Why “the Mindset of the Rich” Keeps Being Sold — A Market That Stands by Not Solving

Introduction: The Same Message, Endlessly Reproduced

Release your money blocks. Hold an abundance mindset. Give yourself permission to receive.

On the money shelf of a bookshop, in a video advertisement, in a course brochure. Search with a little awareness and these words overflow astonishingly everywhere. Changing the wording little by little, nearly the same mould of message flows repeatedly from countless transmitters.

Plenty of people are looking for how to raise an abundance mindset. What this article examines is the premise beneath it: why this kind of message is reproduced in such quantity, and endlessly — its structure.

Let me give the conclusion first. This industry does not solve the problem of guilt over money. Rather, it stands by not solving it.

The One Who Diagnoses and the One Who Sells the Remedy Are the Same

First, confirm a plain fact. Many of those who preach let go of your guilt over money earn revenue precisely by selling those words. The course to let go of guilt charges a fee; the session to release blocks incurs a price. This message is not distributed as free goodwill. It is a product provided in exchange for payment.

This in itself is neither unjust nor improper. Providing value and receiving payment is a legitimate undertaking. The problem lies in that the content of the words being transmitted and the structure by which the transmitter profits overlap exactly.

Replace this overlap with another industry and the strangeness becomes clear. A doctor diagnoses you are ill. And that same doctor sells the sole remedy exclusively. We would not easily believe that diagnosis. If the one who diagnoses and the one who sells the remedy are the same, it is natural to turn a doubting eye on the diagnosis itself.

When it comes to money, we somehow forget this natural wariness — perhaps because money troubles are pressing and we want to cling to something. But precisely when it is pressing, we need to look coolly at who profits from those words.

Here is something I want to distinguish. The objection is it not a twisted view to write everything off as a money-grab is reasonable. Certainly, well-meaning transmitters exist. But individual goodwill and structural profit can coexist. Even if the speaker sincerely wishes to ease the other, if that wish rides on a structure sold as a product and generating revenue, the structure operates as structure. What this article dissects is not the individual’s heart but this structure.

Guilt Has Properties That Make It an Excellent Entrance for a Product

Why is guilt chosen so much as material for a product? Three properties.

First, almost everyone carries it. Rare is the person who has never felt even a little unease at receiving money, at earning, at naming a price. The call you have guilt over money, don’t you applies to nearly everyone. As a product entrance, this is a doorway of unmatched width.

Second, and decisively, there is no method to objectively confirm whether you have let go. Fever can be measured with a thermometer, weight on a scale. But whether guilt has vanished, no one — not even the person — can clearly measure. Told a little seems to remain, there is no means to deny it.

If the terminus cannot be defined, one can keep saying you have not fully let go, a deeper block remains. A product to reduce weight eventually loses the customer who reaches the target; a product whose effect is measurable becomes unnecessary once achieved. But the removal of guilt has no criterion of achievement. So the customer cannot graduate.

Third, even an excuse for when it does not work can be prepared in advance. With an ordinary product, if the effect does not show, the seller’s responsibility is questioned. But in this genre, to the person who did not become lighter one can say because your block is still deep.

This shifting of responsibility strengthens the industry further. Because the result of it did not work is converted not into distrust of the product but into the customer’s self-doubt. Work or not, the customer stays. Work, and they seek more; fail, and they keep coming, thinking still not enough.

The Removal of Guilt Is the Entrance to the Next Consumption

How, then, does this product work within the one who bought it?

Through the exercise, they feel guilt ease for a while. A brake that long bound them loosens. Then the person begins to increase their action — well then, let me earn more.

Here is the crux. What the person, now leaning forward, seeks next is a method for earning. Concrete know-how, investment knowledge, the ropes of a side hustle. And these are usually prepared as the next product by the very transmitter who first made them let go of guilt, or those around them.

That is, the message let go of guilt is not advice complete in itself. It functions as an entrance that sends people off to the next consumption. Release the brake and people want to step on the accelerator. And a product teaching how to step on the accelerator is lined up right beside.

For the seller, guilt over money is convenient in a double sense. First, it becomes an obstacle to sales, since a guilty customer hesitates to buy. Second, however, that obstacle can be removed, and the very process of removing it can be made a product. From one guilt, sales can be drawn in two and three tiers.

Erase guilt completely and the customer does not reach the leaning-forward state of buying; yet leave too much and the wallet does not open. Loosen it just right and make them think I may buy. That adjustment is where this industry shows its skill.

Without Individualising the Problem, It Cannot Stand a Single Day

The mechanism so far rides wholly on one premise: the problem of money is a problem of your interior.

Consider. If the cause of guilt or anxiety over money lay not in the individual’s interior but on the side of structure, what would happen? The product let us get your interior in order would at once miss the mark.

So this industry never speaks of structure. It cannot. Your anxiety arises because you hold no authority to price and stand in a position priced by another’s standard — it could never say this, not if its mouth were torn. Say it and the product for getting the interior in order would stop selling.

Here is the reason the talk of structure never becomes mainstream. It is not that the talk of structure is wrong. It is that the talk of structure makes this industry’s product unsellable.

And this individualising suits mass production too. To analyse structure, you must probe the mechanisms of the economy and the conditions the person is placed in — it takes labour and expertise. But to merely preach hold an abundance mindset needs almost no expertise. The barrier to entry is boundlessly low.

In addition, the receiver cannot verify the content, since whether attitude changed cannot be measured. The supply side is not asked about quality, and the receiving side cannot measure quality. When these two overlap, even a thin message can be poured into the market without limit.

Bathed repeatedly in the same mould of message, its content comes to feel like common sense. And once the premise money is a problem of the interior becomes common sense, the voice that questions structure comes, rather, to sound strange.

Conclusion: Not Solving Has Become the Lifeline

Any product, once it solves the problem completely, no longer sells. Cure the illness and the medicine is unneeded. If so, for a product that keeps selling repeatedly, the problem being completely solved is rather a state to avoid.

The essence of this industry is not the solver of the problem. It is a device for prolonging the problem. It does not untie the problem of guilt over money but keeps it preserved as a product, unsolved.

The objection if you say that, is not every business the same is sharp. Certainly, many businesses design repeat custom. But this genre has a peculiar property: unverifiability. Many products can measure their effect, so if they are truly useless the customer eventually leaves. But the removal of guilt cannot be measured. So even when nothing is actually solved, the customer can be kept by the mere expectation it may be working.

Reading this far, some may have grown gloomy. But I have no intention of ending by denouncing this industry. What matters is not accusation but seeing through the structure.

Once the mechanism is visible, you can avoid being swung about by it. Instead of convincing yourself it did not work because my block is deep, you come to view it at a distance — this is a product built so as not to be solved. This distance is the first freedom.

And what is needed beyond it is not to hate the industry. It is to step quietly off the industry’s logic and rebuild, with your own hands, the question you were never allowed to touch — the question of structure. This whole structure is gathered in the true nature of the guilt around earning.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Skinner, B. F. Science and Human Behavior (1953) Macmillan
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press