JONESTOWN AS PERVERSE UTOPIA

...A recent New York Times report (December 10, 1978) describes the policies introduced by its leader, Mr...

...But they do not kill, or are not capable of killing, almost a thousand people in one sweep...

...To Jones's followers, the society felt like a desert devoid of love...

...By working to monopolize the affect of the community's members, and making them withdraw their libidinal energy not only from outside relationships but inside as well, Jones completed his efforts at reducing his followers to a narcissistic stage of infantile dependency that Bruno Bettelheim had shown to develop among inmates of concentration camps...

...Group members who break up all relationships on the outside will be dependent on staying with that group...

...Several times he had picked up and moved when outside intrusions became threatening...

...Not only blueprints but actual experiments in utopian living attracted over the years the socially committed and the morally courageous, the physically and psychologically deprived, and those yearning for a new morality...

...Already in San Francisco church members had been talked into cashing their life-insurance policies and turning the money over to the Temple, or into signing over power-of-attorney...

...The stable relationship, voila l'ennemi...

...Had he given signs of such wickedness earlier in his life...

...I have come a long way" (New York Times, November 29...

...Way back in Indiana couples had been persuaded to sell their houses and turn the money over to the church...

...There were the poor, the rich, and those of the middle...

...and what had started out as an experiment in liberation usually ended in an experiment in the total absorption of personality...

...Already in the church he had established a kind of spy group that regulated everything including hand holding, forced divorces and shotgun marriages...

...Nobody could leave the premises except some trusted aides who could go as far as the Georgetown headquarters, where control of movement was as tight as it could possibly be...

...From its early days, the People's Temple tried to erect boundaries or break relations with the rest of society (even as Jones tried to influence, cajole, or threaten politicians and the press...

...Around 1965 in Redwood City, it became known that there were guards around the Temple church and dogs along the fences...

...they became unable to plan for the future...

...But most ended in splits, fights between factions, acrid disputes, mutual recriminations, and sordid intrigues between rival leaders...

...Everyone related to you was required to run up and accuse you...

...Jones ordered marriages ended and rearranged...

...Any personal or social values members brought with them from their previous lives were destroyed...

...These utopias transcended the here-and-now, served as guidelines for social criticism and as foci for human strivings...

...Admit it...

...Beatings, torture, mutual accusations and confessions—techniques that had started way back in San Francisco—remind us of the social-psychological processes in the concentration camps as described by Bruno Bettelheim...

...Groups that monopolize affective energies within themselves tend to be subject to inner decay and to have low survival value...

...Relatives of those who had gone to Jonestown without leaving word were met with silence when they made inquiries at the San Francisco Temple...

...A high school boy seen talking to a girl who did not belong to the Temple would be called before the assembly to talk at length about his sex life...

...Could he not at least have made eye contact with someone who had similar feelings...

...as he later reported...

...It was startling to realize how isolated people could be only 150 miles from the capital...

...This is the basis for the incest taboo...

...Here I don't have any intention of becoming a traitor or going back to the United States" (Avis G., quoted in the New York Times, November 29...

...When he bragged to his lawyer, Charles Gary, about having sex with 14 women and 2 men in that one day, he explained that this was to assure their loyalty to him...

...personal and public allegiances were monopolized by a central authority...

...Not wanting to go would be better...

...The well-to-do had to give up their means of survival on the outside...

...They] lived, like children, only in the immediate present...

...The latter happened in Jonestown...

...there were the elderly and young prostitutes...

...He explained that he did this "to assure their loyalty to him...

...The Isolated Society: "We Had Nowhere to Go...

...The Temple ended up with everything I had," said Jeannie Mills...

...Often departing members were called in the morning and told they would leave for Guayana the same night...

...Later, in Jonestown, members were asked to listen to news broadcasts selectively, and had to write out their reactions and send them to "Dad...

...There were convicts and there were lawyers...

...So for years he gave them "opium for the people," and in the end cyanide...

...Family ties within the church were always kept under Jones's direct control...

