In the film Waheda bi Waheda (One by One), the celebrated Egyptian actor Adel Imam plays Salah Fouad, a man working in advertising who invents the name of a product that does not actually exist: “Al-Fankoush.” There is no factory, no packaging, no product anyone can buy—only a name and an advertising campaign clever enough to arouse curiosity.

But then something unexpected happens. People begin asking about “Al-Fankoush,” searching for it everywhere and waiting for it to appear. The name turns into fascination, fascination into desire, and desire into demand—until the man who invented the idea has to find someone who can actually manufacture this “Al-Fankoush.”

The story may be comic, but the question it leaves behind is not. How can a message create desire for something that does not even exist? And do we always buy what we genuinely need, or are some of the things we come to regard as needs shaped only after they are presented to us in a way that knows how to reach us?

If each of us paused to think about some of the things we have bought, we might discover that we were not always buying the object itself. Sometimes we bought a phone because we wanted to feel more modern, clothes because we wanted to look the way we hoped others would see us, a fragrance because it matched the impression we wanted to leave behind, or a car because its meaning had grown far beyond its practical function. Even the smallest purchases can carry an unspoken promise: that they might bring us closer to the version of ourselves we imagine.

That is why desire is more complicated than we think. It does not always begin with a clear—or even genuine—need. It may begin with a comparison, an image, a word, or a passing sense of inadequacy. Then something from the outside arrives and finds a place already prepared for it within us.

Perhaps, then, the question is not always: What do we want? But rather: Who helped us want what we want?

More intriguingly, when people make a choice, they rarely feel that they are acting on a desire shaped for them. They experience it as their own. And perhaps this is where the most mysterious distance begins: the distance between what we truly choose and what others may have helped to shape within us.

This is what interests me most in the story. Advertising does not merely try to place a product in front of a person; it first tries to understand the person who will see it. What attracts their attention? What awakens their desire? What might ultimately move them to buy?

And here the distance between two questions becomes very short in wording, yet very different in meaning: Why does a person behave this way? And how can what we know about them be used to influence what they will do?

Long before “Al-Fankoush” appeared on screen, the American psychologist John B. Watson had become one of the leading figures of behaviorism. In 1913, he wrote that one of psychology’s aims was the prediction and control of behavior. Then came the more revealing moment: in 1920, his academic career at Johns Hopkins University came to an end, and he later joined the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, taking with him into the marketplace what he knew about human behavior.

There, that knowledge began to find a new use—not only in understanding people, but also in attempting to influence their decisions and purchasing behavior.

Watson was not entering a marginal industry. According to later historical estimates, advertising expenditure in the United States reached around $2.48 billion in 1920. The market was expanding rapidly, and knowledge of the consumer itself was becoming an economic asset.

Yet the history of behaviorism is not what concerns me most here. The larger and simpler question is this:

What happens to knowledge when it leaves the place where it was born?

Knowledge does not choose how it will be used. Understanding fear may help a doctor treat it—or help someone else learn how to provoke it. Understanding attention may help a teacher reach a student—or help an advertiser hold someone’s eyes on a message for longer. Understanding habit may help a person break one that harms them—or help others design a behavior they want repeated.

History offers more troubling examples.

When millions of pages of internal tobacco-industry documents were later made public, they showed that major companies were not merely studying who smoked and what they bought. They were also investigating people’s psychological and social needs.

In research aimed at understanding women, ideas such as self-confidence, independence and friendship were examined, and advertising messages were then built to connect cigarettes with those meanings. The industry also drew on scientists, academics, research, conferences and books to help shape a discourse that made smoking more socially acceptable and influenced the way it was discussed—sometimes without fully revealing the relationship to the industry itself.

One of the clearest examples came in 1968, when Philip Morris launched Virginia Slims, a cigarette brand aimed specifically at women. The product was linked to the image of the modern, independent woman and to ideas of liberation and self-confidence.

Studies based on internal company documents later showed that constructing this aspirational image was a central part of the brand’s strategy. It is a striking example of the power of connecting a product not merely to what a person wants to own, but to who that person hopes to become.

And here the question becomes more unsettling: once we know what a person needs psychologically, have we also discovered the door through which we can reach them?

That is why I do not see Watson’s story simply as the story of a scientist who left the laboratory and entered an advertising agency. I see it as a symbolic moment in a broader transition: from asking “How do we understand the human being?” to asking “What can we do with what we have understood—and how might that understanding be exploited?”

Again, the distance between two sentences is very short in words, but enormous in meaning:

“I understand why you do that.”

And:

“If I understand why you do it, can I make you do it?”

None of this means that human beings are machines that can simply be controlled, or that knowing a single psychological principle gives anyone the power to direct people at will. Human beings are far more complex than that.

But it is also difficult to deny that every additional insight into the way we pay attention, learn, form habits and desire things gives those who possess that knowledge greater room to influence us.

And here, for me, the question becomes larger than Watson—or advertising itself:

When does understanding the human being stop being knowledge that helps us, and become knowledge used to influence and exploit us?

A Final Word

Nearly four decades ago, Isaac Asimov, professor of biochemistry and science-fiction writer, observed:

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than we gather the wisdom needed to use it.”

Every discovery opens a new door before us. But it also raises a question about limits and purpose—about what should be done, and what should not. It demands that our awareness deepen, our sense of responsibility widen, and our ethics rise at the same pace as our knowledge and capabilities.

What deserves our concern is not that our ability to understand the human being continues to grow, but that it may grow faster than our wisdom in using what we know.

And perhaps the hardest question of all is this:

Do we use this knowledge for the human being… or to exploit the human being?

The Egyptian poet Salah Jahin once touched on another side of the same dilemma:

Do not compel a man, and do not tell him he is wholly free;   his own bewildered mind is burden enough.   What he desires and longs for today,   tomorrow he may long to change.

We may not be able to stop others from understanding our desires and discovering the paths that lead to them.

But we can still question every desire before we obey it:

Where did you come from?