Photo credit to Daniela Rybarczyk

Humans have the ability to think, but they don’t always use it

Forty years ago, Reverend Jim Jones took about 1,000 of his followers to Jonestown, where 913 of these followers participated in a suicide-murder upon his orders. This isn’t the first time humans have blindly followed leaders.

In 1978, the “Jonestown Massacre” happened. An American cult, known as Peoples Temple, had 913 of its followers die in a suicide-murder in the Jonestown settlement in Guyana, South America. Before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Jonestown Massacre was the largest loss of U.S. citizens’ lives in a non-natural disaster.

Founder Jim Jones created Peoples Temple in Indiana in the 1950s. Jones preached racial justice and social equality and this gained him many followers. He created a group that had followers of many races, which was unheard of at the time.

People Temple was relocated to California in the 1960s. After some negative media coverage of the group, Jones moved about 1,000 of his followers to a jungle in Guyana. Jones promised a socialist utopia in Guyana and Jonestown was born.

But Jonestown was not the paradise Jones promised. Members of Peoples Temples were forced to work in fields in the heat and were harshly punished if they defied Jones. Phone calls were monitored, passports were confiscated and members were forced to participate in mock suicide drills.

“A number of survivors, including those who defected, believe to this day he had paranormal abilities,” said Rebecca Moore, a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University. “He could heal them and read their minds.”

A California legislator, Leo Ryan, heard rumors of abuse and people being held against their will. He, as well as reporters and concerned family members, went to Jonestown to investigate. Upon their arrival, they were all greeted with a dinner and a welcoming Jones. But some members asked Ryan to get them out.

The next night Ryan’s group, as well as a few Peoples Temple members, fled to an airstrip. Jones had sent gunmen to ambush them on the airstrip. Ryan, a cameraman, a reporter, a female Peoples Temples defector and a photographer were gunned down by gunmen Jones had hired upon their escape. This was only the beginning of the deaths.

Jones told his followers to gather in the main pavillion and told them they were to commit a “revolutionary act.” The youngest members died first; parents and nurses gave them a mix of cyanide, sedatives and powdered fruit juice. The term “drink the Kool-Aid” comes from this event where children seemed to be drinking Kool-Aid, and a seemingly harmless substance killed them.

Adults were lined up and surrounded by armed guards. They were then forced to drink a poison-laced concoction. The next day the Guyanese police came and found hundreds of bodies on top of each other, some even in each other’s arms. Jones was found with a bullet hole in his head, most likely self-inflicted. Nine-hundred and thirteen people died; one-third of them were children.

This horrifies me. The fact that one man convinced nearly 1,000 members to follow him out of the country and into a supposed paradise is astonishing. All of those people left behind families and lives; they dropped everything to follow Jim Jones into the wilderness. And worst of all, this isn’t the first time it has happened.

Humans have the amazing ability to rationalize; it is one of the things that separates humans from animals. People are capable of stopping and thinking about their actions and their actions’ consequences. The fact that humans can identify consequences makes them accountable for their actions.

When people give up their right of free thought, they become the prey to the power-hungry predators. This human right is unique in the fact that it is something no law or amendment can ever take from us. But it also serves as one of our greatest weaknesses.

For example, take Nazi Germany in 1941. All of those soldiers and officers were seemingly acting upon their own will, for their country, for the Nazi regime, all just to win a war. In actuality, they were just Adolf Hitler’s puppets.

Hitler was a leader no one dared to cross. He had the power and everyone accepted that. The soldiers and doctors at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp were ordered to kill 1.1 million Jewish people for no other reason than because it was an order from Hitler. They didn’t question Hitler’s orders; they accepted it as right and the truth.

People didn’t think about the consequences. How this could impact them in the future, how this is murder, how this tears apart families and wipes out the next generation. Some of these officers were sentenced to jail after the war because of their actions at the concentration camps.

“It was a cult, total mind control,” said Jonestown survivor Leslie Wagner Wilson, who, as a teen, traveled the country recruiting members. “The church would humiliate you and take away any ego you had. Everything centered on the cause.”

Wilson supports the idea of putting the blame on someone else. Had she and the hundreds of others had the willpower to think about what Jones was saying, they might have been able to save hundreds of people.

“I regret not stopping it, not stepping forward, not understanding what was going on with Jim,” Laura Kohl said. Kohl was very close to Jones and was in charge of sending supplies to Jonestown.

The loss of innocent lives at the hands of others has occurred many times in history. History repeats itself and these events, such as Jonestown and the Holocaust, show how people would rather take orders and blame the person in power than break the chain and think for themselves.

Let’s learn from our many mistakes and not let history repeat itself yet again.