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 19 of 253 · 20 per page

• 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)

  Pyramid schemes are ILLEGAL,” they tend to say as their stock defense. This phrase is a thought-terminating cliché, and it’s an amusing one, because if you take the logic even one step further, it becomes obvious that simply saying something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s not real or that you’re not involved. You can’t rob a bank and then, when accused, just say, “I didn’t do it, robbing banks is illegal,” to prove your innocence. In the city of Mobile, Alabama, it’s against the law to throw plastic confetti, but that doesn’t mean plastic confetti doesn’t exist or that people don’t use it. Sometimes citizens of Mobile throw plastic confetti without knowing it’s illegal, and sometimes they know plastic confetti is illegal but use it anyway because they don’t realize the confetti they’re using is made of plastic. Either way, it’s still a thing, and it’s still not cool. Pyramid schemes are indeed outlawed, and for good reason. They have the capacity to cheat people out of a couple hundred dollars or drive them all the way to bankruptcy and despair. They can shatter entire communities, even national economies, like those of Albania and Zimbabwe, which have been decimated by schemes both pyramid and Ponzi. It’s no surprise, then, that pyramid schemes don’t announce themselves as such. Instead, these companies hide in plain sight behind all sorts of euphemistic labels: gifting circles (also called looms, lotuses, or fractal mandalas), investment clubs, and, most commonly, multilevel marketing companies—MLMs for short. Like the challenge of distinguishing between a religion and a cult, there are few objective distinctions between pyramid schemes and “legit” MLMs. In theory, the difference seems to be that members of MLMs like Avon and Amway chiefly earn compensation from selling a particular good or service, while pyramid schemes primarily compensate members for recruiting new sellers as quickly as possible. But in practice, a pyramid scheme is essentially just an MLM that was run poorly and got caught (more on that shortly). Both organizations are set up like this: A company’s charismatic founder starts by love-bombing a small group of people into accepting an invitation to start their own business. Unlike typical entrepreneurship, there’s no education or work experience necessary to get involved; the offer is open to anybody who really wants to “change their life.” There is no base salary—that would make this a job and you an employee. The MLM makes sure to charge these words so they trigger images of bureaucratic indentured servitude and misery. Instead, you earn a small commission for whatever product you personally manage to unload. That makes this a “business opportunity” and you an “entrepreneur.”

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

  You wish it would stop, but you can’t look away. Wingman is Cranium’s right-hand man, his trusty sidekick, the Robin to his Batman. Wingman’s experience before coming to HubSpot consists of a few years doing low-level jobs in PR agencies. In 2010, while working at one of those jobs, he co-authored a book called The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar . The implication was that Wingman, then age twenty-six, had achieved marketing superstardom himself and wanted to help others emulate his success. He now bills himself as a “marketing author and speaker.” Like Cranium, Wingman believes HubSpot is an extraordinary place. One month when the blog team almost but not quite hits its latest insane lead-generation goal, Wingman sends around this email: “You all are amazing. I know the work you do is extremely hard, but we are on the verge of doing something legendary. Take a step back and look at what you are building [sic ] is a rare thing.” Twice during my time at HubSpot I try to bring in job candidates. Both are in their fifties. One was the founding editor of one of the biggest business news websites in the world and then became a vice president of global digital marketing for a multinational computer firm that did tens of billions of dollars in annual sales. The other is a woman who has spent eighteen years at Time Inc., working on both the editorial and the business sides of the organization. She managed hundreds of people and was responsible for a multimillion-dollar budget. The woman from Time takes the train up from New York to Boston and spends a day being interviewed by various people on the content team, including one woman who is less than a year out of college. The content factory workers come back saying they are not impressed. The veteran marketing guy meets Wingman for lunch and follows up by sending a detailed plan for how HubSpot can expand its business. Wingman never even acknowledges the email. The marketing guy gets hired as VP of marketing at a different software company. The Time Inc. woman becomes a producer for a major cable news network. So it goes. Cranium and Wingman have surrounded themselves with people who are younger than they are and have even less experience, but who are loyal. Jordan and Holly are two of Cranium’s favorites and were among his first hires. They are Level 8 Operating Thetans, and can do whatever they want. Jordan is twenty-eight years old, was hired in 2007, straight out of college, and now manages a dozen direct reports. Holly was hired in 2008, also directly from college, and has a small team under her. 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.

