“… so we have to remain vigilant, teach our friends and customers to be on alert, and push regulators to take care, because there’s still a con artist on every corner.”
– Seth Godin
I recently remembered a time when, back in my more hedonistic days in a nightclub, I was accosted by a friend of an acquaintance, a tech start-up founder.
“So, how’s business?” He asked.
Well it didn’t really matter how my business was going. What he really wanted was to tell me how his business was going.
“I own three companies”
“We’re talking a $5 million a year revenue company”
“Every day I get enquiries asking to buy it”
Ever the curious student of power dynamics, I listened politely as he laid on fact after fact about how successful he was, until finally he bestowed me with his top piece of business wisdom:
“When the customer’s renewal date comes around, don’t send them a reminder!…It’s one of the greatest growth hacks!”
A “growth hack,” you say? What kind of ‘growth’ are we talking?
The growth of distrust and disconnection? The growth of your insensitivity to other people, truth and reality? Growth of the ever-widening chasm between your stated ends and what you’re really setting out to do in the world?
Even at this stage in my life I was no stranger to the reality and contradiction of modern day master-slave dynamics, and the kinds of commercial-scale deception on which it depends. But it was still stark to hear this founder so coarsely, in a moment of intoxicated candidness, verbalise the real intentions and calculated misdirection behind his actions. As oblivious as he was to what he was revealing about himself, he is sadly nothing unusual in the business world. Indeed he assumed that I, as a fellow business owner, would be a companion and co-conspirator who would appreciate such ‘insight.’ But instead at this point I made out like this unfortunate old chap encountering Dom Joly in disguise, as anyone with any genuine respect for freedom and self-sovereignty must do sooner or later.
Many people would not consider this ‘growth hack’ to be a ‘scam’ in the conventional sense, but I’m going to make the case that this sort of ploy is no less worthy of the term than the kind of straight-up, conventional ‘scam’ that you might think of. We’d do well to expand our definition and our thinking. The fact that such behaviours can slip under the radar and appear to be ‘effective’ does not render them any less self-contradictory, any less harmful, nor any more morally sound. The very nature of a ‘scam,’ if it is to be effective, is that its target is not yet wise to it or how it works.
Much of the consumer world at this point in history can in fact be likened to a cacophony of scams. This becomes clear when you develop your perceptivity to hidden manipulation and dark motivations, both of which simply cannot help but reveal themselves once you know what to look for. They permeate every facet of communication with those who perpetrate them – every tone, every word, every little action carries and contains the true intention, no matter the guise.
It is not the first time I have suggested an expansion to the understanding of a common term, not to tar innocent folks with the same brush, quite the opposite – to encompass more of what the term represents at an essential level, and likewise to make it easier to notice and call out falsity in all its forms. In any case there is a useful distinction to be made with the Post-Moral Scammer.
See the only real difference between what you might think of as the crass, immoral scam artist and the post-moral scammer, is that most people do not recognise the scam of the latter. Society hasn’t caught on yet. If you were a scammer (which I hope you aren’t) wouldn’t you rather deploy the latter kind? It’s more efficient, more profitable and, best of all, the target hardly ever knows they’ve been scammed. They walk off none the wiser not even knowing what you’ve stolen. And even when they do, you have the weight of the world on your side. You’re just doing what’s ‘good for business.’ The post-moral scammer isn’t only harder to discern for most people, but they operate on a much vaster scale.
While the stereotypical scammer has barely any comprehension of morality or connection to their conscience, the post-moral scammer believes they are beyond it. The post-moral scammer is also pre-moral in truth, but knows enough about what morality ‘looks like’ to at least craft some semblance of it. They have no need for God. No connection to themselves. They create their own values, or so they think. They are alienated from truth, as much as they will present themselves otherwise, and even though it is their very own twisted desire for truth that renders them capable of recognising morality when they see it.
The post-moral scammer ascribes to the worldview that not only is what they’re doing not immoral – they’re actually better than you for doing it. The only reason that you don’t behave this way is because you’re just not as smart as they are. Their crude and dissonant conduct is rooted not in the absence of ethical integrity but in their superior intelligence. They pursue their insatiable and elusive notion of ‘success’ by convincing themselves that they are not actually scamming at all, which is a far more effective means of serving power and suppressing the cries of your conscience than falling foul of those silly stereotypes. In insisting on “doing what’s working now,” they neglect all timeless wisdom.
