’s that thing that everyone that sells consumer level goods, like drug stores, supermarkets, and convenience stores. started to do about a decade ago and have kept doing it because clearly it works.

It’s quite simple. Instead of having a single price for a single product, they have a “sale” on two or more of them.

So instead of it being $4 for one, it’s $7 for two.

My mind instantly calculates that $7 for two means they are $3.50 each and $3.50 is less than $4 and that therefore buying two is a better deal.

And at that point, I am now completely unable to buy only one because that would be paying too much for it.  The price has been set at $3.50 and to pay $4 for one when I could pay $3.50 for two would be total madness. Just throwing the money away.

Even if I only really wanted one. Even if it could be scientifically proven than I wouild have gladly paid the $4 for it if I had never seen the 2 for 1 price. My sense of value is very finely tuned and they have figured out a way to recalibrate it.

Now, the mathier folk reading this might well be saying “But if you buy twice as much, you will buy it half as often, so what does the supermarket get out the deal?”

Great question, mathlete! I won’t get into the abstruse and mystical realm of retail sales too deeply,. but basically, if you are a supermarket or such, one of the most important numbers in your life is sales volume.

That’s the total amount of product you move. And if you move enough product, the corporations who make the stuff give you a break on the price as a way of encouraging their best sellers.

Enter multiple pricing. By getting consumers to buy more at the same time, the supermarket boosts its total apparent sales volume even if it is not actually selling more product, just selling more at a time.

I mean, sure, from a consumer’s point of view, it’s quite obvious that buying twice as much means buying half as often, but accountant don’t deal in reality, they deal in numbers, and if it makes the number go up, it gets rewarded.

And there is always the chance that having more of something actually will make you use more of it because it triggers a sense of “plenty” in the mind and we use resources more freely when we have “plenty”.

This is a good instinct that comes from a time before refrigeration, where the only way to store food was by getting fat during the times of plenty, like summer,.  and living off that fat in the times of famine, like winter.

Hence : “Oh, go ahead, take all you want, I got a great big bag of it from Costco”.

So yes, even the mighty fortress of my mind is vulnerable to these manipulations.

But of course, that would never happen to YOU, would it?

Guess that makes you better than me. Right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.