All 'Amway IBOs' are equal, but some 'IBOs' are more equal than others

Shyam

'Amway' is a blame-the-victim fraud, but the group is also part of a wider, ongoing, historical phenomenon.

Various reality-inverting totalitarian regimes have grown out of pernicious cults. The self-appointed sovereign leaders of these groups have always enslaved their victims with essentially the same attractive offer of a future, exclusive Utopian existence, but then blamed them when they failed to achieve it. Historically, the abusive bosses of pernicious cults (and their inflexible propagandists) have systematically categorized, condemned and excluded all free-thinking individuals and quantifiable evidence challenging the authenticity of their imaginary scenarios of control.

I would suggest that if anyone wants to understand cultism in general, and 'Amway' in particular, then they should read (or re-read) George Orwell's 'Animal Farm'.

In this allegory of the totalitarian phenomenon, a bunch of down-trodden and ill-informed animals are easily seduced by the 'dream of a future without whips, chains or starvation and where All Animals are Equal.' In this way, a few smooth-talking pigs trick them into slaving for years to run the farm and into building a giant windmill. The animals are constantly told that they all have an equal share of the farm's profits and that their mill will power their farm and not just allow them to retire, but also allow all future animal generations to have easy lives. Many animals die of old-age, and/or exhaustion, in pursuit of their impossible 'dream,' whilst those who begin to realize that the pig leaders (and their propagandists) are dangerous liars, are put on show-trial as traitors and torn to pieces by the farm dogs. At the end of the book, the surviving, unquestioning animals are still starving and freezing outside, whilst a few pigs live in luxury off the animals' unrewarded efforts.

Self-evidently, George Orwell's thought-provoking 'Animal Farm' is not to be found on the list of thought-stopping books which have been peddled by the smooth-talking 'Amway' pigs to the unquestioning 'Amway' animals.

It's one of the supreme ironies of history, Shyam, that (since 1941) successive US governments have poured the blood of hundreds of thousands of their finest citizens, and trillions of tax-dollars, into trying to keep totalitarianism (dressed-up as 'Imperialism', 'Nazism', 'Communism', etc.) at bay, whilst they have, completely failed to identify essentially the same reality-inverting phenomenon (dressed-up as 'The American Way') and, thus, successive US governments have not just allowed totalitarianism to establish itself itself in the 'land of the free and the home of the brave,' but also to spread around the globe waving the Stars and Stripes.

David Brear (copyright 2010)