ruthless publishing companies scoured the universe for ever more creative mating calls in an effort to continually reinvent the self-serving self-help boom ; mighty media empires turned their guns on one another in the race for supremacy , with whole galaxies laid waste ; households paid furtive platitudeypus poachers to provide them with their own home based oracle , always there with helpful though largely vapid and insubstantial advice ; whole countries began to interpret the messages of the beasts in wildly opposing fashions and self actualisation wars broke out all across the universe .