| Understanding Undue Influence |
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I chose Peoples Temple and
Jonestown as my primary example because it fit all of the course objectives
perfectly. I was also quite familiar with this subject because I had done both
my Masters thesis and my doctoral dissertation on cults. Additionally, I had
been the psychological assistant and teaching assistant of the late Dr.
Margaret Singer, author of Cults In Our
Midst, and she and I had started the preliminary work on a book on
Jonestown shortly before she died in 2004.
I began by asking the class
how many of them had heard the phrase “drink the kool aid.” They all had, of
course, although none acknowledged ever having used the term. Even though it is
now part of the common American lexicon, I told them that by the conclusion of
the class they would realize that the phrase is genuinely obscene. It
trivializes a tragedy of immense scope and indicates a pervasive societal ignorance
of just what horrible methods of conditioning and thought reform that more than
900 well-meaning, sincere and decent people had been subjected to before they
were murdered. I also expressed my hope the students that by the end of the
course, the students would have a sound understanding of who Jim Jones was, how
Peoples Temple and Jonestown came into being, and what really transpired on
November 18th, 1978, beginning with my assurance to them that what
had transpired was certainly not mass suicide.
Jim Jones fit the example of
a charismatic leader perfectly. He was a highly intelligent, handsome man who
knew at a very early age just what he wanted to accomplish as an adult, and who
had begun working towards fulfilling that vision while he was still a child. He
was also a remarkably keen observer of human behavior with an uncanny ability –
rare in most people but not uncommon with psychopaths – of being all things to
all people. Jim Jones was also notable because even as a teenager, he grasped
the power that a charismatic leader could exert on followers. The fact that Jim
Jones came from a dysfunctional family and a socio-economically impoverished
background makes his accomplishments all the more striking.
Jones had studied the lives
of such leaders as Mao, Hitler and Stalin. It wasn’t their individual
ideologies that interested him, his early membership in the Communist Party and
his avowed atheism notwithstanding. Rather, it was how these leaders acquired power and the specific techniques they
used, both oratory and manipulative, to increase and retain membership in their
movements. It is also noteworthy that early on, Jim Jones realized that
Christianity was a particularly viable vehicle for him to use to attain power
and control over other people. His attention to detail in studying and later
incorporating the dynamics of both poor African-American and poor white
Evangelical church services was also explained during the Undue Influence
class.
The truest mark of the
genius of Jim Jones is that he did not operate from one specific undue
influence template. Rather, he drew from a myriad of sources and adapted what
he learned into Peoples Temple. If one particular technique didn’t work, he
quickly discarded it and tried another. In the process, he refined the
techniques that had been successful, continually modifying those techniques to
make them congruent with the social and political environments in which Peoples
Temple moved. Jones did not study university psychology, but he intuitively
grasped the manipulative possibilities of heuristics, the context effect,
dogmatism, operant conditioning, central and peripheral routes of persuasion,
cognitive dissonance and subjective validation. He used this knowledge to mold
his parishioners into persons largely devoid of the ability to make rational
decisions about their own well being. In that, Jim Jones was undoubtedly
brilliant.
During the Undue Influence
class, I devoted a considerable amount of time discussing the victims of
Jonestown. The event happened before most of the students were born, so what
they knew about Jonestown, they knew as distant history. They had neither a personal
nor a generational connection to the victims. Additionally, none of the
students was African-American, and none had grown up in an Evangelical
Christian family. As a result, most of the students in the class knew the
residents of Jonestown only as bloated, dead bodies captured on film.
It was important for me to
change that perception. I very much wanted the students to see the Jonestown
victims as having been part of a vibrant community, a community that they
sincerely believed was noble. Despite the hardships of life at Jonestown and
despite the machinations of Jim Jones, the faith of the community’s residents
was unshakable and inspiring. They clearly cared about the spiritual and
material welfare of their fellow congregants. In other words, I wanted the
residents of Jonestown to actually come alive for my students, for them to see
the victims as genuine, caring people. If the students couldn’t grasp how real
and how important these people were then I feared that they would not be able
to understand the horror of the mass murders and the unspeakable losses felt by
the concerned families.
I was very fortunate in
having a wealth of Jonestown materials to draw from. This website was
invaluable to me. I used photographs and excerpts from letters and journals as
a way to demonstrate to the students that Jonestown was a thriving community of
engaged, decent, “normal” people who genuinely believed that they were creating
a more peaceful and equitable world, and who were hard at work to make this
world a reality for everyone. I was also able to incorporate music from Peoples
Temple into my presentation. There is a wealth of Peoples Temple music on the
internet – all of it religious – and I included Peoples Temple music clips in
my presentation to emphasize that, although Jim Jones’ vision was corrupt, the
spiritual faith of most of his followers remained strong.
One of the great enigmas of
Peoples Temple and Jonestown to me has been and – still remains – Marceline
Jones, Jim’s wife. Adopting an African-American infant in Indianapolis, Indiana
in the 1950’s, as she and Jim did, was an incredible act of courage,
particularly given the views of Marceline’s father on race, and it is clear
from books and journal articles about the Jones family that Marceline cared for
her adopted son – as well as their other adopted children – every bit as much
as she cared for her biological child. It is also clear that throughout the
Temple’s history, she remained deeply concerned about the physical and
emotional welfare of all the congregation’s children. In discussing Marceline
with the class, I played a recording of her singing the Mahalia Jackson song
“Black Baby,” which both the students and I found incredibly moving. Her
heartfelt rendition of this song only deepened the irony of the final hour at
Jonestown, when 304 children were murdered, most of whom were African-American.
While Marceline Jones still
remains mostly a mystery to me, I was honored and delighted when that adopted
black son – Mr. Jim Jones, Jr. – agreed to speak to the class. He was gracious,
friendly and humble, and the students liked him immediately. In fact, the
interest in the subject of Undue Influence to the students was heightened by
Mr. Jones’ low key but extremely erudite and informative extemporaneous
lecture. At my request, he talked about his mother and the sacrifices she made
in her own life to insure his own safety and that of his siblings, and the
multiples times she chose the welfare of her children over her own happiness.
Far better than I could, Mr. Jones, Jr. painted a vivid verbal picture of the
Jonestown community and the intrinsic decency and humanity of the residents.
The victims of Jonestown, who up until then had been merely photographs to the
students, became real human beings, with the same longings we all have.
This was the first time
Alliant University has offered a course on Undue Influence, and the class will
likely be repeated every semester. I will continue to include Peoples Temple
and Jonestown in the course material and have developed a two-hour Continued
Education Unit course on Peoples Temple and Jonestown that I will present to
psychologists in the Fall of 2010.
(Patrick O’Reilly can be reached at oreillyphd@hotmail.com.)
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