Cults and high-control groups have reduced the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of millennia down to one simplicity: "Do as you are told!"
Instead of rational inquiry, loyalty to the group is offered as a superior value. To Obey is to be accepted as provisionally worthy of use.
The most dangerous aspect of cult control is the damage it does to the concept of the individual as a person of merit. Contrarily, cults chop the individual off at the knees and bring him low.
Religious cults instill worthlessness instead. Man is dust on the scales, a worthless sinner, and an enemy of God, the believer is programmed to believe of himself. You cannot, must not, and should not ever consider living your own life for your own good!
Is there any wonder how easily the duped, misled and down-trodden slave easily mouths the words, "I would gladly die for ___such and such___?"
It is heroic to LIVE and cowardly to die so easily, reducing one's self-worth to a pitiful transaction for praise by one's leaders.
I look back on my twenty years as nothing short of mental illness as I traded my youth, energy, time and loyalty for persons and beliefs which held me in utter contempt as one of their stooges.
I'd have "died for" whatever blank they filled in with me signing life away on that dotted line with as much mindful reasoning as a bug smashing into the windshield of a speeding car.
Idiots do idiot things and must not be rewarded for it.
That's the job of the Messianic leader. . . the 'dying for' part of it. I leave that task to the professionals.