Seeing Pyramids Everywhere

This is from Wish.com and will be removed on request. But are you sure you want to?

Would you like to make money from home in your spare time selling small pyramids to your friends and family? You can use them to preserve food and keep blades such as razors sharp. But the main way you make money doing this is by signing up other people to sell pyramids to their friends and families and passing it up to the person above you in the chain. You will recover this cost by having the people below you send money up from their own recruitments further down. Everyone’s a winner and the only reason everyone doesn’t do it is their negativity and because they’re not trying hard enough. If you fail at this, it’s on you.

Let me take you back to 1977. At that time, I’d just left one primary school for another, and at this new primary school many of the children were involved in a scheme where they sent letters to several of their friends and received picture postcards back from them and the people those friends sent them would send them back, and so on. I took part in this and didn’t receive a single card back, but other pupils apparently did, or at least they were flashing around these postcards from exotic locations like Bulgaria and so forth. Time passed, and in 1978 I left that school. During the summer holidays, I received a chain letter from a former pupil at that school whom I’d only known vaguely and found quite annoying. The idea was to send six letters to people I knew, within a fortnight, who would in turn each send six letters, “and the chain has never been broken” for something like five years. For some reason I got really stressed out by this and in the end my father just photocopied one letter I wrote out six times and I sent six people them. I received nothing back. Also, in the process of doing so, I did some maths and calculated how many letters per generation that would be. In 1973, I think, the world population was 3 500 million, and at some point in 1978 it was 4 116 million. I worked out that if six letters were sent out per person after a fortnight, whose recipients each sent six more out and so on, the world would have been completely saturated within six months. Over a period of five years, or one hundred and thirty fortnights, the number of letters would have reached more than two googol. At that time, I didn’t use the word googol much and instead used the long scale then popular in Europe, so I worked out that it was in the sexdecillions. I still remember the thrill at coming up with the final result, because I liked the opportunity to use one of those arcane words for vast numbers. I also found it hugely reassuring because I realised I wasn’t letting anyone down.

Although neither of them worked, I don’t now know what the point of the second chain letter was at all, or with hindsight how I got so stressed out about it, except to say that I was a very anxious child. The picture postcard thing would’ve been nice if it had worked, but it didn’t, at least for me, and I’ve now become curious about the authenticity of the postcards I saw the other children showing off. In any case, all of these things are now referred to as pyramid schemes or MLMs – Multi-Level Marketing. Since my extensive scribbling with paper and pencil back in the late ’70s at the age of eleven, I’ve been aware that for whatever reason, they can’t work for most of the people involved with them. Whereas they might look good without the maths, the fact that everyone in the world has not participated in Tupperware or Avon means that they don’t for some reason. In countries where income has to be disclosed by law, the usual situation is that fewer than one percent of participants make any profit from an MLM.

I don’t want to harp on too much about pyramid schemes as such because so many other people do so, and do so better than I can, but I will just say a few things before I go on to discussing some other issues connected to them which are quite interesting. I have to admit myself that the distinctions between a pyramid scheme, MLM, network marketing and a Ponzi scheme are not clear, although I think the first three are probably the same thing and they’re called other things because of the bad name pyramid schemes have got. Strictly speaking, pyramid schemes don’t involve selling products, so for instance the chain letter I mentioned would’ve been a pyramid scheme if it had asked each recipient to send money to the previous person on the chain and ask for money from the next level of recipients. The postcard thing probably wasn’t a pyramid scheme because it didn’t directly involve money. MLMs involve products, bearing in mind that the word “product” can refer to goods or services. They might sell essential oils, cosmetics, electricity supply, or something more abstract such as self-help seminars or cryptocurrency. The person one sends money to is one’s “upline” and the person whence one receives it is the “downline”. So far as I can tell, MLMs and network marketing are synoyms. Ponzi schemes are slightly different. They involve people investing and being paid back for their investment by the manager of the portfolio by newly recruited people. All of these are destined to fail for most participants by their very structure, although for the people at the top they succeed, often by driving the downline into debt. They tend to be aimed at women who are home makers or primarily involved in parenting, and there’s a history behind that. They’re also sold as “empowering women”, when of course they do the opposite. Many MLMs have been started by people who are involved in other MLMs and they tend also to have hidden costs such as business and self-help seminars. Some people have been sold MLMs as a way out of poverty or to help pay tuition fees. This will of course have the opposite effect, and in the latter case could cause serious damage to career prospects because then you very probably will drop out of college because you won’t be able to afford it.

