As for leadership, I am the kind who leads reluctantly and more by example than anything else. Someone had to be on the incorporation papers as president.
Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now.
Even small cults are a serious cost on the world economy, to victims, their families, employers, friends, and credit-card companies.
Some people recovering from drugs or alcohol stay with the programs indefinitely, making the recovery program their family, a long-term source of attention rewards.
Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes.
Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.
Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environment.
People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years, and the long-term reproductive success loop over generations.
Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.
The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.
I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.
If anyone wonders why the airlines are not doing well it is because flying has been made such an unpleasant and degrading experience.
Most of the suicide hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a place not lacking in wealth. But due to rapid population growth, the wealth per capita has fallen by about half in a generation.
The information that is passed from person to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor that gives humans a competitive advantage over other animals.
Children do not have to learn that streets are dangerous places by potentially fatal trial and error.
I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.