Whoever needs a they

Scroll a feed late at night in Kuwait and a certain kind of seller turns up again and again. Doctors do not want you to know this. The banks hope you never find out. Everything you have been told about your skin, your money or your child's diet is a lie, and here is the one person brave enough to say so.

The pitch is not really about the product. It is about an enemy. Once there is a they, the rest takes care of itself: whatever they say, believe the opposite, and whoever stands against them must be on your side.

It is an easy story to start and an easy one to spread. It needs no proof, only a villain. It splits people neatly, and it switches off the instinct we would normally bring to a purchase, the one that asks what exactly is being sold and whether it does what it claims.

That is why it draws exactly the wrong people. Someone with a good product can survive scrutiny and usually welcomes it. Someone selling a powder that does nothing, or a course that teaches nothing, cannot. For them, a loud quarrel with an imaginary establishment is perfect cover. Every question becomes proof of persecution. Every critic becomes one of them.

It is not only the late-night sellers. Whole industries have learned to wrap a weak case in a grievance, because outrage travels further than a careful explanation and invites fewer questions on the way.

Sooner or later, someone looks past the enemy at the thing on offer and says plainly that it is a con. What matters is how many people bought it before then.