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

  “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. The problem is that the headline ideas come from Ashley, whose preferences lean toward BuzzFeed-style lists (“15 Reasons,” “7 Ways”) and Miley Cyrus. The idea is obviously cockeyed. A child could see that. Nevertheless, Zack allows Ashley to proceed. Zack believes that computers one day will do the work of content generation instead of humans.

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

  I say hello when I come to work and goodbye when I’m leaving, and that’s about it. Trotsky’s trouble with Spinner is just beginning, however. For whatever reason, she has decided that she hates him, and she’s waiting for another reason to pounce. One night, foolishly, he gives her an opportunity. It starts when Trotsky writes a Facebook post about the Ban Bossy campaign that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is promoting. Sandberg wants everyone to stop using the word bossy to describe girls. Trotsky says that instead of using her bully pulpit to pursue something as trivial as the word bossy , Sandberg should dedicate herself to more important issues, like the plight of the African elephant, which is on the verge of extinction. Trotsky loves elephants. He’s always ranting about the awful poachers who kill them for their ivory. I have no idea how elephants became so dear to him, or how his mind makes the illogical leap from Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist crusade to the issue of elephant poaching. I also don’t care. Spinner, however, does. She goes ballistic. Instead of bringing the issue up at work and talking to Trotsky privately, she leaps into Trotsky’s Facebook post and starts adding comments bashing him for not taking women’s rights seriously enough. She says Trotsky needs to think about the message he is sending to the talented and intelligent women who work for him at HubSpot. What will they think when they read his post? They will feel neglected. They will feel that he cares more about elephants than he does about them. This is insane. It’s also a strange move for a PR person to make. We’re all supposed to be “solving for enterprise value” and protecting the brand at all costs. Why attack your company’s newest vice president, a guy who is two levels above you in the org chart, and do it in public, on Facebook? What is she thinking? I’m starting to suspect that Spinner might be a little bit unhinged. I definitely think Trotsky is unhinged. He gets into fights on Facebook, and goes on and on, like a dog with a bone. But this is even better, because just like Trotsky, Spinner loves to fight and will never back down. For two days they go back and forth, trading insults on Facebook. It’s like watching monkeys throw their shit at each other. It’s ugly, and stupid, and the best thing ever. Spinner lectures Trotsky about feminism, and Trotsky scolds Spinner about elephants. Soon other people—some from HubSpot, some just friends of Trotsky or Spinner—start chiming in, taking sides and egging them on. The argument degenerates to the level of seventh graders trading insults in the schoolyard. Neither one of them will give up. Every time you think it’s over, one of them lobs another grenade. Trotsky sends me email and tells me he’s done, he’s not going to take the bait anymore.

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

  38 In this arid region, Jericho’s ample food stores would have been a magnet for hungry nomads. Intensified agriculture, therefore, created conditions that could endanger everyone in this wealthy colony and transform its arable land into fields of blood. Jericho was unusual, however—a portent of the future. Warfare would not become endemic in the region for another five thousand years, but it was already a possibility, and from the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft. 39 Agriculture had also introduced another type of aggression: an institutional or structural violence in which a society compels people to live in such wretchedness and subjection that they are unable to better their lot. This systemic oppression has been described as possibly “the most subtle form of violence,” 40 and, according to the World Council of Churches, it is present whenever “resources and powers are unequally distributed, concentrated in the hands of the few, who do not use them to achieve the possible self-realization of all members, but use parts of them for self-satisfaction or for purposes of dominance, oppression, and control of other societies or of the underprivileged in the same society.” 41 Agrarian civilization made this systemic violence a reality for the first time in human history. Paleolithic communities had probably been egalitarian because hunter-gatherers could not support a privileged class that did not share the hardship and danger of the hunt. 42 Because these small communities lived at near-subsistence level and produced no economic surplus, inequity of wealth was impossible. The tribe could survive only if everybody shared what food they had. Government by coercion was not feasible because all able-bodied males had exactly the same weapons and fighting skills. Anthropologists have noted that modern hunter-gatherer societies are classless, that their economy is “a sort of communism,” and that people are honored for skills and qualities, such as generosity, kindness, and even-temperedness, that benefit the community as a whole. 43 But in societies that produce more than they need, it is possible for a small group to exploit this surplus for its own enrichment, gain a monopoly of violence, and dominate the rest of the population. As we shall see in Part One, this systemic violence would prevail in all agrarian civilizations. In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which were economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, with the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have advanced beyond subsistence level, because it created a nobility with the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible.

