Word: cults
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...could one imagine a connection between Santayana and Jones's cult? Santayana--the philosopher of the American consciousness, the dissector of our spiritual heritage; the rationalist Harvard professor, the ascetic hermit; the half-Spanish, half-Boston Brahmin writer who knew the spirit of this country so well yet found it troubling and oppressive--what did Jim Jones see in his words? Surely there is some subterranean meaning in this strange confluence of philosophies...
...American normalcy of his background: Jones, your neighbor, the guy at the plant. He was born in Indiana, the heart of the heartland. Far from the seaboards, with their cosmopolitan outlooks and their receptiveness to foreign ideas, the midwest would seem the most inhospitable place for some "strange cult" to take root...
Jonestown was more than an isolated aberrant phenomenon, a cult which had little to do with mainstream culture; it was, in a deep and touching way, an American tragedy. The incident at Jonestown could have happened only to Americans: the People's Temple arose out of social conditions absolutely indigenous to this country. Though the final mass suicide was bizarre and unprecedented, the force lying behind it are forces peculiar to America. The proof lies in the public's outrage--some deep nerve of the national consciousness has been touched. After all, 300 Vietnamese died in a boat a week...
Religion and insanity occupy adjacent territories in the mind; historically, cults have kept up a traffic between the two. The medieval Brethren of the Free Spirit, the heretical Beghards and Beguines who practiced in Cologne and other Northern European cities, became nihilistic megalomaniacs. They began in rags but then, in the conviction of their spiritual superiority, which they eventually believed to surpass God's, adopted the idea that the general run of mankind existed merely to be exploited, through robbery, violence and treachery. In 1420 a cult of Bohemians called the Adamites came to regard themselves, like the Manson...
...their worst, the cults acquire a psychosis of millennialism. This chiliasm, playing at the drama of the last days, nourishes when life is no longer seen as ascendant. But no matter how democratically advertised, visions of the New Jerusalem, Utopia or an Edenic Jonestown are bathed in a totalitarian light. And they are shadowed by glimpses of enemies: Antichrist, Gog and Magog; paranoia is often a cult's principal instrument of discipline. Even in 1978, one catches whiffs of an old dementia and witchfire...