...Jonestown was more "greedy" an institution than has probably ever existed...

...While it would be fatuous to blame what happened on "American society," we must keep in mind that the damned and the lost and the hopeful who flocked to Jones and the People's Temple did so because the society in which they lived had failed to provide satisfactory bonds, meaningful community, and fraternal solidarities...

...Communes did not usually end in the destruction of their members, and some of those inspired by vigorous religious beliefs even managed to survive for several ' generations...

...Elsewhere there were large stretches of flat, deep, red mud...

...Both promiscuity and celibacy help prevent stable dyadic bonds, for such bonds detract from emotional attachment to the community and its leaders...

...And who was the leader...

...Temple members who made the trip signed away to the church, as many before them had done, their cars, homes, and other possessions...

...Jones knew that the most effective way to control personal relationships is to control libidinal attractions...

...Isolation and secrecy, if they are to be organizational requirements, must be enjoined upon and upheld by all individual members...

...Dederich...

...People's behavior as well as their personal attitudes and moral values had to come under the scrutiny of all...

...Having no place to go, and having invested all their emotional life in the Temple, the stage was set for binding people to the Total Institution that was to be Jonestown...

...Friendships developed as quickly as they broke off...

...Finally, any personal relations, whether sexual or otherwise affective, were broken up...

...Isolated from any but the minimum contact with the outside world, Jonestown's members had no place to go: no place to go to test reality, no place to go with libidinal cathexis except to one man, no place to go to obtain or receive support except from him...

...Nobody could trust anybody...

...People who were deprived of their money would have no options but to stay with the Temple...

...ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND SOCIOLOGISTS are generally agreed on the proposition that society is possible because libidinal energies and affective orientations, within or between generations, are directed outward, so that self-sufficiency is prevented...

...When people are cut off from emotional bonds with their fellows they have no psychic energies left that can be mobilized even in situations of extreme peril...

...Lewis Coser has argued elsewhere that such manifestly opposite sexual patterns as abstinence and sexual promiscuity serve the same purposes (Greedy Institutions, Free Press, 1974...

...There were no roads...

...We had nowhere to go and nothing to fall back on...

...Dederich for more than 230 married couples to divorce and switch to other partners within the group...

...In a sense, if not literally, it was an incestuous community...

...A similar pattern prevails in other totalistic communes today, for example, at Synanon...

...All subsequent quotes and factual material not otherwise identified are from this book...

...When New West magazine was to appear with disclosures about the doings at the Temple, and he departed for Guayana, he instructed his aides to buy out the magazine from newsstands in Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where a copy might fall into the hands of Temple members or their relatives...

...How many were there among the hundreds of adults in line for cyanide who asked themselves like Odell Rhodes, "How can I get out of here...

...The leader had claimed he wanted "socialism" and "Marxism," and had mixed his missionary zeal with religion because he allegedly believed the followers "needed it...

...Some even become murderers, and occasionally there is one who manages to kill as many as a dozen people...

...How could anyone complain about working until dawn after getting off work when Father is in such pain for us all...

...Jim was giving the stuff away just to get rid of it," one former member said...

...Jones wanted the money not only for selfish or organizational purposes: it became a problem merely to dispose of the wealth that piled up...

...They were unable to establish durable object relations...

...There had been no threat on their lives from the outside, nor was there any strong transcendental cause that leader or followers meant to serve...

...The poor had to contribute an ever larger percentage of meager earnings...

...Any 161 loyalties, any solidarity, any relatedness between the members of the Temple had to be broken up, and mutual accusations, hostilities, and mandatory denunciations were used to bring this about...

...and that his mother had predicted her son would be a messiah...

...Without newspapers and with only occasional news that had to be "understood" in a prescribed manner, surrounded by the jungle—how would it ever be possible for any rank-and-file member to test reality...

...It also assured complete dependency, similar to the dependency of a newborn child, on one person, and one person only...

...They include forced vasectomies for male members, mandatory abortions for women, and orders from Mr...

