Since I’ve been capable of reading on my own, I’ve been obsessed with picking apart morbid real-life tales. Whether it was serial killers or the Holocaust, or the details of the Nanking Massacre, I was compelled to read and read.
Lately, I’ve been reading about Jonestown, Guyana. You may not know them by name (I didn’t), but you will know them by pop-culture references to kool-aid laced with cyanide (it was flavor-aid). What you may or may not know was how large their town was (~900 versus Waco’s ~75).
I can think of lots of reasons I find myself compelled to this sort of private scholarly research.
- The morbidity itself attracts me. I don’t believe this is my most important reason, but it is likely the most compelling. I want to know details. I read through every available autopsy report for Jonestown. I am intrigued by the cold nature by which they describe bodies in various stages of decay.
We all are a little attracted by morbidity – people slow down for accidents, people watch Law and Order, etc. I think I am probably drawn to it more than most people. Before I go any further with this discussion, I just thought this was a good point to note. I will not, however, discuss the findings of the autopsy reports, however sordid they are.
- An attempt to find the human element in something so ingrained in pop-culture. It is very easy to dismiss morbid things. We need it to be. We need to believe the people who died in Jonestown were crazy – but they weren’t. They were regular people, they were drawn to something bigger than themselves, something that made them feel good, valued and like they were doing better for the world. The downfall of Jonestown interests me – the increasing paranoia and violence – because it reminds me that any one of us is just as likely to be part of that society and that downfall. This is what our beliefs can do.
But even deeper than just finding the part we should all relate to in Jonestown, I wanted to know more about the people involved, the people who lived there. This is part of the process of dismissing them as “crazy” in an attempt to distance ourselves from their tragedy. I made myself go through a list of names, of people’s pictures, of relatives’ remembrances. I couldn’t make it past the Ds. There were a lot of people in Jonestown, a lot of pictures, a lot of lives. When I read about how they died, how their bodies were treated by our government, it pissed me off.
- I am intrigued by death. By murder, by suicide, by the impetus behind that decision, by the destructive force in each of us. Freud over-simplified it, but it’s true. We each have destructive and creative urges. Society and law attempt to assert guidelines acceptable to most people. Why does that urge overcome some people? Under what circumstances? And when it does come over us, what choices do we believe we have?
We all struggle against the law sometimes – most laws are a function of the passing fancy of societies. I don’t have any friends who haven’t drank illegally, but I’m still not in favor of reducing the drinking age (Check the stats on drunk-driving, a lower legal drinking age does save lives).
What I mean is, struggle against law is inevitable – at least partially because of our destructive urges. The hope is that most of us will bury those urges underneath consideration for others and the society we are part of. Intrinsically, any counter-culture group has to bastardize society in order to allow those urges to fade and to protest current laws or the current situation in society. The people in Jonestown were protesting racism, sexism and classism. They were protesting people starving the world over, the poor treatment of the elderly, etc. All in all, I think most people can support what they believed to a point.
But groups like that don’t accept moderates because moderates wouldn’t throw off the shackles of society like that. What you get is a group of people who feel strongly, who have managed to let go of the laws instilled in them by their past society but who have new laws strongly enforced, otherwise people will stray. They need to believe something, to have something guide them – and that something is a charismatic leader in nearly every case. That leader becomes paranoid and totalitarian in order to prevent society’s influence and the group crashes and burns.
I think America’s politics today mostly reflect that of paranoid and totalitarian ideals – moderates are pushed to the side because they refuse to support either side. I only hope that soon both these polarized groups will crash and burn.
But back to Jonestown. My point is that they certainly aren’t the only people who have attempted to form a utopia and failed. That most of us, if given the chance for what we perceived as a better life and a chance to improve the world, would join Jonestown, Nazi Germany, the Evangelical Christian movement here in the states, etc. We wouldn’t be bad people, but our beliefs would make us do horrible, unfathomable things.
My father said one of the most haunting things to me once when we talked about the Holocaust. He said, “If I was in Germany at that time, I probably would have supported the Nazis.” My father was “liberal”, he had handed out sandwiches to civil rights marchers as a child. I admired him as a thoughtful, open-minded human and at first this sentiment seemed incongruous. But it served a valuable purpose. It reminded me that the people on both sides are humans, however much we try to paint them as monsters. They were all scared and they all just wanted to live. We are each susceptible to reasoning that preys on our desires for a better life.
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