• 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)

  Nevertheless, we get a memo saying that Zack is safe, that he is not leaving the company, that he will be assuming a new role and remains a valuable member of the team. But that’s bullshit. “He’s dead,” Trotsky tells me, in one of our first meetings. “He’s gotta go.” Trotsky explains that there is no way he can join a new company, take away a guy’s job, and then let that guy hang around. It’s not personal, but Zack has to go. “How are you going to get rid of him?” I ask. I find this stuff intriguing. I know nothing about office politics. Trotsky leans back on his beanbag chair. “I’m going to help Zack understand that he would be happier somewhere else,” he says. He smiles. He loves this shit, and I get the sense that he’s good at it. Sure enough, two months later, in March, we get an email from Cranium informing us that Zack is “graduating” in order to look for his next adventure. The whole thing is handled with a smile and a hug. Trotsky’s fingerprints are nowhere to be seen. Trotsky’s appointment also spells trouble for Marcia and Jan, the two women who run the blog. For years they have operated their own little fiefdom, pushing people around, ignoring orders, and playing favorites. They bullied Wingman and dismissed Zack. Trotsky makes it clear that he’s going to change the way they do things, and that, unlike Zack, he has real authority and is not afraid of them. One change has to do with e-books. The blog writers are supposed to coordinate their efforts with the e-book writers. If the e-book team creates a book about, say, how to use Snapchat to sell pet food, the blog should generate articles about Snapchat and pet food, and use those posts to promote the e-book. Instead, Marcia and Jan do whatever they want. They might write articles about Snapchat and pet food, or they might not. Some of it comes down to whether they like the person who wrote the e-book. Some of it hinges on whether they feel the e-book people were polite enough to them or gave them sufficient notice. If Marcia and Jan refuse to promote the e-book, the e-book just dies, because nobody finds it unless it gets mentioned on the blog. Over and over, the e-book writers crank out books only to see them die on a virtual shelf, because Marcia and Jan refuse to play ball. That bullshit is over, Trotsky says. The blog women might not like his decisions, but Cranium has brought him in to break up the logjam and dysfunction, something that Wingman has been unable to do.

• From Cultish (2021)

  With destructive groups like Scientology, the Moonies, the Branch Davidians, 3HO, The Way International (a fundamentalist Christian cult we’ll talk about later), and so many others, there is no longer a “sacred space” for that special language. Now words like “abomination,” “curse,” and “lower vibration” or whatever unique vocabulary the group uses holds that almighty power all the time. In American culture, religious language (particularly Protestant language) is everywhere, informing secular choices we make without us even explicitly noticing. I recently came across a frozen low-fat mac ’n’ cheese meal with the word “sinless” printed on the packaging. Conjuring the devil to talk about microwavable noodles felt a touch melodramatic, but that’s how deep religious talk runs in American culture: There are sinners and saints, and the latter choose 2 percent dairy. The permeable membrane between religion and culture is also what allows so many corners of the capitalist marketplace to call upon God to promote their products . . . including and especially the multilevel marketing industry (a cult category we’ll discuss in depth in part 4). Christian-affiliated direct sales companies like Mary Kay Cosmetics and Thirty-One Gifts encourage recruits by saying that God is actively “providing” them with the “opportunity” to sell makeup and tchotchkes . . . and to convert others to do so, as well. Billion-dollar businesswoman Mary Kay Ash was once confronted in an interview about her famous tagline: “God first, family second, Mary Kay third.” When asked if she thought she was using Jesus as a marketing ploy, she responded, “No, he’s using me instead.” iv. You could fill a book longer than this one with a list of all the thought- terminating clichés, loaded language, and us-versus-them labels cultish religions around the world use to convert, condition, and coerce their followers. To start, take a look at Shambhala, where thought-terminating clichés were disguised as wise Buddhist truisms. In 2016, ex-Shambhalan Abbie Shaw moved to the group’s idyllic Vermont commune to work the front desk and study meditation for what was only supposed to be a casual summer. A recent college graduate from California who’d relocated to New York City for a job in PR, Abbie missed the co-ops she’d lived in as a student at UC Santa Cruz. By her mid-twenties, Abbie was looking to press a spiritual reset button. That’s when she dropped into a Tibetan mindfulness class and quickly fell in love with its teachings of “basic goodness”—the idea that all beings are born whole and worthy, but become lost along the way. That’s why we meditate: to get our basic goodness back.

