American corporations are largely pyramid schemes with the intention of creating zombies in their own image. When I was approximately twenty, I worked for the Limited, a company that put itself on the map in the late 80s via an overpriced, Third World-manufactured Henley shirt for women. The Limited is the parent company of Victoria's Secret. Like most corporations, it is a pyramid scheme designed to make a handful of people at the top obscenely wealthy while exploiting everyone else.
Christianity has become monstrous in its decay. Equinoxes die hard, and the crumbling of the Age of Pisces has barfed up communism (End Times Christianity with the serial numbers scratched off) and every other stripe of immanentizing the eschaton in its death throes. On its way down, Christians have decided to cling to bald materialism as a life preserver. Luxurious, palatial churches attempt to lure new recruits with bogus promises of friendship, companionship, and easy living. Gone are the days of giving up your worldly goods out of sheer generosity to your fellow men; no, the church uses a flashier set of lures to seduce congregants and bolster its flagging numbers. I can name several local churches with worship stage arenas that dwarf my two bedroom house. One local church has a Starbucks-style café. Another's (tax free) campus is so large, it is the size of a small city. Christians have resorted to low tactics to get converts for a long time running: one local church has specialized in matching white men with what is essentially Filipino mail-order brides since the 1980s. Christian missionaries who travel to other continents to bring food and build housing perform those duties with the expectation the fed and housed will convert. I am no Bible scholar but I don't remember Jesus having to resort to the hard sell after performing miracles.
Capitalism Gone Wild
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are all religions of capitalism. All three were founded by shepherds who made a way of life of commoditizing their herds -- the root of the word capitalism means "head", as in head of cattle or sheep -- and women/females are one and the same with commoditized animals. Though subjugation is a controversial term, to play devil's advocate, being the subject is not entirely bad. Being cared for, loved, directed, and protected by a loving father figure is better than a chaotic free-for-all. Compare the intact, father-dominated family of the 1950s to today's every single mother for herself/dog eat dog economy.
Those Bronze Age protocapitalists may have thought of money as the root of all evil but it's actually greed, not money, that is terrible. Money is a figment of the imagination. All the gold in the country won't help you on a deserted island: what will matter far more is skills you've amassed.
The true fault lies in people who chase unearned wealth and who refuse to limit their consumption once they've had a taste of abundance. Those who go far beyond what the Orphic hymns call "necessary wealth" have always been the root of the problem, capitalist or otherwise.
LDS Glitz and Glamour
Considering its simple beginnings, Mormonism or the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) has come a long way. The LDS headquarters is a 28 story building within the Mormon holy land of Salt Lake City, Utah. LDS claims to have over 17 million members and 72,000 missionaries. LDS is the fourth largest Christian church in the United States and claims to have seven million members there. LDS congregations encircle the globe.
The Mormon church is fond of rewriting and covering up its own sordid history, and that is why old books by and about the LDS are priceless. For instance, the reason Mormonism is headquartered in Utah is because entire factions of Mormons went on house-to-house killing sprees in the 1800s, and I am not just talking about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Mormons at the time believed that the souls of the people they killed were saved from the wickedness of worshipping a false god, and of course that meant any god outside Joseph Smith's bizarre rendition of God. The US government banished the Mormon church to the salt flat wastes of Utah, driving them out of their Missouri and Arkansas homelands because they were an unbearable menace. Old Books of Mormon are rife with "reasons" black people are subhuman and somehow not worthy of cohabiting heaven with the "good" Mormon people.
LDS works because it was an early adapter of the pyramid scheme. At the bottom are the young, breeding age men and women it sends out to comb the streets, handing out pamplets. LDS is and always has been a numbers game: the elite at the tippy top are comfortable, middle aged men with compliant, on board wives who have given them many children. Those men lay a bunch of directives upon the women and beta males below them, who lay a bunch of directives on youngsters to do the grunt work of hustling the street for as many new converts as possible. Also, everyone at the bottom must tithe ten percent of whatever they earn in any capacity towards the person above them, which provides the middle aged men at the top with even more creature comforts. LDS is not alone in this kind of scheme, which was readily adopted by the Hare Krishnas who only in the last 30 years have been banned from annoying and assaulting people at airports. To the non-Krishna or the non-LDS, being surrounded by such people of faith feels a great deal like going to a seedy bar as a twenty-one year old girl: you may have a drink in each hand from two different guys, but you feel an awful lot like raw meat being dangled over a pool of piranhas. The feeding frenzy of the LDS or Krishna has to do with astral pyramids however they may be abusing the etheric. There is always the claim they want you to rule alongside them when the dirty truth is they are looking for more slaves.
