The Kool-aid

The people involved are always the losers in cultural wars. They get consumed by their culture.


I want to revisit an observation I first made directly in Patriarchal Apostasy, as well as some observations I once offered which compare P/QF to the dynamic at play in the People's Temple/Jonestown. I hope by the time you finish reading this, and watching the material I'll post below, the phrase that many of us use (sometimes almost casually, although innocently), "drinking the Kool-aid", will have more significant meaning.




In Patriarchal Apostasy, I presented the observation that, in P/QF, the authoritarian culture and lifestyle is the true deity and true religion. Yes, I believe there ARE other idols within it - the bible, or certain interpretations of it and such - but the centerpiece of worship, when you get right down to it, is the authority structure, the family unit, agrarianism (in some cases), et cetera - the culture, the way of life which will bring about the eventual utopia.


For instance, in the typical, dedicated VF or Gothardite P/QF home, there's a lot of Christianese, a lot of God and Jesus talk...but if you took God out of the equation, probably little about the way of life would change...there'd just be less religiousness involving God talk. A few rituals might change (bible studies and so forth), but chances are, the authority dynamic would remain intact, the agrarian, minimalistic and isolationalist lifestyle may very well continue, the mega-family mentality may very well continue. BUT...If you take the authority structure out of the equation, if you necessitate a change in lifestyle, everything about their God would change. Everything. The culture itself has become the true deity, the true religion. They've been swept up in the current of "the movement".


Fear, paranoia, and common enemies are fantastic at uniting people in misguided causes. As one People's Temple survivor once said, "No one sets out to join a cult."


If you're a fundamentalist Christian, fearful of the government, fearful of the public school system, fearful of television and modern media, fearful of anything outside of the straight and narrow-minded way of fundamentalism, yet genuinely wanting the best for your family, that fear, that paranoia, can lead you to some questionable zeal - which leads you to even more questionable choices. When a VF or such comes along, and immediately starts stoking and nourishing your already existing fears, and then you see their webpage or materials showing spit-shined families having perpetual picnics in flowery meadows, and all of it is splashed in the right buzzwords like "godly" and "biblical" and "character", it isn't particularly hard for them to set the hook and reel you in just on what they're offering in the window display. Now, you're united with people who share your fears, who share your societal and spiritual paranoia, you don't have to worry about the public school system teaching your kids evolution or giving them opportunities to do drugs and get pregnant, you now have like-minded media materials available with which to protect your children from what "the world" has for them, and all kinds of formulas which guarantee that your family will end up looking like the family in that initial picture you saw.


With these common enemies, and your own fears, paranoia, and reactionary zeal now being validated by this movement, you can now take dominion over society - and then everything will be the utopia God meant it to be. And, you're now in a cult.




Jim Jones was something of a paradox - part sociopath, and, according to some, at least initially concerned about the outcasts and misfits of society (which is a category he fit into as a boy). A childhood friend claims that Jones was so obsessed with religion and religious ritual as a boy that he once killed a cat with a knife just so he could hold a funeral service. At the same time, he befriended people in the black community in his small, still largely segregated Indiana town, demonstrating a sympathetic view of their plight. It may or may not have been genuine. I really don't know, and probably no one on this earth could answer that definitively.


As a young adult, he began preaching fiery sermons at the local Pentecostal church, and began developing a following within the African-American community there - which didn't sit well with the locals. So, he began looking for someplace more conducive to the culture he was crafting, taking his People's Temple to Northern California in the mid-60s. A congregation of about 100 people went with him, and soon, largely by exploiting the fears of the African-American community (many of which were well-founded in a very turbulent era, racially speaking), he began to build what was portrayed as a religious commune, but what was, in reality, the crafting of an authoritarian culture entirely dependent upon him and his influence over the people. His sermons became less about religion, less about God, and more about Jim Jones and his power and authority, more about social commentary and socialist principles of giving all for the good of People's Temple and "no man is greater than another". He taught that our government was evil, and the only hope for his people was the People's Temple.


The people stayed with him.


They all worked for the greater good of People's Temple, giving everything they had to PT, working 20 or more hours a day between their real world jobs and their duties within PT. Being so physically depleted left them mentally, intellectually, and emotionally vulnerable - willing to accept any and everything Jones told them. It was the perfect environment for a sociopath to indoctrinate a following.


The people stayed with him.


By the early 70s, PT had become far more a "movement" than a church, and Jones eventually moved PT to San Francisco. By this point in time, there was nothing religious about Jones' sermons, as he began instructing his people that there was no God above that would help them, no Heaven awaiting them. They would have to help themselves and make Heaven on earth. Also, by this time, Jones had engaged in sexual relations with a large number of PTers, both male and female, having began teaching them that they were all homosexuals, with him being the only heterosexual among them, and that his sexual relations with them were for them, not for him.


