MLM is also a corporate sponsored cult and puts on ostentatious events. One commonality is how they tell you to remove negative influence, ie skeptical and concerned friends and family, as they hold you back from achieving success.
Tony Robbins (self-help)
Landmark Forum (self-help MLM)
Billy Graham (Christian revival)
Joel Osteen (prosperity gospel)
etc.
They seem to help a lot of people with just mindset stuff
There's carve outs for technical fields, for people who are willing to pay a premium for speed, or personalized learning, or putative 'networking' of course.
https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/college-a...
And public school is just a day care center to keep kids out of trouble so both their parents can work for corporations 10 hours a day. We’ve essentially created a prison environment for kids, and instead of fixing issues in it, we overdiagnose them with ADHD for fidgeting and prescribe amphetamines. Even Paul Graham noted these things: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Also banks are a grift, for many people. The “American Dream” was co-opted where you are sold the idea now of “owning” a home, but to do so you “rent” money issued by a bank, and then work 30 years to pay it back with a lot of interest. The government has to print more money eventually or people will work harder and harder and default. Money printing is actually what frees people up from having to slave for corporations as much (as we can clearly see happened after 2020 with the great labor exodus).
If you have to pay to learn something, it's a grift
Perhaps corrected by saying: _sometimes_ it's a grift, or _often_ a grift, or IMO it is a grift.