Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 142 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Cultish (2021)

  Spiritual influencers are sanctified by the apps for the same reason any other content creator is—because their posts are on-trend and hyper-engaging. They exchange regrammable quotegrams full of buzzy wellness vernacular for ego-boosting likes and ad dollars, profiting from Apple Pay–enabled seekers aiming to soothe the distress and ennui of contemporary existence. Because their actual beliefs take a back seat to the success of their brand, these gurus are willing to fudge them according to whatever the zeitgeist seems to want. If CBD supplements are all the rage, they’ll suddenly flood their feeds with affiliate posts and act like cannabis has been part of their ideology all along; if conspiracy theory–type content seems to be doing well, they’ll head in that direction, even if they don’t fully understand the volatile rhetoric they’re trafficking in. Spend a few minutes poking around the Bentinho Massaro borough of Instagram and you’ll find dozens upon dozens of similar accounts. In one corner, you’ll find “alternative healing” opportunists masquerading as benevolent medical professionals. Like . . . “Dr.” Joe Dispenza, a generic-looking middle- aged white guy who well over a million Instagram followers somehow trust as their New Age sage. Dispenza’s army of adoring acolytes claim he’s helped them manifest everything from their dream job to their spouse to their cancer remission. Dispenza shrewdly exploits SEO and other web-marketing strategies to make millions selling an extravagant emporium of self-help workshops and retreats, public speaking engagements, corporate consultations, guided meditations, CDs, gifts, and books like Becoming Supernatural and Evolve Your Brain. Branding himself as the ultimate “scientific” spiritual authority, Dispenza’s Instagram bio reads “Researcher of epigenetics, quantum physics & neuroscience,” and he proudly flaunts his studies in biochemical sciences at Rutgers University, as well as his “postgraduate training and continuing education”—whatever that means—“in neurology, neuroscience, brain function and chemistry, cellular biology, memory formation, and aging and longevity.” Taking a page out of L. Ron Hubbard’s playbook, Dispenza marries academic- sounding language with the paranormal. Examine, for instance, his definition of a quantum field: “an invisible field of energy and information—or you could say a field of intelligence or consciousness—that exists beyond space and time. Nothing physical or material exists there. It is beyond anything you can perceive with your senses.”

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  In addition, Holly has put herself in charge of making parody videos that are meant to promote the HubSpot brand but don’t always help the company. “Watching this video gave me cancer” is how one commenter reviews one of Holly’s productions, a parody of “What Does the Fox Say?” called “What Does the Web Say?” Says another: “After watching this video I gouged out my eyes and shoved knitting needles in my ears so I would never have to endure it again.” The video is so bad that one of HubSpot’s engineers posts a question on the corporate wiki asking why the video was even created in the first place. Cranium defends Holly, and insists the video was a brilliant piece of marketing. A few months later, Holly strikes again, recording a video that takes “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and changes it to “All I Want for Christmas Is Leads,” with lyrics about sales and marketing. Everyone tells her it’s great. Beneath these people lies another layer of fortified bozofication, which consists of people like Sharon, a forty-something woman who describes herself on Twitter as a “manic pixie dream girl” and calls herself a member of the management team even though she has no one reporting to her. “I manage a team of one,” she tells us one day in a department meeting, and by one she is referring to herself. She runs “influencer relations,” which means she’s supposed to identify people who influence corporate software buying decisions, and become friendly with them. One year at Halloween she gives a speech at a marketing conference while wearing a witch costume, with sparkly shoes, a broom and a big pointy black hat. She posts pictures of herself doing this on Twitter. Marcia from the blog team, who has been at HubSpot since 2008, discovers that by changing the date or byline or some of the information in an old blog post she can trick Google into thinking the post is new, which boosts its rank in search results so it gets more traffic. She starts changing the dates on old blog posts, and writes a blog post teaching Marketing Mary how to do the same. “Historical Blog Search Engine Optimization,” she calls it. Ashley, the youngest blogger, publishes a post titled, “Fifteen Common Grammar Mistakes We All Need to Stop Making,” in which she (a) suggests the passive voice is grammatically incorrect, and (b) claims that “e.g.” stands for “example given.” Ashley also dreams up a solution to one of Marketing Mary’s problems, which is how to come up with ideas for new blog posts. Ashley’s solution is a sort of Mad Libs generator, which she calls the Blog Topic Generator. Type in three keywords, and the BTG will spit out three headlines.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “Clean beauty” MLMs with chicer, updated packaging pivoted to populating their seller bases with “micro-influencers”—women with small blogs and a few thousand social media followers who could be tempted by an unctuous DM about how their feed is amazinggg and would they like to add a second stream of income while becoming part of the clean beauty “movement”?! Pairing deliciously with the glamorous image of a self-employed influencer, this hipper generation of MLMs pitched itself as the perfect side hustle. The nimble direct sales industry always finds a way to reinvent itself—the capitalist cockroach that just won’t stop reincarnating. iii.Hey lady! Just wanted to send a reminder that we’re in the business of changing lives here!! Yes, we’re making money, but it’s so much bigger than that . . . it’s a MOVEMENT. People deserve to be a part of it, they just don’t know it yet, so it’s up to you to show them the light!! You need to be reaching out to EVERYBODY . . . family, friends, Insta followers, the person behind you in line at Starbucks. Start up a conversation, and meet them where they’re at. Our products basically sell themselves, so if you’re not meeting your goals, you need to work HARDER and SMARTER like the boss babe you are. You have such potential. Don’t let me down, but more importantly, don’t