Many years ago a friend talked me into attending an Amway seminar - the impression I got from it was that it was a way of converting your social capital into cash. You use your social networks to peddle overpriced commodity, first yourself and then have your friends hawking them for you. What struck me about it was not that much the idea of "selling out your friendships," but the religious zeal that you had to have to succeed - you had to devote your entire life to the idea of selling their stuff and moving up the pyramid ladder (according to their "training materials."). I understand there are many similar pyramid schemes in the US, such as Tupperware "parties", May Kay cosmetics etc.
Of course the question is whether US society is more susceptible to this kind of scheming than other societies. There were attempts to export pyramid schemes, including Amway, to Eastern Europe, but to my knowledge most of them flopped, or were just outright frauds. I do not have any systematic data to support it, but if this observation is accurate, it seems to suggest that E. European societies are less susceptible to this kind of scheming. Hence the question why?
I can see two possible explanations, not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first one goes along the lines of Max Weber's argument in "_The protestant ethics and spirit of capitalism_. The argument is that capitalism thrives on a certain type of acquisitive mentality, reinforced by religion and other major social institutions. That mentality motivates people to respond to opportunity and accumulate, even if the accumulated levels exceed the use-value of the commodity in question. By contrast, the pre-modern mentality emphasizes immediate pay-offs, and motivates people to accumulate only to the level when it reaches the limit of its use value, and then stop accumulating regardless of opportunities for further accumulation.
One can thus argue that because of its relative backwardness, Eastern Europe (and other underdeveloped countries, e.g. Latin America) has a population with the prevalent pre-modern mentality. Since the pyramid schemes inherently depend on continuous accumulation - since you have to be fairly high up in the pyramid's hierarchy to reap any tangible benefits, they have limited appeal to these populations.
An alternative explanation hinges on the concept of hierophany - or the empirical manifestation of the sacred - (cf. Mircea Eliade, _Patterns in comparative religion_). A hierophany is a physical object or a situation whose observable characteristics resemble the properties of what is believed to be sacred. For example, a tree can be a hierophany because the seasonal changes it undergoes (growing leaves, blooming, shedding leaves, and so on) resembles or "embodies" the sacred idea of cosmic cycle. Eliade argues that hierophanies, rather than abstract representations, are the backbone of most world religions, save the few modern ones.
It seems that hierophanic representations have a certain appeal to "primitive minds," whereas more scholarly types tend to prefer those based on more abstract signifier-signified relationship. There is, of course a certain streak of hierophanic intellectualism - for example Frank Kafka's idea of the sentence being physically inscribed on the prisoners' bodies (_The penal colony_), or perhaps the Theo Van Gogh's images of semi-nude women with Quaranic verses inscribed on their bodies. But this kind of imagery is rare, and thus quite exotic, among the schooled minds.
Pyramid schemes can easily be seen as hierophanic representations of 'sacred hierarchies" that form the core of certain kind of ideologies or religions. The key idea here is that people who for whatever psychological, cultural or social reason are attracted to the notion of a hierarchically organized society would be inclined to embrace pyramid schemes because they are physical manifestations of the hierarchical order. The added bonus is that hierarchies in such schemes are not ascribed (like the Indian caste system) but achieved through efforts that do not require any special knowledge or skills - so any high school dropout can not only become rich, but also prove his/her "moral worth" by climbing up the Amway or Mar Kay hierarchy - which by virtue of hierophanic representation is tantamount to climbing the hierarchy of beings.
The hierophanic nature of the pyramid schemes may explain their popularity among the bobbitts and uneducated riff-raff, but its limited appeal to the educated folk, even those in financial dire straits.
Wojtek