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Amway and the Alt-Right
Dec. 24th, 2017 02:34 pmI am, or rather was, perplexed at various leaders of the alt-right, from Steve Bannon to Wily E. Coyote, Super-Genius At Large. These worthies support a political system in which those who aren't rich will be efficiently exploited by the rich, and in which dissent will not be tolerated. If the alt-right's vision comes to pass, everybody will be "free" to get screwed over. So why do these individuals offer their support?
Then Ed Burmila of Gin and Tacos fame pointed me to a lengthy article about Amway and the people who sign up to be that organization's food soldiers. Although not technically a pyramid scheme, anybody with a minimum of common sense should quickly see that to make anything more than extra money for an occasional beer or pizza requires recruiting a small army of people underneath you to sell sell sell Amway stuff. Yet Amway exists.
Amway exists, according to the article, because a handful of people who've gotten wealthy via the system really run a cult, selling American-style God, patriotism, 19th-century entrepreneurship and related hokum to the grunts at the bottom. And when an individual grunt at the bottom becomes disillusioned and drops out of the program, the top-level people (or some of their middle-level folks) go grab another sucker to feed into the mill.
Bannon, who is personally quite wealthy, would probably end up on top in such an alt-right world. But many of the followers of the alt-right are mere low-level Amway salesmen, destined to be chewed up and spit out.
Then Ed Burmila of Gin and Tacos fame pointed me to a lengthy article about Amway and the people who sign up to be that organization's food soldiers. Although not technically a pyramid scheme, anybody with a minimum of common sense should quickly see that to make anything more than extra money for an occasional beer or pizza requires recruiting a small army of people underneath you to sell sell sell Amway stuff. Yet Amway exists.
Amway exists, according to the article, because a handful of people who've gotten wealthy via the system really run a cult, selling American-style God, patriotism, 19th-century entrepreneurship and related hokum to the grunts at the bottom. And when an individual grunt at the bottom becomes disillusioned and drops out of the program, the top-level people (or some of their middle-level folks) go grab another sucker to feed into the mill.
Bannon, who is personally quite wealthy, would probably end up on top in such an alt-right world. But many of the followers of the alt-right are mere low-level Amway salesmen, destined to be chewed up and spit out.
