What If America Were Normal?

Nothing in what I’m about to say should be taken as a personal insult to any American citizen or anyone living in the States. I should also point out that normality is an illusion and not worth considering as a concept. It’s a bit like the idea of something being “natural” or “unnatural”: pretty much meaningless and only superficially significant. If you examine the concept of normality too closely, it tends to fall apart, so it depends on ignorance and unwillingness to enquire more closely. However, that very failure to examine something through lack of knowledge can also be useful in that you don’t get bogged down by facts and you can sketch something which seems realistic on the face of it to other people who don’t know much about the topic either. That’s kind of what I’m aiming at here.

There is of course a concept out there of “American Exceptionalism” and another one called “Manifest Destiny”, both of which are probably significant in forging national identity. And the US is indeed exceptional, being the world’s most powerful and wealthiest nation, and also one of the largest and most heavily populated. That isn’t what American exceptionalism means though. The idea of a normal America is, in a sense, the opposite of American exceptionalism. The question I’m asking here is what the US would be like if it wasn’t exceptional? By that, though, I’m not particularly thinking of wealth, power, population and size, although all of those may be connected to that idea. Therefore I’ll outline those two ideas first.

American exceptionalism is the idea that there is a qualitative difference and uniqueness about the USA which doesn’t apply to other countries, and sets it up as an outlier in some way. I am personally a little dubious about this regardless of whether it’s positive or negative to think this because I think of the country as a “melting pot”, that is, an amalgam of all the ethnicities and national identities making it up, who were either there before Europeans reached it, were brought with willing settlers or came unwillingly as slaves or indentured labour, and of course immigrants in more recent times. This mixture in itself could make the US exceptional because it could become more representative of the human race than other nations, but in fact the dominant image as presented to the world is of course Northwestern European. And I am myself Northwestern European, something I identify with more strongly than any national identity, so I will tend to be oblivious of the implications of that identity more than most other people might. It does seem, though, that the cultural and ethnic mixture is not generally what American exceptionalism is.

Ways in which America might be seen as exceptional have included its Puritan roots, the complete absence of feudalism from its history, freedom of religion and republicanism with a decidedly small R. England, of course, has a state religion, as had many other countries at the time, and there were also religious connectons with many social struggles in Europe centred around the authority and therefore potential sovereignty of the Roman Catholic Church, such that the alternatives seemed to be either to allow an extranational authority to have some control over a government or to have the government or head of state be also the head of the Church. The US has neither of these, and this is a very good thing. Westminster has bishops in the House of Lords and the Queen as head of the Church. The US is also a republic, and I would also say that it’s also somewhat democratic as simply being a republic because you’ve got a dictator in charge is rather pointless, at least in peacetime. Nowadays this is a pretty common situation but this was not so in 1776 and the allegiance with France makes a lot of sense here. As far as I can remember, the only other republic in Europe at the time was the microstate of San Marino, which even now only has a population of around thirty thousand. I would prefer the US to be less exceptional in this regard because I am mildly republican, mainly because I think there are much bigger issues, primarily that the UK is not communist, and I can’t see the point of having an apparently democratic republic which is still rampantly capitalist. I have a hunch that Puritanism ultimately led to the Labour Party in this country, so it’s interesting that it took such a different course in North America. The Puritans were in a sense trying to build Jerusalem in a promised land.

This brings me to the Mormons and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. To a European, or this European, the Church of the Latter Day Saints seems kind of irrelevant in a way. My understanding of Christianity, and as I’ve said before I no longer regard myself as a faithful Christian substantially because of the behaviour of certain churches in the States, is that Christ came once for the whole world, that those who couldn’t’ve heard the Good News would be judged as if they had and that there was no need for a further manifestation. It’s also abundantly clear that Native Americans are most closely genetically aligned with East Asians in the Old World and therefore not descended from the Jews. However, to someone in North America I can understand that the sense of something happening “over there” rather than on their own continent could be very strong, and here in Britain we’ve had the British Israelites, who were Gentiles who believed the English were descended from the Jews and were therefore God’s chosen people, so it even happens here.

