{"id":31356,"date":"2013-07-25T16:37:14","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T16:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativejonestown.com\/?page_id=31356"},"modified":"2022-02-19T14:18:23","modified_gmt":"2022-02-19T22:18:23","slug":"conn3","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=31356","title":{"rendered":"Excerpt from Lednorf’s Dilemma<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

This excerpt from Lednorf\u2019s Dilemma<\/i> goes more deeply into Jim Jones\u2019 mental derangement than most other writers\u2019 analyses. Nine years of observing the man and his mania underlay my assessment. The excerpt warrants further consideration because it is based in psychological and theological observations:<\/p>\n

**************************** <\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Jim Jones was a flaw in the psychological ointment. He had many of the classic childhood deprivations: a drunken father, who was an even sadder case because he was disabled, having been hit with mustard gas in … [the] First World War. His mother, a hardworking, wildly loose talking woman was the only source of family income for most of Jimmy Jones\u2019s school years.<\/p>\n

But, then, many children had worse backgrounds and went on to become productive and mature adults. Somehow, Jimmy, during his grammar school years, became fixated on death. He often conducted \u201cplay funerals\u201d with the neighborhood kids. A leader from the start, he continued on through the years, running people\u2019s lives, moving compulsively into the staging of strange and darkly bizarre acts in his own church. ??But when and how did little Jimmy become the focus of evil<\/i>? What set him apart from many other youngsters who had similar family misfortunes, yet who grew into adulthood with reasonably healthy egos? \u2026 there was one point in childhood at which he made a fatal error. He came to think that he himself was the only reason for life, that he was the focus of all event… people have a term that comes close to explaining it: solipsism<\/i>. <\/b>Given that lack of understanding, it follows, then, that he was the only real authority over his life. But … he was clever and darkly imaginative, and it led ultimately to a warped kind of pragmatism. Manipulating people, fooling them, charming them, cheating them, and lying to them \u2013 all of this \u2013 was logical in order to survive. You see, what was out there, all around him, was not real \u2013 in the sense that it had no meaning for him, other than to serve his rapidly changing plans for the rising of the only messiah, himself. I would remind you that darkness is self-catalytic. He actually believed half the craziness he espoused. He had an enormous ego. But it was inverted. It was upside down. It<\/i> directed him<\/i>. His intellect was in total service to his ego. He was devoid of the quality that allows one to perform intellectual surveillance on one\u2019s pride, on one\u2019s emotions, on one\u2019s motives \u2013 in short, on one\u2019s ego. He was completely impotent as a human being, in the sense that he could not be intimately comfortable with the genuine authority that confronts us all, that humbles us and allows us to grow in character and wisdom. Jones\u2019s inverted ego, as in all such cases, eventually did him in.<\/p>\n

(David Conn<\/strong> described himself as an \u201cinvestigator of the Jim Jones Peoples Temple cult for nine years prior to the Guyana mass murder.\u201d He died on December 31, 2021, of Parkinson\u2019s disease. His complete collection of articles for this site is <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This excerpt from Lednorf\u2019s Dilemma goes more deeply into Jim Jones\u2019 mental derangement than most other writers\u2019 analyses. Nine years of observing the man and his mania underlay my assessment. The excerpt warrants further consideration because it is based in psychological and theological observations: **************************** Jim Jones was a flaw in the psychological ointment. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":31469,"menu_order":15,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-31356","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31356"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113506,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31356\/revisions\/113506"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}