let YOURSELF down!! xoxo * * * When my middle school friend Becca and I finally got on a call to talk about her MLM experience, it had been a decade since I’d last heard her voice. Becca, now twenty-eight, lives in a little white country house in Maryland with her husband, two dogs, and four cats. She works a nine-to-five and still plays the same local singing gig she did in high school—Friday nights at Backstage BBQ Cafe. She goes to AA several times a week and spends most evenings playing with her baby niece. “I know, look what’s become of me,” she quipped, sporting that old Becca sarcasm and the cozy fronted vowels of our hometown’s accent, which I never get to hear anymore. Becca knew from the jump that Optavia (formerly called Medifast) was a shifty venture. She could hear it. “All that marketing mumbo-jumbo? It was so cringe,” she affirmed. I guess I could have predicted Becca wouldn’t be one of those wide-eyed hopefuls who accidentally finds themselves at the bottom of a pyramid scheme. Becca was well aware of Optavia’s tricky setup, but she was also confident she could game it by tapping into her massive network of Facebook friends. “I one hundred percent knew it was a cult,” she said. “But I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll jump on that wagon.’ Like, let’s scam, you know?” “Sure, sure.” I gulped. Optavia is a weight loss program that delivers prepackaged meals to consumers’ homes, like Nutrisystem or BistroMD. “They definitely try to reel you in by saying all that ‘Be your own boss.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  universities for ideas, and to encounter groups or therapy to emit any “primed scream” of our pent-up emotions. Yet if we are truly aware, we can hear the silent screams of denied feelings echoing off every classroom wall and university corridor. And if we are sensitive enough, we can hear the creative thoughts and ideas that often emerge during and from the open expression of our feelings. Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated. Who can bring into being this whole person? From my experience I would say that the least likely are university faculty members. Their traditionalism and smugness approach the incredible. I remember with something approaching horror the statement of a Columbia University professor shortly after buildings were seized and campus turmoil erupted among the students, who could not be heard in any other way. This professor told me, “There’s no problem of communication at Columbia. Why, I speak to students almost every day.” He sounded like a southern slaveowner in the 1850s. No, I think that if change is to come about in dealing with ourselves and others as complete somas with thought and feeling intertwined, it will be the younger generation who achieve it. They are throwing off the shackles of tradition. They have largely discarded the religious dogmas that proclaimed the body evil and only the mind and spirit capable of good. They are a strong hope against the dichotomized, dehumanized being who can drop bombs on Vietnamese civilians, and handle this quite comfortably at the intellectual level. (In his mind, he has not murdered people, or torn flesh from bone: he has only engaged in “a protective reaction strike.”) Only the younger generation, I believe, can help us to see the awful dehumanization we have bred in our educational system by separating thoughts, which are to be approved, from feelings, which are somehow seen as animal in origin. Perhaps the young can make us whole again. God knows we need once more to be unified organisms, responsive to all of ourselves and all of our environment.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Because they’re Andreessen Horowitz.” Andreessen is a physically imposing man: six feet, four inches tall and heavyset, with an enormous shaved head. He’s an avid Twitter user, sometimes posting more than one hundred tweets a day, pontificating and picking fights. When Warren Buffett expressed skepticism of Bitcoin, a technology in which Andreessen has invested heavily, Andreessen called Buffet “an old white man crapping on tech he doesn’t understand.” Andreessen was quite literally the poster boy for the first dotcom bubble, posing for a February 1996 Time cover sitting barefoot on a throne, a millionaire boy king, twenty-four years old. The first bubble, I believe, became a formative experience for Andreessen and shaped his behavior when he entered the venture capital business. As an entrepreneur, Andreessen had a mixed record. Netscape got crushed by Microsoft and started losing money but nevertheless was acquired by AOL for $10 billion. After Netscape, Andreessen founded Loudcloud, which went public when it was only eighteen months old and had barely any revenues. Later, Loudcloud became Opsware, was split into two pieces, and sold for $1.6 billion, despite never reporting an annual profit. In 2005 Andreessen co-founded Ning, a social network that fizzled out. At some point it seems to have dawned on Andreessen that the people who make the most money in Silicon Valley are not the ones who found companies or run them, but rather the ones who put up the capital. (At Netscape, he reportedly made as much as $100 million, while his investor and co-founder, Jim Clark, made $2 billion.) In 2009 Andreessen and his friend and former business partner Ben Horowitz launched Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, as it is known. (The name is a “numeronym,” a way of shortening a word or phrase by using a number to represent the number of letters that have been left out. A , then sixteen letters, then Z . Tech geeks love stuff like this.) Andreessen and Horowitz developed a reputation for overpaying to get into deals, offering valuations that I’ve been told were 30 percent higher than what other venture capitalists would pay. They also recognized the value of publicity. One of the first partners they hired was Margit Wennmachers, a veteran Silicon Valley public relations specialist known for her sharp elbows. They’ve since hired more PR people, as well as journalists and researchers who produce blog posts, podcasts, and market analysis reports—their own little content factory. Horowitz wrote a book about his experience as an entrepreneur and posed for a Fortune magazine cover with his hands wrapped like a boxer, though he apparently does not actually box. He hangs out with rappers and spouts rap lyrics, cultivating a streetwise image—though in fact he was born in London and grew up in Berkeley, and his father is David Horowitz, a well-known author and conservative commentator. As the tech blog Valleywag summed it up, “Ben Horowitz Is Desperate for You to Think He’s Cool.” Andreessen and Wennmachers assiduously court the press.