People love “God” in the same way they love “rich Corinthian leather”—because it’s an attractive idea, a comforting fiction.

Receiving value and being wanted

The fact that it is also an ingenious fabrication by the seller (or his trainer) makes it even more charming. Value is being evoked in the imagination, and this is intrinsically pleasurable.

Being sold on something is always intrinsically pleasurable, even though you are being threatened with money loss. It’s the entertainment of being wanted by someone, and having them perform their wanting with flattery and by forcing your imagination into pleasurable states.

Special speech

Delivering “S is P” as an objective report is boring. But when speech is selling, you know that desire trumps reality, and poetic listening is very different from fact taking. In particular, you know that really you are listening to a carny scam, a con, a trick, and an attack. The speaker is trying to manipulate you, meaning go around your reasoning self (the one that gets things right by comparing them and then testing them against excellent maxims) and fact-checking self. Reason knows that marketing speech does not have real reference.

Risk makes it a game

It’s also fun by being a risk—if you let the seducer inside for the sake of the flattery and entertainment components, you risk being seduced into actually wanting and paying for the product. Dangerous, and fun, because if you do buy, it will be because of your own desire, stimulated by description and theatrical emotion. It’s theater that invents a value that it happens to have on hand. We enjoy accepting the challenge of opening to, and trying to resist, a good con (or a good Khan—see below).

We both know we’re both pretending that we’re not acting

Marketing is an open secret. When a salesman approaches you, you already know that his persona for the next 10 minutes will be contrived and that he will try to manipulate you with flattery and evoked pleasures to buy his value. You know that this person is not your friend and is not sharing news about something he loves and wants to share. His job is to manipulate your emotions and get your money. He will lie about himself, his perception of you, the product he’s selling, the feelings he has about everything, and even be a false self himself. For “his” actions are not actions emerging from real (default) character of a person, his habitual or “core” self, but contrived and practiced actions.

But you are you, and the real you will be dealing with this other self, that is pretending everything it does to fool you. Moreover, the seller also knows that you know this. He knows that you know that “he” will be falsely friendly and that the “conversation” is really a game where he tries to get your money, and you try to resist. Both parties know that A is fake and seductive. And yet they both agree to play along anyway.

This is an unusual situation: a fakery that knows it’s a fakery but by protocol must pretend not to be, even as each knows that the other knows that the self knows that the other is acting. Not for one moment does either party forget that the other knows that they are both locked into artificial personae forever. Nothing could happen in the interaction that could puncture this. The seller automatically goes forever into his false self trance, and the buyer automatically goes into some equally false role and trance (e.g., he politely humors him, or knows it’s “just his job,” or smirks and rolls his eyes and puts up with it, or skeptical and deadpan or challenging).

The result: two people mocking real communication, each being a false self, and each knowing that the other is a false self. Two humans have donned self-running masks, switched them on, and fallen asleep. The type of the interaction has pushed the free floating fantasy and desire that was in the human prior to intercourse. The masks talk by themselves.

And while this is going on, the human players underneath are monitoring to keep the mask from looking too fake. The goal of the acting is to produce a character that looks authentic. So the seller is actually hooked on his product and is just honestly reporting the good news; and the buyer is actually an intelligent witness to the seller’s communication and just learned something. Both are acting, both know that the other knows this, and both know that they must act or risk insanity. And yet both pretend not to know this and pretend to be themselves.

Anyway! When a salesman approaches you, he is inviting you to improv. Without moving his lips—a la The Shining and Naked Lunch, the consent engineer says Hello there! Bored? Let’s both be those two characters—seller and buyer. OK, we’re starting now … . And then, with his puppet’s lips now moving, he begins his pitch, sets his persona, and positions you determinately.

My goal is to make him laugh at how stupid and nonsensical and false his placebo claims are. This can be practiced all day at Whole Foods Market Lamar, the company’s international headquarters, a self-contained Epcot Center of expensive “green” food and pro-Third World imagery, and a major social hub in Austin. The placebo peddlers there energetically recite half-understood lies, physical impossibilities, known falsehoods, and boring facts languaged as features.

To such a one, I am likely to say the funniest line from The Exorcist:

I’m speaking to the person inside of Regan now. If you are there, you, too, are hypnotized.

Ricardo videos

All that was to introduce the one salesman to whom I could listen all day and all night: Ricardo Montalban. (Runner up: James Earle Jones.) What a masterful man. What a true Gandalf.