The Decision Maker

(And the Gatekeeper)

In sales, it can dawn upon the exasperated salesperson after a long and bewildering exchange that they are not talking to the decision-maker, that they have been casting their pearls before a pretender. At times, the pretension is ludicrous. For example, gate-keeper receptionists who make minimum wage will tell you that a hundred-million-dollar company has no interest in what you are pitching. (If you’re thinking that you have no interest in what they’re pitching either, you must maneuver a workaround.)

There are a number of tells that give away the subordinate. The first is that they are not in a position to have any knowledge or expertise regarding the situation to which they lay claim, like a person who says they grew up in France and yet can’t speak the language.

It’s difficult to know another person. Their lives are formed from experiences you can’t even guess at. But a tell is when you receive nonsensical responses to your questions, and then even further nonsense in response to your follow-up. This is when you realize that they are reading off a different page. For example, I was once drawn into a light debate on the Middle East with a liberal woman. I asked her how she could support an Islamic tyranny that treated women as they do. And her anguished response was, “Do you know how it makes me feel when you ask this?” It was the agony (mock?) of a mindset somewhere down the chain of command.

I noticed a similar problem years ago while attending a book group. The group selected the leading novels of the day to discuss. And then, instead of discussing literary aspects of the story, that is, whether the characters tracked reality, did the story “add up”, was the emotional demand honestly arrived at? etc., the group gravitated towards why the book was popular, or why it shouldn’t be popular, or whether a vast demographic was hoodwinked into liking something substandard, or, reversely, how the demographic (hint: precursors to the Deplorables) had missed something unique and why it was unique. I felt as if we were shopping for fashionable clothing at Nordstroms. In my opinion, they were shopping, not investigating, and my input was like sand in the gears. My remarks were not directed to the decision maker, and my insights seemed to be taken as either off-topic, irrelevant, or deliberately obtuse. The question discussed seemed to be whether the work discussed ‘deserved’ its popularity, depending upon its cultural take. And this judgment was in the purview of the decision maker.

Decision makers decide the sale. When you find one, you must also find out what it is that would make your argument persuasive to them. In sales, locating the decision maker may run hand in hand with determining what will make the decision maker decide. If you offer something the decision maker is looking for, they may likely reveal themselves to you. Until you do, they may hold their cards close to their chest. As a conservative discussing matters with leftists, especially fairly canny ones such as those who populated the union at my workplace, I found they would listen to what I had to say, not in pursuit of the truth of the matter, but for the opportunity to arise for them to reorient my view. I felt like a swordfish in a struggle with the sports fisherman who had no interest in my views on the freedom of the individual. He’d let me run until he felt some slack in the argument, and then reel me in a bit, all the while looking quite self-assured and smug, maybe take a swig of beer or a puff of smoke while chuckling with his comrades.

In sales this can happen frequently in accounts which have been historically run by a competitor for many years. Strong bonds have grown up between the customer’s appointed decision makers and the suppliers (“old boy networks”), favors might have eventually led to kickbacks, back-scratching, and other semi-corrupt business practices. Nevertheless, for proper optics, before resigning the deal with their favored vendor, they may very well put the contract out to bid. When your pricing, service, and equipment so exceed the offer of their established vendor, but your reasoned presentations get nowhere, you can do one of two things. You cut your losses and walk away, or you find a better decision maker, perhaps someone higher on the pecking order, or perhaps someone who is their competitor. There are a lot of fish in the sea.

Like problems, such as the above, arise when speaking with a current Democrat, whom I have given up on. But when I had they were often articulate, educated, and generally intelligent, and often friendlier than a conservative, so that it was baffling that they were not more reasonable. Rational argument was cast against their smug countenances with all the effect of water upon a rock… if the rock could return an attitude of “you just don’t get it (because you are a hateful person, and I don’t want to know you anymore)”.

There have been reams written regarding the reasons for this obdurate attitude to reasonable discourse among Democrats, such as public school and collegiate indoctrination by leftists, leftist stocking of governmental institutions with their cohorts, the natural sympathies of the female gender for a one-size-fits-all of governmental intrusion, and social mores. The Leftist decision makers sign the paychecks of all these individuals with the citizens’ money. That’s what leftwing politics is. But how is all of this capture of the citizens’ natural agency maintained?

