The same thing is happening in Iran. I didn't know it still exists but then I just learned that it is so rampant that Iranian shopping companies may very much start their pyramid section of their business officially very soon. More than anything I think we should have a proper education for the public about this. Funny thing is employees some of these companies hire have to pay the company if they wanna work in there, and the company that I am talking about had something close to 20 people working in there as far as I could see!
That’s a very specific, very broad claim. Can you explain how (apparently all) religions structure and market their pyramidal incentive schemes? I’m not currently active in any organised religion, but I have been for long periods of time and didn’t really notice any pyramidal incentives. In fact there didn’t seem to be much in the way of proselytising at all and I was certainly not involved in doing so. What was I missing?
Some religions are wealthy and maybe you don't like that, fine. How is religion in general a form of pyramid selling though? I'm sure some religions are organised like that, or are used to run such schemes, but the claim seemed to be about religion in general. One particular religion, or groups of religions wasn't specified.
The reward for the Ponzi scheme is the ultimate prize isn’t it; who wouldn’t want to live in paradise forever. All religions run this scheme, as far as I’m aware?
Well, those who spread the religion gain ego boosting status as preachers or such and, often, financial reward too. Lots of vicars with posh cars and TV drives to buy the bishop a private jet etc.
Bishops don't have private planes. The catholic church has its own set of faults, and it is very rich. But they also have smart PR people, and a pope who doesn't like luxury, and they keep their bishops on a short leash.
Edit: I thought "bishop" was a specifically catholic title. It appears that some televangelists may have misappropriated not just the faith, but also the title.
Most people think "Pope" is a Catholic title too, but Discordians believe all people (not even just Discordians) are Popes, and the crossover means that members of the Church of the SubGenius often acknowledge such Popes too.
Anyway, Catholicism is a lot bigger than the Roman Catholic Church. You have other very explicitly Catholic churches such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, and you also have faiths like Anglicanism, which are a weird hybrid where most (Roman) Catholics would consider them protestant, but they refer to themselves internally as a "Holy Catholic church", they have Bishops too (but no Pope, their spiritual head is for historical reasons the Queen of England) and so on.
You are completely missing the point. I could say that of politics, academia, capitalism, country music. What has any of this got to do with pyramid selling?
The thing about religion is that believers try to recruit others and get their standing from that, whether its the small scale parents recruiting their children and deriving authority over their children from that, or those born again who feel compelled to save others. You can't say the same about politics or academia or country music - its not like everyone who goes to university has an interest in educating the unwashed masses; generally, the incentive for someone with a degree is to wish they were rarer! ;)
Not all religious people try to recruit others, I never have, and not all of them indoctrinate or coerce it into their children. I haven't. Some do, sure. That's on them, but 'religion' is a huge category.
For what it's worth, my religious beliefs are shall we say pretty individual. I have no reason to protect, support or defend any other religions. I regard many of them to be pretty appalling in a variety of ways and some of them certainly do engage in aggressive proselytising, deceptive practices and such. But not all of them. In general, specific examples aside, the things I have against them have nothing to do with pyramid selling though and lazy opportunistic slurring like this does nobody any favours.
You're right, relatively few adults these days convert because someone "sold" them on the religion and in my majority-catholic country the church doesn't even make any serious attempt to do this or tell their followers to do this.
But christianity and islam are still the biggest MLM schemes in the world, however they work slightly differently.
Instead of being incentivized to recruit people around you, you are incentivized to create your own recruits by having as many children as possible and it's absolutely expected that you will "recruit" them. Also they love proselytizing (religious education etc) in schools, even though they don't care about doing it to adults. They know children are softer targets, and if they don't convert them before they reach adulthood, they're way less likely to succeed.
Basically it's all about proselytizing to children instead of adults. Get them while they're young!
I get that you don't like religion, but how is it a pyramid scheme where e.g. Humanism, political beliefs, a love of Country Music, or any one of a million other beliefs or preferences aren't? It seems to me to be an extraordinarily specific and weak claim.
Because the followers are supposed to make kids and recruit them into the church at the earliest possible age. They don't want it to be about preference, they want to "lock them in" before they start thinking for themselves. This is literally a part of the catholic religion, you're expected to try to have children and expected to recruit them.
