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 cruises while others do your work for you.