Was Jim Jones mad or bad?

Thomas Szasz

In the four months since the death of the Reverend Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre — even before the release last week of the tape-recorded last moments at Jonestown — the diagnosis of paranoia has been falling on his memory like snowflakes in a winter storm. I suggest that we take another look at some of the facts reported about this Marxist-Christian minister before the sordid truths about his behaviour and that of his followers are completely buried beneath a blanket of psychiatric Speculations and diagnoses. Virtually everyone who knew Jones — among them some prominent and presumably perceptive and intelligent men and women — regarded him as perfectly healthy mentally. In 1976, during the Carter presidential campaign, Rosalynn Carter and Jim Jones dined together in San Francisco. Mrs Carter. who is. as we know, one of America's foremost experts on mental health, found no sign of mental illness in Mr Jones — on the contrary: in March 1977 she wrote Jones a letter praising his proposal to give medical aid to Cuba, and after the election she invited him to attend the Inauguration.

That Jones was accepted as at least 'normal' in California liberal political circles has by now become notorious. That he was still Widely regarded as both mentally healthy and morally admirable during the weeks and days immediately preceding the massacre is evident from the fact that a dinner benefit, called 'A Struggle Against Oppression, was planned for the People's Temple in San Francisco for 2 December 1978! It was to feature Dick Gregory. and the TernPle's two lawyers. Mark Lane and Charles Garry, as speakers, and was endorsed by 75 Prominent city leaders and politicians. It Was cancelled after the massacre.

Actually, in view of Jones's impressive record of good 'psychotherapeutic' works, the enthusiasm of evangelistic mental healthers for him should come as no surprise. Jones 'cured drug addicts'. He 'rehabilitated' aimless Americans and put them on the road to a communitarian salvation. He Was, officially at least, even against suicide it was self-determined. Only 18 months before the Jonestown massacre, Jones led a delegation of People's Temple members on a march onto the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, demanding that the city build an anti-suicide fence on the bridge. In addition to the testimonials to Jones's good mental health and commendable character we also have the testimony of Jones's personal physician that the minister was both a psychiatrically normal and a Morally admirable person. Dr Carlton Goodlet, identified as a 'prominent black doctor' in San Francisco who had attended Jones in Guyana, told the New York Times: 'I was convinced that Jones was involved in a brilliant experiment in Guyana that actu ally put people in better shape down there than they had been in San Francisco.' Even after the massacre, Dr Goodlet offered this psychiatric opinion — not about Jones. but about his disenchanted followers: 'The deserters from the church had come to me, but they were just a neurotic fringe.'

To say that Jones was widely regarded as mentally healthy is. indeed, an understatement: he was regarded as a brilliant mental healer, a great 'therapist'. Many of his followers were former drug users. Two survived the massacre. One of them. Tim Carter, said that he had been 'heavily involved in drugs in California,' and was cured by Jones. Tim's father, Francis Carter (both of whose sons were 'on drugs'). praised Jones's treatment of drug abuse: '1After joining the Temple] they gave up drugs. became rehabilitated, and got better.' Odell Rhodes, another survivor. 'had been a heroin addict from the Detroit ghetto . . . with the help of Jim Jones's power he had beat heroin, he said. He felt he needed his mentor to keep him straight.'

After the butchery in Guyana, however, Jones's followers and friends were eager to dispose of him as a 'paranoid'. Stephan Jones, the leader's son, lost no time diagnosing his father as psychotic, an opinion he kept carefully to himself until 'dad' was dead. 'He has destroyed everything I've worked for,' said the young Jones. One of Jones's lawyers, Charles Garry. had called the commune 'a beautiful jewel. There is no racism, no sexism, no ageism. no elitism [Aid, no hunger.' After the massacre. Garry declared: 'I am convinced this guy was stark raving mad.' If Mr Garry believed this before 18 November 1978, he violated his professional responsibilities as a lawyer and his moral responsibilities as a human being; and if he concluded it only because Jones finally carried out his oft-repeated threat of mass murder-suicide, then Mr Garry is asserting a platitude in declaring his safely-deceased client 'mad'.

