Something we heard a lot of from our Amway upline, and usually
in a taunting “I’m better than the rest of you” attitude was “you haven’t
earned the privilege yet”.
This could be for a number of things.
One time the Platinum was trying to round up a work crew to do yard work at the
Emerald’s house. Free IBO labor in exchange for the privilege of spending time
with the Emerald. Uh yeah. Sounds great. Where do I sign up to yank that
bastard’s weeds? Fortunately the Platinum sneered at me and others in the room
including Ambot that we haven’t earned the privilege yet to spend time with
that bastard. Whew! Lucky me!
The Platinum’s wife rarely went to meetings. I personally think she was just
sick of listening to her husband spout off the same old bullshit. He said by
virtue of reaching Platinum status she’d earned the privilege to stay home with
the kids instead of hiring a babysitter. Hunh? Their son and daughter were in
their early teens. They needed a babysitter? Holy shit I was babysitting when I
was eleven years old. Children of ambots are so badly behaved they need a
sitter into their teens? Maybe all the mothers in the Amway meeting who hadn’t
earned that privilege should have stopped by the Platinum’s house on the way to
the meeting and dumped their kids off with the wife for some free babysitting.
We earned that privilege because we had to put up with her husband that
evening while she got a free pass!
Most of the time the “you haven’t earned the privilege” was a taunt to the cult
followers who hadn’t reached a high enough level in Amway or any level in Amway
as was the case with most of the ambots in our meetings. Most often the
privilege taunt had to do with meeting someone further upline like a Diamond.
Or more appropriately hadn’t earned the privilege of providing free
labor to the Diamond because they hadn’t reached a high enough level in Amway.
Whew! Snuck under the radar on that one that I wasn’t on call to cook those
bastards free gourmet dinners! Actually that might have been kind of fun
spiking their food with something nasty!
A lot of the time the “haven’t earned the privilege yet” might have meant
something else. Like owning something of significant value that your upline
doesn’t own. Just because someone in your upline drives a clunker car or rents
instead of owns a house doesn’t mean that you have to go backwards in life and
give up these items that you’ve worked hard to attain. I think it has much more
to do with jealousy that they don’t have what you have and that’s why upline
flaunts the “you haven’t earned the privilege” taunt.
The last time I took out a loan to buy a new vehicle was in 1993 and I paid it
off early so the bank probably wasn’t too happy with me that they couldn’t make
more money on interest on that one. I’ve never taken out a loan since then to
buy a vehicle. Just don’t feel comfortable doing it. I’ve always been a cash
person but that doesn’t mean I would never consider taking out a loan depending
on the circumstances.
When we joined Amway my car was 5 years old. I paid cash for it when I bought
it. Looked good, ran good, suited my needs. Almost immediately the sack of shit
Platinum was riding my ass about it demanding to know how much I paid for it
and how much was left on my loan. I don’t think I told him how much I paid but
I told him there was no loan I paid cash when I bought it. So he had to try
another tactic. Or two or three. Bottom line was he wanted me to sell my car
and buy something older and cheaper and then I’d have money in my pocket to buy
more Amway products and tools. Like that was ever going to happen. Someone my
age doesn’t need to be driving around in an old clunker that’s breaking down
all the time. That “privilege” can go to the younger ambots.
Then our house came into the equation. Nope we didn’t pay cash for it. Like
just about everyone else we have a mortgage. This is not our first house. When
you sell a house you use the equity for the down payment on the next house you
buy. If you do it a few times by your last house hopefully there isn’t too much
of a mortgage.
Our Platinum had recently purchased his first house. And I say its about time!
You have a full time job and your two children are in their teens and you’re
still renting?! Fucking loser! I wouldn’t even consider having kids until I
owned a home. Its called security!
Our house came up when ambot “counselled with upline”. Different scenarios.
Take out a home owners line of credit on the equity and use those funds to pay
off the credit cards to leave more room to buy more Amway shit and tools. Sell
the house. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!!!??????? And do pretty much the same
thing. Find a place to rent and use the equity to pay off the credit card bills
so you can run them up again.
Excuse me but we had zero balance on those fucking credit cards until you
fucking upline assholes badgered my husband into buy buy buy Amway’s shitty
products and investing in the tool scam. Our penalty for getting involved in
your Amway scam is to sell our house and use the equity to buy more shitty
Amway products? Go to hell!
Equity is to be used for the next house purchase! If you uplines weren’t such
fucking morons you’d know that and wouldn’t be giving full of shit financial
advice. That’s one of the reasons I like David Bach’s books. He doesn’t do way
out there shitty advice like Amway cult leaders. He says pay off those damned
credit card bills but don’t let that debt stand in the way of getting a
mortgage and owning a house. You can do it all. Pay down your debt and your
mortgage and put away money for savings and investments.
Holy shit! I can see the upline covering their ears and screaming NO!!!!
And seeing as how I brought it up lets talk about ambots who own houses. Our
Platinum owned his house - or said he did, I never saw the deed but somehow I
suspect he might have a few upline “business partners” names on it. Another
Platinum in cross line I met owned his house. Our Emerald owned his house. The
only other IBO I know who owned a house were the parents of an IBO. I don’t
think we should count them. They only signed up to help their son out. They may
have bought some stuff but they never went to Amway meetings.
So why the big flap about our house? We’ve been homeowners for many years. This
caused a lot of outrage with the upline that we owned a house while almost
everyone in our upline were renters.
I figured it out. Jealousy! Upline’s reasoning is we can’t have what they don’t
have because we haven’t “earned the privilege”. Because they’re a higher level
in Amway than we are we can’t have anything they don’t have.
