The Cult Leader/Henchman System

One of the prevailing hopes/dreams of humanity is the world could be good and just if the current day leadership were removed/killed.

The author Robert Sopolsky (sp?) published a paper on a tribe of baboons (I think) in Africa where the alpha male leadership died off after gorging on tainted food from a trashbin or some similar scenario. The alpha males prevented the lower status apes from eating the goodies, so it only affected them.

He described the resulting dead alpha male ape society as a golden age. The survivors had lower stress levels and lived a more equal, mutually beneficial life at least for a while. That seems to support the notion that wiping out the "leadership" of any given corporate entity, like a country, would result in a similar golden age... I think there's some merit to that concept.

The problem with that theory is it seems like "the problem" isn't solely the alpha leadership, especially for humans, it's all the followers that really make the pyramid system function, so even if the top of the pyramid is lopped off, the lower levels will quickly build another one.

Videos of frat hazing cult behavior sometimes are released to the public. Even though hazing has been banned a number of times over the years, and to non-cult members the behavior seems insane, lots of people still "willingly" engage in it. 

Recently there were bodycam videos from police going into a frat house in Iowa where a bunch of shirtless dudes were standing in a dark room in the basement. The dudes in the basement were so brainwashed into an alternate reality of frat membership "omerta" that they could barely respond to questions from the police.

The pyramid structure seems to be something like:

• Cult Leader Figurehead
• Top Psychopath Henchmen
• Second tier henchmen who tell NPCs what to do
• NPCs

In the cases of Aum Shinrikyo and the Bagwan Sri Rajneesh cults the cult leader and the top psychopath henchmen lived in a sort of co-dependent relationship where the attributes the cult leader lacked were made up for by the psychopathic henchmen, and vice versa. The top level henchmen maybe lack the charisma or desire to interact with the public, or lack the confidence or insanity to try to foist their crazy expansive crazy vision on others. Similarly, the cult leader probably lacks the desire to deal with myriad details to carry out their insane schemes.

I think if the leaders and complete top level henchman layer of society were removed entirely, it would take a long time for a pyramid structure to reconstitute. That pyramidal structure, though, and the cult leader/henchman system is duplicated over and over throughout the entirety of a country like the US.