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “Can you imagine having to look up the word ‘of’?” Cathy asked me. (As a linguist, I actually could, yes, though certainly not on Scientology’s terms.) Graduating from Key to Life is considered extremely prestigious just because you’ve invested so many hours of tedium into the church. * MLMers are willing to turn any tragedy—from a cancer diagnosis to a worldwide pandemic—into an opportunity to sell and recruit. It didn’t take long after COVID-19 ravaged the US in early 2020 for MLM recruits to start making public claims that their products could protect against both the virus and financial insecurity. The Federal Trade Commission sent warnings to over fifteen direct sales companies, including Arbonne, dōTERRA, and Rodan + Fields, after their affiliates blew up social media with images of “immunity-boosting” essential oils, captioned with the hashtags “#covid #prevention,” and verbiage like “RODAN and FIELDS is always open for business even during quarantine! I’ve been working from home for over 3 years now and still making money when other people aren’t! Isn’t it about time you found out what it is I do and how this company really works? . . . #workfromhome #financialfreedom.” * The full quote from which this idiom purportedly derives reads, “This Text holdeth their noses so hard to the grindstone, that it clean disfigureth their faces,” a reference to working hard to avoid punishment. It was written in 1532 by John Frith, a Protestant priest who was burned at the stake a few months later for publicly questioning the English Catholic Church. Isn’t blending church and state fun? * “American family values” is a classic piece of loaded language weaponized by the political right to condemn abortion, gay marriage, and feminist politics as inherently anti-American. * Even Democrats have accepted DeVos money in exchange for public praise—Bill Clinton took home $700,000 in 2013 after speaking at an Amway conference in Osaka, Japan. * This is a real workout that exists in LA at a studio called Sandbox Fitness. In a room covered in actual sand, clients mount stationary surfboards and perform a variety of nearly impossible strength exercises aided by resistance bands dangling from the ceiling. I learned of this unusual torture from a modelesque action film star whom I interviewed for a magazine article in 2017. “You get so ripped,” she gushed, her pupils dilating. “I do it every morning. You have to try it.” * Then in 2016, an attendee got injured in Manuel-Davis’s class and filed a lawsuit. To the devastation of her many acolytes, Manuel-Davis resigned from SoulCycle in 2019 to launch a boutique fitness cult of her own called AARMY, in partnership with another former SoulCycle idol named Akin Akman, whose loyal gaggle of fiendish riders were known as “Akin’s Army.” * In some cases, getting “seriously ripped” can cost you your vital organs.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” You can hear Peale’s influence in Donald Trump’s speeches and social media posts half a century later. “Success tip: See yourself as victorious. This will focus you in the right direction. Apply your skills and talent—and be tenacious,” Trump tweeted in 2013. Upon launching his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump’s rants about self-reliance took a more paranoid turn. Early that year, when asked who he consults on foreign policy, he replied, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. I know what I’m doing. . . . My primary consultant is myself.” From this complex history, the MLM—the uncanny lovechild of Protestantism, capitalism, and corporatization—was conceived. The Protestant ethic remains very much a part of professional culture as a whole in the United States, and we all grow up internalizing its rhetoric—work hard, play hard; another day, another dollar. My partner and I have an extensive collection of coffee mugs embellished with little sayings, and the other day, I looked up and noticed for the first time that they all just shamelessly evangelize toxic productivity dogma: One mug says “Sleep is for the weak”; another reads “A yawn is just a silent scream for coffee.” A silent scream? Are we all so conditioned to believe it’s romantic to be overworked and exhausted, so terrified of leisure and “laziness,” that we print cute jokes about it on drinkware? In twenty-first-century America, apparently so. The language of Protestant capitalism is everywhere—all the way down to our coffee mugs—but it plays a starring role in the MLM industry, which at once indulges Americans’ most quixotic aspirations and their gravest fears. It’s especially pronounced in the way MLMs stress meritocracy, the idea that money and status are individually earned. Meritocracy is founded on the tenet that people can control their lives in big ways, that as long as they really try, they can pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps. Americans love the mythology that successful people deserve their success while struggling people are simply less worthy. MLM recruits, whose “success” is entirely based on commission from selling and recruiting, relish this notion even more. Per MLM ideology, no win is unearned, regardless of what or who is sacrificed to achieve it. And no failure is undeserved, either. The majority of direct sales propaganda I’ve read emphasizes the “blood, sweat, tears, heart, and soul” necessary to build a sales team, urging sellers to view their efforts as a badge of patriotic honor and to wear it with a smile. Countless MLMs invoke nationalistic slogans to reinforce the idea that enlisting to be a #bossbabe means signing up to serve your country. One diet supplement MLM is literally named American Dream Nutrition; another is called United Sciences of America, Inc.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Sociologists also say that higher education and training in the scientific method generally make people less gullible. And for better or for worse, so does being in a bad mood. In several experiments, researchers found that when someone is in a good mood, they become more innocent and unsuspecting, while feeling grumpy makes one better at sensing deceptio n. Which has to be the most curmudgeonly superpower I’ve ever heard. v.My favorite line I’ve heard MLMers use to defend their business is “This isn’t a pyramid scheme. Corporate jobs are the REAL pyramid scheme.” It’s both a nonsense thought-terminating cliché and a flashing neon sign of us-versus-them conditioning. But while MLMs talk a lot of smack about corporate America and corporate America thinks of MLMs as a scammy joke, they are ultimately both derived from the same Protestant capitalist history. And the toxically positive fable that our society is a true meritocracy—that you can climb the ladder from the bottom to the top if you just work hard and have faith—imbues the rhetoric of our “normal” workforce, too. Many modern companies actively aim to gain a cult following in the image of companies like Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and Ikea—brands that succeeded in cultivating extreme solidarity and loyalty among both employees and patrons. To learn more about the language of cultlike corporations, I hit up a Dutch business scholar and management consultant named Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries. Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley , tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Much better. Only two steps are required to get you started on this simple path to financial freedom: First, purchase a starter kit containing samples and marketing materials, which will cost you anywhere from $50 to $10,000 or more. Pennies, either way, for a new business owner’s initial start-up cost. Opening up a store or launching an e-commerce brand is so expensive, but getting in on this movement? Practically free when you think about it. Next step: Each month, recruit ten new members (sometimes it’s less, but often it’s not) to join your team, which you’ll want to give a jaunty nickname like the Diamond Squad or the Good Vibe Tribe, or maybe something cheeky like You Win Some, You Booze Some. This will help everyone feel bonded. Then, encourage each of those members to recruit ten monthly sellers of their own. You’ll take a small cut of all the earnings underneath you (from the starter kits and inventory your recruits purchase, and also from their product sales). The generation of sellers below you is called your “downline,” while the person who recruited you is your “upline.” Meanwhile, the MLM founder, sitting pretty at the very top of this tetrahedron, takes a cut of everything. In order to move product and grow a downline, you’ll need to spread the word about your amazing new business to everyone you know. To do this, you’ll be encouraged to host lots of parties, both IRL and online. You’ll want to buy snacks and wine, or spend hours concocting cute virtual activities to incentivize attendance. You’ll beseech guests to thumb through the brochures and lotions or whatever in hopes that they’ll buy something, or—better yet—want to sign up to sell the stuff themselves. It doesn’t matter if the company’s products are any good or fill a market demand, and neither does the fact that zero sales experience is required to come aboard. The typical rules of economics do not apply here. The system is promised to work no matter what. As long as you pay the buy-in fee, follow the company’s path precisely, and don’t ask too many questions, the American Dream itself will be yours. This pay-and-recruit pattern continues for each new group of recruits, affiliates, consultants, distributors, guides, ambassadors, presenters, coaches, or whichever entrepreneurial-sounding title the company chooses for its enrollees, who are made to feel special and chosen, even though literally anyone who ponies up can join. Money from recent joinees siphons to their upline, helping those above meet their monthly or quarterly sales quotas, which are disguised with friendlier-sounding labels like “goals” and “targets.” Fail to reach these periodic minimums? Expect to be demoted or kicked out of the company. That can’t happen.

• From Cultish (2021)

  (“Your riders should want to be you or fuck you” was a mantra instructors reportedly learned and internalized. One all-star openly referred to her riders as “little sluts.”) Some top instructors were known for verbally bullying riders and “lesser” employees, as well as stoking all the studio drama that surrounded them, relishing in their deification, like high school Queen Bees. Purportedly, SoulCycle HQ knew of and condoned the bad behavior, covering up complaints about its most prized instructors making bigoted side comments to riders and staff. (Let’s just say they involved the words “Aunt Jemima” and “twinks” and calling curvy staffers “not on brand.”) Reports of sexual harassment had allegedly been ignored, as well. The company “treated [instructors] like Hollywood stars anyway,” read one headline, which Natalia Petrzela DMed me the hour it broke. Insiders reported that higher-ups threw complaints in the trash, while bankrolling one implicated instructor’s $2,400 Soho House membership and rental Mercedes-Benz, like nothing happened. This news didn’t exactly come as a shock. “When you elevate instructors as godlike, abuses of power will follow,” Natalia tweeted. “It makes sense that we saw this kind of reckoning first in yoga, where leaders have long been revered as ‘gurus’; it was only a matter of time for instructors [with] a ‘cult following.’” I read a 2020 study from the European Journal of Social Psychology revealing that folks who received “spiritual training” in certain supernatural crafts like energy healing and lightwork were more prone to narcissistic tendencies (bloated confidence in their abilities, increased hunger for success and social approval, denigration of anyone lacking their self-evaluated superpowers, etc.). This was compared to people who hadn’t gone through any spiritual training at all, as well as students studying less performative disciplines, like meditation and mindfulness. The study showed that even as these gurus encouraged compassion and self-acceptance in others, their own egos swelled. “Master” SoulCycle instructors seem to display a similar response: existing pride in their natural charisma combined with the company’s extreme training is the recipe for a god complex closer to that of a 3HO Swami than an ordinary mortal employed to teach stationary cycling. As of this writing, SoulCycle hasn’t commented on the specific accusations or fired any alleged abusers. And CrossFit loyalists have ensured that their beloved culture—Hero WoDs, beast mode, and all—lives on, no matter the brand name. Some say the mark of a truly “successful cult” is the power to outlast the death or cancellation of its founder. In that case, CrossFit and SoulCycle, alongside Scientology and Amway, have prevailed—at least so far. Certainly the whitewashed, Protestant capitalism-fueled language of “namaslay,” “detoxing,” and “harder faster more” reflects (and perpetuates) oppressive standards that go beyond fitness. We can find talk of tribes and “push to your max” in so many American industries, from Wall Street to Hollywood to Silicon Valley. This language is pervasive and troublesome, no doubt, but its motives and impact are also importantly different from those of figures like Jim Jones, L.