Those Slimy MLMs
MLM stands for Multi-Level Marketing. Multi-Level Marketing or Direct Marketing is a "business" model that requires suspension of disbelief that the bottom of the pyramid can be as rich as the middle or the top that is preying upon it. Arbonne, Amway, Kindermusik, Young Living, Herbalife, Vorwerk, Tupperware, and Mary Kay are among the most famous MLMs. If MLMs can be summed up in one word, it is "misleading". Even the moniker "Direct Marketing" is a lie. MLMs do not exist to sell product directly to consumers. Young Living purports to sell essential oils but anyone who has ever dealt with the company knows that the oils are indistinguishable from what is available at the health food store for a tiny fraction of the cost. The point of Young Living is to enrich Gary Young, snake oil fraudster extraordinaire. Herbalife's poisons enrich Mark Hughes's successors while perpetuating the septic myth that a pill can magically erase genetics, laziness, and etheric starvation. The primary purpose of any MLM is to enrich a handful of founders at the top via the exploitation of downlines. Downlines are the human resources who fork over their energy, money, and the wealth of their families and friends in order to maintain the illusion they will get rich quickly with a minimum of work.
MLMs primarily target women. Women make up over 60 percent of the downlines of MLMs. Young men join the armed forces in hopes of finding the initiatory rites of manhood only to realize they will be ridden hard and forgotten on the sidewalk. MLMs recruit the fairer set with false promises sisterhood and financial independence and crap them out on the other side poorer, sadder, angrier, and lonelier than before.
The fabled MLM "hun" is an officious, annoying, and thirsty saleswoman who will sink to any low in order to climb her MLM's pyramid of so-called business opportunity. MLM huns are infamous for selling out their co-workers, friends, family, and even their children to chase the mirage of cheddar promised by the huns directly above them. To the MLM hun, you are not a person, let alone a friend. You are a SALE. You are a means to an end. The better an MLM hun is at recruiting believers, the more unearned wealth she will enjoy. A particularly bitter atheist meme states "God is an MLM hun".
Retail is Debased
Back to when I was exploring the limits of the Limited: Medieval serfdom would have been less degrading than what I did in that store. When a company refuses to pay its workers anything close to a living wage, it depends on an emotional construct of soap operas in order to get people to work there. At the Limited and other retail slave jobs, we were rewarded based on our willingness to be complaint suck-ups to management. I was hilariously expected to buy a $300 suit every six months on an $8 an hour salary, and the suit was technically discounted. Managers made a princely $14 per hour, ostensibly because they wore the suits which were of course sewn by slave laborers in India, Pakistan, and China. In other words, just like MLMs, the workers were the primary consumers of the overpriced products, and selling the products were not the point of the company's existence. During my trials at the Limited, I earned a tiny commission based upon how much money I got random customers to spend on their credit cards. I was also expected to sell the Limited's own credit card. The whole point was to get people to spend money they did not have on products they did not need. Just like an MLM hun, I was expected to believe in the crappy products and to get other women to believe in them too. I was supposed to look great in my Third World-made suit and to convince other women to buy the suit so they could look like me. The trouble in my case is I am a short, dark woman and despite my body being as slim as it would ever be at age 19, I looked too much like the enslaved women working sewing machines in Zhejiang Province and not enough like the bulimic glamazons on the Limited's sale posters. No aspiring Boss Babe wants to be reminded of the Asian girl sewing her clothes.
After the Limited and my other retail jobs, I tried temping. Almost every temp job I had was at an insurance company, though jobs at other places were eerily similar in vibe. Once again, I labored among masses of underpaid women with whom I was expected to be "sisters". Once again, our work and emotional labor was siphoned upwards towards the faceless top-tier who were too good (and too busy golfing) to hang out with the likes of us. Once again, I sold a racket that I did not genuinely believe in and I was rewarded for numb compliance. There are reasons I choose to this day to make my own modest living without health insurance while driving a seventeen year old car and living in a down-at-the-heels suburbs with low property taxes. I would rather directly invoke my Japanese ancestors and ritually disembowel myself with a sharp knife than to subsist in the Office Space film's dystopia, where every day is the worst day of my life. I will not pretend to be happy and I will not take antidepressants. I have tried that road and seppuku/harakiri is infinitely more appealing. At least Japanese ritual suicide is quick.
