[mistercow]

>and the most successful of the lot is willing to destroy someone's life to earn himself a cadillac.

...and keep his job. You can hardly watch that film without feeling soaked in the desperation of the characters.

>but still, it seems to me the comment is fair based on this particular piece of evidence.

How? The story is about a particular subset of the sales world, which is where you work for an employer who gives you an undesirable product to sell and then puts you under immense pressure to close. These situations do exist, and the people who succeed in them are the ones who are willing to act unethically. The only way that Mamet could have realistically included an ethical salesperson as a character would have been to depict them getting fired.

How do you reckon that the characters depicted in an author's work are likely to comprise the entirety of that author's experience?