In this world, it’s not just goods that are sold. Ideas are sold too. They’re carefully packaged, presented as wisdom, and marketed as virtue, when in reality they’re just products serving the seller more than the buyer. Society is a massive marketplace, not only of items but of ready-made opinions, preset beliefs, and behavioral templates offered to those unsure how to build their own.
Anyone who adopts an idea begins selling it immediately. Not because it’s the most truthful, but because it’s convenient, familiar, or profitable. The target is always the easiest to influence. The one seeking belonging more than truth. Identity more than awareness. Ready answers more than honest questions.
This is how the machinery of collective ritual begins to turn. Repetition. Applause. Intimidation of anyone who doesn’t chant the same lines. Ideas are no longer examined, just echoed. Not understood, but worshipped. Over time, they stop being tools for insight and become shields to defend ego and silence doubt.
Intellectual pride grows, not from experience or depth, but from how many people agree. And the more followers an idea gathers, the more its seller believes it must be right. Even if all they’ve done is resell what they once blindly bought themselves.
Science speaks here too. Psychologist Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments showed how easily people abandon their own judgment just to align with the group. Over 75 percent of participants knowingly agreed with a wrong answer simply because everyone else did. A 2005 study using brain scans revealed that social pressure doesn’t just alter our choices. It literally rewires how we perceive reality. The brain adjusts to match the group. Not because the idea is compelling, but because being alone is frightening. Because asking questions is costly. Because applause, even when hollow, feels safe.
But every idea that’s sold serves someone. It might serve an individual pushing a personal agenda. An institution needing loyal minds. A group afraid of falling apart if people start thinking for themselves. Anyone who steps out of line is quickly accused. Of arrogance. Of ignorance. Of disloyalty. Not because they’re wrong, but because they disrupt a profitable market of unexamined beliefs.
The irony is that people often say, “These are my convictions,” but rarely ask, “Did I choose them?” “Did I build them?” Or did I inherit them? Did they grow from experience or from imitation? Have they expanded my awareness or simply made me feel superior? Do they serve me or do they serve the ones who sold them to me?
Society doesn’t punish thinking. It punishes those who reveal that most people aren’t really thinking. They’re repeating. And the moment you ask, “Who sold me this idea?” you stop being a customer. You become a conscious human being choosing what’s worth believing and what deserves to be let go.
Ideas aren’t rejected because they’re wrong. They’re rejected because they ask too much. They force you to rearrange what you’ve built inside. To give up what was easy. To rebuild something real, thought by thought, scar by scar. But that’s the only way to live as a free mind. Not another vendor in a market of borrowed thoughts.
The question isn’t what do you believe.
The question is who sold you that belief, and why did you buy it.
By Lulu Alhassan
