Applied psychology is routinely described as a helping profession. A critical perspective reveals a troubling question: who does it actually help? Historically, psychologists have largely ignored mass suffering and emancipation, instead aligning with Comte's positivist vision and serving the status quo.
A stark example is Edward Bernays, who pioneered public relations by weaponizing psychology to "engineer consent," manipulating desires and fears to shape public behavior and fuel consumerism. This legacy persists today. Regimes and corporations exploit emotions - especially fear - to manufacture consent. Militarism and nationalism thrive on insecurity, while neoliberal capitalism weaponizes worry as a tool of control.
As one U.S. social scientist noted, the lack of universal healthcare isn't accidental; it keeps people "afraid, anxious, and worried all the time." Health, of course, is just one example. Housing is another. The absence of affordable housing and the denial of housing as a right are intended to put masses into long-term debt (i.e., mortgage) and into jobs that they cannot leave. Mortgage leads to worrying and for decades. It is not a coincidence that banks use slogans like "Seven ways to stop worrying and love your mortgage".
Mainstream psychologists have shown very little interest in how and why worry is systematically manufactured. Debt and credit have long become household terms, and they, too, have been of little interest for mainstream psychologists. Job insecurity, or precarity, has also received little attention. Today even retirement and pensions are under attack, particularly in world's richest countries. Masters of neoliberal capitalism want to make insecurity a norm across the lifespan.
Even though mainstream psychology sees emotions as its domain, it systematically avoids addressing how emotions are used to manufacture consent and particularly how they are used to create mass suffering.