A lot of people don't realize they have a decent amount of negotiating power as employees. Early on in my career I assumed I had no power right up until my employer asked me to do something like this. I told them no and after some nasty emails they backed off and nothing happened.

With as high as rents are and terrible as the job market is you might as well be a slave if you don't know that.

>What is wrong with people when they willfully, or with little protest, go along with the bizarre behavior that is being requested of them?

This was a cult. Full stop. Cults prey on vulnerable people/groom and carefully select their victims. They also take advantage of a slew of tactics to brain hack their victims and pseudo-enslave them.

Take a parallel awful commonly sees scenario like an abusive relationship. In theory one party can just leave, but in practice they are often trapped by many factors, both real and mental. (Similar to here, where huge amounts of social pressure, income, and here we have the awful addition of very direct sexual manipulation and abuse).

I think it's pretty ridiculous to say that "nobody's taking moral high ground in this." The victims have moral high ground over the cult leader.

Additionally, you need to understand that these sorts of organizations, in addition to being structured in a proven way that can massively manipulate people, are often run by extremely capable social manipulators with some sort of pathological personality. I've had the "privilege" to know a low level person like this (still capable - looking back there was basically a cult house, sexual abuse, etc), and these people are on a different level than a typical "bad person." I guarantee you just don't truly understand unless you've dealt with someone like that. The world is a giant game to manipulate for them and they're often extremely intelligent as well. I'm just a normal kind of engineering sort of person and I admittedly ended up with physical injuries/hospitalizations that later in a drunken conversation I concluded were not in fact mistakes, but targeted acts of sadism, deeply rooted in his childhood trauma. Scary. Then after the house crumbled everyone had completely insane stories like being abducted into vans to be terrorized, etc. Dozens of people! These top echelon sociopath people are not something you can easily walk away from, especially if they start as your boss or friend and have months or years to work on you.

And then on another level on this story. Let's just say it sounds like some people are owed a lot of overtime... On a purely business level, this is a disaster and the victims have high ground for what is probably some of the worst work conditions ever conceived.