There are many structural reasons, but the defining one seems to have been a general public demoralization. The positive bulwarks of our national traditions and optimism have been undermined and kicked away, one by one, until optimism itself seems to have become, among the Democrats, a censored attitude nowadays, which has spread throughout the culture as a normalized mores. Try some optimism, and even purported conservatives will often object. They would call themselves ‘realists’ perhaps, but realist or not, they spew demoralization. Ask a psychologist, and they will tell you that it is the depressed who see the world the most realistically. Where the rubber meets the road, optimism is faith-based.

…while in prison Dostoevsky ‘formed an intense admiration for the stoicism of the common prisoners which, he felt, came from their Russian Orthodox faith’

– (Pyman 2001, 107-08):

Cynicism for all things traditionally American, Christian, of personal agency, or built on culturally white male values seems to mark the leftwing decision makers. The ‘rebels’ have taken over the shop and made upside down right side up and are trying their best to normalize it. The populist response has been to find a different ‘decision maker’ who responds to different mores. In the United States this has been President Trump and his MAGA philosophy, which at first may have seemed to come across as quite self-regarding, boastful and obtuse, but with hindsight seems to have been just what the doctor ordered: self-interest and confidence run on common sense life experience, of which they can claim a lot. But if there were any quality about Trump that most offends the current Democrats, I think it would be his determined optimism.

Sometimes I feel that President Trump suffers from the difficulties of anyone whose intelligence baffles the ordinary. He intends to do something that seemingly can’t be understood or envisioned by his detractors. The criticism floods in. He perseveres and accomplishes his task. Things are better. His opposition refuses to acknowledge this, but moves on to criticize his next move. And the cycle continues, with Trump’s strategy being that enough successes will eventually put his critics out of work. Let’s hope that’s true.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn called Stalin’s gulag a system of “destructive-labor camps…The gulag had a system, conceived and designed at the highest levels, to maximally use prisoners at each stage of their physical capacity and then release then when no longer useful and on the verge of death. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Archipelago:

“The higher-ups were sly bastards. They released ahead of time on health grounds those who were going to kick the bucket in a month anyway.”” – Golfo Alexopoulos

The above sounds very much like what the Biden Administration and his subordinates had in mind for us, the Deplorables. We were on track to mimic the Canadian euthanasia protocols.

Ironically, however, those who suffer most from the predatory demoralization our culture currently prescribes, to my mind, are Democrats themselves… who, from most benchmarks of mental health, college indebtedness, accomplishments of marriages and families, and overall happiness, etc., are not doing well at all. And allied with that is a very interesting point that Michael Smith makes in his posting, “Battered Democrat Syndrome” from his substack Unlicensed Pundity.

“I know this seems crass, but I couldn’t help but tie this to the nomination of Zohran Mamdani – and the current trend of Democrats to select candidates that are way out of the mainstream. They just can’t seem to stop themselves. There seems to be a sort of sexual attraction for candidates from the other side of the tracks, and the more radical and different they are, the better. It almost seems as though Democrats, both men and women, are searching for dangerous liaisons with people and ideas that would normally be considered taboo, and the eroticism increases with the degree of radicalism.

This pattern of abuse reminds me of a combination of battered wife and Stockholm Syndrome on a national scale within the Democrat Party.” – Michael Smith

But big changes have already begun to manifest themselves among the most ambitious demographics: young men, blacks and Mexican-Americans, and legal immigrants. These people require the liberties and freedoms offered in the traditional American promise to fashion their best lives. They thrive on hope, and they don’t want the governmental restrictions of wokeness and DEI. Their lives salute a different decision-maker, and their success and the size of their voice attracts others. This has been historically so and has created the great rush of American immigration from our nation’s conception. And so reality continues.

The Deep (organized and weaponized) State, the Leftists, the Progressives, the Muslims, and the Globalists, etc., have tried their best to censure these efforts. But the tradition of common sense is hard to dismiss, especially when it brings palpable rewards. It will probably all hinge upon whether this new decision-maker ethos allows its followers to keep the wealth of their efforts or channels them off into new collective enterprises of ‘national mission’. For my money, the Constitution and Bill of Rights created the only ‘national mission’ we need. Further improvements can be manifest by its citizenry, who have done very well when left well enough alone (Through the Principle of Subsidarity, where decisions are made at the lowest possible level) through their individual agency.

Carl Nelson‘s latest book of poetry, titled Strays, Misfits, Renegades, and Maverick Poems (with additional Verses on Monetization), has just been published. To have a look at this and more of his work, please visit Magic Bean Books.