How do you tell a friend that they’re actively participating in a cult? More so, how do you do it without insulting their intelligence or their character? Like so many cult followers, they are but the victim of their own good intentions at the end of the day. And their continued extortion at the hands of its leader(s) are viewed as investments, the down payments for the promised future of abundance. The only evidence of the promised future of abundance is the current state of apparent abundance displayed by the prosperous lives of the leader(s), and how their recollection of hard work and struggle evolved into sacred scriptures. Sprinkled with the if I can do it, you can do it trope. Their divine struggle is always expressed as a bridge for humility to the current have-nots. It’s to keep their journey as relatable as possible no matter how hopelessly unattainable they are for the average follower.
I was invited via zoom to see one of the leader(s) long and tedious admonitions against working full-time where he droned about the folly of not having a passive income. It was an elaborate decoration of entrepreneurship through an unabridged, unscripted stream of consciousness with a catastrophically stitched-together slideshow that was being narrated with the grace of an adderal-addled teenager’s book report on a book they haven’t actually read but instead browsed passingly over its Wikipedia synopsis. Jumping forward into their story of success to display the modern life of worry-free prosperity, then backwards in time to show they came from a place of struggle, then back again to the present emphasize how selflessly they are for wanting to bestow the fruits of this epic lifestyle to the viewers. It was a truly horrible presentation, unbecoming of any successful person. But, like any good cult leader, the man trucked through the disgrace of a speech with a shimmering confidence only millionaires and sociopaths have.
There was a period during his stammering where I even pulled out my phone’s stopwatch just to count how many times the guy said ‘like’ or ‘um’ and was astonished by the 16 times in under a minute and a half. My brain was swollen with feelings of distrust for this guy and everything he was saying. Not only from the poor spoken delivery, but in the lack of quality in its visual portrayal and in the conceptual format established for comparing (and belittling) alternative vocations. One would imagine that someone so successful could pay for an appropriate slide show and cue cards or teleprompter to read from. It was obvious this zoom event was shoddily put together and unrehearsed, a perplexing low-effort display from a “successful” person.
In comedy and in rhetorical speech, there tends to be a rule of 3– 3 examples of something where the last mentioned is the most effective. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it’s easy to digest while keeping the show moving along (see?). This presentation went into 9 different bitter and outspoken denunciations of modern labor, going so far as shunning the shortcomings of professional trades like plumbing and welding, service industry workers, gig drivers for Uber/Lyft, performing artists, day laborers, nurses, consultants, teachers and social media influencers. The sprinkles on the trash juice ice cream cone of a speech was when he finally initiated the solution or remedy to these shortcomings: His personal pitch for the multi-level marketing business he represents and his promise for delivering sincere mentorship after you invest. His commitment to the cause may or may not be real, but I wasn’t about to trust someone whose entire worth is dependent upon other people investing in his further representation while not actually creating or producing anything himself. His harsh scrutiny and attention to hypocrisy on the other manners of work were conveniently absent when he made sure not to mention how 98% of the people who invest in the company annually fail to break even. But it’s that hyper-successful 2%, which he is allegedly a part of, that are the face of these wannabe TED talks.
I was skeptical, but the remaining 250 ‘business’ people on the zoom call were hypnotized. Their eyes filled with hope, fascinated at the prospects of exuberant wealth, swayed by the pictures of happiness spilling over onto loved ones, and swooning at the possibilities of all this being an esoteric economic shortcut. 250 people aspiring to finally call themselves entrepreneurs with no exaggeration or adjusted inflection when they telly people.
I expressed my concerns about the poor quality presentation to my friend, the sweet follower. And like any good follower, she sprung to her leader’s defense. To her, his inadequacy at public speaking was only a testament to the realism of his success. It was precisely because he spoke so poorly that he was rendered more relatable– that even someone without a fancy business degree or communications degree could be a millionaire through this path. Regarding his harping on 9 alternative pathways to success, she empathized that he was simply giving greater attention to detail because his knowledge about their shortcomings was so thorough. And when it came to the inferiority of his slideshow presentation, she simply reminded me that, as a millionaire, he is already so successful in real life that the extra effort on a slideshow was pretty pointless and redundant. Ergo, he is so successful, he no longer has to try. He’s like a Kardashian.
I didn’t have it in me to bash this idol of hers as a person, though he totally does give off sex-crazed narcissist cult leader energy to me. She admires him... Plus, she appears to get a lot of personal fulfillment from this group as far as socializing and making friends goes, which is probably how he roped her in to begin with. He must have zeroed in on her tiny episodes of vulnerability at one point or another, subtle expressions of her past adversities centered around being an impoverished immigrant and being unable to help her family in times of need, how those experiences may have left an imprint on her, and how to appeal to her deeply entrenched fear of poverty with this fancy marketing pitch.
Needless to say, I have a lot of opinions about cults, their leaders, and their methods of manipulation. I’ve combated a lot of these personalities throughout life and helped to prevent a fair amount of needless extortion at various times. But I don’t know what to say to my own friend. And the things I could say, the things that are piercing and liberating and true in this case, I feel are just not my place to say it.
What a dilemma to have so much personality and so little influence where it could matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment