Ockham and cults
BBC has an interview with a former cult member who has made a career out of analyzing cults. The BBC interview doesn't name the cult, but it's named and fully described elsewhere. It was an unexpectedly small operation that lasted at least 20 years, centered mainly in the Minneapolis area. Cult members received memos from the nameless leader, telling them which jobs to take, what to eat, where to shop, who to marry, when to have kids, how to raise the kids ... essentially all the details of life.

Supposedly the cult was running a revolution based on Maoist ideology. It began with a violent takeover of food coops, but after that it did nothing at all. Members lived rigidly middle-class lives in middle-class neighborhoods, doing the same things as other middle-class parents. The only difference: these middle-class parents were living their ordinary middle-class lives under specific direct orders from the Leader, while other middle-class parents were living their ordinary middle-class lives under broad indirect orders from the TV.

What was the purpose? Unanswered in the various narratives. The only possible answer is simple raw power and money for the Leader. He got a more direct dose of powerjuice than the management of BBC or NPR or Fox or Apple or Google or USA STRONG. Those larger cult leaders know that their orders are being obeyed by millions, but they don't have direct personal feedback to WATCH the robots obeying them. They have to rely on polls and "elections" and NSA monitoring, which must be less satisfying than personal spies.

Non-cult observers tend to overthink the purposes of power, always seeing a complicated chain of ulterior purposes. Nice example in ZeroHedge today: "Our foreign policy is designed to perpetuate the failing petrodollar system." Nope. Just raw psychopathic genocidal powerlust.
  ¶ 5:08 AM