Selling Hope
Yesterday I read an interesting article by westenberg titled: The Gilded Age Is Back. So Are the Grifters. about supposedly successful persons, like as stated in the article, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos et al. sell hope to those hopeless and helpless masses.
I worked for one of those salesmen. Not for one of those mentioned and I won’t mention the specific one, but the sales-pitch is the same. The one I worked for created it’s wealth seemingly out of nothing, started as a teenager with some food shop, inverted and made the first million at around 20. The a private jet and so on and so on. Seems impressive, but I talked to that person in real life. The fact is that the person very well may have worked hard, but definitely had a headstart to begin with. The dream on sale however is making it out of a difficult childhood, single mom, siblings, you name it, and make it to millionaire. It’s all a big old lie. Those persons sell their “dream” “vision” to those who least can afford it for a lot of money. They sell hope for the hopeless. And in return they not only get their money, but in many cases their workforce. I was one of them more or less. I was not exactly dependent on that income, but it definitely was a nice extra. However I saw the others employees. Travelling(!) more than 3 hours per day to reach the office and earn more based on commissions than salary. Talking about the office: of course it was in a high rise building overlooking the city. Of course it had a “fish tank” for all those sales persons. All windows, no walls, a big conference room visibly to everybody. The perfect dream sales machine.
There’s a saying stating that the poor are poor, because they want to. Easy to say, when somebody was never really poor and a perfect motivator for those hopeless I got to know and the ones westenberg describes in the article.