Escaping Utopia

One of the problems of living in a free society is that if an individual or group is able to sustain themselves economically, they often have carte blanche to do as they will, regardless of how destructive their behavour is to others. Hence we get cryptocurrency scammers and the like; and also religious cults. This series focuses on Gloriavale, New Zealand, where a cult that sustains itself by treeting its female members as brood mares, and putting the children they spawn to unpaid work at a young age. Cult members are, it seems, not necessarily happy, but scared of an outside world in which they have been denied the opportunity to acquire any capital. The story is both utterly shocking, but also banal. Finally legal action is being taken against the cult on specific charges (unpaid labour, sexual abuse); but while I don't want to live in a dictatorship, it somehow feels wrong that such an organisation has been allowed to exist at all for half a century, exploiting and indoctrinating its members in plain sight of the rest of us.