To be honest I love the great ‘wtf’ faces from the earth ponies and unicorns at the start.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
To start of with a joke: wow, now all you need to is say it two more times. Cough cough Beetlejuice reference Cough cough  
And now to be serious. Communism was all about equalising everyone so that everyone was on the same slate. To parallel your “absolute leader” theory, communism was in fact an absolute leadership.  
To spread the wealth, the ability, the learning opportunity, that was communism. Don’t tell me you don’t see some similarity?

@Amethyst_Crystal  
That’s why I specified a “religious” cult, as Starlight’s town was essentially a cult all the same, just bound up in a social ideology instead of a religious one.

this is a good song! one of my fav from OTGW this and come wayword soul

@Dark Dash  
A cult need not be religious, it just needs to have near total control of its adherents’ way of life:  
through emotional, psychological, and social manipulation.  
The cultists themselves have to ‘feel good’ about it, too.  
In Starlight’s cult of Equality, they sacrifice their own cutie marks ‘from flesh removed’, so their ‘timeless spirits meet’.  
There can be an agnostic kind of ‘holiness’, if that makes any sense.
 
However, Starlight might try to trick herself and others into thinking it was all for the greater good.  
But what she really wanted deep down, was for everypony to worship her own absolute will.  
To never be alone again, she would shatter the will and spirit of every other pony.
 
There are few villains more horrible than a deceitful, desperate cult leader.
 
@Communist Starlight  
I know ‘communist’ starlight is the popular notion,  
but I always found Starlight’s cult to be more ‘folksy’ and ‘local friendly’, more familiar than not…  
and so all the more creepy.

Agreed. She came really close to changing everything.  
Also, communism!

Imagine an alternate universe where this actually was a religious cult. I don’t know what they’d worship exactly, but I could see the Equality theme being used to represent the idea of sacrificing your individuality to dedicate one’s self to a greater cause.