For over a century, since the invention of modern marketing, companies have been utilizing intellectual behaviour control techniques to make ever-new desires within society. If we purchased items only based on our actual needs, economical growth could not be sustained – hence the social programming of desire. The essence of advertising lies in building unconscious emotional associations that later influence the consumer. These marketing strategies are not identifiable to individuals, yet they demonstrably form human decision-making and preferences – all the way down to the neurological level. As these behaviour control techniques become more sophisticated and intertwined with digital technologies, people are proving increasingly vulnerable.
The law, which traditionally protects only bodily integrity, must awaken to the request for safeguarding intellectual integrity as well. EU regulation has already begun moving in this direction. This can be seen in the creation of the ProtMind project, as well as a declaration concerning the right to intellectual integrity. However, markets are not the only actors employing behaviour regulation. Governments are besides increasingly complementing conventional governance tools like sanctions and financial incentives with behavioural public policies. The “nudge” movement in the United States insists that intellectual regulation preserves individual freedom, whereas Central Europe is more accustomed to a paternalistic approach. This raises the question of how can citizens’ intellectual integrity be safeguarded?
The economy of desire
For a long time, I could not realize what Coca-Cola commercials were actually about. They never said anything circumstantial about the product itself. There was nothing like “drink it due to the fact that it tastes good,” or “the sugar gives you energy.” Instead, the ads always showed smiling young people drinking Coke together, happily. The images radiated warmth. Now I realize that Coca-Cola is not truly selling a drink – it is actually selling the feeling of warmth. This is 1 of the cornerstones of modern marketing: dressing up products with magical promises. A shoe is no longer just a shoe that protects your ft – it becomes something that expresses your identity. And why not have 5 pairs of shoes to show how colourful you are? But the fact is, a shoe will not make you interesting, exotic holidays will not aid you find yourself, and Coke will not give you a sense of belonging. These magical associations were not always part of our regular life.
Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of both propaganda and consumer marketing, worked in the US Army’s communications division during the First planet War and besides took part in the Paris Peace Conference. He was fascinated by how war propaganda managed to frame president Wilson as the defender of democracy and freedom through actions specified as the large loans given to Britain and France. This is despite the fact that America’s entry into the war had many another motives. This experience led Bernays to a realization: if propaganda could be so effective during wartime, it could be just as indispensable in peacetime. That is erstwhile he coined the word “public relations” (PR) to replace the word “propaganda”, which already carried negative associations. Yes, a PR professional is fundamentally a propaganda expert, to usage an old term. The profession has become so successful that while in the United States in 1980 the ratio of journalists to PR professionals was 2 to one, present it is more than six to one. That says something about the nature of today’s information landscape.
To see how deep the rabbit gap goes, it is useful to take a look at how smoking was programmed into society. Since the early 1900s, tobacco companies have been trying to get into the underused female market. The first major run came from the company fortunate Strike, which utilized the slogan “Reach for a fortunate alternatively of a sweet.” The thought was simple: smoking suppresses appetite, so women could usage cigarettes to control their weight and stay slim and attractive. They besides began selling the thought to women that beauty equals thinness. In doing so, they aimed to make tension between women’s perfect same – the individual they wanted to become – and their current self-image – the way they saw themselves. This gap was meant to drive them to take action in order to close this metaphorical distance.
Women thus had started smoking, but only in private. This was not yet happening on the streets or in public spaces. Marketers calculated that if they could break this barrier, they could double cigaret sales. As a result, a fresh strategy was born. Edward Bernays consulted a prominent psychoanalyst to ask what cigarettes symbolized for women. Women wanted to smoke as a way to claim something traditionally reserved for men. This drew on Freud’s explanation of “penis envy”, the thought that women, frustrated by their deficiency of male power, envied the phallic symbol of dominance. Cigarettes became a surrogate – a symbol of autonomy. He convinced a group of 10 young women to confidently light cigarettes while walking in the fresh York Easter Parade. Photos of the event were widely published and framed in the media as “torches of freedom” – selling cigarettes as symbols of emancipation and sex equality. fortunate Strike besides bought paper ads with headlines that blurred the lines between feminism and smoking: “Women are free: an ancient prejudice has been removed.” cigaret sales jumped from 13.7 billion in 1925 to 43.2 billion just 5 years later. But this “liberation”, orchestrated by marketers, came at a cost: lung cancer rates among women quadrupled after the introduction of alleged “feminine” cigaret brands.
Tobacco companies utilized the very same strategy again in the 1990s, erstwhile the Iron Curtain fell and markets in erstwhile socialist countries opened up. They began promoting smoking as a symbol of western, modern, and emancipated womanhood. A 1990 editorial in Tobacco Reporter highlighted the growth possible of women in countries like Hungary and Poland: “Women are becoming more independent and, as a result, are leading little conventional lifestyles. 1 symbol of their newfound freedom could easy be the cigarette.” The programming worked the second time too. Between 1993 and 1997, smoking rates among women aged 12 to 25 in erstwhile East Germany nearly doubled, rising from 27 per cent to 47.
Early marketing worked hard to transform Americans from citizens who bought based on request into consumers driven by desire. Advertisers now globally usage unconscious drives and emotional needs that motivate people. Modern corporate marketing is liable for embedding a culture of disposability into society. This makes people feel incomplete unless they travel to distant, exotic countries. It has besides contributed to the global diabetes epidemic.
