Pyramid Schemes

 

There is a scene from the marvellous film ‘Elizabeth’ in which Cate Blanchett’s character Elizabeth I asks her advisor, Walsingham, played by Geoffrey Rush, advice on how to successfully perform the role of a great leader. He advises her to model herself on Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ, who was venerated, worshipped and idealized. Even though Catholicism was forcibly replaced by Protestant Christianity in Tudor England, devotion to the Queen of Heaven remained inbuilt in the populace. ‘They have found nothing to replace Her’, says Walsingham. Elizabeth I was one of the first monarchs to create a cult of personality around her own persona. 

‘The ordinary people must be able to touch the divine here, on Earth’, Walsingham says. 

King Ramses II of Ancient Egypt understood this well. Many statues of him, handsome and muscled, with the seal of rulership on his strong hand, are found all over Egypt. I was told by a guide there, when I asked if he had really looked like that: ‘Even if he did not, he would have been represented like this, because this was the ideal male body, face and stance of the time’. The statues were like multiple selfies, made of stone, built to last. 

At the top of every multi-level structure is an apex personality, a person who is the cynosure of all eyes: the charismatic, high vibration embodiment of the ideal, the public face of the brand. 

And speaking of faces, there is a Golden Ratio which defines beauty, which  identifies that people with symmetrical facial features have mass appeal. It’s the Look people aspire to. To be able to access the divine in their daily lives. Film stars, rock stars and actors all come down to earth from heaven for brief appearances and give audiences and hold court, just as the kings and queens did in the ancient days, when they were born into that ascendancy, or were heirs and scions of families who had won to the apex of their societal structure by combat, conquest and acquisition. 

Pyramid schemes are named this way because, at the summit, the king whose tomb lies within the structure is literally supported by the labour of the masses at the base. Investigations are currently ongoing into several pyramid schemes - now called multi-level marketing, or MLMs - which are unsustainable because of their inevitably inherent inequity, despite the pleasing appearance of their form and structure. 

The people who are invited to join these schemes invest their own money and also are required to bring in clientele from amongst the community of their family and friends. The monetisation of personal support relationships is an unhappy foundation for trust and affection. 

In democracies, paradoxically, these elitist models of wealth creation thrive, just as in America the Kennedys built the new ‘Camelot’, which seems to now have perished with the unexpected death of John Junior, JFK’s heir apparent. People who generally fiercely defend equal rights and often describe themselves as ‘self-made’, idolized ‘England’s Rose’, Diana Princess of Wales, and noticeably invest in being part of the first circle of corporate, filmic, theatrical, musical or operatic ‘royalty’, cultivating their associations with these blessed shining ones. 

The English Romantic poet Shelley, in his poem ‘Ozymandias’, prophesied the decline of these dreams of power and influence. In the famous sonnet, a traveller to an ancient, ‘antique’, land finds the broken parts of a once colossal statue of a long-forgotten king: 

“...Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.”

The inversions of expectation in the phrase showing the pairing of the hand with mockery instead of generosity and the heart that feeds on the people’s energy and devotion, instead of caring for them and nurturing them, portray a self-serving tyrant. Also a man with delusions of grandeur: 

“And on the pedestal, these words appear: 

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; 

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The ironic transience of the power yearned for and wielded by the ancient all-powerful king is a master class in realism. The mighty works of carved stone have toppled and been eroded by time and the weather. Carved stone gets ground down into grains of sand, just as the beautiful bones of a symmetrical face and shapely body unpreventably  disintegrate through the passing of time. Structures fall into disuse and disrepair. The iconic figure of the God King eventually presided over a desolate and bare terrain. 

Nothing human is set in stone.