Soaking up Temple Guilt
Soaking up Temple Guilt
The Reverend Jim Jones, photo from Wikipedia
I chose this photo of the late Reverend Jim Jones, pastor of the Peoples Temple and later demented leader of the Jonestown community, because it shows the force of his character and the dark drives that his habitual sunglasses cannot conceal. Clearly Jones had a few things wrong with him psychologically. When he entered a hospital for treatment of stress, chest pain, and insomnia, a consulting psychiatrist described him as "paranoid with delusions of grandeur."
Long before he fled to Jonestown, Jones had revealed enough about his character for his associates to raise questions about him, but they never did. Nevertheless, he fixes in my mind the character of a socialist administrator, inasmuch as he diminished the individual self-worth of his church-members and their individual ego-strength, and crushed their independence of thought through endless rants about selfishness, egotism, and greed, thereby reinforcing his members' subordinate status. He could serve as poster-boy for Democratic Socialists.
Even with his obvious psychological and megalomaniacal tendencies, he coaxed a thousand, socialist-leaning church members to follow him to his jungle-lair in far-away Guyana in South America, site-unseen. They accepted a uniformity of rule by a single power-structure, led by Jones himself. After all, if you believe the ethos of socialism, that equality and sharing should dictate the nation's political orientation, then it leaves no room for independent actions, independent centers of power, or independent wealth. Whoever has what Jones construed as "excess wealth" had to share it with the community. He inculcated in his followers a loathing for the Bourgeoisie. "Bourgeoisie" became a go-to epithet for them.
From Raven, by Tim Reiterman:
- page 222: Like Jim Cobb, Wayne Pietila had spent his adolescent years soaking up Temple guilt.
- page 226: Jones began working over his audience with guilt.
- page 287: Jones scorned her selfishness. Many (members) nodded in agreement. They had resented the special privileges extended to Grace Stoen.
- page 332: Le Flora (Townes) had followed Jones for almost seven years. . . . She badgered Harold to Join her, but he was always turned off by the fifteen or twenty members he met. . . . They always talked against the American system.
The environment of Peoples Temple reminds me of left-wing bloggers on Facebook. Peoples Temple operated with a mob psychology, always alert to suggestions of independent thought and action, pulling against the direction of the group. Defectors from Peoples Temple earned the special hatred of Temple members.
The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, released by PBS in 2008, in commemoration of the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978.
Not only did Jones coax a thousand church-members to follow him into the Jonestown Gulag, he also won over the hearts of San Francisco's liberal, left-wing elite. That should not surprise anyone, since the city-leaders shared Jones's preoccupation with egalitarian sharing. Even after defecting church-members outed Jones and revealed his aberrant tendencies, the city-leaders defended him.
San Francisco Mayor George Moscone sitting; Jim Jones standing behind him in the middle.
He basically fled to South America to avoid prosecution. By radio-telephone from his jungle lair, he railed senselessly against his accusers, while his supporters in San Francisco cheered him on. Historians know about his rants because Jones left behind reels of audio-tape footage, including the infamous "Death Tape," where Jones exhorted his followers to commit suicide. He even sent his hooligans to help them do it.
Now we will soon see a feature movie about Jones, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jones, I hope he can replicate the Jones personality, better than he did J. Edgar Hoover's.