It seems to me like in the case of Leverage, them working 75 hours per week reduced the time the could have used to use Reason to conclude that they are in a system that's bad for them. 

That's very different from someone having a few conversation with Vassar and then adopting a new belief and spending a lot of the time reasoning about that alone and the belief being stable without being embedded into a strong enviroment that makes independent thought hard because it keeps people busy.

A cult in it's nature is a social institution and not just a meme that someone can pass around via having a few conversations.

It seems to me that, at least in your worldview, this question of whether and what sort of subtle mental influence between people is possible is extremely important, to the point where different answers to the question could lead to pretty different political philosophies.

Let's consider a disjunction: 1: There isn't a big effect here, 2: There is a big effect here.

In case 1:

• It might make sense to discourage people from talking too much about "charisma", "auras", "mental objects", etc, since they're pretty fake, really not the primary factors to think about when modeling society.
• The main problem with the relevant discussions at Leverage is that they're making grandiose claims of mind powers and justifying e.g. isolating people on the basis of these, not actual mental influence.
• The case made against Michael, that he can "cause psychotic breaks" by talking with people sometimes (or, in the case of Eric B, by talking sometimes with someone who is talking sometimes with the person in question), has no merit. People are making up grandiose claims about Michael to justify scapegoating him, it's basically a witch hunt. We should have a much more moderated, holistic picture where ther

One important implication of "cults are possible" is that many normal-seeming people are already too crazy to function as free citizens of a republic.

In other words, from a liberal perspective, someone who can't make their own decisions about whether to hang out with Michael Vassar and think about what he says is already experiencing a severe psychiatric emergency and in need of a caretaker, since they aren't competent to make their own life decisions. They're already not free, but in the grip of whatever attractor they found first.

Personally I bite the bullet and admit that I'm not living in a society adequate to support liberal democracy, but instead something more like what Plato's Republic would call tyranny. This is very confusing because I was brought up to believe that I lived in a liberal democracy. I'd very much like to, someday.