The Consumer, the Voter, and the Algorithm

What happens when political actors learn how to hack human nature

The Consumer, the Voter, and the Algorithm.

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 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.

Sowing Order, Reaping Chaos: The Paradox of Power in a Fractured World

Reflecting on what we can learn from Beatrice de Graaf

January 6 United States Capitol attack (2021).

In the late 20th century, political theorist Francis Fukuyama declared the "end of history"—a moment in which liberal democracy, seemingly victorious, would spread as the final form of human governance. Yet as we look around the world today, that prediction feels not only premature but ironically inverted. The liberal world order has not triumphed, but fractured. The very systems designed to create stability now seem to generate disorder. In this light, the adapted proverb "wie orde zaait, zal chaos oogsten"—“who sows order, will reap chaos”—captures a central paradox of our time: efforts to impose or preserve rigid concepts of order can inadvertently provoke resistance, fragmentation, and ultimately, chaos.

Historian Beatrice de Graaf, in recent interviews on the Dutch TV program Buitenhof, offers a moral-historical perspective to understand this shift. Drawing on the work of Johan Huizinga and Augustine, she reminds us that real order cannot be achieved through force, spectacle, or domination, but through the cultivation of virtues—justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage. These cardinal values, once central to both governance and citizenship, have been eroded in an age increasingly driven by short-term gain, spectacle politics, and polarizing narratives.

The rise of Donald Trump exemplifies this turn. As De Graaf recounts from her visit to the U.S., even academics fear their own students, practicing “anticipatory obedience” in the face of an aggressive ideological wave. Trump's public alignment with ultra-masculine fighting events and right-wing influencers is not random behavior, but the embodiment of a worldview—a form of symbolic politics that celebrates strength, vengeance, and tribal loyalty over deliberation, law, or empathy. This is not simply populism or eccentricity. As De Graaf warns, it is an emerging world vision, one that trades liberal ideals for a blend of post-liberalism, religious nationalism, and even transhumanist techno-fatalism.

Still, it would be too easy to scapegoat the U.S. or lay blame solely at the feet of political strongmen. Europe, too, has been naïve. The post-Cold War order assumed the universality of liberal democracy, often overlooking the ways in which global inequalities, economic exploitation, and cultural arrogance undermined the legitimacy of that very order. As De Graaf notes, liberalism in its complacency allowed illiberal forces to grow within its own system—something thinkers like Patrick Deneen have critically pointed out from within the West.

But the answer is not to abandon liberal values—it is to rediscover and reinvest in them. Europe may have been slow to respond, but it is not powerless. Recent coalitions, such as the German political realignment and the EU’s increasing investments in defense and diplomacy, suggest a recognition that order must be both principled and strategic. Europe can assert its values—not by mimicking authoritarianism, but by combining resilience with responsibility.

One must also challenge the idea that investing in defense necessarily leads to war. As De Graaf notes, deterrence paired with strong diplomacy can stabilize rather than escalate. The history of the 20th century offers cautionary tales of arms races, but it also offers models of peace built on moral clarity and institutional cooperation. The real danger is not military preparedness, but moral emptiness.

The metaphor of “sowing order and reaping chaos” becomes especially potent when the desire for control overrides justice or when systems of governance are treated as ends in themselves, rather than as tools for human flourishing. When order is enforced without legitimacy, when voices are silenced rather than heard, when complexity is flattened into slogans—then chaos grows in the cracks.

There is still a choice. As Huizinga and Augustine argued during the collapse of their own eras, we are not merely witnesses to history—we are its makers. Augustine put it simply: “We are the times.” And as such, we are responsible not only for naming the crisis but for shaping the response.

The antidote to chaos is not control, but character. Not the assertion of power for its own sake, but the cultivation of a moral order grounded in dignity, empathy, and collective responsibility. That is the challenge of our age—and the hope that still remains.