Mark Lane, Jones's other lawyer and a world-renowned expert on conspiracy and paranoia, described his former client as 'a paranoid murderer who, after four weeks of drug injections, gave the [final] orders'. The great conspiracy-hunter thus sought to exonerate Jones by attributing the mass murder-and-suicide not only to 'paranoia' but to 'drugs' as well. But the fact is that Lane accepted Jones as a client and continued to represent him up to the very moment of mass murder and suicide. I cite all this as presumptive evidence that, prior to the final moment, those closest to Mr Jones did not believe that he was psychotic. Their subsequent conclusion that Jones was paranoid is intellectually empty and patently self-serving. Today everyone who reads newspapers and watches television has been taught that mass murderers are mad.

Thus, so long as he was alive, Jones's friends and followers did not regard him as paranoid — quite simply because they liked what he was doing. For the bottom line is a moral judgment: Jones's supporters think that he was a good man who suddenly became mad; I think he was an evil man, and not just on the day of the massacre.

Whether or not Jones had been 'crazy' well before the massacre depends on the meaning one wishes to attach to that word. However, it is now clear that for a long time Jones's behaviour was sordid and evil; it is also clear that when his followers were faced with certain facts, they deliberately looked the other way. Consider the fol lowing bits of behaviour on Mr Jones's part — during the period when Jones's followers, as well as those on the 'outside', regarded him as not merely 'normal' but 'superior': Jones insisted that everyone call him 'clad' or 'father'. When there was disagreement in the commune, the members would tranquillise each other and themselves by repeating the incantation: Dad knows best. Just do as dad tells you.'

Mr Jones had a wife, several mistresses, and 'had sex' with many of the women and several of the men in the commune. Accord ing to Tim Carter, 'He told their husbands _ that he only did it to help the women.'

According to Jerry Parks, another cult member. 'Everyone had to admit they were homosexual, even the women. He was the only heterosexual.'

Several times before the final butchery, Jones conducted rehearsals of the mass murder-suicide.

Members of the commune had to turn their possessions over to Jones, had to work like slaves, were starved and kept from sleeping, and could not leave the commune.

One wonders what else Jones would have to do to make his followers conclude that he was 'crazy'. The question is intended to be both rhetorical and satirical. We know the answer to it only too well. Hitler's followers — and Stalin's and Mao's as well — participated in a similar death dance on a vastly larger scale, in each case the survivors, and the outside world, concluding, after a holocaust, that the mass-murderer was mad. Which proves how successful these butchers were and continue to be: they have managed to abolish good and evil — in defeat no less than in victory. (It is noteworthy that on 28 November Pravda described Jones and his followers as 'idealists seeking justice and equality in a new land . . . unable to escape the punishing hand of American authorities.') Despite these unsavoury facts (and many others not catalogued here), I cannot recall, in the thousands of words I have read about the Jonestown affair, a single commentator — journalist, politician, psychiatrist, anyone — characterising Jones as an evil man. Mad, insane, crazy, paranoid, and variations on that theme — that is the consensus. James Reston's judgment of Jones was sadly typical. After quoting the opinion of 'one of the most prominent members of the Carter Administration', according to whom the Jonestown massacre was a symptom of 'mass lunacy in an age of emptiness', Reston delivered the craven diagnoses which, faced with evil, liberal intellectuals instinctively issue. Jones, declared Reston, was an 'obviously demented man'.

I think we can do better than this. The evidence — despite Reston and the anonymous high Carter Administration official — suggests that Jones was depraved not 'demented'. and that what his congregation displayed was mass cruelty and cowardice, not 'mass lunacy'. I believe that plain English words such as 'evil', 'depraved', 'cruel', and 'cowardly' furnish a better description of what happened at Jonestown than does the lexicon of lunacy in which those despicable and pathetic deeds have been couched.

