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The Magic Box
A man once wanted to sell a rough carpet, and he made a public offer of it in the street. The first man to whom he showed it said: 'This is a coarse carpet, and very worn.' And he bought it cheaply. Then the buyer stood up and said to another who was walking along: 'Here is a carpet soft as silk, none is like it.' A Sufi who was passing by had listened to the buying and the attempted selling of one and the same carpet with two diffferent descriptions. The Sufi said to the carpet-seller: 'Please, carpet-man, put me in your magic box, which can turn a rough carpet into a smooth one.' - Farid al-Din Attar of Nishapur

"Sales pitches metamorphize reality into miracles with nothing in fact changed. We are conditioned to the magical thinking - the pervasive images and parables of super cleansers and cosmetics, new vehicles of transfiguring power, aphrodisiac doorways to paradise, redeeming graces for the rejected by people who pretend to care for us." - John McMurtry

"A simple psychological trick exists where if one is told two pieces of information separated by a 'but', one is more likely to remember the phrase after the 'but'. An parallel technique widely used by advertisers, is to raise a weak form of the objections to their message at the beginning and then to answer with the message they intend to get across. The purpose of this move is three-fold. First, even if the marketer's answer would not rationally pass muster were the receiver of the message to reflect upon it, this method of framing makes it more likely that people will accept the message without reflection. Second, if the marketer had not raised and then answered the objections, people would likely encounter the objections later. As a result, objections would be left as the stronger signal. Third, and most importantly for the marketer, the marketer now gets to frame the debate in terms that bias reaction towards the outcomes they are after." - Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh

"Americans' illusions about how corporations actually behave in markets has been a critical reason corporations have often come first in society and markets. Commentators and economists who participate in markets typically refer to financial markets as organic entities, uncontrollable living things. The dynamic portrait has a mystical and spiritual quality that suggests one cannot dare to question workings of the market any more than one can the ways of God. Markets have often been cloaked in such mystiques. It's an element of why consumerism has become a national religion and economists such as Alan Greenspan have been regarded as the national equivalent of high priests.

The notion of a self-regulating and self-balancing market, as organic in self-maintenance as the human body or ecosystem has become a prevalent cultural ideology and article of faith during the Corporateer Age."- Jamie Court

"There is no other country on Earth that matches ours for developing such close links between commerce (salesmanship) and the business of government (statesmanship). This is what America is to the world - the ultimate salesman. We are, like it or not, the world's Barnum & Bailey." - Nancy Snow

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