It’s All Sales – So Special It’s Killing Us
Humans Specialized
A long time ago, in lands far away and also right here, everybody did everything. Everyone participated in hunting, gathering, building shelter, watching children, gathering water, and the cultural activities of daily living that enabled our survival.
Some people are better at some things. Other people are better than other things.
When someone starts making that Clovis point in half the time, and has an 80% success rate on that outrepasse shot that often ruined the spear points in their final step of production, that someone should really spend more time making Clovis points, which might leave them less time to grind grain.
Someone else might have a grain grinding technique that takes half the time, and grinds the grain much finer, which enables different processing for your food and it’s yummy, but this person ruins every Clovis point they’ve ever tried to make. Naturally, this person is going to gravitate more toward food preparation, and the entire community benefits from them never trying to flintknap again.
Someone else has truly streamlined the process for tanning hides, actually it’s a sibling team that don’t even need to speak, they just move as one. They’ve developed their own tools for it, and it doesn’t make sense to make these tools for everybody. Nobody else would know what to do with them.
Tanning hides is a very time consuming task, and everyone has needs for tanned hides. The Tanner Twins take to tanning full-time. They start trading their tanning services to fill the needs they don’t have time for.
This is actually a really utopian tipping point for me. People at this stage are doing what they’re best at, and directly benefitting from their specialties. This gives everyone autonomous control of their labor and the rewards of the labor.
It’s seductively fulfilling in times of plenty.
In Walks Scarcity
The Grain Grinder has developed a flat bread that makes mammoth much more masticatable. Everyone loves the bread, and so Grainy does well trading the bread for chunks of mammoth, baskets of berries, or patches for her animal hide shelter.
When winter came, everything was still cool. Grainy had a little stockpile of baskets filled with grain. Even though there waas no more grain to gather, she could still grind the grain and make her flatbread.
But now it’s January, and although Grainy has no idea what January is, she knows it’s been a long time since the grains were growing, and her stores have run out.
Winter comes every year. Grain runs out every year. Everyone depends on the grain and the bread it creates. This can go a couple of ways.
Scenario 1
The people in Grainy’s community value her, and her contribution. They understand that there simply isn’t any grain for Grainy to grind, and that things run out. They sustain her until the grains return in the spring, and have a big festival to celebrate the return of grain. Grainy develops a plan to store more grain, and the Basket Boys are happy to invent new, bigger baskets, for storing the grain. They’re very excited about the new designs and start brainstorming how new basket designs might benefit the other specialists. Grainy makes their bread fresh, and free.
Scenario 2
The people decide it’s not their problem that the grain ran out and get mad at Grainy for being irresponsible. They refuse to sustain her on the whole, but a few kindly souls refuse to let her die or lose shelter. The following year Grainy develops a plan to gather and store more grain.
Unfortunately, the Basket Boys got butthurt that there wasn’t any bread from January to March, so when Grainy came to talk to them about her plan they agreed, but they insisted on a price that was very difficult for Grainy to meet. If she needed their baskets, then they deserved a larger share of the bread (and they were still testy about having gone without).
With this imposed strain, even with the best of planning Grainy struggles to get just enough to keep things going. The Basket Boys hoarded the bread, which molded, so come January they were still out of bread. Grainy didn’t have the extra to meet their demands. They tell the whole community that Grainy should keep the bread from getting moldy, and that she’s a horrible person for selling bread to people knowing that it would mold.
People still come for the bread, but they no longer treat Grainy with respect and kindness. As a group they adopt the idea that Grain Grinders are shifty sorts, trying to shortchange everyone.
One member of the community, who saw the whole thing play out, suggests that it’s all been twisted, and that Grainy is truly a good person who deserves community support. They call this person a “socialist,” and claim they just want to take away everyone’s things and give it all to Grainy. Everyone gets mad and Grainy and her supporter live a fringe life.
Someone steals Grainy’s method, and without all of the hatemongering against him, his business booms. Nobody is buying from Grainy, and they kick rocks at her as they pass by. Grainy struggles to get her needs met and her community tells her that’s what she deserves- nevermind that she invented bread.
Grain Guy makes sweetheart deals with the Basket Boys and the Tanner Twins, and they all realize how much they stand to benefit from creating scarcities to drive this pattern. They create scarcity whenever possible, and talk openly about the wonders of a “free market economy.”
There’s bread in January now, albeit at a much higher price, and everyone rejoices at their “freedom.”
Fast forward Roughly 13,000 years
Mechanic
You’ve always been interested in cars, and started learning how they work at a young age. You’re pretty gifted in it and you got a scholarship to a trade program that you sailed through. Well done. You open a shop to turn your skills into survival and you’re excited that you’re really doing it.