Schemes Seeking Legitimacy: And Others That Don't Bother
Astral pyramids are seductive. The larger a pyramid becomes, the greater its astral gravity because "everyone is doing it". The ambition of Christian churches, MLMs, and American corporations like the ones I worked for before jumping off into a bohemian life of independent music teaching, is to grow. Capitalist to their core, the founders of these institutions know their motives to be corrupt and built upon a foundation of lies, but they likely never cared. Nevertheless, the pyramid must grow in order to gain the illusion of legitimacy. In all cases, there is the notion that if the whole world can be converted or coerced into membership in the Pyramid, the Awakening will come and the Savior will arrive. The Savior will forgive the wholesale destruction and vile grifting it took to achieve the unified state. The game will be finished and will turn over to a new start. For the MLM hun, this turnover is the achievement of a luxurious lifestyle where her downline's work provides millions if not billions of dollars. The MLM hun's dream is to wake up in her perfect McMansion where her butler serves her breakfast in bed. Her agenda is to skip out for a day at the pricey spa and to gorge herself on shopping for status brands. In the case of the wannabe LDS leader, the McMansion is the same but the breakfast is served by one of his pregnant wives. He is more into golf at the country club than spa treatments and shopping but they live in the same neighborhood.
This brings us to the founder of the Limited company I used to work for, philantropath Les Wexner. Lex Wexner is an alleged child trafficker who hung out with Epstein. Rumor has it that Wexner acquired young girls for Epstein. Some of these unfortunate "models" may still reside in Epstein's human breeding farms, albeit as skeletons or ashes now that the operation has been moved out of Epstein's hands. For Wexner, the luxury McMansion lifestyle was not nearly enough. Like his pal Jeffrey, he seems to have required the blood and tears of children in order to get his rocks off.
That's the thing about unearned utopias: they seem great until you get there and actually live the dream. Having a selection of a hundred ice creams in a refrigerator that costs more than the payoff on Kimberly Steele's mortgage isn't so great when you are old and hated. Your waistline and cholesterol count cannot withstand the abuse and your intestines will likely rebel against the lactose. A treat without honest work that went before it becomes just another drug to get through the day without collapsing.
Rise of the NPC
Almost all American businesses have adapted the LDS/MLM model: a pyramid scheme that sells primarily to its own workers before the customer ever arrives and whose wealth is concentrated at the top at the direct expense of the bottom. Growth is dependent upon tricking the bottom into believing they can get to the top if only they trade their morals and their decency, and eventually their pride. This form of predatory capitalism is the religion of the cannibal: eat your family and eventually your own feet and legs in order to save your own head. Compliance is the meat that feeds the cannibal's mouth. Kids nowadays suckle on the digital breast from infancy: the better to indoctrinate you with, my dear.
The NPC or Non-Player Character is a controversial name for a person who has no internal dialogue. In my occultist's vernacular, it is a person who has lost all meaningful contact with his or her higher self. The NPC is gullible, programmable, and compliant. The NPC is the LDS brother or sister sent to proselytize on behalf of Mormon elders. She is the MLM hun. She is me at age 19, working in retail and later, cold-calling strangers in order to sell jet vacations. He is the dupe that allowed himself to be tricked into taking the unsafe and ineffective vaccines.
The NPC has key characteristics. The first is the willingness to believe in a lie. NPCs are the reason why atheists often criticize religion as being the opiate of the masses. Deep down, the MLM hun knows her business opportunity is a fraud. The LDS brother knows at the soul level that it isn't right to attempt to barge into someone's house and that no amount of smiles or reassurance can excuse invading someone's privacy to tell them about a God no human can possibly fully understand. The average Christian has a sense of praying for someone who never asked to be slimy and threatening. It may be buried deep under rock hard formations of cognitive dissonance, but the knowledge is there. Minding their own business does occur to them in the deep subconscious; they lack the motivation or will to uncover it, and that's why we call the pursuit of hidden knowledge "occultism", because it uncovers that which hides and is not obvious. For the NPC, visions of mountains of unearned wealth, flying around in jets, and lounging by the McMansion pool covers any vestiges of morality and decency they wish to leave underground. Any selflessness tends to take the form of wanting to provide one's children, spouse, or loved ones with a cushy, materialist lifestyle, always failing to understand that lifestyle's propensity for creating a Wendigo.