Lumping "Christianity and Islam" reminds me of the craziness that passes as intellectualism on hacker news. "Mother Theresa and Hitler" believe in concentrations camps...come on? Maybe one more than the other?
At the very minimum, you should take a world religion class if you want to be taken seriously???
I group them together as the biggest MLM schemes in the world which sounds pretty much correct according to your own numbers
They are grouped together by size and by the fact they both prey on children as their main recruitment targets
Do you think "christanity and islam" should never be together in a sentence just because they differ in some aspects that are irrelevant to this conversation?
I was tempted to downvote you because of the apparent forced comparison. Care to explain a bit more? I find that comparison a bit offensive even if I am not a christian myself.
Didn't mean to offend your faith. I am talking about the way faith spreads and not about faith itself.
People who need faith are very similar to people who need a job or an income. They are all suffering. That is the commonality. One way faith spreads, if you are a student of history, is to claim faith is a "shortcut" fix to suffering. But if you know your faith, you know faith is hard work/just like keeping a job or earning a living honestly.
That doesn't stop people from selling a "shortcut". Because selling a shortcut is easy. Neither does it stop people from buying into it.
Although the reasons people join a religion may be similar, there is a qualitative difference between the spread of religions and pyramid schemes.
In a pyramid scheme, the participants are mostly busy recruiting new members, and the tangible benefits of membership are tied to the stream of recruits. Once that stream stops growing, people start dropping out and the same pyramid structure that accelerated the growth also leads to accelerated collapse.
Religions that have endured over generations have a very different balance of promises and recruitments. Instead of large immediate rewards that can't be kept up over the long term, they rely on hopes about the indefinite future (e.g. paradise) or benefits that are proportional to the size of the community, not it's growth over time (e.g. caring for their sick). Religions do rely on missionarizing to grow, but they can remain stable even without growth, and mostly propagate themselves by parents converting their children.
> Instead of large immediate rewards that can't be kept up over the long term, they rely on hopes about the indefinite future (e.g. paradise)
I think that's ignoring many immediate things people get from religion. Immediate sense of belonging, getting to listen to someone who's "got life figured out", getting some motivation, and many other reasons. Whether that's provided by a megachurch, a local friendly priest, an MLM convention with a charismatic speaker, or another way doesn't matter. I met a masonic priest who joined the group because his wife died and he needed people who would take him out for dinner once a week.
I come from a country that's virtually 100% Catholic (or at least was) and don't believe that many people really cared about the final paradise. Or at least that wasn't really the reason they turned up to the church every week.
I classified those "immediate things people get from religion" under "benefits that are proportional to the size of the community". The point I was trying to make is that successful religions avoid the cycle of frenzied growth and collapse by not making promises that are likely to disappoint their adherents.
This is very rampant in India as well, local facebook groups get at least 5-10 posts a day regarding pyramid schemes and offers. The response is equally high to these post averaging 50-100 comments whereas other posts barely receive any. Showing the promise land of instant riches without hard work via flashy ads and illogical math creates such greed amongst the low-income community here (which is the majority of the population, btw) that it is almost heartbreaking to see them lose their everything eventually. MLM/Pyramid scams cannot be stopped via government bans or awareness programmes as such, it needs an equal rival which not only makes the same promises but magically also fulfills them somehow. As much as I have observed, the amount of hard work they do for recruiting new members can well be exchanged for a handsome salary with a steady future income promise leading to a better financial gain over time.
He's just saying stupid gonna stupid. Can lower them with education. But I've told people "yo it's 100% MLM" after first sentence and still had a "I want to believe!" mentality. People that have finished university.
I don't agree. Make MLM's illegal, punish people who recruit. They will dry up in no time. The problem now is that they are perfectly legal (or can be made legal by introducing sham product to make it less like a pure pyramid) so recruiters can scam others out of their life savings with impunity.
Is there any country with a working anti-mlm law? I think the line is so fuzzy, it would be really hard to define what's a scam and what isn't. What's the difference between a franchise/dealership and an MLM where some product really exists and you're expected to pay for the stock up-front? If there was a law against one of them, how close would they get?
It's probably not possible to solve this with law.
Even the Pyramid Scheme part is semi-optional with newer scams.