Back to my own experience. When I was training as a herbalist from the mid-’90s, another person involved in herbalism hesitantly suggested I participated in a pyramid scheme called Forever Living Products. They were concerned that it would be unethical to try to recruit me, but I did ask. FLP sell Aloe vera-based products, some of which are meant to be taken per os. I have a whole ‘nother blog on herbalism and home ed (there are connections but I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent) but for the sake of convenience I’ll cover this on here. Aloe vera is primarily a laxative. It does have emollient (soothing) action, so it would probably work, for example, as an expectorant in small doses for example, and will inevitably have other actions, but it isn’t terribly versatile and the mucilage present in it, a polysaccharide which forms a kind of slippery fluid in combination with water, can be found in local, indigenous species such as Althaea officinalis and Plantago psyllium. The latter is in fact probably the cheapest of all herbal remedies. FLP has a division which is said to be the largest cultivator of their plant in the world, situated in North America. The products tend to be sold for a wide range of indications to people who have not received any consultation, often on the grounds that they help you lose weight. It is very difficult to help someone lose weight safely by herbal methods because it acts against the physiological bias of the body, which is to gain weight in healthy circumstances, so in order to help someone lose weight you basically have to make them ill. Obviously there are healthy strategies regarding diet, exercise and psychology which can be productive, but in all probability Aloe vera, like many other remedies, only works temporarily and because it’s a stimulating laxative, which should hardly ever be used. In other words, the way FLP markets its products flies in the face of good herbal practice.

MLMs also distort relationships because they tend to encourage people to sell to their family, friends and acquaintances and cut people out who won’t buy. The chain letter above also indicates a common phenomenon, described as the “hunbot”. Named after their stereotypical tendency to refer to people as “hun”, short for “honey”, on social media, a hunbot is stereotypically a fairly young mother who tends to contact acquaintances, often from the past, just in order to sell them stuff or attempt to recruit them into the scheme while appearing superficially friendly. My male school acquaintance is a mild example of that whom I’m happy to report does contradict the stereotype by being male, and the pressure was rather mild as well, but I never knew him that well and it had been some time since I’d had anything to do with him. All of this also links into toxic positivity, the belief that one must avoid negative thoughts at all times, which can naturally be very harmful and has some link with New Age spirituality.

This brings me to the cult-like aspect of MLMs. I’ve been into the issue of identifying cult-like behaviour already when I talked about it with Trump, but briefly the following criteria can be identified:

• Great or excessive devotion to a person, idea or thing.
• The use of thought-reform programs to persuade, control and socialise members.
• Inducing states of psychological dependence.
• Exploitation of members to advance the leaders’ goals.
• Psychological harm to members, families and the community.

All these things can be fairly easily identified in MLMs. Members are expected to devote their lives to the process of recruiting people and shifting products, are isolated from potential contrary voices, sent to what amount to brainwashing seminars, exploited to make the upline, and ultimately the very top person, richer and have their perception of reality and relationships with others distorted. For instance, they may use personal crises such as falling seriously ill or being bereaved as opportunities to sell people stuff, be encouraged to cut ties with family members and friends who are concerned about them, and made to blame themselves for their failure when in fact the whole system is destined to fail for almost everyone involved. There’s also emphasis on the wealthy lifestyle rather than the value of the work or products themselves.

As I’ve said, the target of many of these schemes is “stay at home moms”, as the American phrase has it. This is a clue as to how they originated. The MLM capital of the world is Salt Lake City in Utah, and legislation in Utah is particularly friendly to their development and promotion. This is of course also where the Mormons are based. I don’t want to generalise here, but there is surely some tendency for Mormons to promote the kind of lifestyle where husbands do paid work in a workplace separate from the home and mothers spend their time parenting and doing housework, cooking and the like, in the home. This situation particularly lends itself to MLMs. Another aspect of these schemes is their proselytising nature, which can again be seen as inherited from Christian-like religious movements such as the Latter-Day Saints. Many parallels can be made between the evangelical faiths and network marketing, and there are even churches which are religious institutions in purely legal terms, but actually exist to carry on this kind of activity. This type of business also tends to proliferate within churches, and this is where I start to become a little concerned about my own activity.

Again, there’s an issue of demarcation here. This is not Home Ed And Herbs, one of my other blogs, but I can’t really avoid going into the nature of my day job, as was, at this point. Before I do this though, I want to emphasise one thing. There is copious good-quality evidence regarding the efficacy of herbal medicine and I don’t have any real doubts about it. I have plenty of clinical findings which correlate to the aims of the treatment plans my patients pursue with me when adherence is close, such as blood pressure, peak flow measurements, joint mobility, anything you like. And this is in conditions which have lasted for years. I am not questioning any of that. Even so, as already illustrated, network marketing poisons everything it touches and consequently essential oils and herbal remedy MLMs tarnish the reputation of their products in all sorts of ways. They may or may not be of good quality and may or may not be appropriately used. This is the perennial capitalist problem of use and exchange value alienation. That said, there is a serious problem with herbalism as a profession, and it isn’t unique in this, but it has been described by herbalists themselves as a pyramid scheme. Hear me out.

