In the early 1950s, Jones began working as a minister in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jones claimed, in 1954, that he had met God on a train, and he was defrocked, so he made his own “church.” He founded the Community National Unity Church, and then changed its name to the People’s Temple Full Gospel Church in 1955. At that time, Jones was a very generous man; he opened soup kitchens and nursing homes and distributed free food and clothing to the poor. In the 1960s, he won several humanitarian awards for his generosity. He believed strongly in inequality among races, but also was a member of the Communist Party. He gained popularity by hiring actors to join his group of followers, then “healed” them.

In the beginning of the 1960s, Jones had a vision of an apocalypse. He decided to move his church to Ukiah, California, just north of San Francisco. He moved again to the Filmore district of San Francisco in 1965. Over the next few years, he continued to attract followers, and at one point, had over 3,000 of them. In 1976, Jones was given a position in the San Francisco Housing Authority.

As Jones gained popularity, he became self-absorbed with power. He controlled all of his followers, and they listened to his every demand. In 1973, a few of his followers left his church and leaked the shocking details of Jones’ actions. Jones decided when members of his church could marry and when they could not, he demanded sexual favors from female members, and he even separated children from their parents.

After 1973, Jones planned to move his church to Guyana in South America. He and his followers were preparing land in Guyana; they established Jonestown. By 1977, Jones and his church had moved to Guyana.

In 1978, more members who had escaped Jones’ power leaked more details. The ex-members created the Committee of Concerned Relatives. They published a book that compared Jonestown to a concentration camp. Jones was, in fact, doing sick things in Jonestown. He was teaching his members about mass suicide and testing their loyalty by having them practice.

In November 1978, a member of the United States House of Representatives, Leo J. Ryan, traveled to Jonestown to try to convince members to return to the US, and to bring back the child of an ex-member. When Ryan and the ex-members were leaving Guyana, Jones and his followers killed them all. The next day was the famous mass suicide. Jones convinced the Jonestown residents, about 900 people, including over 200 children and his own wife, to drink Flavor Aid mixed with cyanide. Jones shot himself to death shortly after. 

Agency behaviour theory was first suggested by Milgram as a way of explaining the blind obedience that people showed during his most famous study. It explains how and why subjects will follow orders even if there are severe consequences or outcomes (such as people being ‘dangerously’ shocked)

It suggests that individuals shift from an autonomous state to an agentic state, with no control over their own thoughts or behaviour-they are purely influenced by someone in a high power exercising control over them. It also suggests that the perpetrators under agentic influence do not hold themselves accountable for the actions that they have taken, as they are obeying a higher authority figure.

Some believe that agentic state and theory are not as reliable as first thought,  as there is no way of measuring the shift from autonomous to agentic, and the theory also does not state what processes within the brain occur to create the shift from the two states.

Applying Agency Theory

Agency theory has been successfully and regularly applied to many different scenarios, however I am going to investigate why people obeyed Jim Jones of the cult of Jonestown so blindly and without regard to what they might be participating in.

Overall, Jonestown was dedicated to providing members of the church with a fulfilling and happy life by working all day to create a pleasant environment for other cohabitants, by any means possible. It was branded a ‘paradise’ and a ‘utopia’ for those wishing to join the peoples temple. People are more likely to obey that of a higher figure if they are being promised a better life, as if they didn’t their chances of reaching this utopia would be scuppered by their own misdoings, therefore making their chances of obeying Jim Jones higher.

With a punishment system in place, Jones could remove people fron an autonomous state, adults were forced to stay in a plywood box had they not worked to the correct standard. Children were forced to spend the night down a well shaft, sometimes upside down. If these measures didn’t gain the required level of obedience from the subjects, then officials would utilise drugging until the agentic state was achieved. This may not be a true agentic state however, as it is enforced upon the subject and they may still want to remain autonomous. As time progressed within the Peoples Temple, punishments grew more and more, echoing the deteriorating state of Jones himself.

The mass suicide was the culmination of many years of conditioning the people of Jonestown. The initiation was the shooting of reporters that were sent by US newspapers due to the more recent disturbing behaviour shown within the Peoples Temple. A shooting ensued, carried out by Jones’ closest cohorts. Jones, in his severely diminished mental state, ordered everyone to drink a fruit cocktail containing potassium cyanide.

To make 900 people kill themselves out of blind faith involves conditioning as well as obedience. Jones subtly conditioned the inhabitants of the Peoples Temple settlement using punishment and reward systems to aid his control over the people, in a form of operant conditioning.

People were attracted to the Peoples Temple initially as a Christian sect, a place to stay and live  a happy life, along with other followers. However Jones began to see himself as a replacement Christ, and bought it upon himself to preach to the masses about his theories. To gain everyone’s trust and obedience,  he utilised the art of speaking. He constantly spoke to his congregation about how they are here to obey and follow, and create a better life for themselves. Much like Hitler, he was very skilled, he could easily manipulate people in his trust, making them much more likely to begin to trust Jim Jones.

As Jonestown progressed, so did the obedience. People carried out orders without thinking, it almost became routine to them to blindly obey Jones and his associates.

When the mass suicide was initiated, parents were ordered to make their children drink the cyanide before them, to ensure that the children died. An observation was made, that the children didn’t obey Jones’ orders, they were far more likely to struggle and oppose the authority, showing that with age comes the knowledge that you must obey an authoritative figure. If the children did show an autonomous state toward to officials, they were have cyanide squirted down their throat.

