In a modern technological consumer driven world, man’s desires far surpass, overshadow and outweigh his needs. What is known as ‘the engineering of consent‘ are subliminally guided choices based upon the manipulation of unrecognised subconscious longings, desires or fears. A kind of consumer centred despotism based upon the need to pursue happiness through purchasing power. The ‘machine of happiness’ is powered by the central motor of all western life: consumerism. What we are witnessing now is a growing epidemic of materialistic gratification through personal association with corporate logo and brand name identities.

In the millennium of the Self, man evolves from a citizen to a consumer as soon as he is able to talk. He is treated as a potential target audience from the moment of conception well into the afterlife. We no longer live in a democracy while the minority subliminally manipulates and controls the majority through advertising and peer pressure. Advertising works by forging the mind of the nation into a unity of thinking, feeling and desires, thereby encouraging emotional attachment to businesses and corporations. Passive consumers are driven by instinctual or unconscious desires. Business and corporations actively encourage and exploit these desires by triggering them. While the often in-built product expiry factor also ensures the even faster turn over of profitability and sales.

However, if business and development were able to RESPOND to the desires of the public, rather than to manipulate and control them in a steam roller like fashion, then the potential is: for a more conscious interaction between both consumer and corporation that can actually assist and enhance the emotional development and intellectual evolution of mankind’s instinctual unconscious behaviour. Thereby encouraging a responsible decision making process that can be demonstrated on many other social levels too, rather than keeping the public locked into a fight and flight kind of push and pull knee jerk subconscious triggering mechanism.