In my opinion, states must intervene – whether through legal or intellectual means. A liberal might say this is simply a paternalistic approach. But this is simply a unusual argument. Persuading people to do what is good for them is frequently labelled paternalistic. However, persuading them to do what benefits us (as sellers or corporations) is seen as a vital part of capitalist free competition and fair play. In the same year that the US government spent 2 million dollars on nutrition education programmes, McDonald’s spent 1.4 billion dollars on direct advertising. This was on top of another 500 million dollars for its “We love to see you smile” campaign. Laws and states cannot be psychologically neutral, as there is no neutral plan for human decision-making. all environment is simply a choice architecture that shapes our decisions.
The case for the legal protection of intellectual integrity
The law present does not deal with intellectual manipulation. While fraud is punishable, the law almost completely overlooks the fact that a multi-million-dollar global manufacture is working to change people’s interior states, desires, behaviour, and yet their personality. This is the problem of intellectual manipulation. The neglect of the head besides appears at the level of fundamental rights. While most countries defend physical integrity as a fundamental right, very fewer address the issues of intellectual integrity and cognitive freedom. However, early signs of advancement are emerging. Article 3 of the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights now includes the right to intellectual integrity alongside physical integrity. In addition, the EU has established a dedicated investigation group called ProtMind to examine the legal and ethical questions surrounding the increasing usage of intellectual behaviour control by both marketplace actors and states.
Just as it is clearly incorrect to interfere with another person’s body without consent or urgent justification (e.g. in a medical emergency), it is likewise incorrect to alter another person’s intellectual states without their consent. Practices specified as hypnosis, brainwashing, aversion therapy, or subliminal influence against a person’s will intuitively violate basic ethical standards. Deception and manipulation, while not always illegal, are morally questionable, and certain forms (such as fraud or defamation) are already criminalized. The legitimate question is where to draw the legal line for little utmost but inactive crucial intellectual intrusions. This involves forms of influence that are not coercive in a legal sense, but which nevertheless form preferences or behaviours in systematic and possibly harmful ways.
One counterargument is that the right to intellectual integrity may already be covered under existing human rights norms – specified as freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and expression. Indeed, freedom of thought is considered an absolute right under global law. The Oxford legal student Malcolm Evans noted already in the 1990s that if freedom of thought were interpreted broadly, even advertising could fall under restrictions. For instance, under a literal reading of the global Covenant on civilian and Political Rights, many forms of commercial persuasion could arguably be prohibited. However, conventional legal interpretations typically restrict these rights to domains of public discourse and moral or spiritual belief. The cognitive intrusions practiced by modern marketing do not clearly fall within this scope.
While the protection of intellectual integrity should primarily be a substance of political and civilian engagement alternatively than criminal law, the legal scholars Jan Christoph Bublitz and Reinhard Merkel have proposed a fresh criminal norm. They propose that indirect interference with another’s head – through stimuli aimed at bypassing intellectual control and causing serious intellectual harm – should be criminalized unless it falls under acceptable behaviour, specified as the exercise of free speech. According to their view, “stimuli” can take many forms, and the law must be able to cover a wide scope of actions. The concept of “indirect” interference includes cases where influence occurs not through direct coercion, but via manipulation that affects unconscious intellectual processes.
This raises the question of what it means to “bypass intellectual control”. Drawing on dual-process theory, it is possible to realize this as an effort to bypass reflective (System 2) reasoning and mark automatic, intuitive (System 1) responses instead. Based on these arguments, I argue that a legal government for protecting intellectual integrity should remainder on the following 3 criteria:
(1) Systematic interventions
(2) The individual affected did not agree or did not even know
(3) The intervention targets fast, automatic reasoning – not slow, rational thinking
The first regulation prevents lawsuits based on average regular interactions. For example, you cannot sue your neighbour just for how they asked you to feed their cat – that is not a systematic intervention. actual systematic interventions require powerful entities with adequate resources to influence many people’s behaviour in planned ways. We should besides ask if there is an economical motive behind the behaviour change? The second regulation allows any systematic influence if the individual agrees. For example, the state may usage specified methods for public health, but only if it has citizens’ consent. The 3rd regulation helps us specify what counts as a violation of intellectual integrity. According to psychology, fast and slow reasoning work differently. Persuasion that targets slow reasoning would not be banned. But strategies that test automatic behaviour or usage emotional tricks would violate intellectual integrity. Categorizing these cases is hard, but with time, legal practice can make clearer rules. A final regulation that protects intellectual integrity against marketplace forces – if grounded in fundamental rights – can besides be applied to limit state intervention too.
These are not meant as final legal texts, but to spark your imagination. Banning a large part of today’s advertising might sound extreme. But imagine telling individual a century ago that smoking would mostly vanish from society. This year, the UK banned cigaret sales for future generations. Social norms change – sometimes quietly, and sometimes through conflict. I believe laws can change behaviour, and people slow adjust their attitudes to match. So yes, law can form social habits. Laws can besides solve what is hard to do alone, but easy together. 1 individual might not defy manipulative marketing. However, strong consumer protection can aid everyone. Right now, companies freely usage behaviour-shaping technologies that most people do not even notice. But just due to the fact that something is the norm present does not mean it is normal.
This text was prepared in the framework of the 2024/2025 edition of the Solidarity Academy, an global task of the European Solidarity Centre, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Warsaw, and fresh east Europe. The task aims to inspire and support the improvement of young leaders across Europe.
Samu Czabán is simply a legal student and behaviour analyst with a doctorate in law and psychology from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). He is the author of many articles published in the social discipline magazine Új Egyenlőség (New Equality).
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