Home > Media > Books > Robert L. Fitzpatrick and Joyce K. Reynolds - False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes
Robert L. Fitzpatrick and Joyce K. Reynolds - False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes
knotheadusc's Full Review: Robert L. Fitzpatrick and Joyce K. Reynolds - Fals...
Awhile back, I got interested in reading about multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes-- not because I was looking to become involved in one myself, but because I had sort of had a near miss back in 1994 and it intrigued me that some people had found themselves so entrenched in the MLM/pyramid scheme quagmire. And then, in my own recent quest to find employment, I began to get phone calls from Primerica, which is in itself, somewhat of a business venture/multi-level marketing scheme. I'd get calls from perfect strangers inviting me to meetings where I could learn how to make "BIG BUCKS" helping other people learn how to manage their money.
Because I was so interested in these types of organizations, I found myself investing in books to read. One of them was Robert L. Fitzpatrick's and Joyce K. Reynolds' False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes, which was published in 1997. Fitzpatrick and Reynolds have written a book that exposes multi-level marketing for what it is, a hopeless field that makes a very few people wealthy and leaves so many other people destitute.
The book starts off with an interesting anecdote, which, after having read the rest of the book, I have to comment was a pretty good hook. The author is sitting on an airplane bound for Kansas City, observing a conversation that goes on between two people. Woman #1 spots Woman #2 reading the want ads and asks her if she's looking for a job. Woman #2 says that she is. #1 tells her that as luck would have it, she's "sort of in human resources" for her company, which "represents over 200 environmentally friendly products". #2, who is in her early 20s and thrilled that someone has taken an interest in her, is immediately excited and wants to hear more. #1 asks #2 if she wants to talk when they get to Kansas City. #1 agrees but says she's looking for work in Maine. #2 says that the company has offices in Maine. The two make a date to meet that evening. #2's seat companion remarks that it looks like she's hit the lottery. The author writes that its likely that Woman #1 isn't really in human resources, nor is it likely that she really has a job. What's more likely is that Woman #1 is a multi-level marketer looking for fresh meat-- someone she can recruit into her organization. But recruits never join these organizations for free. There is always a monetary and usually a spiritual price.
The author remarks that he actually witnessed an exchange like this one on an airplane and later confronted Woman #1, who happened to be sitting next to him as he was proofreading the manuscript for this book. They ended up talking and then getting into a heated argument about pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing-- it was heated because the author had attacked the bastion of Woman #1's faith. He had run into a true MLM proselyte. The author asked the woman in a direct way how many people in her company had actually made as much as $4,000 a month. She avoided the question by claiming that some people made as much as $50,000 a month. He asked again-- how many people had made at least $4,000 a month? Her reply? Thousands. And she said it without losing her composure. But then he pointed out that in order for that many people to be making that much money, her company alone would have to employ a half a million people. Was that possible? Again, she did not lose composure. She simply said she didn't know the exact number, nor did she care to know. She only knew that anyone could make it if they worked hard enough. This, my friends, is what I would call a "false prophet".
The definition of Pyramid Scheme according to Dictionary.com...
A fraudulent money-making scheme in which people are recruited to make payments to others above them in a hierarchy while expecting to receive payments from people recruited below them. Eventually the number of new recruits fails to sustain the payment structure, and the scheme collapses with most people losing the money they paid in.
Beyond the first part of the book, I'm sad to report that I started to lose interest, perhaps because it takes on a distinctly New Age turn that doesn't appeal to me. Fitzpatrick explains how New Ageism and New Thinking have made Americans more susceptible to the idea that mult-level marketing can work. Fitzpatrick writes that the old fashioned formula of working long and hard for one's prosperity seems to have given way to the idea of working smarter and he implies that the "working smarter" ideal is somehow wrong. I don't believe that working smarter is necessarily wrong or that it never works. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong or immoral with working smarter as long as it's effective. Besides, as it is established in this book and others that I have read about multi-level marketing, people who get involved in pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing do indeed end up working very hard and often end up going nowhere.
Make no mistake, Fitzpatrick does loathe multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes with a passion-- and he does claim that the two terms are actually synonymous. He explains how participants become "MLM junkies", ending up entrenched in the promises of the great prosperity that will be offered by the MLM. It's as if any day the wealth will shower upon them. They get their families and friends involved until they have no family or friends left. Fitzpatrick writes of such people with a mixture of pity and slight contempt... and yet he himself was at one time an MLM'er.
It seems that the author himself had some heartbreak related to pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing. The author writes about "The Airplane Game", another scheme in which he apparently got involved. He provides a visual aid of how "The Airplane Game" worked. Fitzpatrick wrote that he was encouraged to imagine a plane full of people, consisting of eight passengers, four crew members, two co-pilots, and a pilot. One would become a player by "gifting" the pilot $1,500 in order to get a "seat" on the plane. When the eight passenger seats have all been filled, the pilot is supposed to leave the game, having been "piloted out". Once the pilot split, the two co-pilots became pilots of their own "airplanes", with the four crew members advancing into co-pilot status behind the two new pilots. The previous eight passengers divided into two crews of four, and then eight new passengers for each of the two airplanes were sought. The cycle continued when former pilots would become passengers again and then get other people to come aboard. That way, they'd get their initial $1,500 investment back, plus $10,500 more, usually in cash. Fitzpatrick wrote that the system eventually became corrupt as shrewd participants found ways to skirt the rules. It wasn't long before legislators started to make laws to make the practice illegal and people started getting arrested for running an illegal Pyramid Scheme. The Airplane Game attracted a lot of the same types of poor and disenfranchised people who are addicted to playing the state lottery (in this case it was Florida's lottery). I found this part of the book pretty interesting to read about, especially when Fitzpatrick started breaking down mathematical probabilities related to the odds of success in MLMs and pyramid schemes.
This book does have some real positives to it. I enjoyed reading about The Airplane Game because it was something I'd never heard of before and Fitzpatrick did a good job describing it. I also believe that Fitzpatrick showed insight into why people get involved with multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. But I didn't find the book as engaging as other books I've read on multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. I found reading this book to be hard work and once I did the reading, I realized that much of what I read didn't stick with me. Perhaps it's because I found the writer's style to be somewhat formal. In a book like this one, that is, one that promises a story, I expect to read something in a style that is less formal and more intimate. I'm afraid that the author's style came across as distant to me, although he does use first person language. I just didn't feel as though he was "talking to me" personally.
If you enjoy reading about subjects related to New Age thinking and spiritualism, you might really enjoy False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes, but I was somewhat disappointed with it. Nevertheless, I wasn't so disappointed enough with this book that I won't recommend it. If I could, I'd give this book 2.5 stars, but as it stands, I'll have to give it 3. It's useful for those who want to learn about the sleazy world of empty promises, false prophets, and lost profits in multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. But if you want to read a good personal account, I still highly recommend Rob Styler's Spellbound: My Journey Through a Tangled Web of Success over False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes.
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