The people stayed with him.


By the time Jones began construction of Jonestown in the Guyanese jungle in 1975 (where he planned to craft his ultimate socialist utopia which he would rule and reign over), his message had become outright atheist. He began to involve himself in the political scene, becoming a mover and shaker in Democratic circles in SF, eventually being named head of the city's Housing Authority. He was given audience by various political dignitaries who visited San Francisco, including eventual First Lady Roselyn Carter. By 1977, a large number of PT members were already living in Jonestown, with Jones and many others waiting to join them at a later date. Also by this time, the small number of people who had left PT began to tell their stories. When Jones learned of a particularly indicting story to be published in a SF newspaper concerning his own corruption and the cultic nature of PT, he immediately left for Jonestown to escape the scrutiny it would bring.


The people stayed with him and went with him to Jonestown.


In Jonestown, Jones began preaching a message of outright Communism, bringing in Marxists with Soviet affiliation to indoctrinate his people. The people there were, by their OWN admission, generally happy, believing in the socialist principles on which Jonestown was founded and operated - although, under Jones' authoritarian rule, dysfunction was always right beneath the surface if not in full bloom. I've listened to some of the tapes of the public meetings in the Jonestown pavilion as the residents hashed out their daily business issues with Jones moderating. Lots of "F@#$ you!" - "No! F@#$ you!" - "Shut the f@#$ up, you asshole!" types of exchanges. The people there loved each other deeply, but were obviously dysfunctional on many levels. Jones probably reveled in this dysfunction. It would serve as evidence, in his mind, that they needed him. Of course, by the time he got to Jonestown, he was also a raging drug addict.


The people stayed with him. They all called him "Dad".


Jones and his People's Temple had shifted from Jesus, to socialism, to atheism, to outright Communism - and the people stayed with him. Jesus left their culture, and they never even noticed, because their eyes were on the culture. There were VERY few people in Jonestown that didn't want to be in Jonestown. Their minds had been cooked. When a culture crafted to [supposedly] combat common enemies is the focal point, gradualism within it is hardly noticed as long as the common enemies remain intact.


Jones couldn't have them devoid of fear and paranoia. That was his means of control. They had to continue to believe that the United States government, and whatever other enemies he concocted (and they accepted) wanted to destroy them. They practiced "White Nights" - where at Jones' command, they drank Kool-aid to perfect the implementation of "Revolutionary Suicide" should events ever "require" as much.


The people stayed with him.


In 1978, members of the "Concerned Relatives", which consisted of former PT members and others who had relatives in Jonestown, began pressuring Congressman Leo Ryan to visit Jonestown, telling him that people were being kept there against their will and being subject to various abuses. On November 17th, 1978, Congressman Ryan visited Jonestown. This video picks up the story from there (and be warned - it's pretty graphic, and some of you may be very disturbed by it)...


 


The words of the young girl at around the 4:05 mark are frightfully similar to some words my ex once said. People who've been brainwashed aren't aware they've been brainwashed. If they were, it wouldn't be brainwashing.


More here (very graphic)...





The audio of Jim Jones in the above clip is from the so-called "Death tape", recorded as the actual event was happening.





Even the final letter written in Jonestown reeks of denial. Some of the PT survivors, decades removed, still have an attachment to the culture that would have killed them too, had they been in Jonestown. Just listen to their words in that last clip. I hurt for them.


Heart-wrenching in every imaginable way...and for those who weren't around back when this happened, or who don't know a lot about Jonestown, it likely puts "drinking the Kool-aid" in a whole other realm of sobering reality.


Under Jones' authoritarian rule, with him using the weapons of fear, paranoia, and common enemies (and promoting the "solution" to those problems), these people deified a culture (and in their case, a man at the front of it), and that devotion took them to a gruesome, senseless death.


Lew! You don't really think the P/QF crowd is that extreme, do you?!


To stage a mass suicide? Probably not - even though there are likely plenty of borderline dangerous individuals (and plenty of religious sociopaths) within the movement. What I see are the same weapons of extremity being used - fear, paranoia, and common enemies - and a culture being sold as the solution to those problems. I see the same authoritarian dynamic, the same bounded choices, the same learned helplessness, the same persecution complex, the same dysfunctions (even if the manifestations are different), the same denial and dissociation.


I also see Kool-aid being poured and served continually, received and consumed readily, through the message of dominionist movements like VF, Gothard, and Christian homeschooling, and through fundamentalists like the IFB. God is a part of their culture in name and window-dressing only as best I can tell, but the people IN these movements haven't really noticed him missing, like I wrote about in my last piece.


Their batch of Kool-aid may not kill the physical body, but it kills the soul.