• From Cultish (2021)

  And yet MLM rhetoric is such a successful assault on the human spirit, so consistently compelling and adaptable, that these companies only continue to thrive. In the 2010s, as ingredient-conscious millennials began overtaking the consumer market and demand for “all-natural” “nontoxic” personal care products increased, the shrewdest MLM founders accommodated. Direct sales wasn’t just for old-school Suzy Homemakers anymore, it was for the savvy youth. “Clean beauty” MLMs with chicer, updated packaging pivoted to populating their seller bases with “micro-influencers”—women with small blogs and a few thousand social media followers who could be tempted by an unctuous DM about how their feed is amazinggg and would they like to add a second stream of income while becoming part of the clean beauty “movement”?! Pairing deliciously with the glamorous image of a self-employed influencer, this hipper generation of MLMs pitched itself as the perfect side hustle. The nimble direct sales industry always finds a way to reinvent itself—the capitalist cockroach that just won’t stop reincarnating. iii. Hey lady! Just wanted to send a reminder that we’re in the business of changing lives here!! Yes, we’re making money, but it’s so much bigger than that . . . it’s a MOVEMENT. People deserve to be a part of it, they just don’t know it yet, so it’s up to you to show them the light!! You need to be reaching out to EVERYBODY . . . family, friends, Insta followers, the person behind you in line at Starbucks. Start up a conversation, and meet them where they’re at. Our products basically sell themselves, so if you’re not meeting your goals, you need to work HARDER and SMARTER like the boss babe you are. You have such potential. Don’t let me down, but more importantly, don’t let YOURSELF down!! xoxo * * * When my middle school friend Becca and I finally got on a call to talk about her MLM experience, it had been a decade since I’d last heard her voice. Becca, now twenty-eight, lives in a little white country house in Maryland with her husband, two dogs, and four cats. She works a nine-to-five and still plays the same local singing gig she did in high school—Friday nights at Backstage BBQ Cafe. She goes to AA several times a week and spends most evenings playing with her baby niece. “I know, look what’s become of me,” she quipped, sporting that old Becca sarcasm and the cozy fronted vowels of our hometown’s accent, which I never get to hear anymore. Becca knew from the jump that Optavia (formerly called Medifast) was a shifty venture. She could hear it. “All that marketing mumbo-jumbo? It was so cringe,” she affirmed.

• From Cultish (2021)

  I suppose I get what I deserve, then, when in the midst of a two-hour social media binge, I come across the profile of a spiritual guru named Bentinho Massaro. With an Instagram bio that reads “Synthesizer of Paths,” “True Scientist,” “Philosopher,” and “Mirror,” Massaro is a thirtysomething white dude who claims to vibrate at a higher frequency than other humans, higher even than Jesus Christ. Sporting forty thousand Insta followers, icy-blue eyes, a robust wardrobe of tight black T-shirts, and a confident voice cloaked in some indeterminate European accent, he reads like a cross between Teal Swan and Tony Robbins. A Hemsworth would definitely play him in the movie. About a dozen proverbial red flags erect in my frontal cortex. I click Follow. A deeper dive soon reveals that Bentinho Massaro was born in Amsterdam but relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and later to the occult mecca of Sedona, Arizona, to run pricey spiritual retreats. All the while, he puts spectacular effort into growing his web presence. Using a Silicon Valley–savvy social media strategy and a portfolio of snazzy websites, he aims to sell you . . . well, your soul. Costing as little as an Instagram follow or as much as $600 per hour on Skype, you can gain access to doses of Massaro’s sacred science—the answers to everything from how to cultivate profound personal relationships to how to become “a human god.” In his YouTube videos, Massaro sits close to the camera, creating the cozy atmosphere of a home gathering or a one-on-one conversation, as he expounds upon subjects like “The Inner Black Hole,” “Presence-Energy Vibration,” and “Cutting Through the Illusion of Mind.” Navigate over to his Instagram and you’ll find minute-long clips where Massaro just stares intensely into the lens, grinning, barely blinking, intermittently murmuring, “I love you.” He calls these parasocial gaze-offs his moments of “oneness—no separation between you or me.” Hundreds of supporters flood his comments with praise: “You are infinite intelligence, love/light,” “Thank you Ben for this wave of consciousness,” “MASTER, teacher, . . . YOU have an amazing ability . . . Please lead us.” Massaro’s ideology is, shall we say, eclectic. He believes in ancient aliens, asserts he can change the weather with his mind, and has announced that he doesn’t want children because he already has seven billion. It should sound familiar by now that Massaro insists he, and only he, possesses the “God’s-eye view” required to guide humanity toward heaven’s “absolute truth.” His teachings, he proclaims, will lead to the “cessation of suffering and endless bliss.” Massaro vows that over the course of any given earthling’s lifetime, they won’t access even “10 percent of what goes on in [his] consciousness in a single day.” His ultimate vision? To bring his internet fellowship offline, buy a big slab of land in Sedona, and build an enlightened new city. Amid lectures on paths, vibrations, and raising your frequency, some of Massaro’s rhetoric takes a grim turn.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Maybe Benioff is oblivious to the phallic symbolism, or maybe he doesn’t care, or maybe—and this is my theory—he knows exactly what he’s doing and he loves it. Mine’s bigger! It’s the biggest! For P. T. Benioff there is no end to the extravagant spending. At the 2015 Dreamforce he docks a one-thousand-foot-long luxury ocean liner at pier 27 to serve as a hotel and party space—the Dreamboat, he calls it. Salesforce.com still isn’t turning a profit, but thanks to Benioff’s huffing and puffing Salesforce.com’s market value has topped $50 billion and Benioff’s own net worth has swollen to $4 billion. Benioff has invented a form of financial alchemy, one where he makes money by losing money. The more Benioff squanders on parties, the richer he gets. Looking down from my hotel window in November 2013, I realize that things are playing out exactly the way Tad, my investment banker friend, told me they would when I met him for a drink just one year ago at Anchor & Hope. This is what a trillion-dollar wealth transfer looks like. Across the country, in New York, bonuses on Wall Street are going to be the highest they’ve been since 2007, before the crash. In 2013, there will be more IPOs than in any year since the dotcom bubble peaked in 2000, and in 2014 there will be even more, according to Renaissance Capital, a company that tracks the IPO market. Surely