Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.
Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children⊠was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.
This isnât a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isnât a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The Peopleâs Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.
People joined The Peopleâs Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didnât start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didnât gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because heâd built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.
Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good â and then it was mostly good â and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasnât that bad, and it wasnât really his fault â and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasnât it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.
Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!
It doesnât matter if youâre right. It doesnât matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.
One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that Iâll never forget which is, itâs only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: âweâre stronger togetherâ; âoppression is badâ; âyou can accomplish more if you believe in yourselfâ; âempathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our livesâ; etc. Then, you move to something thatâs just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because itâs not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasnât, and B -> C wasnât, and C -> D wasnât, andâŠ
This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, theyâd gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.
If your only analysis is âWhere I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazyâ that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.
âThis canât possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and thereâs never been a single instance where it suddenly changedâ is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.
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