The last one I looked at had the usual Pyramid shape, with complicated rules so that it'd always turn out that you didn't get any money, but to defuse the whole "it's a pyramid scheme" thing they said well you can just buy the product and not "join" anything, that's fine too...
And then you realise, wait a minute, the product is basically fruit juice in a fancy bottle for maybe 5000% markup. So, even if you didn't fall for the pyramid scheme, if you buy the juice you _already got scammed_.
I looked at their company structure and the MLM company is legally completely separate from the juice company even though you can't buy the juice elsewhere. So even if the MLM company was shut down for being an outright scam (which isn't likely even in a country that doesn't elect a barely literate reality TV star to run it) the juice company locks in a large fraction of the profits and that's 100% legal, they simply sell a cheap product at a high price and keep the difference for themselves, nothing could be more in line with the American Dream.
Because the MLM makes people buy juice to get their money, and that leaves them with crates of awful-tasting juice they'll never drink, they're tempted to eBay it for say, half the RRP to cover some of their losses. But of course if the juice was available on eBay for half price it shows everybody what a scam this is, so company policy strictly forbids this...
It can work the other way too. How many people have had their savings wiped out starting s restaurant when they had no idea what they are doing, compared to people who started a McDonald’s or Subway and made out ok?
The only thing you can do is force publication of accurate numbers, and audit them. I have a pretty low view of people who with IQs over 95 that join pyramid schemes. They are throwing their friends and family under the bus in hopes they personally get rich. That is extremely immoral even if you are poor.
In the US, if you do this, at best your friends will think you are an idiot, at worst you are going to get cut off. I’ve seen both happen more than once.
MLM scams are massive in the Philippines right now as well. The baffling thing to me is, when I've laid out how this works to friends talking about joining up, they agree with the math but join anyway! It's like they need something to believe in subconsciously even if their logical mind knows it's bullshit.
Maybe these schemes really sell hope to those that need something to believe in, replacing religion on some level. Except in this case it's economic hope, the belief that if they work hard enough they will be rewarded.
I've noticed a trend amongst participants. The people at the top are straight up psychopaths looking to exploit human greed for their own gain. But the lower level minions are usually simply poor. They have very little to lose, so why not try it? Ultimately they usually end up poorer, but there's always the story of Bob and Betty who made a million dollars last year and came from nothing to be top sellers.
Then you haven't experienced the religious fervor with which they defend the scheme once they're hooked. It's definitely more like a cult than any form of gambling addiction and once inside the relentless brainwashing begins.
Many of these schemes even have weekly "meetups" aka services akin to those of religious congregations. These usually include an iconic leader who admonishes the minions for the coming week and encourages them to cut out any family or friends who dare to question them.
Even here in the U.S., I've known several people, with good stable money making careers to give it all up and start selling vitamins or beauty care products or whatever. It's truly bizarre and the desperate sell-to-everyone-all-the-time behavior that seems to appear afterwards drives all their friends away. I'm not sure what these schemes seem to be exploiting but man if it doesn't smell like religious radicalization.
Maybe an education pyramid scheme? You receive training in useful skills, but only if you keep teaching your newly acquired knowledge to multiple other people.
You mean like a chain letter? Usually, incorrect "facts" aren't incentivizing enough on their own to keep sharing them, which is why most of those viral memes spread quickly and die out quickly.
I was thinking more in terms of a long-term commitment that provides enough benefits on its own to offset the time and effort spent by each participant on spreading it to others.
Even in the US there are large MLM scams. Just look at Herbalife. They say they stopped some of the bad practices after the FCA investigation, but how likely is it that they changed a pyramid scheme into a non-pyramid scheme overnight?
Amway is another example. It has established close ties to the US government to help ensure its survival, even though it is another parasitic multilevel marketing pyramid scam.
Like biological parasites, the long lasting ones seem to have optimized the level of damage and chaos they cause, along with maintaining protection mechanisms (lobbying, political donations, corruption) that enable them to continue to survive and be incredibly lucrative to their founders.
In the UK Amway's legal settlement requires them to publish the compensation tiers and how many people are in each tier. So you can see at a glance that almost everybody involved gets nothing.
It doesn't stop people joining, unfortunately. Knowing that Sue, the really successful seeming Super Global Ambassador Tier leader at the presentation on Saturday earned less than a shelf stacker does not stop some people figuring if only they join Amway they'd be doing better.
