I Could Never Sell

Why do we talk about religion and politics here?

Besides the obvious answer, I mean: Because we like to.

Michael Mace talks about building teams to analyze a company’s competition, and the difficulty of getting the techies to focus:

…true advanced technologists often have very fixed ideas (ie, I want to work on speech recognition, therefore I believe that many important problems can be solved with speech recognition). They can be very impatient with anyone trying to impose customer or competitive realities on them.

– Michael Mace, Stop Flying Blind

So there’s the first reason. The challenge of time management. We do what we like, and what we’re good at (probably these are the same), and we are “impatient with… customer or competitive realities.”

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, has a great blog on marketing in the Internet era. He quotes his mentor Jim Barksdale:

The Main Thing is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing

So then why religion and politics?

The candidates and the parties and the factions spend billions to sell us a President. Yet it costs us nothing to choose one (or so we believe, say the surveys). At most it costs us time and trouble getting to our polling place.

Nor do we have anything at stake in voting (or so we believe, say the surveys).

At the Intrade Prediction Markets you buy and sell “shares” in financial, political, and weather events. $10 on Ron Paul for the Republican nomination, for example. Since Ron Paul is a long shot, your $10 would get more shares of Ron Paul than of Rudy Guliani. The other traders will sell you plenty of Ron Paul for your $10. They think you’ll get exactly nothing for your shares once the Republicans pick their nominee. The gamblers and players at Intrade have a better record of predicting election night winners than any of the famous-name polls we follow in the news (Gallup, Zogby…).

We can’t get their estimate of the best-selling sedan of 2008 though. You could ask them to list that question (“make a market in it”), but they would decline. The word “sedan” would start too many arguments. We’re still arguing about who won the Presidency in the year 2000.

The players at Intrade bet pocket change on this. But if we can believe the surveys, and the answers we give to surveys, the players at Intrade have more at stake in the election of a President than you and I do.

So that’s why election season teaches so much about selling.

We don’t vote our pocketbook. Instead we “send a message.” We vote our story. Our story of everyone, and of us versus others.

Same when we buy a sedan or cell phone or vacuum cleaner: we are telling ourselves and others who we are. But we also need to get to work, call when a tire goes flat, and get broken glass out of the carpet.

When we pick a President, it costs us nothing and gets us nothing. Our vote makes no difference. It’s all story. Story at it’s purest.

And religion? Why religion?

First, because our elections have become holy wars…

Second, because religion is the Story of Stories, the story behind all our stories, the story of our world and another world, of us versus them, of our other world versus their other world…

Story at it’s purest.