...Ever since the industrial revolution and earlier—already in antiquity—usually at times of widespread discontent with the quality of life, blueprints for a more satisfying social organization were drawn up, from The Republic to Utopia (which coined the generic name) to Looking Backward...

...How did he grow up in the small town where he was born...

...Ron Javers describes the physical isolation 159 from the plane that took him to Port Kaituma—a six-mile jeep ride from Jonestown: At some points the trees were so thick we couldn't see the ground...

...Jones controlled the news and the members' access to it...

...Not being permitted to establish relationships with one another, they soon became incapable of doing so, like Don F., who wrote in one of his mandatory letters of confession: "Now I know I'm like a banana, just one of the bunch...

...The answers about the characteristics of the members are not satisfactory...

...But it served other purposes as well: it deprived members of all means of independence...

...People would call their children to tell them they would be leaving on a trip immediately, and refuse to say where they were going or how long they would be gone...

...They must all have felt, as Odell Rhodes later stated about himself, "dead inside" (New York Times, November 29...

...Jonestown was a community isolated by design...

...Whether members refrain from all sexual relations, as did the Shakers, or whether there is a controlled form of promiscuity, as in Oneida, is sociologically unimportant...

...For married couples, Jones would often have another form of advice: abstention...

...It seems that at the high point of the ceremony of self-immolation everyone was but an atom unto itself, unable to relate even in imagination to others who might share some doubts...

...It was hostile," said a former member...

...Not only did it erect insurmountable boundaries between the inside and the outside, between the "reborn" collective present of the members and their "disreputable" private past...

...This prevented interference from nonbelievers, but mainly it prevented reality testing...

...This is hard work...

...The questions that are usually being asked are: What kind of people were those commune members...

...Were they without roots...

...How could anyone have looked for evidence of the alleged fact that mercenaries were waiting in the woods to invade the settlement and torture its members...

...there were physicians and nurses, blacks and whites...

...Jonestown seems to have been incestuous in more than the figurative sense...

...And so we read in one of those required letters of confession: "I'm an elitist and anarchist...

...they lost their feeling for the sequence of time...

...Sex was one of Jim's specialties for pulling people apart," said a former member...

...Jonestown is a case in point...

...Even as we recoil in horror at the unfolding of the Jonestown story it behooves us not to look at it in isolation...

...Arbitrary and unpredictable interference with them leads to their being damaged at best and destroyed at worst...

...Although their quest turned out to be a delusion, we cannot deny that their need was acute...

...Individuals had to submit to physical and mental humiliations and more: they had to humiliate themselves...

...Let us turn from personal to structural characteristics...

...I've come a little way...

...Couples were forced apart and told not to engage in sexual intercourse because it was evil...

...Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1943.] For the acceptance of the new life, everything that had to do with the personal life of the past or of the present—relatives, friends, social, personal, and intimate values—had to be defiled...

...I'm Dead Inside" THE PROBLEM, it seems to us, is that emotional energies cannot simply be "channeled" for the common or not so common good...

...There was no way to get to Jonestown except by air or by a long boat trip along the Atlantic coast and up the Kaituma River.* The isolation of the site was a criterion for selection when Jones first conceived of the settlement...

...These, paradoxically, led to its destruction...

...When your name was called, people would scream, `Get down there,' and swear...

...Communes have an innate tendency to become, as one of the authors wrote, greedy institutions...

...160 together with their passports...

...Perverse as it was, Jonestown was a species of the genus, utopian commune...

...What manner of man commanded such obedience...

...There was hardly any contact with the outside on the part of rank-and-file members...

...By claiming, and receiving, undivided loyalty, and by reducing the claims of competing roles and allegiances, it succeeded not merely in totally absorbing members within its boundaries but in reducing them to human pulp as well...

...But surely, the JekyllHyde personality is a frequent figure, and many people have fantasies of omnipotence...

...There were those with weak moral beliefs, and those with a strong social conscience...

...Nor do the characteristics of the leader tell us much...

