Anyone here ever run into a deal like one of these?

I'd known a guy many years ago who got up every weekday morning and went to work at a place called Andy Wall Advertising in in Beverly Hills. His workday consisted of four hours of "dialing for dollars" on old-fashioned land lines to try to sell small business operators "public image" advertising in an essentially bogus magazine called the Martin Luther King Scholarship Fund Quarterly. Raised by truly awful parents, he was everlastingly devious and compensatorily narcissistic. And he'd learned all manner of manipulation techniques including subtle shame & guilt maneuvers, and codependent-controlling Karpman Drama Triangulations. (Decades later, I saw "him" in George Simon's In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People and Susan Forward's Emotional Blackmail.)

Not long thereafter, I recalled my own experience of interviewing for a job with a personnel recruitment outfit in downtown LA while I was going to college nearby. The guy who ran the place was an awful, utterly antisocial gonif with no scruples. And the people working on the phone banks reminded me vaguely of a movie I'd seen starring Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin & Kevin Spacey (as the very "bad guy") about a timeshare sales boiler room.

Years after I had worked for a multi-media operation in a major resort city, and learned quite a bit about cult dynamics from comparing my own experiences in and around several (including the CoS, the WTS, and est, it dawned on me that what I'd experienced at the job (over several years) was disturbing similar to everything I've thus far mentioned. The man and woman who ran the media company were vile manipulators who constantly cheated on and abused their advertising sales people and creative staffs. So much so that the large (for the area) company had a reputation for driving people to severe alcoholism and nervous breakdowns. (One of those owners drank herself to death in 1997.)

As I studied cult dynamics online and in books like these, I began to see how that firm and others I ran into (but thankfully never worked at, or -- at least -- not for long) ran their operations on A 10-Level Pyramid Model & Psychodynamics of Cult Organization. Including a huge natural resources company in Orange County, the largest seller of heavy earth-moving equipment in Southern California, the largest developer and operator of regional shopping malls in the Western US, etc.

From the outside, most of these companies looked really "good." On the inside, however, it was evident that they operated on that pyramid, and that as employees climbed up the side thereof, they became increasingly caught in the cultic addiction process and increasingly willing to abuse those further down to advance the imperatives of the "gurus" at the top. Authoritarianism has been around for thousands of years, of course. (Did the pharaohs "invent" it in the "Western" cultures? IDK4S.) And masking it behind various "respectable fogbanks" has been around for centuries as well.