There's a payoff in terms of membership in a group to believe things that don't comport with reality, or that it would take but a short time to debunk. For instance, if you want a sense of membership and belonging "on the cheap" you can join the fellowship of fundamentalist Christians by subscribing to the belief that there was a creation event a mere 6,000 years ago that created mankind and the world. Intellectually most of the people who subscribe know perfectly well this can't be true, but believing it gets them a lot of friends who appear to like them, and it's relatively costless. The issue here is that you get cheap membership at a low price. It turns out that theology is more flexible than we've thought, which is both good and bad news.

But some people want more than cheap benefits. Close-knit groups provide benefits to members, such is willingness to sacrifice for one another, care and support of the children of nonrelatives over a period of years, care during sickness, all on the assumption that 'when it's your turn' you'll reciprocate. In other words, group membership is a "product." The problem is that making such benefits broadly available would create a crowd of aspirants, or what economists call 'free riders,' who'd go ahead and reap the benefits, but fail to reciprocate when it came to 'their turn.' That's a problem, because it taxes the group's resources.

The solution is to require people in this group to do 'cult-like' stuff that signals to the other group members that they're committed and will reciprocate when the time comes. Such a demand might be giving all your money to the group, wearing strange clothes, altering your appearance such as growing a long beard, speaking jargon, or 'wasting time' in by observing the rituals and training of the group in lieu of pursuing your own career. These cost more than subscription to an odd or improbable belief. They act as a 'signal of committment.' And they're fairly typical.

Once people become members of the group (cult) it becomes an efficient corporate engine both for the distribution of humanitarian and social goods as well as other benefits. But the same kind of organization, because it creates strong loyalties and is therefore efficient (because loyal members don't have to be monitored), it is also an extremely efficient mechanism for the exercise of violent/terrorist acts. Hamas is a perfect example of a group that made this shift/transition from a relatively benign group to terrorism. The same 'organizational structure' is good for both. At the time that the shift was made there was extensive debate within Hamas as to the morality of killing civilians, because the prevailing belief was that such a thing was immoral. (In fact, there's a strong taboo against it in Islam.) However, once the group decided to change the theology wasn't much of a barrier. Beliefs changed pretty quickly. (And here you current cult members probably need to take note.) And because Hamas had developed far more of these cult-like signalling devices it turned out to be far more effective at terrorism than other groups with exactly the same beliefs, such as Islamic Jihad (IJ). The "corporate structure" was made efficient by the very devices that signalled commitment.