The Spiritual Ponzi Scheme

In 1903, a young man from a family in Parma, Italy found himself in dire straits. After squandering his time, money, and education at the University of Rome; his family made it a point for him to recognize his disgraceful acts. He was given an ultimatum. They caught wind of a trend of Italian boys migrating to the US to come back with wealth and dignity. They urged him to do the same. Upon arrival, though, he realized the difficulty of life for immigrants in the US. Thus an idea was born. An idea that only changed the face of his life forever, but would be coined as the archetype for the most fraudulent cases in history. His name would be synonymous to fraud. Charles Ponzi.

He utilized his training as working for the Italian Postal Service. Charles Ponzi Ponzi tricked thousands of New England residents into investing in a postage stamp speculation scheme. He promised investors that he could provide a whopping 50 percent return in just 90 days. Each time a new investor gave him money, he’d use those funds to pay off earlier investors to create the illusion that they were profiting from a legitimate business. At the height of his huge scam, he raked in $250,000 a day, about $3 million in today’s money. But his days of scheming and scamming caught up to him in August of that same year, when he was charged with 86 counts of mail fraud.

John Mark Comer wrote in his book, Live No Lies, “the greatest lies are the ones that are mostly true” and posits that lies are weaponized ideas that “have power only when we believe them. We hear all sorts of ideas every day, some brilliant, others ridiculous; but they have zero effect on us unless we begin to trust them as an accurate map to reality.” It’s no mystery that we live in an era of weaponized ideas. It is the perfect arena for these ideas to find mass confirmations amongst people who have attainable means to saturate them. The goal of realizing any actual truth can feel unattainable and impossible to reach.