'Lyoness' is only one chapter of a big propaganda lie.

Absurd, 'Income opportunity' liar, Hubert Freidl, posing as a historically-important businessman, philanthropist and financial guru - the victim of absurd lies.

A reality-denying chapter of the pernicious 'MLM income opportunity' fairy story arrived this week from the USA, in the form of an unsigned, and unsubstantiated, comment:

'I couldn't stop laughing after reading this blog. Obviously some very committed MLM and Lyoness haters here. LOL Looking for a demon, they found one in Friedl who has accomplished so much in only a decade by offering people an opportunity. The ad-homenem attacks on the CEO and the company are absurd and the Nazi-name calling and offensive. Lyoness a cult? Absurd. As a Lyoness member, I am saving and making money.....'

Contrary to what the author of the above propaganda steadfastly pretends to be reality, I've not been calling anyone a 'Nazi' out of hatred. I've been explaining calmly and, in great detail, why the clandestine criminal activities of 'Income Opportunity' racketeers, like Hubert Freidl, have been neither original nor unique, and why, consequently, they cannot be fully-understood in isolation.

In the final analysis, the impressive, technical-sounding, made-up labels which latter-day cult instigators always hide behind, should be recognised as being merely a collection of up-dated titles for an ancient fiction. 

In 1945, whilst most, contemporary mainstream commentators were unable to look beyond the ends of their noses, with a perfect sense of irony, Eric Arthur Blair a.k.a. George Orwell (1903-1950) presented fact as fiction in an insightful 'fairy story' entitled, 'Animal Farm.' He revealed that totalitarianism is merely the oppressors' fiction mistaken for fact by the oppressed.

In the same universal allegory, Orwell described how, at a time of vulnerability, almost any people's dream of a future, secure, Utopian existence can be hung over the entrance to a totalitarian deception. Indeed, the words that are always banished by totalitarian deceivers are, 'totalitarian' and 'deception.'

Sadly, when it comes to examining the same enduring phenomenon, albeit with an ephemeral 'Capitalist' label, most contemporary, mainstream commentators have again been unable to look further than the ends of their noses. However, if they followed Orwell's example, and did some serious thinking, this is the reality-inverting nightmare they would find.

More than half a century of quantifiable evidence, proves beyond all reasonable doubt that what has become popularly known as 'Multi-Level Marketing' is nothing more than an absurd, cultic, economic pseudo-science, and that the impressive-sounding made-up term 'MLM,' is, therefore, part of an extensive, thought-stopping, non-traditional jargon which has been developed, and constantly-repeated, by the instigators, and associates, of various, copy-cat, major, and minor, ongoing organized crime groups (hiding behind labyrinths of legally-registered corporate structures) to shut-down the critical, and evaluative, faculties of victims, and of casual observers, in order to perpetrate, and dissimulate, a series of blame-the-victim closed-market swindles or pyramid scams (dressed up as 'legitimate direct selling income opportunites'), and related advance-fee frauds (dressed up as 'legitimate training and motivation, self-betterment, programs,' etc.).

The overwhelming majority of all the countless millions of victims who have been consumed by individual 'Income Opportunity/Prosperity Gospel' cults, have remained silent and passive,  and continued (unconsciously) to form part of the overall lie: whilst, as a direct result of the silence and passivity of the overwhelming majority of the victims, all casual observers of individual 'Income Opportunity/Prosperity Gospel' cults (including, law enforcement agents, regulators, academics, legislators, judges, journalists, etc.) have also remained silent and passive, and have continued (unconsciously) to form part of the overall lie.

Today, it is very difficult to determine exactly how many people in total around the world have already been churned through the pay-through-the-nose-to-play 'MLM Income Opportunity/Prosperity Gospel' cultic game of make-believe, since it was first peddled as reality under the name of 'Nutrilite Inc. /Mytinger and Casselberry Inc.' back in the late 1940s. It is also important to distinguish between short-term and chronic, losing-players. In general, the overwhelming majority of fraud victims never complain, but, right from the outset, the self-perpetuating 'MLM Income Opportunity/Prosperity Gospel' lie was maliciously designed to implicate its victims - loading them with shame and guilt, and, thus, prevent them from ever facing reality. Classically, the quantifiable evidence proves that, without exception, chronic, losing-players have been subjected to co-ordinated devious techniques of social, and psychological, persuasion designed to shut down their critical, and evaluative, faculties. In this way, they have been conditioned (unconsciously) to think of themselves, not as the victims of a cruel deception or as brainwashed cult adherents, but as 'Independent Business Owners' exercising free-will.  What has made external reality even more unacceptable, is the ego-destroying fact that a large proportion of victims were deceived by a close friend or relative and, in turn, these victims then deceived, or tried to deceive, their own close friends and relatives. The few, destitute, chronic, former losing-players who have managed to recover fully their critical, and evaluative faculties, and who have filed well-informed civil lawsuits against the corporate fronts of 'Income Opportunity' cultic racketeers, have invariably been obliged to settle out of court. Although a number of isolated civil investigations, and successful prosecutions, have been pursued by the Federal Trade Commission against some smaller 'Income Opportunity' front-companies in the USA, no co-ordinated official effort has ever been made to face wider-reality and identify, let alone tackle, the overall criminogenic/cultic phenomenon that has lurked behind all the shielding layers of structural, and pseudo-economic/scientific, mystification, reality-inverting 'commercial'  jargon and kitsch capitalist/Utopian/American Dream imagery.


