I believe that the kingpins and the big moneymakers in MLMs like Mary Kay are well aware of the underlying pyramid scheme. However, they have to hide the reality of what they are peddling to fool people into participating. Why would anyone willingly participate in a system where 99.6% are sure to lose money, and an even higher percentage will harm their own reputation and relationships?

Here is where the cult tactics come in. The two biggest distractions in MLM discussions are the incomes of the upline, and individual products sales. Neither of these have any bearing on an individual’s success, but these topics dominate the discussions. But it is all a ruse.

MLMs like Mary Kay are in the business of fooling their customers into thinking they are business owners so they order significantly more product than can ever hope to sell or use personally, and to recuit others under them to do the same, ad infinitum. This is the ONLY path to riches in MLM.

The success of their upline has absolutely no bearing on whether they will ever turn a profit. And individual product sales have absolutely no bearing on achieving riches in MLM.

If you look at the behaviors of the scant few making big money in MLM, they have these two things in common: Massive recruiting success paired with significant front-loading averages of new recruits.

There is zero correlation to the success of their own upline, and near zero correlation to personal product sales. So why talk about these things so much? To hide the truth that the product has nothing to do with MLM success. In place of this reality is a cult-like obsession with things completely unrelated to individual MLM success: upline success and product sales.