Dreaming of Mitteleuropa

Subtitle: Thoughts on an ordinary day encountering Americans just doing their business.

Once again, he thought:

“The United States is a business society.
Public interaction is transactional.
It is governed entirely by the norms of commercial exchange.
Reason is not banished, it has some use in law.
(Though that use is not normally available to the ordinary person.)
Its use in business is among some members of a professional team.
It is not used in interactions between representatives of a business enterprise and members of the public.
They are treated the same way as the company’s non-professional workers: to be managed.
The use of discourse in professional life is almost entirely managerial.
Our middle classes are socialized into a culture where the interesting questions are supposed to be:
How are these things, persons, and situations to be best managed?
(On behalf of the organization we are working as part of)?

I am a fool and always have been. A bit anyway.
I come from a proud lineage of folly.
My mother and father were fools (sometimes, anyway), their mothers and fathers were fools.
A fool is someone who does not know the ways of the world, at least well enough to avoid being taken advantage of or wronged.
Fools lose, wise guys win.
Bullies know this, which is what makes them conservatives.

Yesterday I acted quite the fool.
Being the sort of person who can only learn from his experiences, and not always already having known the score, the story, the lowdown, what to do, what everyone knows, what only fools are ignorant of, I had to take note.
Being no kind of fool, you, reader, will only find this laughable if not just boring.
Here it is.

A merchant I do business with wants to sell me a product.
They mention this. I say no, not now.
Well (looking it up in their system), do I have your phone number correct?

Translation:
Do we have your permission to call and sell you our product?

All speech that follows Anglo-American business society norms requires a translation manual.
And you need to remember that they display this friendliness, which is entirely about the sale.

If you don’t speak according to business norms, an American may actually not understand you. They may think you are very weird. They aren’t pretending or lying, they actually are bothered and confused by your behavior. If someone says, “So what do you mean by that?” they very likely really are trying to say, “What makes you think you can act/talk like that here? This is our place of business! When I say ‘The cat is on the mat’, the truth of my statement is my right to say it as boss or professional who is authorized to make ‘true’ statements, that others must know are true and believe and follow. It certainly doesn’t mean that I believe and am asserting that an actual cat may now be said to be on an actual mat because on observation that is the case. Though I might perfectly well make such statements if that were my job, like if we were counting mats and selling cats. And if I were the cat and mat man.

Thus, at the limit, (in this crazily ‘paranoid’ fantasy), in the business society no one every really says anything to anyone about anything. That’s very dangerous.

A direct question will get the true answer they want to avoid.
Because their intention is to pursue their wish to sell you their products and services,
whether you like it or not.
Though it is fine if you do.

If you don’t like what they are doing, it is pointless to say anything,
which will only be used to get their way with you,
which is against you if it’s what you don’t want.

That is how sales and customer service personnel in America are similar to the police.

I always correct my mistakes.
America is a business society, and ‘communication’ is either about sales or management.
There is nothing else.

If you don’t like the way we do business here, you are free to leave.

How many times in my life I have heard that.

Go back to Russia where you came from. Or is it Germany. Or wherever. It doesn’t matter to us what your problem is. The thing is, we do what we do, and if you don’t like it find your own team.

I wound up concluding that the society is a bunch of sports teams. In other words, a corporate state.

Now, about Germany. Germans across the political spectrum before the two world wars tended often to see English culture as being overly commercial. The observation is true.

Slight problem with that:
First, the ‘National Socialists’ often held this opinion.
But, you say, so did the left.
Yes, comes the retort, but everyone knows that America and England defeated both fascism and socialism and socialism can only mean tyranny.

And this is the true explanation for how a terrible society (or one with a terrible government at the time?) would send huge numbers of persons to places where they might be killed or left die.
(We just keep them under control, since some of the people who need to be managed are to be kept in places of exclusion, while others are welcomingly included and offered nice opportunities, if they an afford the ticket). For such things there is an available absolving explanation.

You may have your opinion, I was told, but don’t act as if social life involves some kind of ‘we’. No, there’s just me and you and what either of us is buying or selling. If you want to buy what we’re selling, it’s beautiful; if not, it can’t be helped (or, in an uglier mood: get lost, buddy).

I am working now with a translation manual.
In a business society, every statement has as its meaning and condition of satisfaction:
This is what I am selling (or what we are doing, or ‘about’, such as performing an identity with our team or social club), are you buying it?
Good sales people don’t take no for an answer.
They smile and love all the people. Just as good masters love the people they rule.
You need to have a good attitude.”