Paranoid Conditions and Cult Leaders
By:
THEODORE MILLON and
Seth Grossman
Carrie Millon
Sarah Meagher
Rowena Ramnath
In
a study of the paranoid personality, Hampton and Burnham (1990) explore the
character of the Reverend Jim Jones, the cult leader famous for the 1978 mass
suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 people died, including almost
300 children, most by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
As
noted by these authors, Jones showed signs of pathology from early in life. As
a 6- year-old, he often greeted his next-door neighbor, a university professor,
by saying, “Good morning, you son-of-a-bitch.” His mother was a factory worker;
his father, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He graduated from college in 1961 and
was ordained in 1964. He bought churches in Los Angeles and San Francisco,
building a congregation dazzled by oratory and religious claims. He worked hard
at instilling terror into his congregation, describing his divinely inspired
vision of the coming nuclear holocaust. Claiming sometimes to be the spirit of
Christ and sometimes that of Lenin, he preached the virtues of socialism and
persuaded his flock to empty their pockets into the coffers of the People’s
Temple.
Yet,
Jones also did good things, such as establishing soup kitchens and social
programs and adopting seven children. Such ostensibly altruistic acts allowed
Jones to present an extraordinary face to the world. Eventually, he was awarded
the title “Humanitarian of the Year” by the Los
Angeles Herald.
As
his paranoia began to amplify, Jones decided to relocate his command center to Guyana.
Almost 1,000 members of his church followed him, and together they founded Jonestown,
a safe haven from nuclear holocaust and the persecution of groups back in the
United States.
Far
from creating a heaven on earth, Jones stripped his followers of all autonomy,
imposing “a regimen of terror, physical punishment, beatings, exhaustion, emotional
dependency, and tyranny” (Hampton & Burnham, 1990, p. 79).
Eventually,
Jones became convinced that he was being persecuted by unseen forces,
particularly the
CIA.
Those who disagreed with him, he said, would be killed.
The
paranoid personality traits of Jones are easy to identify. From an early age,
Jones was secretly grandiose. In the era of his Los Angeles and San Francisco
churches, for example, he identified himself with the spirit of Christ. Later,
he claimed privileged access to special knowledge, his visions of a nuclear
war. Entangled with his grandiosity was a lust for power, a deep suspiciousness
of those “on the outside,” demands for absolute loyalty, severe punishments for
breaking this loyalty, and the elevation of his own need for loyalty to the
level of religious dogma. The smallest disagreement was treason.
To
sustain his appetite for domination, Jones worked hard to create strong
in-group/out-group feelings in his flock, especially a sense that the end was
always near. This he followed up with techniques of mind control,
sleep-depriving his followers, and working them to exhaustion.
Given
his grandiosity, Jones appears as a mix of the paranoid and narcissistic
personality disorders, an especially powerful combination for the aspiring
charismatic cult leader.
References
Personality Disorders in Modern Life,
second edition, 2000, 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Read Also
Paranoid Personality Disorder, Case vignette (1)
Paranoid Personality Disorder, Case vignette (2)
Paranoid Personality Disorder, Case vignette (3)
Paranoid Personality Disorder, