Our becoming self manifests the "Yes" of the unconditional—unconditional positive regard, compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance. Our becoming self speaks and enacts the "Yes" of the unconditional. Within ourselves and toward others, when we find our connection with the becoming self, we find the aspiration toward unconditional positive regard, compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance. The media, advertising, and the popular culture recognize these essential values but only to deny them to us through manipulation, cynicism, fear, and subversion. The meaninglessness of self and being, of life itself, has even become part of our academic discourse.[167] They speak the "No" to what life and the becoming self have to offer. The less they feel they can participate directly in such life and becoming, the more they will work to keep their needs endlessly fed but will remain always unsatisfiable, insatiable. They remind me very deeply of the people I met in the cheapest cab in town. They just drive better cars.
We might remember, thus forgo the far too expensive luxury of condemnation and blame, that those individuals who perpetrate these distortions of life live inside the dominator model. They feel the sting of the profound fear of scarcity that forms part of the dominator model. They live inside the world they create and the meaning perspectives that motivate that world and perpetuate that world. They undoubtedly need more liberation than those who just try to navigate through the sea of negative media, advertising, and popular culture. It lives inside of them, and it must contaminate them very deeply. If the unconditional is universal and absolute, these people also need our compassion. We do not wish to speak a "No" to their "No." Through becoming aware of what happens to us as we slog through the seemingly inescapable endlessness of the constant sales pitch, we can say "Yes" to what the being way of life suggests and what our becoming self offers us as whole beings and lovers of life.
We have been told by the endlessly friendly and helpful voices of the media model that they express unconditional positive regard for us, the only condition to this regard comes in our buying and using what they tell us will make us feel better about ourselves. When we follow their advice, we will really form part of the having world, the conformity of consuming for which these voices speak. These voices substitute buying and having for living and being. They substitute our basic needs for the unconditional and caring with buying and having. They tell us that the good life is a life of scarcity, and we better buy what we can while we can.
The media model continually sells us on the idea of our essentially defective being. Once we buy into that idea, we will feel endlessly dissatisfied with ourselves and everything about ourselves as instructed to feel by the media model. When we feel dissatisfied with ourselves because of who we are not and what we do not have, we feel endlessly deprived. Once we feel all of that, we buy what they tell us to buy to satisfy this sense of deprivation and palliate our painful dissatisfaction. We buy what we get told will satisfy our artificially created but now deeply felt needs. For some moments we feel better, maybe even a species of good.
It doesn't last. It can't last. If we didn't have any real need for the product in the first place to satisfy our real needs as whole beings, and the product only palliates our false needs at best, our feeling of good can't last. It only exists during the consuming of the thing we hope will answer our needs. The having of it doesn't. It can't. It never will. Besides, the voices will tell us soon that the thing we bought has become passé, and no one who is anyone uses it any more. We need to buy the new improved version of our self before anyone can see we have fallen out of our delicately poised place in the dominator, consumerist, conformist, media promulgated model.