At the time I was qualifying as a herbalist, ninety percent of the students were female, which corresponds to MLM proportions. Nine out of ten students dropped out before the end of the course. It’s basically impossible to make a living as a practicing herbalist and most people who stay in the profession manage to do so by teaching, writing books, endorsing products or teaching CPD. I haven’t done this because I don’t think it’s a good idea to encourage people to imagine they can make a living out of doing this. Herbalism is fine. What it isn’t is a feasible way of making a living and it can only really ever be a side hustle for most people.

This is emphatically not deliberate. Herbalists act in good faith and the pyramidal nature of the situation is not our fault. The problem is that I, and probably many other people, am partly motivated by the desire to make a living and support my family with it. It’s also part of a much wider problem which can be observed elsewhere in the world of paid work, notably the performing arts. Most people who become authors, actors, artists or musicians cannot make a living that way and have to supplement their incomes in other ways. There are probably many other examples. In fact, the proliferation of degrees generally may lead to similar consequences for much of the population in developed countries. I just happen to be able to observe herbalism at close range.

Donald Trump is of course famous for his endorsement of MLMs. He’s been involved in at least two: ACN and The Trump Network. The first is primarily a utility company. Well actually it isn’t, because MLMs are always primarily MLMs. By this I mean that the real drive in the company is always going to be to get more people to sign up rather than on their goods and services, but this is what’s supposed to face the world, as it were. It was accused in 2002 of switching utility services to consumers without consent, which in fact is something which happened to us perpetrated by a different company at about the same time when we first bought a mobile phone, so it may have been common practice at the time. This is not so much to excuse it as to observe that things have been pretty bad for a long time, but I suppose we all know that. Later on, Trump recommended investing in ACN without disclosing his involvement in it. This was while he was president. They were also served a cease-and-desist order for being a pyramid scheme in 2010. As for the Trump Network (I’m not sure how to captalise that, unlike him), it was a pretty standard vitamin and “health” product scheme which he lent his name to, which encouraged many people to join for some unknown reason. It’s probably quite important to learn how that thought process happens, so the fact that this is unknown is rather hazardous.

One of the most remarkable schemes is NXIVM, pronounced “nexium”. This was a somewhat EST-like sex cult which looked like an MLM on the outside and which branded women with red hot irons with their logo, selling them into sex slavery. Its founder, Keith Raniere, used to be in the ‘Guinness Book Of Records’ as having the highest recorded IQ score ever and is now serving a 120-year jail term. It seems to have been a personal growth seminar and commune, and has more cultish characteristics than many other schemes, but even so is quite typical in that the features of proselytism and brainwashing are found in many other organisations of this nature. Incidentally, EST has a website but there’s no way I’m linking to that so you get Wikipedia on that link.

Perhaps rather disappointingly to those who haven’t been watching it closely for a long time, the Body Shop has also been involved in MLM. This paragraph would have to be peppered with a lot of “allegèdly”‘s for me to go into their activities since, and even before, their foundation in other ways, but leaving those aside there is a section of the company called “The Body Shop At Home” which does practice this. And before you go thinking that LUSH is better, whereas I’m not aware of them being involved in such a scheme, I think when it comes down to it if you want to have ethical dealings, you should probably just do as much as possible yourself. I don’t know which cosmetics companies come out of this well really.

Online criticism of MLMs has become a lot more prominent recently, particularly on Reddit and YouTube. There are disputes going on within this and MLM-organised backlashes to it, so it’s all a bit complicated, but one thing I have noticed about these is that they tend to see MLMs everywhere. This doesn’t mean they aren’t everywhere, and the real situation is more, so to speak, ideological in nature. That’s not a criticism incidentally. I don’t think there’s necessarily any problem with coming up with a body of theories and general Weltanschauung to explain social phenomena in the political sphere. However, the views expressed by vocal anti-MLMers do tend to include many things which would not previously have been thought of as connected, in particular religious cults. And the theories do have explanatory power. For instance, the concentration of MLMs in Salt Lake City and the corresponding friendly legislation makes a lot more sense if the two are linked. The issue is that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Consequently, if you come out of a general perspective of opposing these schemes and analysing them to work out exactly what’s wrong with them, when your purview begins to dilate, it wouldn’t be surprising if you tend to see them in the same way. At the same time, I come from a vaguely Marxist perspective, and likewise I see these phenomena in Marxist terms. Given that a lot of anti-MLMers are American, they may not have had the opportunity to encounter much Marxist theory in everyday life or their education, and consequently they have what amounts to quite a productive ideology which could in theory expand into an overarching social theory which lacks the stigma Marxism has been given in that country. At the same time, at least as far as YouTubers are concerned, they need to think of their audiences and continue to portray these businesses in the same vein, and this is a difficult line to tread. This is where the issue of commercial interests comes to bear on them. Again, like a good Marxist I don’t blame them for that because it’s economic determinism. And in fact it’s working against network marketing and this is a good thing, because as well as being effective and accurate propaganda, the YT advertising algorithm is plonking MLM ads on their content, where it won’t fool anyone and it means their profits are to some extent being funnelled towards people who are working on their downfall. And that’s all absolutely fine. Good for them.