Xenu1
'I still feel uncomfortable with the Nazi comparisons, Freemasonry and the like. We are in conspiracy-territory here and, with respect, you come across as obsessed. Maybe your personal family history affects this?'
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Ah, so I take it we've now moved out of 'Godwin's Law territory' which you previously accused me of occupying.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not interested in your comfort or in your opinions. What I am interested in, however, is the truth, and the truth about cultism has a tendency to make many people feel very uncomfortable, because it challenges their ego-protecting model of reality. Indeed, your comment only confirms my overall analysis.
You write 'with respect?' Yet I detect little respect in your comment. I'm only politely inviting my readers to think, but you are impolitely refusing to make the effort.
The central point which I have been making, but which you (and many other casual observers of cults) have completely failed to grasp, is that the arbitrary mystifying names which are always hung over the entrances to cults, are largely a distraction. Once you know the universal formula for how all cults are instigated, it's not difficult to understand that you can hide the phenomenon behind almost any reality-inverting camouflage. Cults and cult instigators behave like chameleons, and history proves that they are at their most dangerous when their camouflage has been perfectly tailored to fit the spirit of the age.
Self-evidently, you are not putting forward an evidence-based argument. You are just offering a blanket dissmissal of my evidence-based, deconstructed analysis, and trivializing my intellectually-rigorous approach as 'obsession.' I could easily dissmiss your less than rigorous approach as ignorance and mental laziness, but I'm far too polite to do that. Thus, call me obsessed, but I'm still politely making the effort to try to get you look beyond the end of your nose and think.
The fact remains that tens of millions of people around the world continue to be churned through 'MLM income opportunity' rackets each year, leaving their cash behind them. Virtually none of them will ever complain, because they haven't the slightest idea what they were actually involved in. Like all cults, 'MLM' rackets have been designed to be beyond ordinary human understanding.
Due to its global scale, the increasing number of groups involved, the staggering ammount of cash their bosses have stolen, its infiltation of traditional culture and capacity to survive all low level investigations (and legal and media) challenges, I have described so-called 'MLM' as being one of the most alarming developments of the cult phenomenon since the demise of the so-called 'Third Reich.'
Obviously, far from being a crackpot conspiracy theory, groups like 'FLP' and 'Amway' convert their adherents to believe in a form a conspiracy theory, where anyone challenging the authenticity their closed-logic 'us vs them' fictitious controlling scenarios, is systematically dehumanized and excluded by the scenario.
Talking of conspiracy theories, I happen to have access to 'Amway' brainwashing tapes (sold by the Yager organization to high level initiates), where persons such as my myself are openly condemned as being the 'evil agents of Satan.' At one time, a leading 'Amway' propagandist posted a description of 'the internet war against Amway being prosecuted by the members of an anti-capitalist cult.' Myself and Robert FitzPatrick were, thus, listed as 'cult members.'
Again, I'm not making inappropriate or glib comparisons, I'm describing in accurate deconstructed terms the internal totalitarian structures, and fictitious controlling scenarios, of organizations like 'FLP' and 'Amway,' and calmly explaining that these groups are unoriginal perversions of traditional fraternal secret societies and religions, but presented externally as 'businesses' in order to fit the spirit of the times.
To say that 'Amway is just a scam,' is patently wrong. It is my considered opinion that MLM is part of a widely-misunderstood, ongoing, criminogenic phenomenon which poses threat to democracy and the rule of law.
I would suggest that you also take a long hard look at the perverted fraternal secret society known as the 'Second Ku Klux Klan,' which counted around 6 millions adherents during the 1920s. During this, period the KKK was lawfully-registered in the USA, and various other countries, as a labyrinth of privately-owned limited liability commercial companies. The guy who instigated the '2nd KKK' was exactly like Dexter Yager - a con artist, but Yager didn't instigate 'Amway'.
By the way, at one time in the 1990s, I was in regular contact with Sydney Schwartz. He was being sued for saying that 'Amway' was cultic. At that time, 'Amway' threatened Sydney with a list of 'experts' who were apparently all going to turn up in court and swear that 'Amway' wasn't a cult.? One of these coopted 'experts' was the corrupt British director of a 'cult advice' charity who'd secretly been on 'Amway' payroll for years. After a 1993 UK magazine article began to expose 'Amway' as a cult, this guy, Graham Baldwin, and his partner in crime, Ian Howarth, managed to round up a significant group of victims in the UK and prevent them from complaining by negotiating compensation deals.