“American Progress”, 1872 allegorical painting of expansion of the USA by John Gast

That very White lady is carrying a book. As far as I know, the idea of Manifest Destiny is dead today, but I’m probably wrong. The idea here is that the West of the North American continent was destined to be made in the image of the East and that US institutions and people (presumably meaning Whites of European descent) were especially virtuous. I’ve heard that the Mormons believe the Constitution of the United States is divinely inspired, and this seems very much to go along with this idea. An important part of it is that there seems to be an idea of divine right and God aiding the American settlers in this aim, which is irresistible because God is on their side. I would be interested to know where Black people and Native Americans fit into this idea. I can at best only imagine paternalism. Of course I could spend time looking into this but I’m trying to use broad strokes here and use my ignorance to produce something more assertive than it might otherwise be. This will probably lead to me doing something crass and naïve, but the alternative is obfuscatory waffle and I’m not doing that here. And like American exceptionalism, I don’t feel entirely negative about the idea of Manifest Destiny (aren’t there a lot of capital letters in this post?), because if it means the spread of republican democracy that would seem to be a good thing, provided it was proper democracy as opposed to the likes of the Trail of Tears, nuclear testing on Western Shoshone land, Black slavery and indentured servitude of White people being tolerated and whole swathes of people being conveniently written out of the rights the US government is supposed to have given them.

In a sense, the idea of a “normal” America could still include exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, but in a very different form. The question I’ve set myself works like this: what would the United States be like if their distinctive character were more in line with other countries? Is there a straight line of progress from which the US have deviated and many other countries haven’t?

Canada springs to mind as an example of a nation which has pursued a different historical path but still shares features with the US. However, as a country Canada is itself quite atypical. Most Canadians live within a couple of hundred kilometres of the Forty-Ninth Parallel and Canada is of course a monarchy. It’s also barely cohesive according to some Canadians I know (again I’m being wilfully ignorant here). It’s fairly atypical nowadays for a developed country to be even a constitutional monarchy.

In South America, some countries have a large enough Native American population relative to their Europeans for it to be acknowledged officially as an influence on their culture and national life. I’ve already mentioned Bolivia on here in that respect. By contrast, US culture seems to be much more dominated by Whiteness, and I wonder why this is. I don’t think it’s entirely unfair because I suspect the population of Native Americans, even at the start of European colonisation, was smaller than it was in Central and Southern America. It obviously didn’t help that they were deliberately and accidentally infected with European diseases and massacred by the Europeans, but this wasn’t a uniquely North American thing. The thirteen most common Native American languages are Central or Southern American, or Mexican, and unlike the situation in Bolivia, Perú or Paraguay, the situation for the US as a whole is not of a single or a couple of widely spoken non-Indo-European languages. Nonetheless, the US is a federal state, so it could in theory have official second languages. Navajo is only the thirty-third most spoken language in the country. And it’s at this point that it becomes particularly clear, if it wasn’t before, that one reason the US is not “normal” is its history. Navajo is still spoken by more people than Gàidhlig is in Britain, even proportionately, and yet Gàidhlig is one of our official languages.

The second language over most of the US, perhaps surprisingly even including Alaska, is Spanish. The exceptions to this are the states of Hawaiʻi, where it’s Tagalog, the Dakotas, where it’s German, and Louisiana, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, where it’s French. The unexpected one there is Tagalog in Hawaiʻi, because why isn’t it Hawaiian? It also surprises me that Tlingit or Inuktitut are not the second language in Alaska. However, in Canada the whole country seems to be officially bilingual, so it might be expected that either the US as a whole has two official languages, English and Spanish, or that each state has an official second language such as German for North and South Dakota, but in fact the US has no official language at all. Maori is an official language in Aotearoa New Zealand, so it does happen that indigenous languages in English-speaking countries can have that status, and therefore it would also make sense for Navajo at least to be an official language in the states where it’s spoken. That, then, is one oddity about the US which could be normalised.

A second peculiarity is the nature of its democracy, more specifically the Electoral College. This exists because of the historically poor communication between Washington DC and the rest of the country, meaning that those present in the city would be better informed and make better decisions than elsewhere. It doesn’t make sense nowadays and many Western democracies have proportional representation. Therefore it could be expected that if the US was “normal”, it would also have proportional representation. There isn’t just one form of proportional representation of course, but it could be expected to have it in some manner. This would then have a knock-on effect on its party system. As it stands, the US has just two significant parties, which have moreover been rather similar to each other over much of their recent history, and this is where it gets complicated, because the right-wing nature of the Democrats has influenced party systems elsewhere in the First World. A four-year term for the Presidency, on the other hand, is pretty normal. But Congress would be expected to have a somewhat wider ranges of parties in it, and the oddity of having a President whose politics are at odds with the rest of the legislature is another anomaly which might be expected not to exist.

