Glenn W. Turner is now all but forgotten. But this salesman extraordinaire in flashy suits was once all but omnipresent in American life. Turner, the son of a sharecropper, told people they could all be rich and successful like him — if, that is, they made an investment in his multilevel marketing company. They would peddle “mink oil” makeup and his “Dare to Be Great” motivational tapes, and collect more money by recruiting others and taking a percentage on their sales.

When newly minted salespeople found it impossible to make a go of it, they were told to “fake it until you make it,” by wearing expensive clothes and waving around $100 bills to lure in others, a disillusioned Oregon recruit testified in court in 1972. A few months later, another seller would tell a Florida courtroom that he, too, had been instructed to “fake it till you make it.” When the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Turner’s company, a judge cited the phrase as evidence of malfeasance.

As far as I’ve been able to discover, these are among the first times that this now commonplace phrase received prominent mention in the media. Today, “fake it till you make it” has come to represent the scrappy, optimistic mind-set of American hustle culture. But as Turner’s saga shows, there’s a dark side baked into the “fake it” mentality: the fakers who attempt to win success through fraud, then never make good on their promises.

“It’s inherently manipulative, deceptive, fraudulent, inauthentic,” says Robert L. FitzPatrick, co-author of “False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes.” Yet, he adds, “it’s just entered the culture, and it’s completely normalized.”

As Elizabeth Holmes gives way to Sam Bankman-Fried, who gives way to George Santos, it’s worth pondering why our society has embraced an ethos popularized by a huckster such as Turner. What does it mean for a nation to valorize faking it as a means to an end — and is there any way for Americans to turn back?

It’s not clear who originated the exact wording of “fake it till you make it,” or how Turner and his followers adopted it. But it draws on older strains in American life, marrying psychological concepts on how to change human behavior with the positive-thinking self-help culture that might as well be America’s unofficial state religion.

The notion that you can fake it until you make it began to spread through multilevel marketing efforts such as Turner’s, where studies show few earn a profit and deception is rife. The saying became so pervasive in Amway that it would be the title of a 1980s exposé by Phil Kerns. “I have often wondered if Amway distributors borrowed this terminology from Turner’s group, or was it Turner who confiscated these words and phrases from some Amway distributors?” Kerns wrote.

Even as Turner attracted increasingly negative attention — in 1972, he was arrested on 86 counts of violating securities laws — the phrase gained popularity in a more earnest context within Alcoholics Anonymous. There, it appeared as a way for people in recovery to project themselves forward into a more sober future. Today, the phrase is also a way to push back on the feelings of self-doubt we call impostor syndrome, or to put forward an advantageous personal or professional confidence we might not entirely feel. That spirit is everywhere. But nowhere has the ethos of “fake it” found more fertile soil than in Silicon Valley, where the line between optimism and deceit can admittedly be a fine one. In the low-interest-rate environment of the past decade, investors put up money with little diligence, and “fake it till you make it” turned toxic.

Food delivery services such as Grubhub and Postmates included restaurants on their platforms that didn’t have contracts with them. JPMorgan Chase fell for Frank, a college financial planning outfit whose customer base it later (allegedly) discovered was mostly made up of fake email addresses created at the behest of founder Charlie Javice. (Javice has denied the bank’s claims.)

No surprise, trust is cratering. According to 2019 surveys done by the Pew Research Center, almost half of us say Americans are not as reliable as in the past. We don’t trust the government, media or big business. We are forever suspicious, convinced someone else wants to profit at our expense.

And all too often, we are right.