But you could argue it had benefits, because it was so
obviously stupid it may have inoculated potential victims against cult think and saved some lives.
Moral orientations fall neatly on two spectra. One is empathy to narcissism. The other is practicality, which can be counterintuitive, vs emotion, which has no concept of consequences beyond the present moment.
Both are "subjective" in the sense that you can't usually argue people from one to the other.
The rest is execution and PR.
There's some social conditioning which teaches people that empathy is good, and rather more that suggests practicality is valued and emotional regulation should be a thing.
But in the real world - and especially in the US - narcissism is far more valued in practice, and emotionality is far more profitable.
Which is why it's a culture of opportunists, corporate criminals, scammers, and manipulators.
Meanwhile, in a very real, literal, sense Wall St is just Heaven's Gate with quarterly reports. The outcome - mass suicide - shows every sign of being identical in the medium term.
The machinery is far more abstracted and indirect, which makes it harder to see when you're inside it. But there's only a difference of scale between a lone nutjob scamming a handful of followers to death and a collection of systems and institutions that are objectively likely to leave most of the planet uninhabitable by the end of the century.