Some might argue that there is a meaningful difference between these two kinds of ‘scam’ – that one involves informed consent and the other doesn’t. But the uncomfortable truth is that both are intended to exploit information asymmetries and psychological vulnerabilities, in order to override your capacity for informed decision making – and what is made to resemble ‘informed consent’ often isn’t. Both kinds of scam involve manufactured consent through deception. The fact that one takes great pains to stay barely within the bounds of the law (and even that is often questionable, as we’ll see later), while the other flies in the face of it, means little in terms of genuine moral and personal integrity.
Again the primary difference is defined more by what is perceived to be a scam in culture and what isn’t rather than any essential moral difference, which in turn is influenced by how readily such immorality is understood, detected or even accepted. This distinction is problematic since, again, the whole point of a scam is that it remains undetected (at least until the point at which the scammer has what they want). This apparent difference is also reflected somewhat in current law which naturally lags several steps behind immorality’s leading edge. The post-moral scammer is permitted and even celebrated because they appear to be driving economic wellbeing forward, hidden under the guise of false and partial metrics. (In some parts of the world, even the most blatant scammers – like Yahoo Boys – are honoured and respected, so make of that what you will). The real difference between the two ‘kinds’ of scam may be better thought of as quantitative rather than essentially qualitative, with one being apparently more subtle (at least perceptively, when it happens to mirror one’s own blind spots and motivations).
The law implies that you, as the target of said ‘scam,’ are more responsible for the outcome in the case of one than in the other – that if you fall for a ‘scam’ you’re the victim of a crime, but if you merely believe you have been deceived by a dishonest company then that’s on you. But what I am saying is not that you’re just a victim in either case but that, on the contrary, you are entirely responsible for the decisions you make in all situations – including your encounters with both ‘kinds’ of scam – and for your own discernment in who you deal with and who you buy from.
The more discerning you can be, the more materially free you will be, from all kinds of deception and in life in general. This means avoiding not only blatant scams, but also not paying the price for the kind of deception that western culture en-masse still finds acceptable.
The idea, however, that you should never have to deal with such attacks on your economic wellbeing, or that they shouldn’t happen at all, is baseless, because the very freedom to choose integrity, develop self-knowledge and grow in responsibility also entails the freedom to betray it. But this in turn means that you and society at large also have the freedom to respond to these behaviours as they really are in themselves and bring appropriate and rational measures against them into existence. As usual, such impositions upon your freedom do serve a twisted kind of purpose in pointing the way towards greater self-actualisation. Your struggles with them reflect a certain contradiction in your own mind.
I soon put the above nightclub event out of my mind, but was reminded of it again recently when an apparently reputable UK company attempted to pull a similar trick on me. This was a particularly audacious and persistent post-moral scam of the kind I would have hoped to see western culture grow out of by 2025, but in essence it was also nothing unusual.
It involved offering a nonetheless useful software product on subscription, but employing a range of tricks and sleights of communication designed to conceal from you a questionable 30% price hike upon renewal. In a two-hit combo, they also stipulated terms that prohibit refunds, in flagrant violation of Consumer Protection regulations.
All taken together there was a clear and deliberate effort to part their customers from their hard-earned economic energy through deception; to lure them into making decisions which they would not have done if they had all the available information. Needless to say, if a more-informed customer is considered to be bad for business, you have a bad business.
For what it’s worth I did get a refund. The firm capitulated the second I mentioned consumer protection laws. But they still conspicuously neglected to respond to any of my points or questions around their sidestepping of the law let alone morality. Assuming my motivations were as utilitarian as their own, they hoped I’d just ‘go away.’ It did not occur to them how I might have been motivated by anything other than a monetary refund. I was eventually put through to their unironically named ‘Head of Compliance’ who, following suit, attempted to gaslight his way out of it as well as frame the refund – my legal right – as apparently generous. I had not realised compliance and generosity were synonymous.
