Amway: the cult of free enterprise.

• Author: Bass, Paul

Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise.

Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise. Steve Butterfield, South End Press, $8.50. Recruits are given special monikers within the organization and are promised salvation. Soon they find themselves sitting for 12 hours at a stretch at mass rallies, chanting thanks to the Leader for "teaching us to be free.' Contacts with parents and friends who aren't in the circle of the elect are cut off. Lectures, speeches, tapes and books indoctrinate them and incite them to fight for the Free World against Communism. They do not second-guess their superiors. They work long hours for little or no pay for the leaders who "love' them.

Moonies? Close. These are the shock troops of Amway.

Steve Butterfield, a Vermont English professor and onetime distributor for the mammoth corporation, tells how the peddling of laundry soap and breath freshener has been turned into a religious quest for half a million Americans.

His tale is a chilling one. Amway somehow devised a method for brainwashing its eager legions into sacrificing their lives to line the company's pocket, all the while convincing them that they're crusading for something much different.

Take the work ethic, for example. Once recruits are drawn into Amway, they enlist their own distributors through a pyramid scheme, much like a chain letter. You get rich by convincing those below you to give you money in the belief that by doing so they can get rich. So to make enough money through Amway to be able to quit your regular job, you have to dupe 100 others into becoming independent distributors on their own and buying overpriced Amway motivational tapes and books every week to "learn' how to earn a million dollars. While ostensibly pushing the work ethic, Amway lecturers teach you that the aim of the job is to retire and take ocean...