High status males had multiple wives or additional mating opportunities in the ancestral environment.

Humans have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to changes in status.

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environment.

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.

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.