You tell everyone you know that you’re opening a shop. People are excited. You have a grand opening, and you end up booked all day, and for most of the week.
You get to work, and you knock out those repairs in record time and do a beautiful job doing it. Your customers are all pretty happy.
The second week, your appointments run out, and nobody has made any new ones. You’re patient. You restock and clean, and write your SOPs.
The third week there’s still nobody. You wish you hadn’t spent anythign restocking. Next month’s bills are looming, both at home AND this new business venture.
You cry to your mom and a few hours later get a call from your cousin needing work on his fuel pump out of pity. It sinks in that this isn’t going to pay the bills.
It doesn’t matter that you’re gifted and personable. It doesn’t matter that you have a store front. It doesn’t matter that people need work done. None of these things equate to a flow of business that facilitates paying the bills.
When your cousin comes in you tell him that you see some other problems you wouldn’t mind fixing for him. He agrees on one more repair, but recognizes the other suggestions as cosmetic. Now there’s a vibe between you that’s awkward. Woohoo. You tell him there’s a friends and family discount, and give him 25% off. Now what you made from the appoitnment looks pretty insignificant when compared to bills coming due.
Cuzin becomes your regular customer, always sure to mention that friends and family discount. He also ran his mouth, so everyone you actually know wants the friends and family discount, and the ones that came in that first week are pissed off that you ripped them off and didn’t offer them the discount that didn’t exist yet.
You clearly cannot rely on your personal network to drum up business. You take out ads. You display deals in your windows and on a marquis sign.
You spend as much time and effort ensuring new business as you do working on the cars, and as a matter of fact, in order to do enough business to keep things going, you don’t have time to do the work you’re gifted in anymore, so you hire someone and pay them as little as possible to do the job you actually want to do because you have to do the sales.
Farm
You inherit the family farm and somehow manage to make it through all of the hoops the government has made to interfere with inheritance. Your survival, and the survival of your family, depends on the survival of the farm.
The predators move in. Taxes go up. The layers of red tape are never ending. Everyone in the family gives all of their effort to running the farm, and the demands are never ending. You’re responsible for everyone’s survival so there’s a pressure to make people get things done, and to require everyone to value the farm, because of the tied survival. Personal authenticity is interpreted as betrayal, and you leverage access to farm resources against loyalty.
The tractor breaks. You can’t afford to fix it, and you can’t farm without it. You have to take out a loan, and then the priority becomes repaying that loan on top of all of the farm bills. If you just fix the tractor, you don’t make enough to break even in it all. Besides, that new mechanic won’t just fix the tractor. He’ll find about 15 other things that “should really be a priority.” So, you buy the new fancy all-in-one jobber that gets so much more done in record time.
You manage to secure a little profit buffer, but you know how easily you could lose it. Every decision becomes about exacting more pennies per transaction, and saving more pennies along the way.
When your daughter gets sick, you don’t take her to the doctor. You have family remedies, and Dr’s just charge for made up things. She keeps getting sicker, but you’ve developed a toughness culturee so she still gets her chores done. She learns that her only value is in pushing through her pain.
You constantly obsess over how to get higher yields and cut costs. Before long you have chickens who don’t have room to turn around and are pumped full of things to make them develop at record pace. You have land that’s been overworked, so you start dumping chemicals in to make it produce for you.
The survival of the farm demands more and more, and you make one decision after another to make more money. Your social connections are about making money. Going to church is about making money.
Every member of your family has to commit ethical atrocities to accommodate the need for more. The culture of your family changes so that members are punished if they aren’t “tough” or “hard” enough. Your daughter gets too sick to stay “tough,” and by the time you involve a medical professional, she’s too far gone. You rant about how all doctors are quacks while you’re putting her in the ground. Then you get back to work. Cows don’t milk themselves.
Policecops
You feel a strong drive to protect people, and want to do good in the world and bring down bad guys. You become a policecop. You went to policecop school where they taught you how to really give it to the bad guys. You mean it with your whole heart, so you took in every word.
You get on the force, and you’re a grown-up policecop now. You get your grown-up policecop partner and hit those streets.
It becomes obvious that while you do occasionally really save someone or really stop something awful, most of the time you’re just hunting, scanning your surroundings for any violation you can exploit.
In order to be a policecop, you need shelter, and transpotation, and food. Luckily, the force pays you so you can pay these things. That money comes from somewhere- the city budget. In order to get that budget money, you have to make money for the city, and you do that through hunting violators.
You develop group techniques for effectively bringing in visible violations. You enforce your evaluations of who can be hunted at every turn. Good job officer.
You don’t spend your time actually enforcing the law. That plays out, on the rare occasion that people get caught, in a courtroom. You don’t even know the law. You know what you can write tickets for, and how to argue so you’re always right and the citizen is always wrong no matter what. You punish those who oppose you in any way.