   


Until the 1970s, the original 'MLM Income Opportunity/Prosperity Gospel' cultic racket  'Nutrilite' a.k.a.'Amway,' remained confined to the USA. In the face of a prolonged (but far-from morally, or intellectually, rigorous) FTC investigation, the 'Amway/MLM' lie first spread to Canada, then to W. Europe and Australia. However, in 1979, when a corrupt, and/or naive, US federal judge failed to identify 'Amway' as the corporate-front for an ongoing, major, organized crime group, this classic regulatory-failure was widely-seen as a license to steal. Since that time, countless US-based copy-cat rackets have been instigated behind labyrinths of legally-registered corporate structures pursuing lawful, and/or unlawful, enterprises - a significant number of which ('Forever Living Products', 'Herbalife', 'USANA', 'Nu Skin', 'Xango' etc.),  have been allowed to grow out of control and to infiltrate traditional culture all around the globe, accompanied by a distracting flock of co-opted political, academic and celebrity stooges, and shielded by a parallel labyrinth of legally-registered corporate structures known as, 'Direct Selling Associations.'

In the past, various casual observers have thrown up their hands in horror when I have dared to say that, given its duration, scale and devastating impact on huge numbers of vulnerable persons,  blame-the-victim 'Income Opportunity/Prosperity Gospel' cultic racketeering is an ongoing financial, and psychological, holocaust (with a small 'h') of which many people have been in denial. Sadly, the essentially-absurd fairy story entitled 'MLM Income Opportunity' has been allowed to expand to such titanic proportions, that the truth has long-since become almost unthinkable. However, since the concept of the big propaganda lie, is widely-understood, it seems almost inconceivable that the directors of law enforcement, and intelligence, agencies around the world have also remained unable to look beyond the ends of their noses and identify what the bosses of 'MLM/Prosperity Gospel' cults have actually been doing. 

The following sinister quote has often been attributed to one of history's most-sinister criminals, Joseph Goebbels: 

'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.'

Given its content, it is supremely ironic that there is no evidence for Goebbels ever having made the above statement. That said, it is a very accurate description of Goebbels' reality-inverting activities as Adolf Hitler's propaganda chief. Indeed, before his cowardly suicide in the face of reality, Goebbels spent the last years of his life steadfastly pretending that the heroic and enlightened leader of the 'Noble Aryan Master Race,' Adolf Hitler, was telling the truth, whilst the leaders of Britain and the USA (controlled by the forces of evil - Jews and Freemasons) were repeating big propaganda lies.

The origin of the first part of the above Goebbels statement would appear to have been a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler, compiled in the USA during WWII by the 'Office of Strategic Services,' later to become known as the 'CIA.' This document concluded that : 

'His (Hitler's) primary rules were: 
never allow the public to cool off; 
never admit a fault or wrong; 
never concede that there may be some good in your enemy;
never leave room for alternatives;
never accept blame; 
concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; 
people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.' 

Hitler's psychological profile was drafted (prior to the full-extent of his crimes against humanity being discovered) by a team of medically-qualified academics who had apparently been studying 'Mein Kampf,' Chapter 10:

 '... in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad mass of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly outrageous lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.' 

Despite appearances, Hitler was not confessing to being a liar in Chapter 10 of 'Mein Kampf.' This was merely a typically-mediocre little narcissist (who imagined himself to be a great author/thinker - the anointed-Messiah/saviour of his people) revealing his extraordinary knowledge of how to lie successfully whilst steadfastly pretending to be struggling to establish the truth against the reality-inverting forces of evil. Hitler would soon transform into a megalomaniacal psychopath. The unconditional deference of his deluded followers only served to confirm, and magnify, his own increasingly-paranoid, and self-righteous, delusions of grandeur.

David Brear (copyright 2013)