It’s important to take note of what you really see and hear in your dealings and not merely what you want to see and hear. When you’re willing to see it, any communication with such entities will swiftly reveal the true intentions, as they hide, project and wriggle, and stumble over themselves in self-contradictions, recoiling behind that familiar facade of fake kindness and fake customer service – a short-term profitable ruse, but not anywhere near as convincing as they think. In the case of the aforementioned organisation, I’d previously had communications with them about a far more trivial, technical matter where, true to form, they wasted no time in heedlessly brandishing their arrogance and attitude towards their customers.
I am no innocent myself. I also recognise the temptation to just ‘do what’s working now’ and I have also dabbled in that approach in my businesses. But I’ve also felt the full brunt of its dark side. I’ve felt where chasing metrics, money and job ‘success’ for their own sake ultimately leads.
I’ve also worked a diverse variety of jobs and careers across multiple industries, engaging with all kinds of people at all levels, and seen how many organisations, large and small, operate from the inside. Coming out of university I believed naively that the economic machine of the world was entirely rational and good. But once I realised how far from actuality this was, I still cared enough to observe and think about a way forward.
As much as many folks will on some level acknowledge and recognise deception in our world – noticing it in advertising, at work and in politics (most notably in the opposing candidate) – it takes a great deal of energy and courage to truly see and assimilate its true depth, breadth and magnitude, or to even go beyond seeing it only selectively.
Of course deception has existed as long as humans have, and been propagated as a tool for the centralisation of power for as long as there has been civilisation. But the way in which it has become so overtly and shamelessly engrained into the economic structure of our world is a phenomenon dating back not much beyond 100 years and the shenanigans of Edward Bernays, the father of public relations – a way that is not only not hidden, not merely accepted, but lauded. You’ll be kicked out of many corporations for not doing it. They won’t speak of this of course. That would be too honest. But again, if it brings the dollars in, it must be good.
And it doesn’t end with outright lying. That’s just the very start. It can be any misuse of words, insinuation, tone, body language, advertising – any situation where there is a contradiction between communication and reality; any situation where you seek to keep others in ignorance for some perceived benefit to yourself. The catch of course is that it’s not really a benefit at all but mere expedient relief from inner conflict and shame; an attempt to plunder recognition from other humans in the world. Wouldn’t you rather your legacy was to help people be more aware, not less?
If greater transparency with the customer would appear detrimental to your business, then clearly your business is not aligned to the needs of the customer, and your idea of ‘success’ is not true success. You have become a scammer by default.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Cultural self-contradictions have a way of working themselves out. The past is littered with heinous practices that were praised at the time, but today are seen by most people to be just as egregious and untenable as they are in reality. But such change can take a very long time, with meaningful shifts often unfolding over timescales that exceed any single human lifetime.
For now, it’s fair to say that a worryingly large percentage of people in the western world still simply do not seem to have a problem with post-moral scamming, if they perceive it at all. Why is this? In my mind there are four primary reasons.
The first reason is simply that one first needs a frame of reference with which to see beyond it. If commercial-scale deception is what you know, how can you even see the problem, let alone imagine another way? Well, one way is by listening to your conscience. The conscience carries wisdom reaching far beyond your own lifetime and learned experience.
Which brings us to the second reason – because for some this inner voice is simply not yet loud enough to be heard. The amplitude of their natural pain, in the face of an unnatural situation, is insufficient for it to surface into awareness. They are yet to face the full brunt of their hubris.
Thirdly – because everything else that is vying for attention is simply too loud – a cacophony of sensory distraction and aimless thought designed precisely to drown out this inner voice and keep it nicely placated. A situation perpetuated wilfully, not only by the external world and its endless temptations and intrusions, but through poor psychic hygiene.
And lastly, because many are complicit, perpetuating the very same dishonest behaviours; relying on them, structuring their personal, professional and even spiritual lives around them, and believing that they are receiving some kind of benefit through them. Like the majority of abusive characters, they carry an air of unaffectedness in the face of immorality, acting as somehow beyond it. But this is not because they are beyond it. They are just getting started. The post-moral scammer must forever act faultless in order to drown out their own guilt, because to admit that they too have been harmed – by this system, by their parents, by the world and by other people involved – would be to undermine the very same harm they must perpetuate on others.
