Hungary votes on 12 April. I am Hungarian, which is one reason this subject does not feel abstract to me.
If you have watched Orbán’s system long enough from the inside, one thing becomes very clear. It was not built mainly on policy detail, administrative brilliance or some magical understanding of the national soul. It was built on a much older and more reliable foundation: fear, belonging, grievance, protection, repetition. “War or peace” is simply the latest packaging. Reuters reported in February that Orbán was again framing the election in exactly those terms, while Freedom House’s 2025 reports describe a country where anti-migrant and anti-LGBT+ politics have gone together with pressure on journalists, universities and NGOs critical of the ruling party. When press-freedom groups then condemn the removal of Telex journalists from a campaign event a few weeks before the vote, the pattern is not especially subtle anymore.
I am not saying people are stupid. That would be cheap. Politics is not a slot machine, and voters are not lab animals in national costume. But modern politics has learned the same lesson that modern commercial industries learned years ago: the fastest way into a person is often through biology and psyche rather than reason. Fear moves faster than argument. Belonging settles deeper than evidence. Identity is stickier than logic. Once you understand that, you stop trying merely to persuade people and start organising whole systems around what keeps them anxious, loyal, hungry, tribal or soothed.
And once that idea clicks, you start seeing the same business everywhere.
The broad commercial formula is simple enough. Make the thing visible. Make it normal. Remove friction from trial. Build reward into use. Repeat until repetition feels like choice. At that point the user starts doing part of the work himself. The product no longer feels like something imposed from outside. It starts feeling like routine, preference, comfort, identity. In other words, it starts feeling like “me”.
Industries have been spending real money learning how to do this. Nobody publishes a neat line in the annual report called “budget for exploiting the nervous system,” but the surrounding numbers tell their own story. The neuromarketing market alone is estimated at about US$1.83 billion in 2026, and in Great Britain licensed gambling operators spent £1.15 billion on advertising and marketing in the year to September 2024, with digital taking the largest share. Those figures are not the whole picture, only a glimpse of the scale. The real spending is spread across product design, behavioural research, data science, algorithmic targeting, consumer insight and marketing optimisation. The point is not the exact total. The point is that none of this is accidental or marginal anymore.
Food is an easy place to see it. The old story was that people ate too much because they were weak, greedy or lazy. That story is wearing thin. A 2024 BMJ umbrella review linked greater exposure to ultra-processed food with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes, especially cardiometabolic illness and common mental disorders. A 2023 BMJ article argued that ultra-processed foods high in refined carbohydrates and fats can usefully be understood through an addiction framework. Children’s digital food marketing research now reads less like advertising theory and more like patient notes from a civilisation that got too clever for its own appetite. Children recognise the ads. They understand the intent. They still respond to them, because being aware of manipulation is not the same as being immune to it.
Social media is no more dignified. A 2021 study using computational reward-learning models on more than one million posts from more than 4,000 users found that social-media behaviour conforms both qualitatively and quantitatively to the principles of reward learning. That is a very elegant scientific way of saying the platforms learned how to train us. Check, scroll, compare, wait, hope, repeat. It is not magic. It is reinforcement. The platforms do not merely host human behaviour. They shape it.
Once you look at the world this way, the gambling industry stops looking like a morally isolated villain and starts looking like the least coy member of a much larger family.
Casinos, particularly slot products, have long been a masterclass in this business. Near misses, those outcomes that land just beside success, have been shown to activate brain regions associated with wins in pathological gamblers. Losses disguised as wins, where the machine celebrates a return that is still smaller than the original wager, lead people to overestimate how often they genuinely won. Then there is “dark flow,” that absorbed, numbing state in multiline slot play where the player is no longer really pursuing money in any meaningful sense. He is sinking into the machine. The session becomes less about winning and more about relief, trance, escape, obliteration, call it what you like. The machine becomes a lit-up shelter from the rest of the day.
At that point the phrase “responsible gambling” starts to sound like something written by a committee trying not to upset the furniture.
There is very little that is responsible about gambling as a product category. The game is mathematically stacked against the player. The sensory environment is built by the operator. The pace is controlled by the operator. The retention model belongs to the operator. The product design belongs to the operator. The database tools belong to the operator. The advertising budget belongs to the operator. The state licenses the whole arrangement, taxes it, often depends on that tax, and then everybody turns to the customer and says, in effect, “Now please be sensible.”
That is an odd sermon to deliver from one side of a rigged table.
