Cultish

and has announced that he doesn’t want children because he already has seven billion.

By and large, new religion experts are not terribly concerned that the drawbacks of cult fitness stack up to the likes of Scientology, either. “I definitely think some of these workouts are ‘culty,’ but I say that with scare quotes,” commented Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. The main “cult” symptom Luhrmann finds in fitness buffs is the belief that if they attend classes regularly, their lives will dramatically improve overall. As long as they attend class five times a week and say the mantras, then that will change the way the world unfolds for them. It’s that sense of excess idealism again—that conviction that this group, this instructor, these rituals, have the power to accomplish more than they probably can.

It is no accident that the studio fitness industry blew up so suddenly and powerfully in the early 2010s—a time when adults’ trust in both traditional religion and the medical establishment took a sharp decline. An unshocking 2018 poll by the Multiple Chronic Conditions Resource Center found that 81 percent of American millennials are unsatisfied with their healthcare experience, due to everything from high insurance costs to institutional race and gender bias. Not to mention the US’s lack of public fitness programs (like, say, Japan’s “radio calisthenics” broadcasts, which folks are free to follow at home or together in community parks each morning at no cost). Younger Americans feel like they have no choice but to take their health into their own hands.

Combine this withdrawal from mainstream medicine with young people’s disillusionment with traditional faith, and cult fitness exploded to fill these corporeal and spiritual voids. In a 2015 study called “How We Gather,” ter Kuile explored the ways millennials find community and transcendence beyond conventional religious communities, and found that studio workout classes were among the ten most profound and formative spaces. At least for a certain demographic . . . because as soon as people began coveting fitness so intensely, they started to crave more exclusivity, too.

Like most other MLM founders, Patrick was big on prosperity theology and New Thought, and he was famous for turning inspirational mottoes minacious: “Tell [recruits] they’re going to be happier, healthier, wealthier, and receive what they want out of life with the Holiday Magic program,” he wrote, adding in the same pen stroke, “Any person who fails in the Holiday Magic program must fall into one of the following categories: lazy, stupid, greedy, or dead.” Patrick was also known for throwing the uttermost bizarre MLM conference in history. Called Leadership Dynamics, it took place in a crappy Bay Area motel and cost a thousand bucks to attend. For two days straight, Patrick had recruits engage in a series of freaky power games: He made them climb inside coffins and strung them up on gigantic wooden crosses, where they’d dangle all afternoon. Like Jim Jones, Chuck Dietrich, and (to a lesser degree) Jeff Bezos, he also forced them into “group therapy” sessions where they verbally tormented each other for hours on end.

Patrick’s behavior was unhinged from all angles, but when the FTC brought him to court, their most compelling argument against him, and what eventually allowed them to shut down Holiday Magic, was their points about his speech. Ultimately, the court ruled that Patrick’s deceptive hyperbole, loaded buzzwords, and gaslighting disguised as inspiration were what defined him as a pyramid schemer. This makes sense, because in every corner of life, business and otherwise, when you can tell deep down that something is ethically wrong but are having trouble pinpointing why, language is a good place to look for evidence. This is where the FTC turned to squash Holiday Magic, and over the next few years, its attorneys cited the same type of outlandish, fraudulent messaging as they prosecuted a litany of MLMs—including the biggest one they ever went after, Amway.

In 1979, the FTC finally accused Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos of pyramid scheme activity, which led to a massive drawn-out case. But, as we know, Amway never closed up shop. (Again, this was a company whose founders golfed with heads of state—there was no chance the government was going to take them down.) The judge fined the company $100,000 (chump change for the corporate heavyweight) and sent them on their merry way.

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 tendencies.) “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.”

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.

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. With a personal net worth of over $5 billion, Rich DeVos served as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, was BFFs with Gerald Ford, secured special Amway tax breaks for hundreds of millions of dollars, and funneled prodigious sums into Republican presidential candidates’ coffers. Amway funded the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and, naturally, the most direct-sales-friendly president of all time, Donald Trump. Throughout the 2010s, Trump made a killing from his endorsements of several MLMs. These included a vitamin company and a seminar company, both of which paid him seven figures for permission to use his likeness as a mascot and to rebrand as the Trump Network and Trump Institute. (In 2019, a federal judge ruled that Trump and his three children could be sued for fraud in connection with these organizations.) To return DeVos’s favors, these presidents all publicly lauded Amway and the Direct Selling Association in general as a commendable, profoundly patriotic enterprise.*

These intakes weren’t medical examinations conducted by registered dietitians. They were trauma-bonding tactics carried out by regular people, like Becca and her mother-in-law. The company knows what it’s doing by bestowing recruits with titles like coach, senior coach, Presidential Director, and Global Health Ambassador—it fills them with a sense of authority. “I think a lot of these women convince themselves that they really are a health coach,” Becca asserted. “They say you are giving people an amazing gift of life. If your coach gives you a shout-out in our secret Facebook group, people are like, ‘Incredible job! Saving lives!’” Everyone knows deep down that the difference between a coach and a senior coach has nothing to do with nutrition expertise; it’s how many people they were able to add to their downline that month. Yet when the company is love-bombing you with a fancy title and adulating you as a lifesaver, you become conditioned to interpret it that way, if you want to.

the capitalist cockroach that just won’t stop reincarnating.

Plenty of modern companies try to sell goods by associating them with larger identity benefits, like by buying this trendy lip gloss or that beach towel made out of recycled plastic, you will establish yourself as a hip, healthy, sexy, ecofriendly person in general. Sociologists call these “organizational ideologies,” and they’re not necessarily all bad. Most successful brand founders agree that having a “cultlike company culture” with intense values and rituals is simply necessary to secure repeat customers and loyal employees in today’s dubious, transient market. These organizational ideologies should be taken with a grain of salt, of course, since basing one’s politics, healthcare decisions, and very identity on what profit-driven brands have to say, even (and especially) ones that