Then there are the three “biggies” in American politics which don’t occur much elsewhere in democratic countries: the right to bear arms, the existence of capital punishment and the strong influence of religious fundamentalism on politics. I’m not going to tell anyone else how to run their country, but I know that many Americans agree with my view on the right to bear arms, that it is not the right to bear firearms as they exist today and that they could be expected to exist within the setting of a militia. This is probably somewhat complicated by the popularity of hunting in the US. Practically anyone outside America perceives their gun culture as hazardous and pathological, even in countries which have their own such as Switzerland. I wonder in fact if the Swiss approach to firearms is closer to the intent of the US Constitution. Nonetheless, as far as I know no other Western democracy has the right to bear arms, although the fact that they’re “out there” does present a problem with gun control. There has been a similar problem in these isles with the north of Ireland in that respect. Responses to mass shootings in the rest of the world are usually to tighten gun control. It would certainly be expected that a “normal” US would have the usual prohibition of firearms to civilians.

Capital punishment is currently abolished in Europe except for Belarus and two small unrecognised republics in Eastern Europe. In North America, it exists in several Caribbean nations, including Cuba, and in South America it’s still on the books in Guyana but it’s a long time since it’s been used. On the whole the death penalty exists in countries which are either totalitarian régimes or have significant fundamentalist religious influence on their politics. This is a bit of a generalisation as, for example, it doesn’t seem to apply to India where it still exists. The biggest perpetrator by far is China. Consequently the US is definitely unusual in this respect.

Unlike the “U”K, the US is an officially secular country. For some reason this hasn’t stopped it from being strongly influenced by religion, and for atheism or non-religious sensibilities to be frowned upon in many communities. The oddity here is that the US is not unusual in being officially secular, given its position in terms of freedom and enlightenment, but it is unusual in having a strong religious influence on government policy, which is not the kind of thing you generally expect from a democracy in the developed world. In particular this influences the attitudes taken towards the queer community and abortion, as well as the teaching of evolution in schools. A more normal society would be more secular in its general community. There would be less church attendance, schooling would not be influenced by creationism, homophobia would be less acceptable and abortion rights would be enshrined in statute law rather than depending on case law. There would probably also be less support for Israel and less Islamophobia.

The issue of racism can’t be passed over here without comment. Overt and active racism is clearly endemic globally, and sadly the racism of the US is only remarkable in degree rather than qualitatively, but there would still be some differences. There would not, for example, be any attempts to impose literacy tests on the right to vote. In India, ballot papers have been illustrated for a long time and in this country we have logos representing the parties on our papers too, which I presume is linked to literacy concerns. The enormous Black prison population is also widely seen as a loophole in continuing slavery, so the prison population would be smaller and there would be more non-penal approaches to crime. But there would still be racism, and it would still be institutional and structural.

I therefore present to you the Unexceptional United States of America (UUSA):

The UUSA has a written constitution, four-year presidential terms, is a federal republic and is officially secular. In these respects it’s like the exceptional version. However, it also:

• Has proportional representation
• Has a smaller prison population
• Has the official languages of English, Spanish, French, German and Navajo, depending on the state, and possibly others.
• Has fairly liberal abortion laws
• Has several parties substantially represented in government at any one time.
• Has strong gun control.
• Is a place where racism and homophobia are considered far less acceptable.
• Has no death penalty.

I also think it would have some kind of socialised healthcare system and be less “patriotic”, e.g. there would be no Pledge Of Allegiance in schools and Old Glory would be less in evidence. American English is still spoken with its own grammar, vocabulary, accent and spelling, but they use the metric system.

Please note two things about this. Although I believe this would be a better country than the current US, I’m not explicitly advocating for this country. Also, although I’m extremely left wing, this is not a left wing America. It’s still a country where capitalism is relatively unfettered and has unfair advantages, where free enterprise is prized and where there is very little sympathy for communism. This is still a rich country with an aggressive interventionist foreign policy, and still a very unequal country, and in particular it’s still very racist.

The reasons the US is not like this are of course historical. It has a history of slavery, it was colonised by Puritans, practiced genocide on Native Americans and all of these things have left scars on its identity today. This is a fantasy America, and it would be difficult to imagine a series of events which could have led to its reality. But this is America as an unexceptional nation, and I’ve done this to illustrate what’s odd about that country. No intent to insult anyone exists here.

Have a nice day.

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.