For decades, we have been training and forming business professionals in the wrong way.
Between the 1970s and the late 1990s, we created what could be called professional humanoids — people who believed they were free to choose, think, and decide, but were in fact moulded by systems larger than themselves. They walked the streets with confidence and filled the offices of “success stories,” but their triumphs were scripted and narrowly defined. The model of “the successful man” became the standard, while society celebrated individual victories over collective progress.
The Legacy of Business Education
Business schools taught history, the classics, and processes rooted in industrial legends. Henry Ford’s methods were held up as timeless, reshaped into lean manufacturing, just-in-time supply chains, and online mass production. Productivity was measured in growth and profit, not in quality, value, or human well-being.
The schools of thought of Peter Drucker and Philip Kotler also shaped generations of professionals. Their frameworks justified not only the mechanics of marketing but also its manipulative dimensions: constructing demand in order to sell preexisting supply. Advertising, branding, and strategy became elegant veils — creative ways of selling rather than authentic efforts to solve real problems. As the cynical adage went: “People don’t buy what they want. They buy what I tell them to buy.”
Culture and the Rise of Greed
The 1987 film Wall Street captured this shift perfectly. Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, declared “greed is good.” What was meant as a caricature of capitalism’s excess instead became a blueprint for ambition. Rather than warning against moral decay, the film inspired many young professionals to chase wealth at any cost. Culture celebrated not responsibility or sustainability, but quick profit and personal gain.
Whether or not the movie directly caused a surge in finance careers, it reflected a larger trend: business was increasingly reduced to speculation, markets, and individual enrichment, with little concern for the broader consequences to society, the planet, or human dignity.
Manufactured Individualism
We were molded into controllable, intelligent, cultured beings — but also compliant. Happy, busy people rarely question the system. Our lives became checklists: get a job, marry, have children, attend church, be kind, be useful, but above all, be productive. Productivity itself became a moral obligation, defined not by our values but by the invisible hand of faceless powers.
I am not naïve; I understand that hidden powers and interests will always shape the world. But the depth of control — and our willingness to accept it — has been staggering.
A Liberal Economist’s Stand
Here lies the paradox. I am a liberal economist. I believe in capitalism, in meritocracy, in free trade, in markets with little or no tariffs, and in individual freedoms. I trust markets more than governments or institutions to regulate themselves. Keynesian interventionism, to me, was a mistake that limited freedom and responsibility.
Yet, philosophically, I am also libertarian. Free will is the genuine ability to choose between alternatives, not outcomes predetermined by power or manipulation. And that is what we have lacked. The freedom we were promised has often been illusory — shaped by advertising, cultural scripts, and systemic manipulation.
Real freedom must be rooted in logic, coherence, and authenticity. Without these, capitalism risks becoming a theater of imposed desires rather than a space for genuine choice.
The Digital Revolution: Liberation or New Illusion?
From the early 2000s to the 2010s, cracks began to appear. A new generation of “humanoids” started to question the false promises of consumerism. The white-picket-fence dream of their parents revealed itself as a carefully packaged illusion. Then came the digital revolution — the rise of the internet, social media, and global connectivity.
At first, this was liberation. Information flowed freely, hierarchies weakened, and individuals gained a voice on platforms that once belonged only to governments, corporations, or media monopolies. Access to knowledge, new business models, and global collaboration reshaped what freedom and opportunity could look like. Technology promised authenticity: a chance to bypass the middlemen and speak directly, create directly, choose directly.
But the revolution carried a darker side. The same digital tools that empowered us also became mechanisms of manipulation. Algorithms replaced advertisers, filtering not only what we bought but also what we thought. Social media personalized desire, manufacturing demand with surgical precision. Instead of one Gordon Gekko telling us “greed is good,” billions of micro-Gekkos now whispered to us from every device, every feed, every notification.
Technology gave us more choice, but also more noise. It expanded our freedoms, but also subtly programmed our preferences. The dream of authenticity risked dissolving into a new kind of control — softer, invisible, and far more pervasive than the old world of Ford’s factories or Madison Avenue’s ads.
The conclusion…or not
The task before us is to move beyond the humanoid model — beyond the compliant professional molded by unseen forces. Capitalism, at its best, should empower freedom and authenticity, not manufacture illusions. Markets can and should regulate themselves, but only when rooted in honesty, responsibility, and respect for real human needs.
To be a liberal economist today is to defend free markets not as tools of manipulation, but as arenas of genuine freedom. To be human is to insist on authenticity over spectacle, logic over illusion, and freedom over the faceless powers that would prefer us obedient.
The digital revolution has given us the tools. The challenge is whether we use them to reclaim true freedom — or allow them to become the most sophisticated illusion yet.
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