[387] see the whole tragedy of the force to adjustment, under the necessity of competition. This leads finally to the problem of advertisement^a. Advertisement is the means of conditioning the customer for special products. Now this means that the products are not conditioned by the needs felt by the customer, but by the need to sell, and especially by the need to sell ever-new things in a dynamic society--to OVER-sell, all the time, in order to keep going. This gives perversion of needs... Formerly there were needs, and there still are needs of all kind, and industry and work tried to serve them. Now there are needs produced which

didn’t exist before, and are produced in order to make selling possible. This distorts the fundamental meaning of production, to satisfy needs, almost into its opposite. We come into the vicious circle of gadgets, the vicious circle which produces means and ends, and these ends become means again, and there is no end of this circle of means and ends. If you ask "For what?", the answer would be "For production." And if you ask "Production for what?", you would answer "For gadgets." And so it goes on, and there is no ultimate end,

no overall end, as it was in a period in which needs decided what was to be produced. So we have a total society which doesn't do anything but produce, not in order to produce the fulfillment of needs, but in order to create new needs and then new productions for these new needs. This is the vicious circle in which we all become ruined because every real time for contemplation, for the "vertical line" towards the eternal, is taken away by the dynamic of this society in which the end, the purpose, is NOT the end, but becomes again a means for MORE production!