it cannot end well when a bunch of money-losing companies go racing into the public markets, and when risk that previously was confined to private investors gets shifted onto the public. Nevertheless, the Fed keeps printing money, and the stock market keeps going up. The ducks are quacking, and the VCs are racing for the exits, launching IPOs as fast as they can. Somehow I find myself sitting in the middle of the maelstrom. Part of me finds the whole thing appalling. But another part still hopes to profit from it. Fourteen [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] Meet the New BossI ’m still in San Francisco when I get an urgent message from Wingman asking me to call him. There’s some big news, he tells me. The company is about to announce an important new hire—a guy named Trotsky. Trotsky will oversee HubSpot’s content operations and thus will now be my boss, instead of Wingman. On the phone, Wingman keeps talking about Trotsky as if he’s a celebrity. Finally I confess to Wingman that I’ve never heard of Trotsky. I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit this, but who is this person and why is it a big deal that he’s joining HubSpot? Wingman seems taken aback. “He was content marketer of the year in 2012,” he says. “Oh, right,” I say, as if I’ve heard of that award. I feel a twinge of sadness that such a thing even exists. “It’s pretty huge for us to get him,” Wingman says. “I can imagine,” I say. “That’s great.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  The sixteen-member management team includes two women. Of the eight directors, two are women, and aside from Dharmesh, everyone is white. Across the ranks of ordinary employees, as far as I can see there are zero black people. The first time I go to an all-hands company meeting I’m taken aback: It’s an ocean of white people, all of them young. It’s not just that everyone is white, but that they’re all the same kind of white. Klan rallies probably comprise a broader swath of the Caucasian population. It’s like stumbling into some weird eugenics lab, where people get hatched from pods, already dressed in J.Crew, Banana Republic, and North Face. The women have the same shoulder-length haircut, and when it rains they all show up in knee- high Hunter boots. The guys are former jocks and frat bros, with buzz cuts, salmon-colored shorts, backward baseball caps, and boat shoes. It’s like a reunion of the Greek system from some small college in New England. It’s like Cape Cod has barfed up all of its summer inhabitants under the age of thirty, and they’ve landed in the same building in Kendall Square, still wearing their Black Dog Tavern T-shirts. From what I can tell, HubSpot employs a handful of fifty-something people, a slightly larger number of people in their forties, a few dozen people in their thirties, and then that huge army of twenty-somethings. Later I will be told by a fellow HubSpot alumnus, a guy in his late thirties, that when he left HubSpot the company had seven hundred employees, only seventy-five of whom were over the age of thirty-five. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said, when he was twenty-two years old. No doubt after that someone coached him not to say things like that anymore. But it hasn’t changed his hiring preferences. In 2013, the average Facebook employee was twenty-eight years old, according to PayScale. Out of thirty-two tech companies surveyed by PayScale, eight had a median age under thirty and only six had a median age above thirty-five, the New York Times reported, in an article headlined, TECHNOLOGY WORKERS ARE YOUNG (REALLY YOUNG). “Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America,” Noam Scheiber proclaimed in a March 2014 article in the New Republic, aptly titled THE BRUTAL AGEISM OF TECH. The article introduces a San Francisco cosmetic surgeon who claims to be “the world’s second biggest dispenser of Botox,” and describes the plight of forty-year-old men who desperately seek out cosmetic surgery so they can hang on to their jobs. WE WANT PEOPLE WHO HAVE THEIR BEST WORK AHEAD OF THEM, NOT BEHIND THEM, reads a technology job advertisement Scheiber cites. The tech industry’s ageism is blatant and unapologetic. It’s wrapped up in the mythology that has sprung up around start-ups. Almost by definition these companies are founded and run by young people. Young people are the ones who change the world. They’re filled with passion.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  A kindred spirit to Hildegard was Elizabeth of Schoenau, who died 1165 at the age of thirty-six.740 She was an inmate of the convent of Schoenau, not far from Bingen, and also had visions which were connected with epileptic conditions. In her visions she saw Stephen, Laurentius, and many of the other saints. In the midst of them usually stood "the virgin of virgins, the most glorious mother of God, Mary."741 When she saw St. Benedict, he was in the midst of his monkish host, monachalis turba. Elizabeth represented herself as being "rapt out of the body into an ecstasy."742 In the interest of purity of life she did not shrink from rebuking even the archbishop of Treves and from pronouncing the Apostolic chair possessed with pride and filled with iniquity and impiety. On one occasion she saw Christ sitting at the judgment with Pilate, Judas, and those who crucified him on his left hand and also, alas! a great company of men and women whom she recognized as being of her order.743 Hildegard and Elizabeth have a place in the annals of German mysticism. Joachim of Flore,744 d. 1202, the monastic prophet of Southern Europe, exercised a wide influence by his writings, especially through the adoption of his views by the Spiritual wing of the Franciscan order. He was first abbot of the Cistercian convent of Corazza in Calabria, and then became the founder and abbot of St. John in Flore. Into this convent he introduced a stricter rule than the rule of the Cistercians. It became the centre of a new order which was sanctioned by Coelestin III., 1196. Joachim enjoyed the reputation of a prophet during his lifetime.745 He had the esteem of Henry VI., and was encouraged in his exegetical studies by Lucius III. and other popes. After his death his views became the subject of conciliar and papal examination. The Fourth Lateran condemned his treatment of the Trinity as defined by Peter the Lombard. Peter had declared that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitute a certain supreme essence, quaedam summa res, and this, according to Joachim, involved a substitution of a quaternity for the Trinity. Those who adopted Joachim’s view were condemned as heretics, but Joachim and the convent of Flore were distinctly excepted from condemnation.746 Joachim’s views on the doctrine of the Trinity are of slight importance. The abbot has a place in history by his theory of historical development and his eschatology. His opinions are set forth in three writings of whose genuineness there is no question, an exposition of the Psalms, an exposition of the Apocalypse, and a Concord of the Old and New Testaments.747

