Cultish

There’s a religious power in quotegrams that far predates social media. Our love of a pithy adage in square form is connected to the needlepointed psalms on display in reli
gious aunts’ powder rooms. But it even goes back further than that, to—can you guess the era?—the Protestant Reformation, when there was a big shift in focus away from religious imagery (stained glass, Last Supper frescoes) and onto text. “There was an increasing discomfort with the ambiguity you get from images,” commented Dr. Marika Rose, a Durham University research fellow in digital theology, in Grazia magazine. “So a Protestant valuing of the Bible made it a much more text-based religion.” Ever since, our culture has looked to snack-size proverbs for guidance and gospel, convinced that when it comes to written quotes, what you read is what you get. On the internet, however, a mysterious epigram with no clear source can serve as an on-ramp leading seekers to something much more sinister.

“Being in a top management position, if you’re not careful, you go into an echo chamber,” Kets de Vries explained. “People are going to tell you what you want to hear, so you start to get away with your madness. And that madness becomes institutionalized very quickly.”

According to ex-Amazonians, maxims often repeated around the office include: “When you hit the wall, climb the wall” and “Work comes first, life comes second, and trying to find the balance comes last.” As Bezos himself wrote in a 1999 shareholder letter, “I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified.”

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.”

Then we have System 2, which involves slower, more deliberative, rational judgment. This is a much newer development. In the “information age,” where billions of people interact with each other anonymously online, spreading questionable claims and deleterious conspiracy theories, System 2 thinking becomes useful, because when something sounds fishy, we don’t have to lean on instinct to make decisions about it. We can take our time, ask questions, thoroughly investigate, and then decide how we want to react.

According to Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, gullibility exists because of two opposing data-processing systems that have developed in humans’ brains: System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 thinking is quick, intuitive, and automatic. When someone tells us something, this system relies on personal experience and anecdotal knowledge to make a snap judgment. Among ancient humans who lived in small groups, where trust was built on lifelong face-to-face relationships, this method was pretty much all you needed.

Rich DeVos’s seventeenth-century interpretation of prosperity theology suggests that if you are not rich, then God does not love you. As he declared, “The free-enterprise system . . . is a gift of God to us, and we should understand it, embrace it, and believe in it.” According to DeVos, if you feel as though you’ve been shut out of the system your whole life, then you’d be an imbecile not to give up on bureaucracy and turn to an MLM.

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

By the 1800s, the Protestant ethic had spread to America, but it had evolved a touch. Now riches weren’t perceived so much as a gift from God, but as a reward for independent achievement and a sign of good character. This revised Protestant ethic stressed ambition, tenacity, and competition, which jibed with the rise of industrial capitalism (defined by mass manufacturing and a clearer division of labor).

As professional labor became central to Christian life, the ability to call yourself a skilled, hardworking breadwinner indicated that you were a member of God’s elect.