This is true however a large percentage of the US population refuses to have anything to do with them. I'm in Manila for work a lot, and the number of MLM scams and the percentage of people sharing them and recruiting on facebook is unnervingly high.
In Ponzis and Illegal MLMs, there's either no product or a sham product to disguise money from new recruits paying off the lineage.
Legal MLMs are legal because there's a more legitimate product that accounts for a larger share of revenue.
But even for-profit corporations that need to grow to survive share some features with the illegal variety, it's just that the real value of their products is a larger portion of their total revenue.
They're also massive in South Korea and a pretty entertaining movie about them came out in South Korea in 2016 called "Master" [1]. It's highly dramatized, but has a few scenes in it of the big sales gatherings of some of these scams. They have much of the appearance and feel of a mega-church gathering (also common in the country) and seem to use many of the same "make people feel good and then exploit them along the way" techniques.
It's my understanding that the movie was made simply to help raise awareness of these predatory groups as the population they tend to target don't have the resources to do it themselves.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 404 ms ] threadNB I hate Google for breaking the above URL but I’m tired of fixing them...
Edit: I thought "bishop" was a specifically catholic title. It appears that some televangelists may have misappropriated not just the faith, but also the title.
Anyway, Catholicism is a lot bigger than the Roman Catholic Church. You have other very explicitly Catholic churches such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, and you also have faiths like Anglicanism, which are a weird hybrid where most (Roman) Catholics would consider them protestant, but they refer to themselves internally as a "Holy Catholic church", they have Bishops too (but no Pope, their spiritual head is for historical reasons the Queen of England) and so on.
The thing about religion is that believers try to recruit others and get their standing from that, whether its the small scale parents recruiting their children and deriving authority over their children from that, or those born again who feel compelled to save others. You can't say the same about politics or academia or country music - its not like everyone who goes to university has an interest in educating the unwashed masses; generally, the incentive for someone with a degree is to wish they were rarer! ;)
For what it's worth, my religious beliefs are shall we say pretty individual. I have no reason to protect, support or defend any other religions. I regard many of them to be pretty appalling in a variety of ways and some of them certainly do engage in aggressive proselytising, deceptive practices and such. But not all of them. In general, specific examples aside, the things I have against them have nothing to do with pyramid selling though and lazy opportunistic slurring like this does nobody any favours.
But christianity and islam are still the biggest MLM schemes in the world, however they work slightly differently.
Instead of being incentivized to recruit people around you, you are incentivized to create your own recruits by having as many children as possible and it's absolutely expected that you will "recruit" them. Also they love proselytizing (religious education etc) in schools, even though they don't care about doing it to adults. They know children are softer targets, and if they don't convert them before they reach adulthood, they're way less likely to succeed.
Basically it's all about proselytizing to children instead of adults. Get them while they're young!
It is not a part of any of your examples.
Anabaptist out of Christian sects had the right idea in my opinion.
At the very minimum, you should take a world religion class if you want to be taken seriously???
And your post is for sure a shining example of "intellectualism".
Or just like grouping two beliefs with about half the worlds population together?
Google says there are 2.2 Billion practicing Christians and 1.8 Billion practicing Islam.
How many Billion people are you referring to when you use the word "retarded"?
They are grouped together by size and by the fact they both prey on children as their main recruitment targets
Do you think "christanity and islam" should never be together in a sentence just because they differ in some aspects that are irrelevant to this conversation?
Who were you referencing that's incredibly retarded?
People who need faith are very similar to people who need a job or an income. They are all suffering. That is the commonality. One way faith spreads, if you are a student of history, is to claim faith is a "shortcut" fix to suffering. But if you know your faith, you know faith is hard work/just like keeping a job or earning a living honestly.
That doesn't stop people from selling a "shortcut". Because selling a shortcut is easy. Neither does it stop people from buying into it.
In a pyramid scheme, the participants are mostly busy recruiting new members, and the tangible benefits of membership are tied to the stream of recruits. Once that stream stops growing, people start dropping out and the same pyramid structure that accelerated the growth also leads to accelerated collapse.