This instant metamorphosis of Jim Jones from prophet to psychotic now conceals — as previously the deliberate denial of the significance of his everyday behaviour by those who knew him had concealed — the selfevident evil that animated this bestial tyrant long before his supposed 'degeneration into paranoia'. That is the phrase used by Time magazine, where Jones is described as an 'Indiana-born humanitarian who degenerated into egomania and paranoia'.

I object. I submit that it is radically distorted to view every gesture to help the poor — regardless of motives, methods and consequences — as 'humanitarian'. Which tyrant has not claimed to be motivated by a desire to help the helpless? We know only too well that to those hungry for power the prospect of 'helping' life's victims presents a great temptation; this temptation is complementary to that which alcohol and drugs present to those hungry for an effortless and simple solution to life's problems. That is why these two types of persons are drawn to each other so powerfully — and why each regards the competent, self-reliant person as his enemy. So much for Jones's 'humanitarianism'.

As to Jones's 'paranoia': we accept the proverbial wisdom that one man's meat is another man's poison; similarly, we should accept that one man's prophet is another man's paranoid. It is simply not true that Jones 'degenerated into paranoia'. Jones was the same person on 18 November 1979 (the date of the mass murder and suicide) that he was the day before, the month before, the year before. Jones did not suddenly change. What did change suddenly was the opinion certain people entertained and expressed about him. Indeed, it is mendacious to claim that Jones's mind changed, when in fact it is the minds of those now judging him to have been paranoid that changed!

What we need, then, is not so much an explanation of what happened in Jonestown (as that is clear enough) as an explanation of the explanations of that carnage which the purveyors of conventional wisdom have offered us. Briefly put. such a metaexplanation might state that paranoia in a dead and dishonoured 'cult' leader is caused by the followers' (and other observers') sudden realisation that they have been duped, which instantly transforms them from sycophants (and sympathisers) into psychodiagnosticians — of the fallen idol's insanity.

Much could be, and should be, made out of the carnage of Jonestown. What I want to make out of it here is, briefly, this.

Access to drugs entails what is now smugly called 'drug abuse'. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Why, then, the shocked surprise that access to freedom entails 'freedom abuse'? Assuredly, the abuse of freedom — like the abuse of alcohol, drugs, food, or any other good that nature or human ingenuity provides for us — is a small price to pay for the boundless benefits of freedom. That the abuse of freedom entails risks to innocent persons is one of the tragic facts of life. The children murdered at Jonestown are a sombre reminder of the awesome power parents have over their children — a power that, as Jonestown and other communal experiments have shown, the collectivisation of the family can only harness and amplify. As to Congressman Ryan and his party, they paid a heavy price for their naïveté and miscalculation: after being repeatedly warned about Jonestown and after having been emphatically disinvited by the inhabitants, their attempt to 'liberate' would-be defectors without adequate arms was as ill-advised as it would be to attempt to scale the Alps without proper shoes or clothing.

The ultimate facts, ugly and undeniable, are that of the 909 bodies at Jonestown, 260 were those of children, butchered by the peace-loving, 'humanitarian' followers of Jim Jones; and that, like their leader, these butchers hated the open society and 'fled' their homeland to settle in a Marxist country. The men and women of Jonestown rejected liberty; it is as if they had turned Patrick Henry's maxim 'Give me liberty or give me death!' on its head and had sworn allegiance to the maxim 'Give me death rather than liberty!' When Congressman Ryan insisted on staging his inspectioninvasion to foist on them the liberty they loathed, the Jonestown patriots proved that they had the courage of their convictions. The point is not merely that actions speak louder than words, which is obvious enough; it is rather than in the base rhetoric of butchers — regardless of whether they come garbed as priests, politicians, or physicians — 'love' means 'hate', and 'I will take care of you' means 'I will kill you'.