The adults showed an obvious agentic state toward officials. They very calmed lined up to receive the cocktail, and drank it all together, without showing any form of disobedience towards the people ordering them to do so. Those who did remain autonomous, very either shot or injected with cyanide.

The people obeyed Jones’ instructions as he had conditioned them in to believing that he had the utmost authority by conditioning and using communist regime. Most of the people had been within the compound for a long time, giving Jones enough time to convince the Peoples Temple that he was the new messiah, thus giving them the basis on which to sacrifice their life.

Overall, they people were conditioned by Jones into an agentic state over a number of years, which eventually culminated in the death of 909 people. The main interest here is that the children were autonomous when they died, giving an indication that with age comes the knowledge that authoritative figures must be obeying, whereas people of a younger generation may still have to learn about obeying authority

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Pedro Lopez, known as the Andes Monster, was a serial killer that assassinated little girls in Colombia, Peru and Equator during the 70s. He looked for his victims in the market, usually girls with cute and innocent eyes, and followed them during two or three days. When the victim was alone, he would kill her.

He did it hundreds of times. The Police got him in 1980, and he confessed everything. The police found 53 bodies of girls between 8 and 12 in the location he indicated. Neither the police nor the killer can precise how many girls he killed, because those were only the girls in one single spot. Authorities estimate something around 300 killings.

Jim Jones

Jim Jones was a cult leader during the 60s. He had thousands of fanatic followers, which Jim Jones hit and sexually abused several times.

In 1977, after authorities started to investigate him, Jim Jones moved to a farm in Guiana with hundreds of his followers.

When police finally got to him in 1978, and surrounded the farm, Jim Jones persuaded his followers to commit a collective suicide drinking cyanide. Nine hundred and fourteen followers died. Jim Jones, on the other hand, didn’t want something so clean as drinking poison; he shot his head before police invaded the farm.

Buhram

According to the Guinness Book, Buhram, the thug, is the top killer in history. Buhram lived in India between 1790 and 1840, and was a member of the Thug cult, which praises the sacrifice of victims in religious rituals.

Buhram used to choose his victims among striders. He approached them, became a friend, and strangled them when they got alone. History estimates something around 930 executed by Buhram the thug.

Not many people in the West knew where Guyana was. In fact, not many Westerners knew that there was even such a place. Whereas, on the other side of the Atlantic, just above the equator in the north of the South American continent, not many Guyanese people had heard of Jim Jones. No one knew, without being told that is, where Jonestown was. But this is a different story with countless political implications.

I was at my friend’s house having lunch before heading back to school. I was a primary school pupil, in what is called fourth standard in that part of the world. My friend’s mother had the radio tuned to the lunch-time Calypso programme when there was a sudden break in the steel drum rhythm and the news reader came on. “Breaking news,” he had said. And then told of the peculiar story of how more than nine hundred people lined up and willingly drank Kool-aid which they knew was laced with deadly poison.

Of course, as a little child – a sensible one – I thought that it was most absurd. Why would any one stand in a queue to volunteer to be killed? My life as a physically and emotionally abused child was enveloped with misery and pain so it was odd for me to feel such terror at the idea of death.

I told myself that surely, it was a mistake and that the people were unaware of the Kool-aid’s deadly ingredient. But I was wrong, there were pictures in the newspapers the next day, and the next, and the next after that. They showed hundreds of murdered people lying like mere piles of dirty laundry on the ground. In my child’s mind the pictures made dozens of photocopies and filed them neatly away under “long term” memory.

There were images of families bunched together, face down in the grass, almost giving an impression of a sinister scrum. I saw pictures of dead mothers still holding equally dead babies tightly to their hearts. Some of the newspapers printed pictures of the boundless piles of shoes collected at the site after the bodies were moved. And still more on their front pages, showed little knitted booties of babies whose mothers had spoon-fed the tainted drink to their unwitting infants before swallowing a cupful themselves.

Until attempts were made to match earlier photographs to one of the dead bodies found apart from the masses, there were speculations that Jim Jones had escaped, because only very few people had even a fleeting recollection of what he looked like.

Some Guyanese people still like to say that he didn’t die. What is certain though, is that this American preacher had, after allegedly fathering dozens of babies by various women, somehow managed to brain wash his devotees not only to give up their homes in America and follow him to a third world former British colony, but to kill themselves and their children, submitting to a whim of his putrid, devilish mind.

It was later revealed that not all of Jim Jones’ followers met their deaths by drinking the Kool-aid. Some were found shot at a nearby airstrip, apparently trying to escape the afternoon drink on offer at the People’s Temple of doom.

I followed this story with the rapt attention of a middle-aged reporter in need of a better twist to a macabre story. It naturally, didn’t help me with my personal abuse problems as they got worse and I lived every day in the hell Jim Jones might have created if he had any power at all.

Because of its use of death as an escape, this story did discover for me a bizarre outlet which – apart from in my nightmarish dreams – I never really even considered using. And though I didn’t understand it clearly at the time, it brought to my attention the fact that unlike those people whose pictures I had studied, I did not choose to be victimized.

I was only a child, and like in the case of those children whose little booties made the front page of the national paper, grown ups are the ones who make the decision to either protect or violate the lives of little angels.

When President Carter mourned for the dead, it was for the shot Congressman Ryan, the NBC news reporters and the other Americans who lost their lives at the hands of his own citizen. Our dead and that little twisted piece of history that should not have been ours, will live in multi million pixels in my mind forever. After all, my late uncle was one of the soldiers sent into Jonestown for a frenzied clean up right after the massacre.