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

  HubSpot’s official response to the book was an essay called “Undisrupted,” attributed to Halligan and Shah. They admitted that claims in my book were accurate. Yes, HubSpot had diversity issues. Yes, they did call it “graduation” when they fired people—but they were going to stop doing that. Yes, Shah did bring a teddy bear to meetings, but he was going to continue the practice. The problem, however, was that the essay did not mention the hacking scandal or FBI investigation. Apparently someone had decided they could simply leave that out and no one would notice. Of course everyone noticed. “It is HubSpot’s response to the book that suggests it is as clueless as Lyons portrays it,” was how the Financial Times put it in its review of the book. The book hasn’t hurt HubSpot’s business or its stock price. Many HubSpot customers truly love the company and feel an almost religious devotion to Inbound marketing. They’ve been swept up in HubSpot’s narrative about being lovable and magical and making the world a better place. In September 2015, just weeks after the scandal broke, and at a time when he was still being sanctioned by the directors and investigated by the FBI, Halligan gave a keynote speech at the Inbound conference in front of thousands of adoring customers. Those people knew about the scandal, and didn’t care. HubSpot’s employees remain equally loyal. In December 2015 HubSpot was ranked fourth on a list of the top fifty places to work in the United States, based on an employee survey conducted by Glassdoor. Also near the top of the list was Zillow, the real estate website that has been sued by women claiming the company had an abusive, ageist, frat house culture. HubSpot scored higher than even Facebook and Google. A lot of its employees really, truly love the company and are happy there. I understand why. For the right kind of person, it’s a great place, with nice perks and a fun culture. Even former employees remain loyal to HubSpot and still love the company. I had a different experience. Where others saw a fun place to work, I saw a place where “old people”—those over forty, and certainly people over fifty— were largely unwanted, and the company made no secret of it. I saw astonishing uniformity and groupthink, and an incredible lack of diversity, based not just on age but also on race, euphemized as “culture fit.” I saw poorly trained managers, haphazard oversight, and an organization that was out of control. I know that HubSpot can be a fun place to work, that they put on an entertaining show at Inbound, and that at least some customers, maybe a lot of customers, derive real value from HubSpot’s software. But I fear that customers and employees are being naïve about the people they’re working for and doing business with. HubSpot has nineteen thousand customers.

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

  The problem is that the headline ideas come from Ashley, whose preferences lean toward BuzzFeed-style lists (“15 Reasons,” “7 Ways”) and Miley Cyrus. The idea is obviously cockeyed. A child could see that. Nevertheless, Zack allows Ashley to proceed. Zack believes that computers one day will do the work of content generation instead of humans. The BTG is just a first step, ushering in this brave new world. Ashley schedules countless meetings to “brainstorm” ideas and give us progress reports. At last, with great fanfare, Marcia, Jan, and Ashley launch the BTG. The project immediately blows up in their faces, because the BTG produces ridiculous, pointless results. A woman who runs a blog for a hospital complains in the comment section that she tried to use the BTG to generate ideas for Cervical Cancer Awareness Month and received the following: WHY WE LOVE CERVICAL CANCER (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!) and MILEY CYRUS AND CERVICAL CANCER: 10 THINGS THEY HAVE IN COMMON Those headlines are so good that I want to print them out in seventy-two- point headline typeface and paste them on the wall. The BTG is never spoken of again. But it remains online, because, as one manager tells me, if they take it down that might hurt Ashley’s feelings. Six months later, Ashley gets a promotion. These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.” They create websites to build their “personal brands,” with huge photos of themselves and lists of their accomplishments. They have a Toastmasters club, where they take turns giving presentations and sharing tips on the art of making PowerPoint slide decks. They dream up ridiculous activities, like having a scavenger hunt in Kendall Square or going kayaking on the Charles River. Marcia and Jan, who run the blog, decide to have a “content hackathon,” where they will round up a bunch of people and work late into the evening, brainstorming ideas for blog posts. On the day of the hackathon I’m packing my bag to go home when Olivia, an intern, asks why I’m leaving. I tell her I have two kids at home and dinner waiting for me, but in addition to that, I don’t see the point of pulling an all-nighter just to write some blog posts. She looks at me as if I’m an imbecile. “It’s a hackathon,” she says. “I know,” I say, “but why have a hackathon? If we need more blog posts, why can’t we just write a few extra posts over the next few weeks and bank them up?” She pauses.

