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cult like behaviour has emerged despite the good intentions of those in control.

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[forum.culteducation.com]

Gaining power puts the powerholder at increased risk of misdoing.
Let us look at the Stanford Cookie Experiment.

I first learned of this experiment from reading a book, written by Robert I Sutton, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford University, entitled The No Asshole Rule:Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't.

let us look at Professor Deborah Gruenfeld's experiment--what I term the Stanford Cookie Experiment. I believe that scholars of cults and dysfunctional organizatins need to place this experiment alongside Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiment and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment.

This experiement demonstrates how a leadership role, randomly assigned, has a tendency to trigger swinish bad manners in otherwise normal persons.

The way the experiment worked (and it was replicated a number of times)
subjects were assembled into a group to do a shared task.

*At random, one subject in each group was assigned the role of overseeing and evaluating the others' work--randomly assigned to a leadership role.

During the experiment, a plate of cookies/biscuits was brought in.

Time and again, those subjects randomly assigned to the leadership role, tended
to do the following:

Took more cookies (greed)
Chewed with mouths open (lapses of ordinary good manners)
Got crumbs on their faces and left crumbs on the table (messes for others to clean up)

Thus, random assignment to a brief, time limited leadership role had a potent effect--increasing the probability that the promoted subject's manners would deteriorate.

Now...these were persons who had not sought the leadership role. By contrast, the persons who interest us are those who are driven to desire power, desire fame, spend years seeking ways to market themselves, hone their persuasive skills, and once they become leaders of personality centered groups, are waited on, insulated from consequences, and have enablers making excuses for them.

Imagine the Cookie Experiment going on for ten years or more, and with someone who sought the leadership role, rather than being randomly assigned to that role, and for just an hour or two.

That matchs the life trajectory of many gurus and human potential leaders.

The experiment was done by Professor Deborah Gruenfeld of Stanford University--her
speciality has been researching the effects of putting people in positions of power where they lord it over others.

[www.google.com]

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Stoic
Except that in this case, that of Diamond Way, there is only one person who has set up, directed and controlled the structure of the organisation from the beginning.

Any disempowerment is being perpetrated by that person...

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Stoic
suenam,

There is nothing more disempowering to the followers than a leader who dupes and manipulates them--in the guise of some higher spirituality--and leads them into ignorance and an indulgence of their basest impulses.

Good religion of whatever denomination attempts to lead mankind into some self-control over those base instincts, not give them a solid excuse to behave at their worst.

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Stoic
I further think that what Nydahl is fully buying into is not Buddhism but his own personal aggrandisement by any means possible.