A Mormon housewife turned a fake diary into an enormous best-seller

>By the time you hear about them from your assigned ministering brother or sister, it's too late and the ground floor has been marbled over.

I was working at a concrete making place, and during lunch break the chief was talking about getting in on a Ponzi scheme, and he said "It's a ponzi scheme but if you're getting in at the beginning it's a good idea." to which his main guys in our group nodded sagely and I masterfully managed to keep from laughing.

Just a tangential request: is there any curated playlist consisting of such good podcasts? I have a difficult time discovering interesting podcasts.

(Maybe that's an interesting project)

She found success in her time, but in retrospect and in a wider context her work is viewed negatively for obvious reasons. That doesn't seem shocking or incredible.

I agree with your characterization of fiction and poetry. There have been many writers who wrote fictional diaries (e.g. Max Frisch' Stiller) and other (real) diaries that entered the realm of literature (e.g. the diaries of Anne Frank).

I'd say where most people would draw the line is when someone tries to sell something as autobiographic that has been clearly made up for moralist reasons, yet still lie about it's authenticity.

This has nothing to do with the book, and everything to do with the person who pretends to have lived a live that they have not.

In the end the artwork can sometimes be more wise, intelligent and impactful than the artist who made it. Yet the context the artist creates will always colour the reception.

> Every fiction is a fabrication.

There is obvious difference between selling fabrications as fiction and selling fabrications as your real world experiences. The decision to mark it as such is not irrelevant and is not something you can blame purely on publishers.

> Mmm... Or maybe she was... an artist?!

Or liar. Works for me.

Art would be doing something like the Blair Witch Project, that is trying to maintain the credibility of the fiction but still has a producer listed on IMDb. This is a bad lie.

because there are double standards for certain groups.

Nowadays if you are religious or conservatives you are a bigot nazi and should be demonized always.

This isn't one sided though, conservatives demonize liberals as terrorist commies, its just that the media companies push the first narrative more often.

When we realize its all hogwash, and that news companies are owned by a few companies to promote culture wars.

At the end of the day its a side effect of media radicalization to allow the corrupt to further rob the middle and low classes of what little they have left.

a chart from 2019 I believe, could be more or less recent: https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/cfr-m...

I went to a middle school were most of the teachers were (ex-) hippies. In 7th grade we had sex-ed which also covered various drugs. I remember my sex-ed teacher saying something like (unironically) "As supplemental reading, read 'Go Ask Alice'". I think the book was more or less accepted as near-truth/reality neither fully good nor fully evil, something akin to Hunter S. Thompson (this is the first time I'm hearing it's a crock.)

In the same class we had an anti-drug speaker in his early 40s who told us his story: "After high school I lost my way in life, sailed around the world in a sailboat, did a bunch of strange drugs, and slept with 100s of beautiful women. But now I'm clean and my life sucks." My friends and I had finally found a role model.

Baader–Meinhof phenomenon

It's because the book which is mentioned in the article, "Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries", was just released.

Go Ask Alice predates A Million Little Pieces by more than 3 decades.

It's pithy, but calling BS on each other's world views is probably the road to flagged comments.

That's not true. The original people who saw it (with their spiritual senses) also claimed that others could know it was real (with their spiritual senses).

If the world didn't get to see it, or can't see the literal face of, or a pointy appendage of God, or can't see the difference between this religion and every other religion that makes claims based on one's subjective spiritual senses, then that's a problem for them (and their obvious spiritual deficiency).

Why does everyone leave out the important details??

TFA is blatantly wrong:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/th... https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/ei...

Let's not go into a religious flamewar please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Be careful with dismissing the general idea that drugs can lead to a miserable life since drugs can lead to complete misery. I was going down the street at my downtown the other day. I looked to the side, the side of the sidewalk, and saw someone that had lost all control of his life and was barely hanging on. He was sticking a needle in his arm and was shooting up. He looked like life had chewed him up and spit him out. Up to that point I had only seen it on TV or the movies. This was the first time I had seen it in real life. It was much uglier than I had ever thought it would be. It was shocking to see it. It's very sad that addiction can lead to such circumstances.

