If people, in general, did treat their jobs as being "real" and as a reflection of their character, rather than as a sort of different 'mode' of humanity, then the world would not quite look the way it does today.
The culture of sales - which eventually shades into law and politics, because they're all based on the same psychology - is incredibly toxic. It's also noisy and expensive, culturally and ecologically.
I'd much rather have sales operate as customer solution generation - with "Sorry we can't do that for you" as an option - than customer predation.
While there are some egregious examples, the rate at which a sales interaction is based on outright fraud is thankfully very small.
As for focusing on customer solution generation, I would highly recommend you spend more time working with customers before setting others up for that sort of torture.
Take for example the Pepsi challenge, in a blind test people reliably choose Pepsi, but knowing brands, they choose coke.
Coke are successfully increasing sales for something people arguably don't want. Except they do because they feel coke says something about them? They're told coke says something about them? What's the morality implications there?
Anyway, whatever your opinion that isn't about finding a customer solution, customers clearly want Pepsi, perhaps with coke branding, marketing is working against that in this case.
Salespeople are some very driven folks but honesty and a desire to help customers solve needs is not a common trait.
A long time ago cannibalism was considered the norm. At some point the disadvantages became obvious.
We're about to go through an analogous transition with our economic belief systems.
If current trade relies on trust, sociopaths could take advantage of that trust. If you replace it with a trustless system you take all the humanity out of it(?), which starts seeming a bit dystopian to me.
Plus to me marketing is very broad, and can basically be divorced from economics. Marketing (propaganda) still existed in the USSR.
Can you be more specific about this new economic belief system?
I said I cant imagine a system more hostile to sociopaths. You've provided historic examples that are less hostile.
What salesmen do is not really lying in the same sense. It's more of an eternal waffle, the words required of them fall out of their mouth in smoothly flowing paragraphs, a distortion field where truth and falsehood blend together.
They'll say what you want to hear, which can be both better or worse than lying, but it's quite a different thing.
People talk about this in the context of politicians quite a lot. It's quite rare for them to outright lie, it's more about the waffle.
This made me chuckle. I see what you are trying to point out, and generally agree, but it's sort of a way to make a fundamentally negative behavior seem almost endearing.
"the sword was deployed in smooth swipes and swift thrusts to achieve victory over the enemy" sounds different from "make the enemy's guts spill and blood gush in torrents until they flee in terror".
Is it? The person that says they saw X at the bar, is probably the same kind of person that will say black is white at work. Whereas the person that tries to maintain integrity at work isn't likely to be the type to go home and lie.
There are times at work where the way I've felt comfortable presenting something hasn't matched what the company would like me to present it as. I can see how someone with less scruples would go further than I were willing to.
Part of a vicar's job description is "claiming something to be true for which he has no evidence", a.k.a. lying.
I'm not a religious person, but I have no problem believing that others believe he exists. It isn't lying if they truly believe what they are saying.