There was a response to that message, which prompted this next essay. Sorry for not including the reply but it's not mine, and I think this is straightforward enough even without knowing what it was a response to:

But see you're missing the point. It doesn't matter if it has any influence on any specific person or whether there is indisputable coercion. It matters if it has influence *in bulk*, and if that creates a runaway positive feedback loop. And it most definitely does.

Arguing ontology is also missing the point. Sure individuals "exist" in any ordinary sense. But the problem is that depending on what phenomenon you are trying to understand, effective understanding might arise from thinking about individuals, or about collections of competing mental processes within an individual, or groups of individuals competing with each other, or groups of ideas competing with each other, or any of infinite fine shades of division of those things. To think that the "existence" of "individuals" is important is nothing more than a blockage of your ability to categorize phenomena at whatever grain is relevant to the question at hand.

Personally I would argue that a classification system that prevents understanding (i.e. "individuals are the fundamental unit") is "wrong" in any meaningful sense of "wrong". Yes, I will also admit that "individuals don't exist" is "wrong" in any meaningful sense of "wrong". The point is not to argue one theory against another; that's the travesty of academia, forget about that. The point is that it inhibits your ability to relate your own mind to your own experience (i.e. in this case, it inhibits your ability to understand the phenomena of psychologically-driven corporate consumer marketing at the societal level) if you identify or reify one specific way of imposing order on your sensory experience at the expense of others (i.e. thinking that "individuals" are more real than some other level of discussion, as you say in the last paragraph).

To take one specific example from your message:

But is some nefarious locus really to blame, or was
the war an inevitable outgrowth of the nation's history, needs, and
position relative to its neighbors?

That's exactly like arguing about whether the damage was caused by Hurricane Katrina, or maybe it was really just a lot of really strong wind and rain. Both are equally true; the label ("hurricane", "locus of intentionality") is just something that we use to make it easy to talk about systems where groups of processes that have something in common tend to have some aspect that is co-located in some space for some time. Certainly it would be stupid to forget that "hurricane" really just means there's a lot of wind and rain in a certain area for a while; there's no essence or soul or homunculus to the hurricane above and beyond all that wind and rain. Likewise it would be equally stupid to refuse to acknowledge the usefulness of having a label to use as a handle to talk about it.