"The American child passes through a stage when it seems tremendously exciting to go around the neighborhood peddling cookies…"

 

Myth = selling candy bars and living with your parents = sustainable business model

The quality and clarity of “I was a right wing nutjob” memoirs of the pre-End of History era often astounds me: Gerald Schomp’s , Jerome Tuccille’s  and Karl Hess’s , all released in the seventies, are easily three of the five most valuable books for understanding American conservatism that I’ve read ever.

But Stephen Butterfield's Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise, which was independently published and has been mostly ignored outside the ex-Amway community no thanks to this ridiculously ugly cover, lends an insight the others don’t, because before Stephen Butterfield got into Amway, he was a professor in Vermont whose 1972 dissertation was titled “Black Autobiography: The Development of Identity, Language and Viewpoint from Douglass to Jackson.” Where the other apostates took naturally to stuff like sales, bullshitting and union-busting, Butterfield’s reaction to his first exposure to the Amway “plan” in 1971 is total revulsion. It takes six or seven years of steady stagflation for him to finally sign up, and although he ultimately claws his way into temporary affluence his narrative is chiefly animated and enervated by the unbelievable exertion involved in suppressing just about everything he has ever learned or read to get through the day.

But in rummaging through his overeducated psyche for an explanation of Amway’s essential appeal, Butterfield hits on a kind of profound truth: when you’re broke and desperate in America, knowledge is actually a kind of curse—something which saddles possessors with the burden of “stinking thinking” that only snuffs out success. Or as his senior supervisor Dexter Yager once headlined a section of one of his books:

Myth: Education = Good Job = Success

Contempt for both education and jobs is at the heart of the Amway philosophy.

A principal target of influence for jewels is the public educational system. All the ones I heard speak on the subject criticized public schools for being Negative about America; they were not teaching children to respect men of great wealth; they did not require students to pray or read positive-thinking books; they were exposing teenagers to smutty reading matter; they were programming students to fail…

This is the essential message of the self-help literature marketed to distributors…Holding a job is the mark of a loser, unless it is merely a stepping stone to higher things…A job is called a J.O.B., which, in the words of Bill Britt, prominent Diamond in the Yager organization and a member of the Amway Board of Directors, means "Jackass of the Boss." Speeches by Kay Fletcher and Don Held, also prominent Yager Diamonds, imply that corporate employees are suckers who are too frightened to let go of their security blankets and exercise their own ability to perform.

The optimal mindset for Amway success is in Yager’s terminology “mentally broke”; the antithesis of mentally broke is “stinking thinking.” Early and often Butterfield is branded a stinking thinker, but that doesn’t immunize him from the American Way Appeal. 

The American child passes through a stage when it seems tremendously exciting to go around the neighborhood peddling cookies, or set up a lemonade stand on the corner, and, by brash clowning and hawking, get a few dollars in his or her hot little hand that weren't put there by Mom and Dad. What keeps the insurance man plugging away, and brings warmth to the heart of the used car salesman, must be the unconscious hope of recapturing this golden time. We may resent adult sales people, but our children are rewarded for their business adventures: the teachers smile, the neighbors buy, the parents help them save. Selling in our culture is surrounded by a whole folklore of humor and approval.

When I sat there with my Amway product kit, gazing at the red, white and blue box of SA-8, and listing who would buy my soap and shampoo, and dreaming about the faraway places I would travel to on my profits, and letting the vibrations of my own culture, the great American Way, ring my nerve centers like a turning fork, I was probably living the archetypal first experience of every new distributor. It was a return to childhood. I had given up fighting my country. I was tired of wishing we would all be enlightened and work each according to ability and take each according to need. It was too exhausting to build movements for social change and watch the members and leaders run off to Wall Street. I was bored with political discussions of any kind, having repeated them endlessly without noticeable effect for years. It was as if Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs, the assassinations of King and Malcolm X and the Kennedys, Kent State and the black uprisings, Yankee imperialism and the hippies and the yippies had never happened, and I could go back to the malt hop with Richie Cunningham and the Fonz, as my kids were doing, and start all over again from the beginning. It was like coming home on holiday, after a long separation, to meet the family.

I found this passage particularly chilling. In all my Sisyphus years of laborious free market myth puncturing I had taken on everything from the MBA to the iPhone to Sarah Jessica Parker to the goddess of full coverage that doesn't clog pores. And yet, it had never even occurred to me to slay the lemonade stand… 

But I'll think about that tomorrow.