Pyramid schemes causing social harm in China – crackdowns may not be working
economist.com
economist.com
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.
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.
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.
NB 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.