What kind of person joins a cult?

Jeffery in Alabama at The Feral Irishman posted on the Tsuchinshan Comet and then Irish added HERE. 

That triggered some thoughts.

Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate was a cult that believed that the Hailey-Bopp comet was an Uber to Paradise. 

The central belief of the group was that followers could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by rejecting their human nature, and they would ascend to heaven, referred to as the "Next Level" or "The Evolutionary Level Above Human".  Wikipedia

Their leaders convinced them that they had to leave behind their flawed, mortal bodies to get to the comet and that they would get new-and-improved bodies in Paradise. 39 members committed suicide.

Jonestown

Same but different.

Charismatic leader who claims that God talks to him.

More than 900 people died by suicide and murder.

Jim Jones was a Communist and was a political player in San Francisco...something the Progressives don't like to talk about.

End of the Mayan Calendar

Long article on Wikipedia.

The phenomenon spread widely after coming to public notice, particularly on the Internet, and hundreds of thousands of websites made reference to it. "Ask an Astrobiologist", a NASA public outreach website, received over 5,000 questions from the public on the subject from 2007, some asking whether they should kill themselves, their children or their pets...

Order of the Solar Temple

Given the scale of the issues facing the group leaders, it was decided they would "transit" to Sirius. The Order termed the acts a "transit", which they described as "in no way a suicide in the human sense of the term". In their view, traitors would be simply murdered, while "weaker" members would be "helped" to transit, and the remaining members considered strong enough would kill themselves. Members believed that, upon death, they would acquire "solar bodies" in a faraway location in space (typically given as the star Sirius, but alternatively Jupiter or Venus)

Commonalities?

They all were able to find "seekers" who attached themselves to The Cause. "Seekers" is a nice way to say "aimless drifters".

Many probably suffered from anxiety and were inherently neurotic personalities.

Many desperately WANTED to believe that life is "fair" and that they should never experience suffering.

My gut-feel is that many of them lacked mental toughness. We all grow up being somebody's special snow-flake. Part of growing up is realizing that...well...we are not all that special*. And that someday Granny is going to die and someday we will have to pay our own way and find our own ways to cope with the buffeting and chaos and river of life.

One scary part of cults is that those damaged people were very willing to inject poison into their own children and pets and then themselves.

Some of the people join a cult because they want to be sophisticated and cool and a trend-setter. They want attention and recognition for their special uniqueness! Once inside the cult, they cannot get out and they are brain-washed.

Today

Today we have people who have been convinced it is righteous to not reproduce.

We have people who think a 90% die-off in humans would be a good outcome.

Assisted suicide is available in many countries and it is marketed as a human right.

---that is evidence of the aimless drifting part---

We have vast legions of people who are sure the universe is supposed to revolve around them and they have been groomed to be "tools" of the elites.

There is no shortage of neurotic people. The current system seems to manufacture them on an industrial scale.

If Trump wins, it will be a trigger for some of those people to lose their bananas.

*...not all that special...except to Jesus. Christianity has a pretty good track-record of not being a death-cult. Of course, having a 2000 year history and a billion+ followers, it is possible to find "situations", but on the whole, I still think it is the "best game in town".