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  the incarnation of the Son of God for the salvation of the world. They make Christ either a mere man, or a mere superhuman phantom; they allow, at all events, no real and abiding union of the divine and human in the person of the Redeemer. This is just what John gives as the mark of antichrist, which existed even in his day in various forms.864 It plainly undermines the foundation of the church. For if Christ be not God-man, neither is he mediator between God and men; Christianity sinks back into heathenism or Judaism. All turns at last on the answer to that fundamental question: "What think ye of Christ?" The true solution of this question is the radical refutation of every error. Notes. "It has often been remarked that truths and error keep pace with each other. Error is the shadow cast by truth, truth the bright side brought out by error. Such is the relation between the heresies and the apostolical teaching of the first century. The Gospels indeed, as in other respects, so in this, rise almost entirely above the circumstances of the time, but the Epistles are, humanly speaking, the result of the very conflict between the good and the evil elements which existed together in the bosom of the early Christian society. As they exhibit the principles afterward to be unfolded into all truth and goodness, so the heresies which they attack exhibit the principles which were afterward to grow up into all the various forms of error, falsehood and wickedness. The energy, the freshness, nay, even the preternatural power which belonged to the one belonged also to the other. Neither the truths in the writings of the Apostles, nor the errors in the opinions of their opponents, can be said to exhibit the dogmatical form of any subsequent age. It is a higher and more universal good which is aimed at in the former; it is a deeper and more universal principle of evil which is attacked in the latter. Christ Himself, and no subordinate truths or speculations concerning Him, is reflected in the one; Antichrist, and not any of the particular outward manifestations of error which have since appeared, was justly regarded by the Apostles as foreshadowed in the other." — Dean Stanley (Apostolic Age, p. 182). Literature.—The heresies of the Apostolic Age have been thoroughly investigated by Neander and Baur in connection with the history of Ebionism and Gnosticism (see next vol.), and separately in the introductions to critical commentaries on the Colossians and Pastoral Epistles; also by Thiersch, Lipsius, Hilgenfeld. Among English writers we mention Burton: Inquiry into the Heresies of the Apostolic Age, in eight Sermons (Bampton Lectures). Oxford, 1829. Dean Stanley: Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, pp. 182–233, 3d ed. Oxford, 1874. Bishop Lightfoot: Com. on St. Paul’s Ep. to the Colossians and to Philemon, pp. 73–113 (on the Colossian heresy and its connection with Essenism). London, 1875. Comp. also Hilgenfeld: Die Ketzergeschichte des Urchristenthums. Leipzig, 1884 (642 pages). CHAPTER XII.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Recruits save up all year to attend these events, skipping best friends’ weddings and grandchildren’s births if they must, for the chance to meet Optavia’s charismatic leader and cofounder, Dr. Wayne Andersen. “They called him Dr. A and he’s, like, their ruler,” Becca winced, referencing the anesthesiologist turned self-described “leader of the movement to better health.” “Dr. A comes out and spits culty inspiration about how we are saving people’s lives one person at a time, how we are making America healthy. Of course they charge a fortune for tickets to see him.” All MLMs throw similar Tony Robbins–esque self-help bashes, which cost thousands of dollars to attend. Tupperware hosts an annual Jubilee. Mary Kay’s Career Conferences are known for their masterfully orchestrated recognition ceremonies. Recruits don’t just go for fun; these conventions are advertised as compulsory if a recruit really wants to “succeed.” Though rest assured the point isn’t to provide serviceable selling advice. It’s to paint the most extravagantly flattering portrait of the company possible, to lure already-committed recruits deeper in. The average Amway event reads like a cross between a Christian tent revival, a political rally, a football game, and a supersized family reunion. Some Amway conferences are literally called family reunions. More than any other MLM family, Amway wields unbelievable power—not just over people directly involved with the company, but over the entire American political system. Founded in 1959, Amway operates in a hundred countries and rakes in $9 billion a year, thanks to its network of four million distributors, called International Business Owners (IBOs). Amway is a Christian company whose fundamental message is that Americans have lost touch with the qualities that once made us great: individual freedom to achieve, traditional “American family values,” and unswerving devotion to God’s blessed America. * “I’m going to tell you what’s wrong with this country,” bellowed Dave Severn, one of the company’s unicorn-rare Executive Diamonds, at a 1991 rally. (Amway’s top titles are all named after precious gems and other treasures: Ruby, Pearl, Emerald, Diamond, Double Diamond, Triple Diamond, Crown, Crown Ambassador.) “They have allowed everything we stand for . . . to simply go down the tubes by hiring UN-CHRISTIAN PEOPLE to try and run a Christian- based society. . . . The Amway business is built on God’s laws.” Amway’s two deeply conservative founders were Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, who died in 2004 and 2018, respectively. That second name should sound familiar: The DeVoses are a Michigan-based family of politically influential billionaires; Rich was the father-in-law of Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Gilgamesh, however, who probably ruled around 2750 BCE, was a new kind of Sumerian king, “a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader, hero on the front lines, beloved by his soldiers— fortress they called him, protector of the people, raging flood that destroys all defenses. ” 3 Despite his passion for Uruk, Sin-leqi had to admit that civilization had its discontents. Poets had begun to tell Gilgamesh’s story soon after his death because it is an archetypal tale, one of the first literate accounts of the hero’s journey. 4 But it also wrestles with the inescapable structural violence of civilized life. Oppressed, impoverished, and miserable, the people of Uruk begged the gods to grant them some relief from Gilgamesh’s tyranny: The city is his possession, he struts Through it, arrogant, his head raised high, Trampling its citizens like a wild bull. He is king, he does whatever he wants The young men of Uruk he harries without a warrant, Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his father. 