When "Everybody wants to sell you something," who can you believe?

"Grandma, you are soooo strong! Now can I have a lollipop?"

PC: Glynn424 via Pixabay.

He had knocked at my door. He looked at me earnestly, and told me of his quest—attempting to connect it with my own story. He was selling magazines, with the hope that—after getting started in business—one day, he would “have the kind of fiscal success” that I apparently already did. The young man motioned widely at my home as I stood in the doorway. Only, I didn’t actually own the home: it was my husband’s parents’ house. We’d “landed” there for about a year, with one small tot in tow. “Fiscal success,” by even basic American standards, was not really a thing we could flaunt.

But here he was on my doorstep—a young guy with no point of connection with me but what he’d seen with his own two eyes for the past 3 minutes. What I said next is not relevant to this post—what’s relevant is the conundrum that the young salesman-in-training found himself in.

And that’s how sales is often done in America. You enter an environment in which there’s no strong reason for mutual trust—where there’s no shared context—but you try to establish a mutually-beneficial contract.

Or worse—you try to establish a contract in which a better bargain for one side means less for the other. You try to sell someone a thing they don’t need, don’t want, and ultimately won’t use. The America we live in is forever marred by the fear “somebody’s always trying to sell you something.”

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Flannery O’Connor* chronicled an America where lonely souls transplanted from their hometowns were pretty common, and sketchy salesmen were frequently trying to loot those lonely souls for all the cash-money they were worth. (or occasionally worse!)

Her voice is often prophetic:

There were two buckets on the card table, one empty and the other full of potatoes. Between the two buckets there was a pyramid of green cardboard boxes and on top of the stack, one peeler was open for demonstration. The man stood in front of this altar, pointing over at different people… “you aint gonna let one of these go by?”

— “The Peeler,” O’Connor

If you want to sell something that’s not actually very good to somebody you barely know, that’s hard. So you’ll try to find a way to make it easy. One common approach is to be extra-friendly to your potential-client so they will keep talking to you. (perhaps even if it’s “false friendliness.”) Another is to play up the value of your wares, (perhaps even if it’s “false advertising.”) like the kitchen-convenience salesman above.

Now “false friendliness” might be hard to draw an ethical lines to define. But notice this: In a world where good salesmanship is valued, the temptation to flatter—and here, I mean “to give someone a ‘compliment’ that is not genuine”—is enormous. The thing that I find strange is that we justify it. “He’s just trying to get along with everyone,” we say. Or we say, “She’s just trying to be nice,” even if we know—or ought to know—that some of the things that were said were insincere.

I think the sense that these types of insincerity are “not a big deal” are worked so “deep into us” that we sometimes don’t even notice it. (After all, we value the following litmus test: ‘What good answer can you give to the question, “Does this dress make me look fat?” ') So at times, we thoughtlessly approve of insincerity—as long as you “say something nice.” We even coach our children on how to do it.

But you can’t always blame “the adults”—sometimes the children don’t even need coaching! (It’s “in their water,” it’s the Zeitgeist, it’s the world they’re “swimming” in.) One time I went on one of my “flattery is dangerous, yet in America, we don’t even see it as wrong” rants in a small group. I was “coming out of left field”** a bit, but one woman “got me” quickly pointed out:

They learn so early, too! ….my grandson isn’t yet 4, and he says to me, “Grandma, you are soooo strong! Can I have a lollipop?”

I could only wish that all such statements of this type were that overt and that badly-targetted! If we issued all our compliments the way 4-year-olds do, then maybe the danger of deception would not be so much of an issue.

* One of my favorite thought experiments is to wonder, “what would she do with this, artistically, if she lived to see today’s world”—a world that is:

• presently familiar with the prevalence of “robo-callers,” and

• which can recollect its history of spam emails, and

• has a future primed for AI-generated ads that mimic humans’ genuine engagement.

** Partly because there’s another, milder definition of flattery than the one I was using! And it’s pretty common!