It is not the absence of desire, as Buddha suggests, that leads to happiness. Rather, it is the presence of desires that we try to satisfy that makes us happy. A person who wants nothing out of life is utterly bored with it; and a person who has desires that cannot be satisfied is frustrated. The happy person is the one who has a lot of desires that can be satisfied.
So to maximize the utility of its citizens, society has two important roles: to generate desires. and to satisfy them.
Generating desires requires advertising. But such advertising can take many forms. For example the Marlboro man with a cigarette between his lips makes smoking look attractive. The father who continually talks positively about education makes his daughter try harder in school. And the McKinsey info session that presents management consulting as a desirable job inspires Dartmouth students to apply for it.
These are all examples of ways in which society acts through market forces to create desire in people. But society also works to satisfy these desires. Factory workers make Marlboro cigarettes for smokers; college presidents runs colleges for people who value higher education and consulting firms like McKinsey hire people interested in working as a business analyst. Both creating desire and satisfying it are equally valuable functions of society.
The extent to which our desires are a function of such "advertising" is grossly underestimated. It's not that a person completely uninfluenced by society, say, one who lived on a deserted island, would not look at the moonlit night sky and find it beautiful. But if that person had read some poem about the night sky on moonlit nights, he would find it much more beautiful. Even suffering and poverty can be made to look attractive, as a fair number of writers have succeeded in doing.
Such subliminal advertising permeates our lives in the most fundamental way. It forms our desires. And hence it determines our very conception of beauty -- since beautiful things are what we find desirable. Many people, observing the vast differences in what human beings find beautiful, ascribe it to intrinsic differences in human beings. But the greater part of such differences should be ascribed to differences in every individual's experiences, and therefore differences in the subliminal advertising that they have been exposed to.
Many people underestimate and often attack the role of advertising in society without realizing its important contributions. For example, advertising can actually play a role in increasing social welfare.
Through advertising, society can generate the desire to make welfare contributions. Suppose that society decided it would be more optimal if people found making homes for the homeless more desirable than investing in a luxury car. And to this end it engaged in an advertising campaign that made building homes for the homeless a very attractive proposition, like "For every home that one builds for the homeless, one gets a beautiful medal."
The TV commercial could go something like this:
Cool music in the background; a well-dressed, attractive man with a briefcase full of money walks down the street past a row of gleaming high end BMWs into the Home-for-the-Homeless center where he deposits his suitcase full of money and picks up his medal. The words "Just do it" appear as he disappears into the dark night.
So we'll have rich people coming to their cocktail parties on foot, scoffing at the cheap ones who come in their BMWs. Those with more medals will try to make them discreetly visible to all, while sneering at the unlucky ones with few medals, while the ex-homeless move into their new condos by the lake.
Happiness all round. It's all in the advertising.