Jealous, petty, materialistic ambots. Got one message for you when it comes to
my car and my house: Fuck off!
Anna, you are absolutely correct about the deep motivation behind the "You don't have the privilege yet!" scream that IBOs always hear from up-line, especially from Platinums.
ReplyDeleteIt's based on pure resentment and envy. A big thing for up-line is their sense of superiority and power over down-line. They want to be the bosses, the mentors, the directors, and the role models for anyone below them in the Amway hierarchy. And since most people who sign up in Amway are losers to begin with, it's usually possible for up-line to act this way. They collect monthly fees from you, they give you advice, they issue directives, they order you to do (or not do) certain things, and they lord it over their IBOs like medieval seigneurs lording it over the poor serfs. What a sense of power these Platinum assholes have!
Well, if an IBO has things that are a cut above what up-line has, this seriously rankles them. You own a nice and expensive car? You own your own house? You have nice furniture and fashionable clothing? You go on vacations? All this will send your up-line into a slow burn, and he will do everything in his power to force you to give up those advantages, all in the name of the Great Amway God.
When he screams "You don't have the privilege yet!" what he's really saying is this: "No one has the right to be successful and happy in life if they haven't done it through Amway! And I'm ahead of you in the line for that success! YOU CAN"T BE BETTER THAN ME!"
Up-line will give an IBO deliberately bad financial advice in order to wreck the IBO's financial situation, so as to reduce him to an inferior level. One of the biggest and most evil things an up-line can do in this area is to counsel the IBO to sell his house and rent. Owning a house is one of the really solid foundations of security and success! Giving up that house for the prospect of being a renter is suicidal.
To all Amway IBOs -- your up-line does not want to help you. What he really wants is to demean you and make you feel inferior to him.
Anonymous - resentment and envy is a huge driving force behind Amway cult leaders. They are outraged if anyone in the downline has a nicer lifestyle than them and they set out to destroy it.
DeleteWWDB = World Wide Destructive Bastards!
I'm sure we can all be a little envious if one of our friends has something nice happen like a big promotion or buys a boat or goes on an amazing vacation but normal people don't go out of their way to rage on that person like it's done in the Amway cult.
Amway losers hate it when others are happy and successful in their life and are ahead of them when it comes to finances and retirement. They make themselves feel better by screeching about how that person hadn't earned that privilege yet for no better reason that that person reached that milestone before the Amway loser.
There is that famous quote attributed to Gore Vidal the famous American man of letters, "whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." I think there is a little bit of that in all of us. The feeling of inadequacy when our friends have something that we don't. Most of us get over this though and quickly. To spend your life resenting other people for their successes is to be perpetually miserable because you cannot be happy with the things you do have.
DeleteMLM companies are however like perpetual children, incapable of processing emotions in any sophisticated way. Everyone in an MLM scam needs to be angry about 'unearned' goodies. Never mind that if you buy a house, it is due to a fair degree of sacrifice to get the deposit on the house. Never mind that if you have a credit card maxed to the limit, this is not evidence of something great in your life. I understand that circumstances can force you into that situation and it is a tough place to be but there is a difference between paying health care or essential bills and thereby maxing your card out versus buying boxes of soap to store in your garage in the hope that one day someone will decide to wash their clothes with soap bought from you.
The harsh truth in life is that there will always be people richer than you and people smarter than you. There will even be people who are both richer and smarter than you. Probably there are people who are less well off than you and people who are less capable than you are. Envy is natural but not particularly good for your mental health. Neither is gloating about your situation compared to someone else. You are where you are due to a combination of skills, work effort and luck. If you are lucky enough to be born in the USA or Australia your hard work is likely to lead to some kind of success. If you are born in a war torn country your intelligence, hard work and other skills and talents will not give you as great an outcome in most cases.
The moral of the story is to accept what you cannot change, change what you can and never take it all for granted. Whatever else you think about never think about an MLM scam as a way out of your circumstances. You will work hard for no reward just to perpetuate the riches of some person levels above you in a hierarchy and you will gain absolutely no meaningful life experience along the way except perhaps for mistrusting your fellow humans for the rest of your life and mistrusting all your fellow human beings is a terrible place to live.
Aussie Hillbilly - as you said normal people don't obsess over successes other people are having. That is something Amway losers do. And that is one of the reasons why Amway Ambots are so miserable. Another reason they're so angry all the time is because they're losing boatloads of money in ScAmway. They attach onto anything else that can keep them in this miserable frame of mind. And ironically they go around screeching at everyone else for being negative when they need to look in the mirror. The most negative people I've met in my life have all been in the Amway cult.
DeleteAnd those are good words of wisdom about accepting what you can't change and change what you can. An MLM scam will never be the answer unless you are one of the founders or got in early enough to make money off the poor suckers that came behind you.
IBOs in Amway live in a little self-contained bubble of anger and hate. They are losing money on a regular basis (and believe me, they are well aware of it). They cannot recruit down-line. They are forced to attend meaningless functions that teach them nothing but bleed them dry of cash. They must tolerate all the contempt and abuse that their up-line dishes out, and not say a word in protest.
DeleteQuite naturally, they are filled with repressed resentment. So they must let some of it out by abusing others -- and the perfect targets are people not in Amway, who are already officially demonized by up-line.
Anonymous - those are all good reasons for someone to be angry and resentful. And how they make themselves feel better by abusing others. Whether they're in the Amway cult or not! The phoniest people around are Amway losers. They are full of anger and hate and go around with fake smiles and love bombing while preaching the gospel of never say negative. Two faced liars.
Delete