It’s only a few days to Christmas. It was supposed to be the season of goodwill to all men when I was a kid. Now it’s the season for fulfilling the desires fuelled by a merciless commercial engine, whatever the cost to the consumer. I thought about the difference between the needs of people and their artificially accumulated desires, and came up with this.

America has a number of advertising geniuses. These are people who can convince you that you cannot exist without something that wasn’t even available until yesterday. They have worked very hard at creating assumptions over the years. They don’t ask me if I have a car, they ask me what kind of car I have. They don’t ask me whether I watch TV, they ask me my favorite programs. I haven’t watched TV since 1950, when I saw it was becoming a method of mind control. And that was in Britain, with the BBC.

The assumptions in that paragraph were created by those master salesmen who gave Americans a simple set of material goals.

“What you need to make your life complete is this new machine.” says the salesperson, women can do this well too, so I say salesperson. And overcome by social pressure, repetition and manipulation, the victim buys the machine, thinking himself or herself to be a shrewd consumer.

The housewives now have TV’s, refrigerators, washing machines, and dozens of kitchen gadgets. Yet many buy TV dinners instead of putting their mechanized kitchens to good use. They have been sold on convenience foods after buying their mechanized kitchens.

The one car household goal of yesterday is now way behind the times. The two-car household is now the norm. The TV sets are bigger, or smaller, or brighter, or easier to switch and program. They are always different from last year’s obsolete model, that no self-respecting customer would be using now, as is clear from the salesperson’s attitude.

When a piece of equipment that has performed faithfully for over 20 years finally breaks down, the repair parts are no longer available. The device was built too well. The bright eyed gentleman with the 24 tooth smile will try to sell you something prettier, that has been designed with immense scientific ingenuity and skill to crack up into an unrepairable heap some two days after the warranty expires.

And you may not have needed that 20 year old faithful servant in the first place. The product may have been better then, but the deception could have been the same.

By keeping everyone hopping from one desire to another, and by manipulating people’s minds so that the desires become goals, American business keeps us from working at our needs.

Further, because they have woven into our thought processes the assumption that the achievement of a material goal is a criterion of success, and also that success is a primary objective, the joy of living disappears in a series of contrived frustrations at being unable to achieve our alleged goals.

Thus we live continually in the future instead of in the present time, and so we never have time to realize that our actual needs are really few. A need can be satisfied. A full meal for example satisfies the need for food. Satisfying the need does not automatically produce another need. Satisfying a desire merely opens the door for another desire to enter. People with millions of dollars still strive for more. When able to satisfy every whim that can be satisfied with the expenditure of enough money, they continue to search desperately for something else: another romantic conquest, a trip round the world in a balloon, the ultimate set of clubs, another merger to bring more power, the only specimen of that particular stamp…the list of desires is endless.

My personal list of needs contains only three basic items: someone to love, good food, and shelter. These are needs for me, not desires. Your own needs may differ, but they are unlikely to be less than three, and on consideration will probably boil down to fewer than you thought, if you don’t confuse the means of obtaining a needed thing with the need itself.

Consider the three I’ve cited for a moment. Take good food first because it is easiest to deal with. Food comes ultimately from the soil—not from the refrigerator. When our ancestors settled this country the wonderfully fertile top-soil in Illinois averaged four feet in depth. Places that are now dusty wastes measured their soil depth by the yard.

Greed brought the present condition about. After 200 plus years of concentrating on desires rather than needs, we are among the most over-fed and worst-nourished people on the planet. The white flour and sugar businesses have made addicts of us until our judgement is completely shot. Deficiency diseases that less ‘ advanced’ nations scarcely ever encounter are sweeping through our over-fed but under-nourished population, not to mention degenerative diseases that are now affecting even young people.

As a background to these distressing facts is an even more sinister one. We lose about four billion tons of top-soil every year due to erosion. It is not replaceable. It is the basis of our food, which makes us the kind of human beings we are.

The food value of the pretty vegetables and crops we see carefully displayed in supermarkets is becoming less and less as our soil is depleted of minerals and organic matter because of the greed-based agribusinesses running the show.

About 90% of all cancers, for example, are due to environmental causes. Yet over 50 times as much money is spent on chemical and drug research on cancer as is spent on nutritional research on cancer. It is becoming clear that it is more profitable to seek than to find. And profitability is king.

Just look at the topsoil figures alone, and see how much our desires have put a smokescreen to our needs. Remember that some countries have cultivated the same land for 30 centuries without any erosion or drop in yield. Why couldn’t we have done that too? Was it because most of the people who did and do that have brown skins, so we must know better than they.

What about shelter? Has our system been organized to make it easy for a young couple to have a home and garden, and a permanent base? This is the kind of dream that might have the label of ‘family values’ in some circumstances.

The cost of housing gives the answer. To my mind the real estate developers are thieves, or at least blackmailers, with a bit of piracy thrown in.

When those young people who can still do arithmetic figure out that their ‘starter home’ in the range of $150,000-$250,000 is so poorly built that it won’t last as long as the mortgage payments, they are not likely to lead happy and contented lives. And the payments are directly related to the employment situation, where CEO’s with millions and millions of dollars in their own coffers can casually put thousands of workers out of a job, and call it by some euphemism like re-structuring, or cutting the fat. When the fat is on the cats at the top, that’s a joke.

Moreover, the greed of the developer uses over a million acres of farmland to build on, and to bring people to the cities every year. That land, covered in cookie cutter homes, can no longer grow food for the people it houses. As Gandhi said, "There's enough for everybody's need, but not enough for everybody's greed.

Maybe we could accelerate human evolution by research so that humans could eventually eat and digest concrete. Many of us eat sawdust in our bread already (added organic fiber), not to mention over 2000 additives thoughtfully, and expensively provided by the chemical industry—about four pounds per person, per year, on average.

The Government could certainly be persuaded to fund research on such an idea with its practically unlimited business potential. It can always find money for destruction, and this could be labelled as such with a bit of spin writing…a new and profitable use for bulldozed structures for example.

It would be easy in the present climate of official ignorance about important matters of science to pass a bill organizing a Department for the Complexification of Mineralogical Variations in Our National Diet…DCMVOND, a great acronym too! A start-up 100 member committee composed of people who know nothing about diet, and a $10 billion start up budget, both would be easy to find in the current regime.

Meanwhile our food makes us sick, undernourished, and obese. Then the advertisers direct us to the pharmaceutical companies and physicians, the major cause of personal bankruptcies in this country.

And how about someone to love? —a subject too delicate for the salespeople to deal with directly and honestly.

They have solved the problem by mutilating the concept of love into a mixture of sex, which is a desire, status, another desire, and competitiveness, a behavior based on a learned assumption. By this clever device the whole concept of love has been disintegrated into a miasma of role playing, contracts, and a pornographic exploitation of the visual senses and the reptilian part of the brain. All this is plugged into the concept that “ If you don’t buy her this, you don’t love her.” and “Your love can be judged by the monetary or scarcity value of the presents you buy.”

If your list of needs even approximates mine, you will readily see how little emphasis we, as a nation are placing on them.

Take a look around you at the huge percentage of people who are living completely in the desire world. They are certainly getting their just reward. To die rich seems an almost universal goal. What a wonderful aim for the pinnacle of three billion years of the evolution of consciousness! Mahatma Gandhi had six possessions when he died, and they all fitted onto his blanket, which was one of them.

Maybe you should try not to get too involved in that game, unless you can treat it as a game, in which case it is just fun, and a way of gaining in freedom of choices. Otherwise it can suck you into the illusion that life has a purpose, or goal, based solely on desires rather than needs—the assumption on which all the other nonsense is based.