Everything Is a Pyramid Scheme
You might have heard of pyramid schemes like Amway and Herbalife, but you might not have heard of this secret pyramid scheme that has existed for hundreds of years. It's called capitalism.
WAIT!
Before you click off this article with the assumption that I’m some sort of anarcho-communist who is trying to virtue signal to a leftist echo chamber, just wait. I’m going to explain to you how to survive the series of never-ending pyramid schemes and leverage the nature of late-stage capitalism for your own benefit. This is not a political article. This is simply a realist view of personal finance in dystopia.
Tony Soprano Says It Best
In modernity, every successful business model other than a simple mom-and-pop store generally follows the motto of “shit rolls downhill. Money goes up.” Also, mom-and-pop shops generally get steamrolled or bought out by big businesses that can operate with narrower profit margins, so they’re rarely viable these days. Even when someone does find a niche that hasn’t been saturated to start their small business in, it ends up getting bought out or steamrolled by the big players once they have become privy to the new status quo. Usually, these days, this is happening in big tech.
Everything is designed to exploit human capital.
The idea is to keep you in debt and force you to work. You are programmed to fear debt. This is how they gain your leverage. You may think, “I just won't go into debt”. Unless you’re independently wealthy (in which case, why are you reading this?), good luck buying a house, a car, or an education without debt.
Many think that a clever way around this is to go into the trades, but this is ultimately a trap as well because you will be paying medical bills which are disproportionate to your income in your 40s (from back and knee injuries as well as toxic inhalants) so unless you were extremely frugal and lucky in your 20s and 30s you’re probably fucked.
However, I said, they gain their leverage based on your fear of debt. Not the debt itself. So here’s how that works. You’re afraid of what will happen to your credit score if you can’t pay back your debt fast enough. You’re afraid you’ll never be able to buy a house. The sad truth for the majority of our generation is that most of us won’t be able to afford a house either way.
But I’ve got some good news for you. There is no debtors prison. They’re not going to put you into indentured servitude if you don’t pay it back. What happens is you talk to the collectors and generally settle for a lower fee that you pay off monthly. As long as you work with them and try to pay back little amounts at a time, they’re never even going to take you to court or garnish your wages. It's too much of a time and labor sink for them to take you to court in most cases.
Federal loans have forgiveness after about 20–25 years. Keep this in mind. People freak out way more than they should about debt. The U.S. is built on debt. It's literally how this country runs. The U.S. is at $33 trillion in debt. And I don’t see them trying to pay much of it back.
That's not to say that you should open up a new line of credit and immediately max it out on high-risk strategies. But if there is a college degree that can set you up for success in a lucrative career, it's absolutely worth it despite what many will tell you.
Everything is structured in a pyramid.
Ok, I went on a bit of a tangent about Debt there for a while, but I’ll reel it back in…
Think of Andrew Tate’s Hustlers University. Andrew Tate (a controversial internet guru) created another one of those “make money online” courses. Its filled with a bunch of obvious methods like copywriting, affiliate marketing, etc. But the main way everyone makes money with Hustlers University is by affiliate marketing the course itself! The majority of internet courses work on a pyramid scheme basis like this!
Some guy at the top collects all the cash while the people beneath him do all of the work. And the lower down the pyramid you go, the less money people are making.
Find me one business model these days that doesn’t work like this.
Key Takeaways
Okay, so I said I was going to teach you how to leverage this all in your favor. Now that you know everything is a pyramid scheme and that fear of debt is what keeps people desperate, how do we go forward?
Step one: don’t be afraid to go into debt for something valuable like education. If you choose a lucrative field, you’ll be able to pay the debt off easily. If you don’t, the debt goes away after a long enough time, regardless. Sure, your credit score will be destroyed, but you can pay credit repair agencies to fix it. You probably weren't going to be able to buy a house if you couldn’t pay off 100k of debt over 20 years in the first place. Let's just be real.
But the other aspect I want you to see is that everybody is involved in some sort of pyramid structure in today's society. You just have to choose the right one that you can get in on as close to the top as possible. Seek undersaturated profitable ventures and execute. Realize that in order to really make money, you’ll need to delegate work to people below you that you can profit off of. Is it exploitative? Yes. But that's capitalism. There is no such thing as ethical participation in capitalism. It was always a game of survival. I don’t like it any more than you do, but if you want to win, then you should accept this truth.
