Our identity and dominator bargain against our becoming self enters our lives powerfully and nearly irresistibly through the media generally and advertising specifically.[159] We can also find the tool of both in our popular culture. If the media chose to serve our ends, the media could provide us with life and self enhancing ideas and images, but it rarely does so. If it found its purpose in our well-being, we might experience ways of finding the best in our whole being and in our becoming self in some part through the media. Media and advertising finds its purpose in our well-having, in our confusing material gain with our gain as whole beings in ourselves and in an authentic community relationship with others. In that way, it has to seek to dominate us, get us to conform to its standards of living which function as standards for consumption. It inherently works as part of the having and consuming meaning perspective which exists in direct opposition to our being and becoming conscious perspective and against our becoming self. Advertising by its very nature never carries with it any real sense of unconditional positive regard. It may appear to do so, and work quite diligently to seem as if it speaks in such a way, but such regard could never serve its commercial and economic purposes. Advertising and what it provides needs to make us want it and its regard, which it will mask, but will always come to us as essentially and completely conditional and contingent on how much we participate in the consuming system it represents and serves.[160]
It works in a subtle way for a number of reasons, primarily because we come to these entities as seeming volunteers and very open to every level of message contained therein. As volunteers, we open ourselves freely and easily to the experiences and messages provided by these entities in a way that probably takes us back to our early and very trusting years of life. The media and advertising use all of the vulnerabilities and needs we have felt since our very beginnings as whole beings. They exploit these essential human qualities thus use them in ways that work to manipulate us into surrendering our individuation, into surrendering our right to the ends principle, and in that way, we seemingly volunteer to become the means to the advertising system's dominator ends. Truly, we engage in surrender and submission.