Cultish by Amanda Montell

Author:Amanda Montell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Wave
Published: 2021-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Heyyyyy boss babe! Thank you soooooo much for responding!! I really think you’ll be a perfect fit for this! I don’t have much info to send via DM, the only website I have is for my current clients, but we have several different plans available depending on what you’re looking to accomplish. We treat our clients like family, so it’s really important I have the right information before moving forward, and I won’t know what’s best until we chat. The call will only take about 20 minutes :) I’m so excited to share more!! xoxo

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To me, MLMs’ ra-ra speech style—the excessive exclamation points and “Just believe in yourself, and you can become rich”—reeks of toxic positivity . . . or forcing a silver lining around an experience that is actually quite complex, upsetting, and deserving of more careful attention.

In the messaging of every single MLM I looked into, from Amway to Optavia, there was this startling hybrid of love-bomb-y talk about the power of a positive mind-set and ominous warnings about the danger of a negative one. On its face, promoting a chin-up attitude to your business associates might sound good and fine, but MLMs condition their recruits to fear “negativity” so viscerally that they avoid breathing a word of criticism about the company or anyone in it. “You don’t gossip. You don’t say bad things about other people. If they hear you doing it, or hear about you doing it, you will hear from your director,” cautioned one ex-Amway distributor. Amway labels any attitudes or utterances they don’t like “stinkin’ thinkin’.” Using this deceptively cute catchphrase, they’re able to isolate followers from any stinkin’ thinkers on the outside, who will pose a threat to their success. If a friend or family member expresses doubt in the company, you’re instructed to “snip them out of your life.”

Followers become conditioned to speak in the MLM’s unnaturally cheerful register everywhere they go—with friends, family, strangers, and especially on social media. On Instagram and Facebook, you can clock a boss babe instantly, whether they explicitly mention a product or not. All it takes is that robotically chirpy syntax to give them away. It’s as if someone is standing behind them as they type, cracking a symbolic whip to make sure they’re always selling and recruiting, even if they’re just posting about their dog. Like followers of an oppressive religion, MLM recruits wind up trapped in ritual time.

Whenever I hear this too-good-to-be-true-type rhetoric, my gut tells me to run like hell. And yet as good as it might feel to write off anyone who buys the grandiloquent poppycock of direct sales as a hopeless dunce, the truth is that this toxically positive rhetoric is fundamentally baked into American society. The cult of multilevel marketing is a direct product of the “cult” that is Western capitalism itself.

In the United States, networking marketing as we know it got its start in the 1930s, post–Great Depression, as a reaction to employment regulations introduced by the New Deal.

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