Religions that have endured over generations have a very different balance of promises and recruitments. Instead of large immediate rewards that can't be kept up over the long term, they rely on hopes about the indefinite future (e.g. paradise) or benefits that are proportional to the size of the community, not it's growth over time (e.g. caring for their sick). Religions do rely on missionarizing to grow, but they can remain stable even without growth, and mostly propagate themselves by parents converting their children.
I think that's ignoring many immediate things people get from religion. Immediate sense of belonging, getting to listen to someone who's "got life figured out", getting some motivation, and many other reasons. Whether that's provided by a megachurch, a local friendly priest, an MLM convention with a charismatic speaker, or another way doesn't matter. I met a masonic priest who joined the group because his wife died and he needed people who would take him out for dinner once a week.
I come from a country that's virtually 100% Catholic (or at least was) and don't believe that many people really cared about the final paradise. Or at least that wasn't really the reason they turned up to the church every week.
How do you propose to "magically" fulfill a pyramid scheme without a pyramid scheme?
Even the Pyramid Scheme part is semi-optional with newer scams.
The last one I looked at had the usual Pyramid shape, with complicated rules so that it'd always turn out that you didn't get any money, but to defuse the whole "it's a pyramid scheme" thing they said well you can just buy the product and not "join" anything, that's fine too...
And then you realise, wait a minute, the product is basically fruit juice in a fancy bottle for maybe 5000% markup. So, even if you didn't fall for the pyramid scheme, if you buy the juice you _already got scammed_.
I looked at their company structure and the MLM company is legally completely separate from the juice company even though you can't buy the juice elsewhere. So even if the MLM company was shut down for being an outright scam (which isn't likely even in a country that doesn't elect a barely literate reality TV star to run it) the juice company locks in a large fraction of the profits and that's 100% legal, they simply sell a cheap product at a high price and keep the difference for themselves, nothing could be more in line with the American Dream.
Because the MLM makes people buy juice to get their money, and that leaves them with crates of awful-tasting juice they'll never drink, they're tempted to eBay it for say, half the RRP to cover some of their losses. But of course if the juice was available on eBay for half price it shows everybody what a scam this is, so company policy strictly forbids this...
The only thing you can do is force publication of accurate numbers, and audit them. I have a pretty low view of people who with IQs over 95 that join pyramid schemes. They are throwing their friends and family under the bus in hopes they personally get rich. That is extremely immoral even if you are poor.
In the US, if you do this, at best your friends will think you are an idiot, at worst you are going to get cut off. I’ve seen both happen more than once.
Maybe these schemes really sell hope to those that need something to believe in, replacing religion on some level. Except in this case it's economic hope, the belief that if they work hard enough they will be rewarded.
I've noticed a trend amongst participants. The people at the top are straight up psychopaths looking to exploit human greed for their own gain. But the lower level minions are usually simply poor. They have very little to lose, so why not try it? Ultimately they usually end up poorer, but there's always the story of Bob and Betty who made a million dollars last year and came from nothing to be top sellers.
A simpler explanation is that they just love to gamble.
Essentially, they bet on ending up in a higher position of the pyramid.
Many of these schemes even have weekly "meetups" aka services akin to those of religious congregations. These usually include an iconic leader who admonishes the minions for the coming week and encourages them to cut out any family or friends who dare to question them.
I was thinking more in terms of a long-term commitment that provides enough benefits on its own to offset the time and effort spent by each participant on spreading it to others.
Like biological parasites, the long lasting ones seem to have optimized the level of damage and chaos they cause, along with maintaining protection mechanisms (lobbying, political donations, corruption) that enable them to continue to survive and be incredibly lucrative to their founders.
It doesn't stop people joining, unfortunately. Knowing that Sue, the really successful seeming Super Global Ambassador Tier leader at the presentation on Saturday earned less than a shelf stacker does not stop some people figuring if only they join Amway they'd be doing better.
In Ponzis and Illegal MLMs, there's either no product or a sham product to disguise money from new recruits paying off the lineage.
Legal MLMs are legal because there's a more legitimate product that accounts for a larger share of revenue.
But even for-profit corporations that need to grow to survive share some features with the illegal variety, it's just that the real value of their products is a larger portion of their total revenue.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.htm
Id imagine this is worrying the Chinese government
It's my understanding that the movie was made simply to help raise awareness of these predatory groups as the population they tend to target don't have the resources to do it themselves.
1 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5735464/