Negotiating life

'Salesman!' is almost the worst insult society can throw.  It implies someone without moral fixed points, willing to sell anything - including souls - to anyone for the right price.  The salesman - or saleswoman - is regarded much in the same way as flies are, necessary but loathsome evils for maintaining the great chain of being, feeding off the more constructive activities of others, adding nothing, and taking much - notably in the form of the parasitical and widely-resented commission.

This ethical snobbery is not just small-minded, it is downright hypocritical: we are all salespeople, and have to sell every day.  The sale probably takes the form of a request or a desire we have: the act of convincing, the use of logic, or the smallest piece of domestic rhetoric - all of these are signs of bargaining, of the soft or hard sell.  Every waking hour that we are with other people we have to get them to buy, even if it just a particular idea of ourselves as a person, or even the entire package of our identity as human beings.  Indeed, as each conversation in the world draws to a close, it is almost certain that with it has been closed another deal, however masked and minute.

Because of our misguided disdain for the more manifest acts of selling, we tend not to examine the process too carefully.  This is a pity, because in its delicate play of characters and roles, its formulaic language and in its highly formalised structure it possesses in reality much of the richness and complexity of an art-form, perhaps a little like grand opera.  It is a pity too because as with other art-forms, there is much to learn from the deeper motions that lie behind the surface conventions.

For the sake of simplicity, consider the dynamics of the most basic form of this interactive art of selling, the haggle.  The vendor names a price - outrageously high but in the full knowledge that it will never be achieved. You, the buyer, respond similarly with an outrageously low counter-offer, also fully aware that it will never be accepted.  You both then proceed to move inwards - whatever the details of the verbal choreography - until some figure is agreed upon that represents a compromise, a kind of balance between the two starting points.

What exactly has happened?  In arriving at that final price you have both settled upon a value for the object in question.  Until that final moment, that object had no one worth, but two contradictory ones. The act of haggling, the closing of the sale, has conferred an agreed value.

And so it is for all sales.  Every time a deal is truly closed, there are two satisfied people, the seller and the buyer.  Between them, they have agreed on a value for the object in question.  Between them, they have conferred a kind of order on the little corner of the universe they have some control over.  This is why the sale is so important to society.  In its transaction it creates a little more order in an otherwise random and structureless universe.  The sale - whether it is of a jug in a market, or of a jumbo jet, or of an idea you wish to get across to someone - is a another agreed point on the fragile map of our world.  We need that map to help us find our way through life. To negotiate it, so to speak. 

(22.2.92)

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