You participate in community narratives about needing more force to make more security. People vote for the people who want to give you money.
Healthcare
You want to save lives. You do well in school and study all the time. You make it through med school and get hired at a small private practice.
You’re assigned the new and boring patients, which is fine, you don’t mind paying your dues.
You’re never able to give your patients the care that you swore to, because insurance won’t pay for what they actually need. You aren’t there to meet their needs. You are there to work the menu.
When the patient comes in, the front desk starts the series of screeners that determine which menu is next. The patient’s presentation determines their treatment options based on what their insurance provider has approved. As the doctor, you won’t even talk to them about the options you really think are best for them, because those aren’t covered by insurance and often insurance will not allow you to pay out of pocket for the better option.
As a doctor, you oversee the patient’s interaction with the menu and create orders for treatments, tests, and referrals, which are end menus.
When the first treatment fails, you open up the next set of menu options for the patient.
None of this is based on the patient’s reality and this does not work for zebras, okapis, and duikers. It is very effective for getting the most common ailments in and out, and the majority treated and back to work. This doesn’t leave any room for difficult diagnoses.
It protects you though. As long as you stick to those menus, you’ve offered the “standard of care,” which protects you legally no matter the outcome. It exchanges the Standard of Care for the Hypocratic Oath, in a world where malpractice can be your undoing.
You stick to the sales from the menu.
Therapist
You see the pain in the world and you want to make it less. You want to help people cope with chaotic and traumatizing lives. You want to make a difference and help people heal.
You study, you pass your tests, you get certified. You are ready to take on clients. There is a constant pressure to take on more patients, and you don’t even mind because you are here to help. You take on more patients than you can adequately support.
Your schedule is packed, and you don’t have time to keep up with your notes, or plan tools for next session. You don’t have any open time to get your needs met, so occasionally you have to call in just to make it to your own appointments. Your colleagues are doing the same, so you all end up covering for each other.
You get a new client with cptsd, and you promise you’re as committed as they are to processing that trauma. In the first session, they blow you away with their presentation of their childhood trauma which took the entire hour. Clearly, they mean business and it’s honestly refreshing to have a client who’s so dedicated to healing.
The next week, you have to cancel your session with this client because a colleague called in, and their group session is at the same time. For the company it’s an obvious choice that several insurance payments pay more than one does, so they cancel this client’s appointment. Ten days later, at the emergency make-up appointment that was the first opening even though you promised weekly sessions, you cancel because you called out sick that day.
Despite your client begging for help, you continue to choose the company money over the needs of your client, and try to gaslight your client about how sorry you are, even though this breaks professional ethics, and you do not advocate or show up for them.
The client goes without care again, despite the need. Medicaid still paid for sessions, and there’s always a next client on the waitlist to move to.
There are some suicide awareness posters up in the lobby so you feel like you tried. When representatives from your company call the client, it’s only to convince them to bring their insurance payments back, not to meet the clients needs.
You find out that you’re the 5th therapist in 5 years that’s had this client pull out all of their trauma without any support to work through it before the therapist flaked on them. You specifically promised this client you’d show up and this client said, “I don’t believe you, you’ll get sick next week, then you’ll have a training, then a vacation, then we won’t even remember where we were.”
Each time the company has invested in a force of people to make retention calls with promises of EMDR and other therapeutic modalities that you never really offer because you don’t show up and neither did they.
Instead of behaving ethically, you tell the client that you had no choice, and do whatever gets the company more sales.
So now what?
That depends on you. I’ve been fired or shoved out of every job I’ve ever had because I see this happening and I demand ethics. I can’t honestly tell you to take that course of action, because you have to survive.
The result is that none of the specialists really get to perform their specialities, they are specialized sales people.
You can’t go to a mechanic and just get your needs met, you have to dodge predatory practices because they have to survive.
I welcome you to watch any of a number of documentaries on American food production, and my series on Food Addiction is not a bad place to start. Ethics are absent in the American food supply, and not only is it about sales, it’s about ensuring ongoing sales.
Policecops aren’t serving or protecting, they are preying on us for profit.
Doctors aren’t healing us, they are guides through medical menus that gatekeep access to treatment.
Therapists don’t heal us, they just complete cycles to get insurance payments.
What do you do for a living? How do you get paid for it?
How many things do you have to do to ensure that you keep getting paid for it?
How much of your job is about your job, and how much is about sales?
How does your company talk about sales to make it not sound like it’s sales? How do people participate in that?
(if you’re wondering why I always get fired, it might also be because I say stuff like this in the break room…)
Operation **Reclaim** Loveland 
What do you think?