JONESTOWN
A reader asks, “How can one man be so completely in charge that millions of people obey him?”
The first thing that popped into my head was this quote… “If you want to understand charisma, look into the soul of the follower.”
Every human starts out with the parent/child power dynamic, the authoritarian lording over the newbie who has no say in any matter.
The authoritarian/subordinate dynamic continues through the many and varied stages of the socialization process… teacher/student; coach/player; preacher/flock; officer/enlisted; boss/employee… Via magical thinking in Sunday school, all of us were introduced to the ultimate authoritarian, God, the invisible overlord who, like Santa Claus, sees you when you’re sleeping, knows when you’re awake, and knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake… or you’ll burn in hell.
Bottom line: Throughout our lives, on many fronts, our culture reinforces its demand for obedience.
However, even with years of authoritarian indoctrination, not everyone falls under the spell of authoritarian expectations and demands. In July of 1971, my fifteen months in the Air Force ended with an Other Than Honorable Discharge. I learned the hard way that I do not possess the traits necessary to fit into a strict, rules-bound, uniform-wearing hierarchy. This ordeal was my much-needed rite of passage into a sense of autonomy… self-rule… moral independence.
RESEARCH DEPARTMENT / WIKIPEDIA DIVISION
The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, better known by its informal name "Jonestown", was a remote settlement in Guyana established by the Peoples Temple, an American cult under the leadership of Jim Jones. Jonestown became internationally infamous when, on November 18, 1978, a total of 918 people died at the settlement, at the nearby airstrip in Port Kaituma, and at a Temple-run building in Georgetown, Guyana's capital city.
In total, 909 individuals died in Jonestown itself, all but two from apparent cyanide poisoning, a significant number of whom were injected against their will, in an event termed by Jones as “revolutionary suicide.” A third of the victims were minors. Guards armed with firearms and crossbows had been ordered to shoot anyone who attempted to flee the settlement. The poisonings in Jonestown followed the murder of five others by Temple members at Port Kaituma, including U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, an act that Jones ordered. Four other Temple members committed murder-suicide in Georgetown at Jones' command. Jim Jones was found dead lying next to his chair in the Jonestown pavilion between two other bodies, his head cushioned by a pillow. His death was caused by a gunshot wound to his left temple.
Drinking the Kool-Aid is… strongly believing and accepting a deadly, deranged or foolish ideology or concept based only upon the overpowering coaxing of another. The phrase typically carries a negative connotation. In recent years, it has evolved further to mean extreme dedication to a cause or purpose, so extreme that one would "drink the Kool-Aid” and die for the cause.
How does one man order over 900 people to commit suicide and murder, and in one day all of them OBEY him? Probably the same way some people believe they drink the blood of Christ at communion every Sunday... a ritual repetition laced with religious emotion… until one day the Kool-Aid is spiked with cyanide.
Jim Jones filled the vacuum that haunted the souls of his followers, the self-loathing, the embittered, the lost. Adolf Hitler filled the vacuum that corroded the German population after the devastating loss in the Great War. During the run-up to the 2016 election, I watched a few Trump rallies on TV, looked into the souls of his followers and the first word that came to mind was… Hitler. Like Hitler, Trump awakened and released the embittered marauders that populate America’s dark side, the criminal minds suddenly made joyous with open-season bloodlust.
Without his rabid MAGANAZI followers, Donald Trump would be just one more spoiled brat standing on an urban street corner like a madman preacher spewing his fire & brimstone tantrum. But, with over seventy million MAGANAZI followers uplifted and inspired by his tantrum and poised to OBEY his command and strike like scorpions, Trump could pull out his dictator on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote.
General Douglas MacArthur spoke of “a dangerous concept… that the members of our armed forces owe primary allegiance and loyalty to those who temporarily exercise the authority of the executive branch of government, rather than to the country and its Constitution which they are sworn to defend. No proposition could be more dangerous. None could cast greater doubt upon the integrity of the armed services. For its application would at once convert them from their traditional and constitutional role as the instrument for the defense of the Republic into something partaking of the nature of a praetorian guard, owing sole allegiance to the political master of the hour.”
“Democracy is premised on the belief that we can trust ordinary people to make consequential decisions. It’s in some ways an enlightenment ideal premised on another enlightenment ideal: the triumph of reason and the capacities of ordinary people. To buy into it, you have to believe that people will be more loyal to principles and discernment than to leaders and groups, and in that sense, democracy has always been a risky project. If democracy requires independent-minded people who can reason well, autocracy requires the opposite, people who will obey orders about what to think as well as do.”
If Trump is elected president in 2024, will the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force obey him? Will the FBI obey him? Will the Defense Clandestine Service obey him? No, of course not. This is America. We Don't Do Fascist.
A great post about so many disturbing events and possibilities. I truly hope you are right in that they won’t obey him. Yet that touch sarcasm underlines the danger.