...It turned out that the followers were of all kinds...

...The regression into childlike behavior was inescapable...

...Isolation could not be maintained without secrecy...

...It successfully "devoured" its members by 162 making total claims on them and by encompassing their whole personality...

...To survive for even the short period it did, it operated in secrecy, erected strong barriers around itself...

...CHILDREN WERE removed from their parents, spouses separated, matches made and broken up...

...Were they the rejects of society—the drug addicts, the convicts, the prostitutes, those not embedded in the social fabric of their society...

...It did, after all, unfold at this time and in this place...

...When they arrived at Jonestown, whatever money they had left was confiscated *Marshall Kilduff and Ron Javers, Suicide Cult (New York: Bantam Books, 1978...

...To assure its survival, however, two more things had to be accomplished: the remaking of personal values, and the prevention of solidarity within the settlement...

...Rankandfile members had to break all ties with the outside...

...At Jonestown, those who, like Bettelheim's camp inmates, did not develop a childlike dependency were accused of threatening the security of the group...

...A certain amount of what Philip Slater has called "libidinal diffusion" (American Sociological Review, 1963) is necessary for social survival, since it facilitates exchange among various units of a society...

...While psychological predispositions in the leader and his followers explain some of their mutual attraction, they cannot fully explain this horrible success story...

...so they turned to the People's Temple, which they saw as an oasis...

...Temple members often had to forgo bidding their relatives good-bye when they left for Guayana...

...Already in San Francisco Jones spent much of his time presiding over such "catharsis" sessions, which were grueling, drawn-out spells of emotional dissection by the followers: Why did she wear such new clothes when there were millions of people starving...

...In the mid-'60s in Redwood Valley, the Temple members' children were said to lie, and to be evasive at school about what they did at the Temple...

...There was isolation from the media as well...

...Yet, as Lewis Coser and Henry Jacoby wrote years ago, "We are appalled to discover that many of the rationalistic fantasies of the world improvers contain a large admixture of what we now 158 recognize as totalitarianism" (Common Cause, February 1951...

...All this money made the People's Temple a viable operation...

...Not only will it be difficult for them to return home if they so desire, but their whole cognitive and affective orientation will be inward-directed so that the outside world fades from view—much as in cases of confinement to concentration camps, longterm imprisonment or hospitalization, even though in these cases the inmates do not join voluntarily...

...Former Temple members report that men and women would be forced to strip off their clothes at the public meetings and say they were homosexuals or lesbians...

...It is interesting to hear that as a child he killed animals, and said mass after their death...

...HAVING NO PLACE to go was not enough...

...The Invertebrate: "I Know I'm Like a Banana...

...At best they tell us who was attracted to Jim Jones, but they cannot tell us why they obeyed him unto death...

...Sex Was One of Jim's Specialties for Pulling People Apart...

...He also instructed his aides to forbid followers to read newspapers or watch television...

...There was no place to go with one's cognitive assessments if not into the jungle—even if, as is doubtful, the need for such assessment were perceived by the members who anyhow "knew" that they must depend on "Dad...

...While isolation and secrecy were organizational requirements for Jones's designs, they served social and psychological purposes as well...

...What these communities share is a deliberate attempt to prevent dyadic personal relationships so that emotional energies will be purposely channeled...

...That's what made it so hard to leave...

...Wasn't it true that he wanted to make love to another man's wife...

...it also succeeded in maiming them by breaking up any mutual attachments, sexual or otherwise...

...Their isolation from other social institutions, their inward orientation, the absorption of the members' total personality often led to a disintegration of the commune, even as it deprived members of the ability to sustain personal relations both within and without...

...Many of his marathon six-hour sermons dwelled on sex, including directions to members to swear off relations...

...This assured the absence of interpersonal allegiances...

...Yet, in most communes morals and social relations tended to become regulated from above...

...The leader, who was called "Dad," had sexual relations with the commune's members, that is, his "children," men or women, sometimes as many as 16 a day, as he bragged to Charles Gary...