I admit that I myself hung out with the idea that if you’re ‘making money,’ making a measurable ‘contribution’ or ‘creating value,’ then everything else must come out in the wash in the end. I studied some economics at university and saw truth in the theories of thinkers like Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and Malthus, and I still do. But back then I was subscribed wholesale to the beliefs of the ‘invisible hand,’ the perfect measurement and quantification of success, and that people and firms, acting ‘rationally’ to benefit themselves, only end up benefitting all. All of this is true of course, but only to an extent.
My undergraduate thesis began to cast some doubt on the idea for me. I was examining how meaningful progress is measured in society, looking at various metrics, starting with Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and how they impacted actual wellbeing. When Simon Kuznets had the bright idea in the 1930s to begin measuring the size of the US economy, it turned out to be a powerful metric for bringing people out of the post-war era. What gets measured, improves, as Drucker later said.
The West had been widely experimenting with measurement and quantification generally for a good 250 years already, but by focusing on economic growth as the metric for the modern era, it is no overstatement to say that the West found its next level up. This was a useful map, a good enough vehicle, to carry it to the next station on its journey. As religiosity continued to fall, improving the economic number became not only useful but a moral imperative, filling some of the space previously occupied by religion and tradition.
But the inevitable lesson of my analysis was not that we simply haven’t found the right metric yet. The problem was – and still is – in believing that metrics are the point at all – that we can capture everything that matters in any single idea.
Like all ideas, metrics can at best be a proxy for development and for a limited time. This is not exactly what I was hoping to discover in my academic degree, and I’m not sure whether or to what extent saying as much harmed my grade, but that’s just the thing – science and philosophy done well won’t merely tell you what you want to know, but what you need to know.
Twenty-five years into the 21st century and we have a serious problem: the general belief that the image – the measurable thing, the object, the job title, the ‘economy,’ the currency, KPIs, likes, followers, subscribers, turnover, number of employees – is the thing in itself, is creating problems that now no one can afford to ignore. Much of the western world, at least, in its Spiral Dynamics Orange frenzy, is obsessed with metrics. GDP plays a role in societal development and it, or something equivalent to it, always will, for as long as there is civilisation. But it’s not the only measure and it in itself is not the point. It would be entirely possible to triple GDP from here and have a perfectly horrible society.
While measures of progress do serve to solve problems and advance development in the near term, they do so mostly as proxies for the realness they represent. Whatever real value is generated by pursuing numbers, followers on Instagram and such like, for their own sake, is generated in spite of it, not because of it. Unless you pay attention to yourself, the realness you need will eventually be subsumed by your ulterior aim of self-avoidance; manifesting as falsity, ego inflation and the perpetuation of master-slave dynamics at all levels. All activity will become merely instrumental to what is really a pursuit of power in the project of self-avoidance, and your very attempts to hide yourself will be precisely what reveal yourself.
The same fallacious principle is held by many organisations and ultimately boils down to one rule. If it appears to be good for business, it must be good in itself. If it improves the bottom line, it must be good absolutely. “We’re hear to make a profit,” you say. Nothing wrong with that. But are you here to make a profit at the expense of everything else under the sun?
There is no shortage of stories of executives killing their geese that laid golden eggs (for example here and here) in ignorance of this process and blinded by greed. It’s a predictable and repeatable business trope. It turns out that what is apparently good only for profit is actually not good for profit at all. Let alone is it good for themselves, their psyche, and the world. Yet we learn from history that we don’t learn from history, said Georg Hegel around 200 years ago.
What’s “working?” What’s working now? There’s really only one thing that’s working now and that ever works. It worked yesterday and it will continue to work forever into the future, and that is to develop self-knowledge and embrace the process in whatever form that takes. After all, there is such a thing as an unconscious mind, and we’re not even equipped to comprehend what ‘success’ really is for us without experience of engaging with our deepest parts. That includes the will of the unconscious and all the tragedy of things not going our way. Business and livelihood done well can bring about as much a genuine encounter with the self than any other ‘spiritual practice,’ while any attempt to adopt a ‘strategy,’ in the absence of any meaningful inner dialectic, will serve little end other than to deliver a harsher encounter with truth in the end.
