I disagree: For example accepting or rejecting a golden cage is a deep decision about one's moral values - thus near to a religion.
It felt like a cult, we felt he asked to us make completely unpractical sacrifices purely in the name of an ideology, the Free.
In hindsight he might have been right, but there clearly was a communication problem, and our kneejerk reaction was to take distance from anything that looked like a cult.
That’s still how people react when they’re just told Apple is evil and they should give up their iPhone for some open source hardware phone or they’re sheeples.