Cults typically go after single, white, young, middle-class and upper-middle-class people who have been taught to be open to innovative ideas and to try new experiences. They are often intelligent young men and women who are extremely idealistic and altruistic. Margaret Singer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley said that cults “don’t want Chicanos or blacks. They don’t want the streetwise who’ll cause trouble, who know there’s no free lunch. They want the upwardly mobile who come complete with dowries.” (This, of course, is an ironic comment in retrospect, considering how the Rajneeshees’ “Share-A-Home” program, which brought several thousand homeless people from all around America to Rajneeshpuram in order to register them as voters in a local election, turned out, when they staged a mass rebellion against their temporary masters).
https://newrepublic.com/article/147657/outside-limits-human-imagination