The mounting racket of dark patterns all around the developed world represents the coming end of this particular value system and its corresponding crescendo of con-artistry. We are approaching the peak ‘negation’ (to use a Hegelian term) of this meme – where the unwavering pursuit of one thesis to its limit brings with it and makes manifest its very own internal contradiction to the point of forced failure. That is to say that the pursuit of ‘goodness,’ freedom and progress through measurement alone not only deviates from the real goal to the point of it becoming undeniable – it ultimately becomes positively counter to it, and that, in the absence of responsibility, empathy and self-reflection, unwelcome transformation is necessarily forced upon the world from the inside out.
Those who choose to recognise and dance with this movement become free, while those who actively avoid it eventually become forced into compliance with reality through inexorable forces beyond their control. Until then, they are a scam artist by choice or by association.
During the 2020 lockdowns, employers around the world overnight miraculously figured out how to enable home working for their employees. It turns out it was not only possible but productive and, eventually, necessary. Many people found that they quite liked working this way – they got more done with less effort and fewer inane distractions – while employers figured out a hack for saving on office space and other overheads. But generally those who had any respect for their own freedom, beyond merely striving to ‘win’ at master-slave dynamics, were already well aware of this opportunity more than a decade earlier. In the end, as is often the way, it took for the long-outmoded way to become simply untenable before spirit forced a change.
Meanwhile, for the post-moral scammers, business is booming. They continue to operate with apparently no end in sight and nothing in their way.
You can leave reviews and expose them, but it often makes little difference. Few potential customers check reviews, or register the gravity of what is being said when they do. After all, a lack of available information is not the crux of the problem.
Meanwhile the post-moral scammer can always (and often does) bury honest, aggrieved reviews in a pile of fake, incentivised ones of their own, by offering their more undiscerning and suggestible customers free department store vouchers and such like. This is despite the fact that this practice of review manipulation has been illegal for over a decade in many jurisdictions and, as of 2025, very explicitly so in the UK’s updated consumer protection regulations under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.*
* Which makes it a specific offence to offer incentives for positive reviews without clear disclosure, with potential fines of up to £18,000 per instance.
Forget raising your situation for ‘mediation’ by posturing ‘ombudsmans’ and other third parties, for in all likelihood they too are part of the post-moral scam and simply cannot see beyond it. Their job has become to uphold the scheme while pretending to be impartial; softening the blow for the perpetrators under the guise of offering you a remedy, while simultaneously weakening your position if you later choose to escalate it via the regular legal channels. They are preservers by nature – not of truth, but of themselves – of an outmoded system, no matter how corrupt it may be. After all, they were hewn from the same stone and their real incentives are aligned as such. Their remit too is to maintain their own inner contradictions as far as metaphysically possible.
They all fall foul of the ultimate spiritual fallacy – believing they are only responding to an objective reality and not participating in its creation. But peak power is a mere moment before peak irony. The harder one clings to their thesis, their ‘betterness,’ the more absurd outer reality must become.
The reverse – taking responsibility for your mind – is the ultimate self-knowledge practice. Call it a “growth hack,” if you will. And it involves discernment.
There will come a time when even the average person, through the same inexorable forces, will be compelled to vet the ethical integrity of those he buys from, partners with and does business with. Economic utility alone is not enough, and firms will need to have integrity or fail. This means genuinely and not just posturing (as though that has to be said), since wherever an individual is truly moral, posturing does not fool them.
Meanwhile those who perpetuate such scams, who enjoyed the fleeting feeling of being ahead and above the world for so long, must contend with the rude awakening that they were behind in all the ways that matter.
Truth is coming, it always does. Even if it takes 250 years. Once one person sees it, it’s only a matter of time until it disseminates, and the deceiver of today becomes tomorrow’s caricature. But in the meantime these encounters serve a purpose in showing each of us where we ourselves lack freedom and discernment. Freedom and discernment come together.
As for the post-moral scammer, they will continue to think they’re being smart and getting results by employing dark patterns, but to a growing number of folks they serve only to loudly advertise their own cartoonish moral shortfalls and their clumsily concealed exaltation of power over freedom.
I invite them to do the brave thing of being honest in their work. What’s the worst that will happen?
The worst that will happen is that you will have to face your fear of being yourself and letting the chips fall where they may.
