As some of you know, I just came back from a sales seminar in Las Vegas. They teach people how to sell and be a “good” salesperson at the cost of $1000 a month. This consists of one call per week to check your progress. This is a prerequisite to being successful in white collar America.

And it will take your humanity away.

Basically, instead of just talking to your clients, a good salesperson is supposed to memorize a script, which means everything you say (and everything your customer says) is completely decided beforehand. It’s the blueprints to human interaction, with the conclusion decided before it happened. A salesman will also cut friendly human interaction to a minimum, because anyone who does not directly benefit your business and make your wallet increase is not really your friend. Having to talk to other people is torture anyway (see: Huis Clos, Jean Paul Sartre). Also, don’t watch the news, because it is unproductive. This means that the friendly face of commerce (see: The Office) is disappearing due to the continuous isolation of man from the world in which he lives in.

Man is different from everything else because he has choice. He has the free will to do either moral deeds or immoral deeds (see: existentialism). I’d hope we have this right, since we’re allegedly condemned to hell for knowing the difference (see: Book of Genesis). The system contradicts this by emphasizing blind faith in the system. The philosophy goes something like “I know what I’m doing. Trust me. I know this is counterintuitive, but deal with it and you will succeed”. This is, of course, contrary to everything that human beings pride themselves on. Without the power to think and choose, how are we human? I guess the blind faith part makes us kind of religious, but this then turns into a cult worshipping the deity known as money (quote the guy, “make money and buy your own damn church.”) So I don’t know if that is any better.

Everything is in the name of efficiency. The goal is to maximize your efficiency with a tight schedule. In other words, set the hours of operation that you as a machine will run. It’s a numbers game. It’s more dehumanizing than the assembly line. There’s no time to just sit at your desk and ADD, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only guy who does this.

But what I find the biggest problem is the concept of “if you didn’t get it, you lost it and threw it away”. What the hell is that supposed to mean? The philosophy basically states that if you missed out on a possibility of making $5000, you lost $5000 and therefore wasted $5000. According to that logic, every moment you’re not having (vaginal) intercourse, you’re killing babies and you’re a murderer, right? This is retarded.

Interestingly, I’ve seen several correlations between the dehumanization of man in the business world and other aspects of life. There are several ways people study and break down human interaction to make it almost mechanized in the response for response conversations (like the sales scripts that incorporate neuro-linguistic programming). Some of you might know of Paul Ekman, a specialist in microexpressions. This means that he can tell what emotion you’re feeling and if you’re lying to him based on expressions on your face that are too small for normal people to notice. A always causes B, and there are no exceptions, because the ways faces move in different situations are involuntary. Everything is so calculated that the “Truth Wizards” know exactly what is going on all the time, which makes normal human interaction really difficult. They are then forced to isolate themselves from society due to knowing too much. This is a recurring theme in the show “Lie to Me”, starring Mr. Orange/the only guy with enough balls to rob Samuel L. Jackson in a diner.

Another example is Owen Cook, better known for his web name “Tyler Durden” (real original, dude). He is a leading pick-up artist that had dreams of some experiment called “Project Mayhem” (once again, real original). He gets his power differently from the other pick-up artists. Mystery seems to use evolutionary nature to get his way (peacocking, SR value, etc.). Style uses his vast knowledge of everything that has ever been written, which I guess is a legitimate advantage for anyone who writes for the New York Times. Tyler breaks down every fiber of everyone around him and puts them together in different ways as if they were mechanical parts, assigning weird names to every piece of the puzzle. Every action is quantified and analyzed in the lab, which happens to be the room in which he plans his schemes. He predicts every action you are going to take through analysis of everything you did before (see: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists). The irony of both, of course, is that when you try to be more human by understanding humans, you become less and less human. Whoever is most human tends to be the least human (see: I am Legend, the book).

To maximize efficiency, to maximize knowledge, and to maximize output, you would need to dehumanize yourself. It is to give up the very aspects that make you a person. You make the same movements over and over until you get it right. And then you set a new goal and do the same movements over and over until you get it perfect. You do it day in and day out. You are moving to someone’s rhythm. You are dancing an endless waltz.

With this in mind, here comes the million dollar question. Are we human, or are we dancer?