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Niccolo Machiavelli
(Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
A
Machiavellian, named after
Niccolo (ni-co-LO) Machiavelli, is a manipulative SOB (or DOB, just to keep it equal), who knows every button to push to make you do his (or her) bidding, through cunning and duplicity. Whether the one being used will be harmed is of no consequence to the "user", as long as the user derived benefit from it.
By default, any
network marketing upline is a Machiavellian, because as long as you have joined (and bought a starter kit), your upline will have benefited. Whether you benefit from joining is completely irrelevant.
However, as in most cases, manipulation can be for good... or evil. Machiavelli himself was often portrayed as amoral manipulator, but that would be simplifying the issues too far into black and white. He was advocating the rulers to get things done, through manipulation if need be.
Think about it. Aren't modern laws trying to "push" you into behaving a certain way? Like the various "sin tax" on things like cigarettes and alcohol?
But in general governments don't enact laws to be evil. Scammers do. Let's assume for now we are talking about the EVIL machiavellians only.
Machiavellianism (manipulate others for one's own gain), along with Narcissism (extremely self-centered), and Psychopathy (have no empathy), are known as the
"dark triad" of personality traits.
Origin of Machiavellianism in Scams
How do uplines "go bad"? Generally, it's because they were taught that way. Instead of learning how to sell (i.e marketing), they were taught "ass backwards" to emphasize the network instead. Apparently they were taught that as long as everybody they recruit (into the network) buy a 'starter kit' that counts as "sales".
But it's not sales. There were no sales to real customers. All sales are to affiliates / recruits.
And they will instill the SAME (and WRONG) attitude onto their downlines.
Chinese has a term for this: 層壓式傳銷 which literally means "level pressure style marketing", though commonly translated as "
pyramid selling". The closest term in the West is "product-based pyramid scheme", where products are barely sold outside the network, but are mostly consumed within, but with money moving from the bottom up. At certain angles, this indeed resembles network marketing, but the key difference is in network marketing, the overall goal is to sell products to customers OUTSIDE the company. There are people outside, NOT affiliates, that are actively using the products, and people are selling to those customers. Product-based pyramid scheme, on the other hand, sells to its own affiliates, with little to no sales to outside customers. Some are known to claim to give away stocks or "points" that can be traded for stocks later... if you buy up a lot more products.
One such scheme in China went after the elderly, by telling them the company will do
initial public offering (IPO) soon, must bring up sales figures, must look good, so IPO can go smoothly, and encouraged the affiliates / customers to buy up even more products (most of which are vastly overpriced) for the "virgin stocks" which supposedly can be traded for real stocks if IPO goes through. It never did, and the company was busted as pyramid selling. The seniors were manipulated into joining, with fraudulent product claims and income potentials, then with various manipulations to buy up even more stuff that they don't need. The same scenario was repeated last year, when another company was busted in Hong Kong, this time claiming that
this US-based company is going to be very big if people buy up their "Internet Comm Suite" for 24000 HKD (about 3000 USD) a year to accumulate "points" to be traded for stock later, and company will buy back the stock for huge riches.
Both pyramid selling cases relied on people who have little understanding of IPO and stock market. But the same idea can be applied to almost any sort of potential profit. And it always involve the same 3 steps.
A machiavellian's "modus operandi" has 3 steps:
Let us discuss each in turn.