5 These young men may have been conscripted into the labor bands that rebuilt the city wall. 6 Urban living would not have been possible without the unscrupulous exploitation of the vast majority of the population. Gilgamesh and the Sumerian aristocracy lived in unprecedented splendor, but for the peasant masses civilization brought only misery and subjugation. The Sumerians seem to have been the first people to commandeer the agricultural surplus grown by the community and create a privileged ruling class. This could only have been achieved by force. Enterprising settlers had first been drawn to the fertile plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates in about 5000 BCE. 7 It was too dry for farming, so they designed an irrigation system to control and distribute the snowmelt from the mountains that flooded the plain each year. This was an extraordinary achievement. Canals and ditches had to be planned, designed, and maintained in a cooperative effort and the water allocated fairly between competing communities. The new system probably began on a small scale, but would have soon led to a dramatic increase in agricultural yield and thus to a population explosion. 8 By 3500, Sumer numbered a hitherto unachievable half-million souls. Strong leadership would have been essential, but what actually transformed these simple farmers into city dwellers is a topic of endless debate. Probably a number of interlocking and mutually reinforcing factors were involved: population growth, unprecedented agricultural fecundity, and the intensive labor required by irrigation—not to mention sheer human ambition—all contributed to a new kind of society. 9 All that we know for certain is that by 3000 BCE there were twelve cities in the Mesopotamian plain, each supported by produce grown by peasants in the surrounding countryside. Theirs was subsistence-level living.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Reformation prepared the way for a more spiritual worship of God and a more just appreciation of the virtues and faults of Thomas Becket than was possible in the age in which he lived and died,—a hero and a martyr of the papal hierarchy, but not of pure Christianity, as recorded in the New Testament. To the most of his countrymen, as to the English-speaking people at large, his name has remained the synonym for priestly pride and pretension, for an arrogant invasion of the rights of the civil estate. To a certain class of English High Churchmen he remains, like Laud of a later age, the martyr of sacerdotal privilege, the unselfish champion of the dowered rights of the Church. The atrocity of his taking-off no one will choose to deny. But the haughty assumption of the high prelate had afforded pretext enough for vehement indignation and severe treatment. Priestly robes may for a time conceal and even protect pride from violence, but sooner or later it meets its just reward. The prelate’s superiority involved in Becket’s favorite expression, "saving the honor of my order," was more than a king of free blood could be expected to bear. This dramatic chapter of English history may be fitly closed with a scene from Lord Tennyson’s tragedy which presents the personal quality that brought about Thomas à Becket’s fall.172 John of Salisbury. Thomas, I would thou hadst returned to England Like some wise prince of this world from his wars, With more of olive-branch and amnesty For foes at home—thou hast raised the world against thee. Becket. Why, John, my kingdom is not of this world. John of Salisbury. If it were more of this world it might be More of the next. A policy of wise pardon Wins here as well as there. To bless thine enemies — Becket. Ay, mine, not Heaven’s. John of Salisbury. And may there not be something Of this world’s leaven in thee too, when crying On Holy Church to thunder out her rights And thine own wrong so piteously. Ah, Thomas, The lightnings that we think are only Heaven’s Flash sometimes out of earth against the heavens. The soldier, when he lets his whole self go Lost in the common good, the common wrong, Strikes truest ev’n for his own self. I crave Thy pardon—I have still thy leave to speak. Thou hast waged God’s war against the King; and yet We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may, Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites And private hates with our defence of Heaven. CHAPTER V.INNOCENT III. AND HIS AGE. A.D. 1198–1216.§ 35. Literature.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The rapid growth of the two orders in number and influence was accompanied by bitter rivalry. The disputes between them were so violent that in 1255 their respective generals had to call upon their monks to avoid strife. The papal privileges were a bone of contention, one order being constantly suspicious lest the other should enjoy more favor at the hand of the pope than itself. Their abuse of power called forth papal briefs restricting their privileges. Innocent IV. in 1254, in what is known among the orders as the "terrible bull,"788 revoked the permission allowing them to admit others than members of the orders to their services on festivals and Sundays and also the privilege of hearing confession except as the parochial priest gave his consent. Innocent, however, was no sooner in his grave than his successor, Alexander IV., announced himself as the friend of the orders, and the old privileges were renewed. The pretensions of the mendicant friars soon became unbearable to the church at large. They intruded themselves into every parish and incurred the bitter hostility of the secular clergy whose rights they usurped, exercising with free hand the privilege of hearing confessions and granting absolution. It was not praise that Chaucer intended when he said of the Franciscan in his Canterbury Tales,—He was an easy man to give penance. These monks also delayed a thorough reformation of the Church. They were at first reformers themselves and offered an offset to the Cathari and the Poor Men of Lyons by their Apostolic self-denial and popular sympathies. But they degenerated into obstinate obstructors of progress in theology and civilization. From being the advocates of learning, they became the props of popular ignorance. The virtue of poverty was made the cloak for vulgar idleness and mendicancy for insolence. These changes set in long before the century closed in which the two orders had their birth. Bishops opposed them. The secular clergy complained of them. The universities ridiculed and denounced them for their mock piety and vices. William of St. Amour took the lead in the opposition in Paris. His sharp pen compared the mendicants to the Pharisees and Scribes and declared that Christ and his Apostles did not go around begging. To work was more scriptural than to beg.789 They were hypocrites and it remained for the bishops to purge their dioceses of them. Again and again, in after years, did clergy, bishops, and princes appeal to the popes against their intrusive insolence, but, as a rule, the popes were on their side. The time came in the early part of the fifteenth century when the great teacher Gerson, in a public sermon, enumerated as the four persecutors of the Church, tyrants, heretics, antichrist, and the Mendicants.790 § 69. Franciscan Literature.