A relatively close-knit, high-trust society, with a lot of housewives eager to make themselves some money in a socially acceptable way?

Completely anecdotal but this might be related to the notion of it being the MLM capital as well. Most marry young and settle down quickly. The notion of a housewife being able to contribute monetarily is infatuating. This coupled with the fact that Mormons (typically) are trustworthy of insiders means frauds and MLMs can spread virally.

Entire communities would get caught up in the latest herbal essence MLM.

I used to be Mormon, I think Mormon culture is the main reason. This article seems to describe the reasons well: https://religionnews.com/2017/06/20/10-reasons-mormons-domin...

I lived in Utah. There’s plenty of MLMs and Ponzi schemes due to the religious culture. Oils, beauty products, blankets, weight loss solutions, workout pants, you name it.

There are many stay at home mothers who get involved in these schemes to make a few dollars here and there. They end up buying plenty of product up front and not being able to sell it.

Hope that helps.

I live in Utah and was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the dominant church in Utah -- which often bleeds into the culture). In my opinion, the large amount of former missionaries (who often participate in door-to-door sales-like evangelizing) in Utah provides an ideal workforce willing to participate in difficult sales. Many of my friends and family went into sales after their missions as an easy way to make a lot of money. I think this is a large piece to your question.

Additionally, as another comment has said many of the stay-at-home mothers I know who are members of the Church become huge advocates for these pyramid schemes and push them onto friends and family.

This is just anecdotal data so I apologize for the lack of sources other than my own, subjective experience.

Utah has the strongest legal protections for MLMs/Pyramid Schemes/etc. in the country [1].

The demand for that safe harbor and the political will to pass it is largely a result of Mormonism. The hierarchy of the church discourages anyone from criticizing the next level 'above' them. There is also strong societal pressure for Mormon wives to be stay-at-home mothers, but the economic reality means they often need to find some way to make additional money. Add that to the Mormon mission system, and you have a vast number of people comfortable making cold calls (whether for Elohim or doTERRA).

[1] https://quackwatch.org/mlm/legal/utahbill/

So as someone who grew up with lots of Utah Mormons (mother was a convert) I believe there was a strong evolutionary selection pressure for naivety to both become a Mormon and then remain Mormon through all of their “trials and tribulations” in the mid 1800s. If you thought it was all horse shit you wouldn’t have moved 1000 miles to Utah in the middle of nowhere.

While members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can be exceptionally intelligent people, there’s also an air of childish gullibility I don’t see in the general population.

I’m not super confident with this theory and have no skin in the game but it’s something I’ll posit to friends over a drink if Mormons come up.

Major source of income for Mormons, who run the state

I was extremely disappointed to see this statistic trotted out in the New Yorker - almost as a throw away line. It’s such a weak claim for something to be “reputed to be” or “estimated by some” which is probably how it got past the fact checkers (I have not been able to find the source of the 1:100,000 estimate), but it’s stated with authority and smugness and contributes to national readers’ general misunderstandings of Utah and Latter-day Saints.

I know MLMs happen in and are more common in Utah than in other states for all the reasons people have identified in this thread, but it’s also true that high-trust communities have many many benefits, and though there are bad actors who figure out how to exploit these trust networks, the networks somehow stay resilient and help lead Utah to lead the nation on a number of wellness statistics such as the lowest unemployment rate in salt lake out of all big cities [1] and having the lowest income inequality other than Alaska and Wyoming (which have less than 1M people each) [2]

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/09/18/salt-lake...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/income-ineq...

High levels of social trust. Makes for a good environment for scams - everybody wants to think the best of people.

Utah now has a fraud registry (like a sex offender registry) to help prevent serial fraudsters from finding another mark. I have no idea if it's effective but it did seem like a good idea when they first implemented it.

It's somewhat interesting reading to just skip around and see the different kinds of schemes being used (they all have descriptions of the how the fraud worked).

https://www.utfraud.com/Home/Registry

I also suggest the /r/scams subreddit to keep up on what is out there. Most are laughably bad but occasionally some are quite clever.