James Arthur Ray's pseudo-scientific racket is essentially no different to 'Scientology' or to 'Amway'

Shyam

 I have been asked two questions by a journalist :

 - Even if he once worked for 'Amway,' what has James Arthur Ray killing people in a sweat lodge, got to do with 'Amway?' 

- Why do you consider 'self-betterment' to be so dangerous?  

The answers to these questions have already been given, but I'll try to make my responses even more clear. 

James Arthur Ray's so-called 'self-betterment business' is one of countless, essentially identical, pseudo-scientific rackets which have all been effectively authorized in the USA by stupid, and/or lazy, and/or corrupt, legislators; for all pernicious cults have been built around fraudulent, pseudo-scientific mystification invariably designed to fit the spirit of the times. Cultic charlatans all seek to overwhelm their adherents emotionally and intellectually by pretending that progressive initiation into their own superior or superhuman knowledge (coupled with total belief in its authenticity and unconditional deference to the authority of its higher initiates) will defeat a negative or adversarial force of impurity and absolute evil, and lead to future, exclusive redemption in some form of secure Utopian existence. By making total belief a prerequisite of redemption, cult adherents are drawn into a closed-logic trap (i.e. failure to achieve redemption, is solely the fault of the individual who didn't believe totally).

Thus, if, on the pretext that you are an entirely honest person who wants to benefit humanity, you coerce ill-informed individuals into submitting to impermissible techniques designed to shut down their critical, and evaluative, faculties and, thus program them to dissipate all their mental, and/or physical, and/or financial resources to your benefit, and to persist in following a demonstrably-unviable 'plan'  no matter what suffering this entails, then you are perpetrating, and dissimulating, a blame the victim fraud. Furthermore, a mountain of quantifiable evidence proves that, when taken to extremes, the co-ordinated, devious techniques of social, psychological and physical persuasion which have been inflicted on many millions of ill-informed individuals by unqualified pseudo-scientific charlatans like James Arthur Ray and his criminal associates, L. Ron Hubbard and his criminal associates, and by the billionaire  bosses of the 'Amway' mob and their criminal associates, can cause serious psychological, and/or physical, damage and even death. 

David Brear (copyright 2011)