The public-health literature has been catching up with that absurdity. A 2024 Lancet Public Health Commission treated gambling as a public health issue and called for protection from gambling-related harm to become the primary regulatory focus, explicitly comparing gambling with other addictive and unhealthy commodities such as alcohol and tobacco. Livingstone and Rintoul were blunter years earlier: the discourse of responsible gambling is inadequate for preventing or minimising harm. They were right then, and the argument has only aged well since. The problem with “responsible gambling” is not just that it is soft. It is that it places moral weight on the wrong part of the system.
And this is where the question of personal responsibility gets uncomfortable.
Of course people make choices. Nobody needs a lecture about that. Adults place bets, buy cigarettes, eat rubbish, scroll for hours, vote emotionally, ignore warning signs, go back for more. Choice exists. Agency exists. The problem starts when those words are used too cheaply, too cleanly, in environments that have been professionally designed to weaken exactly the sort of judgement they are supposed to celebrate.
Choice inside a manipulative system is still choice. It just stops being a very complete moral argument.
That matters in gambling more than almost anywhere else. The player is told to behave responsibly inside a product architecture built to encourage repetition, distortion and immersion. He is expected to remain measured while the machine leans on reinforcement, uncertainty, sensory reward and dissociation. He is invited to think of any resulting harm as a personal failure of discipline. The more polished versions of the industry now do this with a sympathetic tone and a little safer-gambling badge in the corner, which changes the cosmetics and not much else.
Telling people to behave responsibly inside a professionally manipulative environment has always been a good deal for the environment.
The same logic shows up elsewhere. Food companies engineer products around craving and repetition, then talk about balanced lifestyles. Social platforms build around compulsive return behaviour, then offer “digital wellbeing” tools buried somewhere in settings, like apologetic chocolates on a hotel pillow. Political systems stir fear, grievance and belonging, then speak solemnly of the democratic will. The pattern is familiar because it is useful. Engineer the pressure, then individualise the blame.
That is one reason Orbán belongs at the beginning of an article about gambling. Not because he is running a slot machine in Parliament, but because the same emotional mechanics show up in a different costume. Build a system around fear, tribal reassurance and repetition. Dominate the media environment. Keep the emotional weather unstable enough that protection becomes the thing people feel they are voting for. Let the message sink into identity. After a while the structure feels natural. People stop experiencing the system as manipulation and start experiencing it as common sense. That is the real trick. Once the machinery becomes emotionally familiar, it no longer feels like machinery at all.
The corporate world does this too, only without flags and with worse coffee.
And where exactly are politicians in all this? Too often they are either asleep, compromised, late, or pretending that markets will sort this out if we all behave like adults and read the small print. They won’t. Markets do not develop a conscience just because the product is exploitative. They refine the exploitative parts because those are often the profitable ones. The same is true in gambling, food, tech and politics itself. If politicians understand that whole sectors now study biology and behaviour in order to turn vulnerability into recurring revenue, then treating harm as a matter of private self-control becomes less like neutrality and more like surrender.
That leaves the obvious question of what should actually be done.
Not prohibition. Prohibition is usually the daydream of people who will not be around for the black market that follows. And certainly not another layer of “play responsibly” messaging, which has all the practical force of telling drowning men to breathe calmly.
The first step is honesty about the product. If gambling products rely heavily on immersion, reinforcement, variable reward, dissociation and prolonged engagement, then regulation should begin from that fact rather than from some sentimental fiction about entertainment. Product design standards need to be real. Features such as losses disguised as wins and near-miss-heavy mechanics should not be treated as decorative details. Friction needs to be put back into the system deliberately. Advertising rules need to be tighter, especially where digital targeting and constant exposure are concerned. Independent research needs actual independence, not that familiar arrangement where industries fund the study of the harms they would prefer to continue causing. And states need to stop pretending they are neutral when they profit directly from the licence fees and tax flows of these businesses.
More broadly, politicians need to recover a fairly unfashionable idea: that regulation is part of civilisation, not an administrative nuisance one apologises for before lunch. The more industries learn to work directly on appetite, fear, habit and belonging, the less credible it becomes to answer the resulting harm with soft language about informed choice.
Because that is the part that keeps bothering me, and perhaps it should.
The modern world has become astonishingly good at learning us. Not our ideals. Not our better nature. The rougher stuff underneath. Hunger. Fear. Dependency. Boredom. Vanity. Loneliness. Tribal instinct. Relief. It has learned how to map those things, test them, trigger them, monetise them and wrap the result in something that still feels voluntary.
Some industries do it with salt, sugar and fat. Some do it with lights, sound and near misses. Some do it with infinite scroll. Some do it with national flags, enemies and promises of protection.
Same animal. Same wiring. Better operators.
That is why this matters. And that is why “responsibility,” on its own, is nowhere near enough.
