When Philosophy Becomes a Product
We have mistaken the love of wisdom for a weapon.
Philosophy was meant to bring peace, not power.
Yet in the digital coliseum, wisdom has become a gladiator’s tool, a language of manipulation cloaked in enlightenment.
The words of dead philosophers are traded like crypto tokens, each promising a new hustle, an edge, a strategy for control, to “turn obstacles into opportunity.”
The ancients have been drafted into the corporate productivity seminar.
Epictetus now teaches “focus on what you can control” at leadership bootcamps.Plato urges “clear and logical thinking” on PowerPoint slides.
Socrates offers “critical reasoning skills” for quarterly reviews.
Pythagoras crunches numbers in Excel.
Aristotle runs HR under the slogan “encourage and nourish.”
Heraclitus has joined a startup, preaching “embrace and adapt to change.”
And Democritus, reborn as a data analyst, assures us that truth is “data-driven decision-making.”
Thus the sacred art of questioning has become a self-help industry. The eternal pursuit of wisdom, outsourced to net gurus and TED Talk prophets.
The purpose of thought has been inverted.
It no longer seeks understanding but advantage.
Yes, the ancient sophists sold rhetoric for profit. But today’s startup sophists go further, marketers of control selling domination instead of insight. They call it realism or the revelation of power structures, but it is only insecurity disguised as wisdom.
The truly strong do not need to manipulate; they can stand still without fear of not being noticed.
Real philosophy begins when one stops seeking victory.
It begins in the quiet effort to see things as they are, without turning them into a means to an end.