I stood at a trade show with a bag full of silicone wristbands. I sold them with a promise. Wear one and you would be stronger, more stable, more balanced. People believed it. They bought. I made money.
Was that a lie or was it good marketing? I no longer know. The line between the two moved while I worked, and I never noticed when I had crossed it. At the start I asked questions about the product. Then I stopped.
I came out of e-commerce. I had studied marketing, started companies and built software. My measure was practical. Find what works, locate the demand and meet it. By that measure the wristbands worked. There was demand and I met it.
There was a test. I would have someone stand, push on their arm and watch them lose balance. Then I put a band on them and pushed again, and they held. They stood firmer. They felt something. Thousands of people felt it. Athletes and celebrities wore the bands. Ordinary buyers wore them and told their friends.
Then I read the science. Double-blind, controlled. The result was a placebo, no measurable effect. There was no bio-frequency and no energy resonance. What the researchers measured instead was belief, expectation and group dynamics. The effect came entirely from the wearer’s own mind.
The tests said no. Customers kept buying, and I earned either way. This is where self-deception begins. I never sat down one evening and chose to deceive anyone. The question of whether the thing was real became a question I could settle tomorrow. Tomorrow the till was full again, and the question waited.
There is a name for this. Mauvaise foi, bad faith. You hide behind the market, the customers, the role you play. You act as though you are not free, as though the situation decides for you. I was free. I could have stopped at any hour of any day. I behaved as if I could not.
I thought of myself as a decent person and never checked the claim. I was helping people, after all. They came away feeling stronger. What was wrong with that? The strength most likely came from inside their own heads and not from the silicone on their wrists. I suspected it. The suspicion came late, well after the start, and it was no shock. It came quietly, and I set it aside and kept selling.
Knowing made it worse. Once I understood the test I did not stop. I got better at the job. I knew which sentences closed a sale. I knew why the demonstration convinced people, because the body answers to expectation, and I used that knowledge to sell more.
The question I never said out loud was simple. Do I take the illusion away from them or do I keep earning? I kept earning, one participant in a collective placebo that customers, retailers and I all wanted to keep alive, because stopping was uncomfortable and the money was real.
The largest deception lived in the wish of millions of people that the band be true. Nobody organised it. I fed that wish for years without having started it, and lived on what it paid.
I am describing myself, and a trade that ran because no one at any single point had to decide to lie.