FTS: False Transcendence Syndrome
Another key trait of the NPC is false transcendence. Americans especially love false transcendence, which is the practice of pretending you've got it all together via a surface glamour of looking great and having money when your life is actually a hot, red mess. The MLM hun is expected to fake it until she makes it: she is expected to go into credit card debt if necessary to finance purchases of MLM inventory or product. The LDS brother is expected to smile and pretend that his relationship with the Mormon version of Jesus has brought peace to his saved soul. The retail employee is expected to claim she is happy with the landfill-destined junk her employer coerced her into buying on her lousy pay. The people who got the MRNA vaccines are expected to cover up any complications they suffered. If people around them died mysteriously close to the time they were injected, they are told to ignore the vaccines as a possible cause. In order to survive in the NPC dogpile, you must accept the programming.
NPCs are routinely told they are in charge, that they are indies, innovators, and entrepreneurs. This is a lie. The NPC only becomes an NPC because he or she is too weak or afraid to stand on her own two feet. In order to be an entrepreneur, you must be unwilling to answer to a superior who directs your energy. Christianity and other monotheist faiths have a superior in their single God, and that would be fine and good if Christianity's pyramids served God and God alone and not some greedy human with a McMansion. In MLMs, the hun is a customer first and an entrepreneur dead last. In order to be an entrepreneur, you must create your own business and take the leading role in it; in other words, you must form your own astral pyramid. Unlike pyramid schemes, astral pyramids can be benevolent if you choose to make them so. In any prefabricated system, the NPC joins someone else's astral pyramid and it is highly likely you they are at the bottom of that pyramid. In the case of religion, when the Divine becomes a cookie cutter, mouse-find-cheese, copy-paste of what someone else experienced, the NPC dwells somewhere near the bottom. The NPC lacks a dialogue with his or her higher self because he awaits the orders of his superiors, or at very least some dogmatic creed, to tell him what is supposed to happen. If that scripture tells him to take up the cross and be poor or to undergo the trials of Job, he is likely not to listen as it interferes with his golf and McMansion fantasy of heaven on Earth.
NPCs are addicted to virtue signaling because they tend to go insane when their vision of golf/spa McMansion utopia is threatened by someone with a working conscience. The NPC's vision of personal utopia is lightly overwritten with cherry picked bon mots from Scripture or affirmative folk sayings. The dialogue with "God" is shoehorned into whatever the NPC's handlers tell him to say. God is reshaped into a thing that provides the basest of material desires. In the case of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the Christian god was reworked to be the builder of several luxury compounds where Tammy housed her amazing shoe collection and Jim was sexually serviced by all manner of women and men.
You know me by now: saying I am reliable is a euphemistic way of saying I am PREDICTABLE. I am not going to suggest anyone who hates NPCs, LDS, MLMs, or the capitalist mindset that gave rise to them in the first place to go around fighting or "raising awareness" about those things. I am going to once again (yawn!) suggest that if you despise a thing, ignore it and build your own thing until your strength naturally overcomes the thing you despise. I despise MLMs, so I will never recommend one and you certainly won't see me buying their products or becoming a rep. Instead, if I want a Pampered Chef can opener -- that particular MLM actually makes a quality can opener -- I will quietly buy one used on eBay. If you hate the corporation you work for, it is never to late to develop a workaround or a side gig. As far as eschewing unearned wealth, it takes some meditation but anyone can do it. You can act like Jesus right now, wishing blessings upon others even if you are too powerless to perform miracles. It's simple: mind your own business and do your own thing.
People would not need to virtue signal if they were confident in their own virtue, their own judgement. there is a way i like though. co operatives. been in 4, so far. bob's red mill, for example is worker owned.
I get smarter every time I read your stuff :)