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

  How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room, under constant, tremendous psychological pressure, for $35,000 a year. You can save even more money by packing these people into cavernous rooms, shoulder to shoulder, as densely as you can. You tell them that you’re doing this not because you want to save money on office space but because this is how their generation likes to work. On top of the fun stuff you create a mythology that attempts to make the work seem meaningful. Supposedly, Millennials don’t care so much about money, but they’re very motivated by a sense of mission. So, you give them a mission. You tell your employees how special they are, and how lucky they are to be here. You tell them that it’s harder to get a job here than to get into Harvard, and that because of their superpowers they have been selected to work on a very important mission to change the world. You make the company a team, with a team color and a team logo. You give everyone a hat and a T-shirt. You make up a culture code and talk about creating a company that everyone can love. You dangle the prospect that some might get rich. But Silicon Valley has a dark side. To be sure, there are plenty of shiny, happy people working in tech. But this is also a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders, who have rigged the game in their favor. It’s a world where older workers are not wanted, where people get tossed aside when they turn forty. It’s a world where employers discriminate on the basis of race and gender, where founders sometimes turn out to be sociopathic monsters, where poorly trained (or completely untrained) managers abuse employees and fire people with impunity, and where workers have little recourse and no job security. In December 2014 Nicholas Lemann published an essay in the New Yorker contrasting the vision of work that Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary CEO of General Motors, described in his 1964 memoir, My Years with General Motors, with the vision laid out in a series of books published by executives from Google.

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

  The Venetian Grand Council agreed to provide ships for 9000 esquires, 4500 knights, 20,000 foot-soldiers, and 4500 horses, and to furnish provisions for nine months for the sum of 85,000 marks, or about $1,000,000 in present money.440 The agreement stated the design of the enterprise to be "the deliverance of the Holy Land." The doge, Henry Dandolo, who had already passed the limit of ninety years, was in spite of his age and blindness full of vigor and decision.441 The crusading forces mustered at Venice. The fleet was ready, but the Crusaders were short of funds, and able to pay only 50,000 marks of the stipulated sum. Dandolo took advantage of these straits to advance the selfish aims of Venice, and proposed, as an equivalent for the balance of the passage money, that the Crusaders aid in capturing Zara.442 The offer was accepted. Zara, the capital of Dalmatia and the chief market on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, belonged to the Christian king of Hungary. Its predatory attacks upon Venetian vessels formed the pretext for its reduction.443 The threat of papal excommunication, presented by the papal legate, did not check the preparations; and after the solemn celebration of the mass, the fleet set sail, with Dandolo as virtual commander. The departure of four hundred and eighty gayly rigged vessels is described by several eye-witnesses444 and constitutes one of the most important scenes in the naval enterprise of the queen of the Adriatic. Zara was taken Nov. 24, 1202, given over to plunder, and razed to the ground. No wonder Innocent wrote that Satan had been the instigator of this destructive raid upon a Christian people and excommunicated the participants in it.445 Organized to dislodge the Saracens and reduced to a filibustering expedition, the Crusade was now to be directed against Constantinople. The rightful emperor, Isaac Angelus, was languishing in prison with his eyes put out by the hand of the usurper, Alexius III., his own brother. Isaac’s son, Alexius, had visited Innocent III. and Philip of Swabia, appealing for aid in behalf of his father. Philip, claimant to the German throne, had married the prince’s sister. Greek messengers appeared at Zara to appeal to Dandolo and the Crusaders to take up Isaac’s cause. The proposal suited the ambition of Venice, which could not have wished for a more favorable opportunity to confirm her superiority over the Pisans and Genoans, which had been threatened, if not impaired, on the Bosphorus.

• From Cultish (2021)

  In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchang e: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.” This jargon isn’t damaging in and of itself. As always, words need context. And when used in competitive start-up environments, those in power can easily take advantage of staffers’ eagerness to achieve (and basic need for employment). Excessive “garbage language” may signal that upper management is suppressing individuality, putting employees in a headspace where their entire reality is governed by the company’s rules, which likely weren’t created with much compassion or fairness in mind. (Research consistently shows that something like one in five CEOs has psychopathic tendencie s.) “All companies have special terms, and sometimes they make sense, but sometimes they’re nonsense,” said Kets de Vries. “As a consultant, sometimes I enter an organization where people use code names and acronyms, but they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. They’re just imitating what top management says.” At Amazon, for instance, Jeff Bezos’s ideals are strikingly similar to those of MLM leaders: disdain for bureaucracy, fixation on hierarchies, incentives to rise to the top no matter who gets thrown under the bus, and a juxtaposition of lofty motivational-speak with metaphors of defeat. Bezos created his own version of the Ten Commandments called the Leadership Principle s. It’s a code for how Amazonians should think, behave, and speak. There are fourteen of these principles—all vague platitudes, like “think big,” “dive deep,” “have backbone,” and “deliver results.” Employees recite them like mantras. According to an explosive 2015 New York Times Amazon exposé, these rules are part of the company’s “daily language . . . used in hiring, cited at meetings, and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.” After an Amazon employee is hired, they are assigned to commit all 511 words of the Leadership Principles to memory. They are quizzed a few days later, and those who recite the principles perfectly receive a symbolic award: permission to proclaim “I’m Peculiar,” Amazon’s catchphrase for those who admirably push workplace boundaries. From then on, employees are expected to tear each other’s ideas apart in meetings (similar to the vicious confrontations of the Synanon Game), “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting” (that’s according to Leadership Principle #13). If an underling gives an opinion or responds to a question in a way their manager doesn’t like, they can expect to be called stupid or interrupted midsentence and told to stop speaking.

• From Cultish (2021)

  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. Ron Hubbard, and Rich DeVos. In the case of these leaders, the goal was not so much to reinforce the problematic power structures of our larger society, but more to exploit followers in a way that directly benefited the guru and only the guru. One type of leader uses language (perhaps even unwittingly) to support frameworks that already exist; the other uses language, always deliberately, not to uphold the current order of things but instead to swoop in and create something tyrannically new. In the end, some problematic leaders are really just followers of the larger system. But a truly, destructively cultish leader is one who wishes to overthrow the system and replace it with something that grants them ultimate power. v.If a fitness brand or leader falls closer to the Scientology end of the cultish spectrum, you’ll hear it. Tune in to the loaded language, us-versus-them verbiage, thought-terminators, and verbal abuse that make up the language of cultish influence, and the leaders’ motives will ring loud and clear. Examine, for instance, the speech of ill-famed hot yoga guru Bikram Choudhury . . . Long before he was sued for sexual assault and fled the United States, Bikram Yoga’s eponymous founder was a well-known egomaniac and bully. In the early 1970s, Choudhury moved from Calcutta to Los Angeles, where he created his hot yoga empire, which boasted 1,650 studios worldwide at its peak in 2006. During his glory days, Choudhury enjoyed a litany of nicknames that reflected his bellicose cult of personality—the Anti-Yogi, the Walter White of yoga , the crowned head of McYoga. He shattered visions of the peaceful, meditative yoga master by screaming, cursing, and name-calling in class. The content of his profanity-filled caterwauling wasn’t Peloton-style inspirational, but instead shamelessly misogynist, racist, and fat-shaming. “Suck that fat fucking stomach in. I don’t like to see the jiggle jiggle.” “Black bitch.” “Chickenshit.” These are direct quotes, loudly proclaimed in public. In his famous teacher trainings, Choudhury preached to sweltering halls of five-hundred-plus aspiring Bikram instructors, who’d each paid between $10,000 and $15,000 for the opportunity to follow him. Poised on a high throne (always equipped with a personal air conditioner), he would bellow call-and-responses, making no attempt to hide his megalomania. Choudhury would exclaim, “It’s my way or the . . . ,” and the group would call back in unison, “Highway!” “The best food is . . .