Hope and Unity in Las Vegas

Cult leaders, musicians, and dictators; drinking the Kool-aid

J. Y. Gao

Our senior Shore News editor, Lawson Banks, wrote the phrase ‘ready to drink the Kool-aid’ in his account of Shore’s great return to dominance in rugby, which has, in turn, sparked a discovery that was helped along by our Insights Editor, William Johnston (in history class), about the People’s Temple cult of the 50s, 60s and 70s America. The particular phrase refers to the mass murder-suicide of 918 individuals by Valium, chloral hydrate, cyanide, and Phenergan poisoning. Horrid and morbid indeed – though the journalistic world has no place for the mundane.

Why an individual would ever consider willingly taking fruit punch laced with cyanide seems like an impossible question to answer. From the perspective of the ‘sane’ and the ‘normal’, psychopaths and their psychopathic followers often seem mysterious and alien, and yet when we unravel a little bit of the psychology behind cults and powerful ideologies, we quickly discover that it was not by divine intervention that millions of people were able to buy into the blatant racism of Hitler, nor supernatural forces when a orderly, well-mannered girl of 18 turned into a crazed monster screaming at a wiggling Elvis Presley. These are men and women, like you and I, who have jobs and families.

Hope. Hope is what I am inclined to say at first, so let’s discuss this idea for a moment. If you ever notice the rhythm of your life, your daily habits, movement and actions, you’ll find almost everything you do is goal orientated. We consistently strive to achieve a goal – no matter at what scale. Perhaps you will even believe when I say that bigger, decade-spanning goals – regardless of whether or not you are aware of them, are the only source of meaning in your life. An individual will aim for a higher position at work, more sustainable family conditions, establishing/improving/sustaining relationships with your significant other and others in your life. And thus when we discover the omnipresence of goals, it becomes clear why hope is able to guide not only the leader toward their ambitions, but guide an entire nation towards undefined ends. Hope is the belief that a goal is achievable, and when that goal is achievable, the means so often become negligible. 

The victim card and justice card – a hand that, when played, creates the most compelling ideologies of history. Jim Jones, the leader of the People’s Temple cult preached of a world that is equal and a world that is fair. He preached of himself and his followers as suffering minorities of good in a dark evil world. In a society where colour dictated the bathroom you used, the table you sat at, and the seats you took on the bus, Jones held each congregation with alternating races sitting side by side, hand in hand, every row, to the back of the church. He preached of himself as a God who could heal wounds with words (he faked many ‘healings’ during his preachings by simply asking a walking woman or man to act paralysed from the waist down. Jones would then help them to walk again with only his voice).

Of course, in a setting that is as large as Jones’ congregation, with a goal of a perfect utopia, a motivation of injustice, a sense of moral obligation as the suffering minority, and a hope of success with the divine powers of a divine leader, even the most sensible are subject to persuasion.

A sense of unity and belonging is yet another driving force. The sense of patriotism – of pride and gratefulness – during a rendition of a national anthem, a national celebration of culture, or an inter-school sports match, is a powerful emotion. Every once in a while, when you realise that your beliefs do not stand alone, but are shared between thousands; your nationality not individual, but shared among millions; you feel as though in that very moment an entire people has opened its arms wide. The transmissibility of behaviour is a real phenomenon. When a crowd of three thousand clap and cheer their hearts out at a charismatic Jim Jones, we are all susceptible to the peer pressure. When a man with a little moustache rings his voice echoing around a vast square, 10 thousand soldiers positioned in alignment, and 10 thousand of your countryfolk cheering behind them, you are likely to cheer too. When two legs wiggle so naturally and so freely, and so induced by the music, and when ten thousand scream and cry in excitement, you will scream and cry in excitement too.

Through the course of history, we have seen the same goal appear over and over again. People will always want freedom. In democracy, it is freedom of speech and thought, and freedom from dictatorship; in socialism, it is freedom from individual burden and the injustice of life; in industrialisation, it is freedom from the restrictions of individual labour; in romanticism, it is freedom from the industrial world; in the renaissance, it is freedom from archaic tradition; again in Elvis Presley, it is freedom from traditional constraints of higher society to the real, visceral reality of physical and emotional experience; in the information age, it is freedom from the limits of technology to global interconnectedness; in war, is it freedom from injustice and oppression. 

When you are entranced by a light of freedom beaming just past the horizon, your boats, however small, will be pushed from the docks into waves however big.