How to spot cult leader personalities

The author is on point, and he didn't say 'cult leaders' are good, he said that people with that personality type can be, which of course they can.

I think that most of our 'great leaders' (good one's) that we look up to, flirt with this mindset for periods of time in their lives.

Not all cult leaders maintain their disposition after being arrested.

The author was fairly concise actually in identifying core attributes, and especially with the meta cognition bit.

I didn’t read it that way at all, and felt that section ring particularly true. “Joust” really just seems like another word for willing to engage in well-intentioned debate. The realization the author likely made was that the so-called “cult leaders” were not at all engaging in good faith, despite them and their followers insisting otherwise. Some really great examples of this would be Jordan Peterson or Eric Weinstein. The moment you think you can engage with these sorts in good faith is the moment you’ve fallen into their trap.

I’ve always been fascinated by personality, and spent a decent amount of time in and out of school studying it.

One thing that gets me about the way this author talks is it’s condescending. As though he’s an enlightened observer staring down over his spectacles at this type of person. (Like the final quote about cult leaders being mundane or boring…) Sorry to say, but that person you’re talking down on is probably way more clever and motivated than you are. He’s putting you in the bucket not the other way around!

But the thing that fascinates me is how personalities evolved in general. Like why do people have these set ways of being?

The apparent answer is that personalities evolved as a symbiotic trait. If I have a few people in my village: one’s an asshole to defend from enemies, one’s passionate and emotional to rear children, one’s a narcissist who wants to unite and lead us (under him), one’s a thinker who will improve our hunting and killing tools, and a few people just don’t think that much and view life as hard and are willing to “just go along with things”…

Before you know it we have a mini society. A village of people who work together automatically bc it’s just who they are and it works for (most of) them

So the question is: are cult leaders actually something that thousands of years ago was a benefit? Has society changed so that now they just don’t fit like they otherwise would in a healthy village? Or do parasitic personalities also evolve that have always been a detriment to the rest of us?

I was confused reading this. Is the author talking about literal suicide cult leaders like Jones, Koresh, and Applewhite, or "cult of personality" types like Jobs and Elon?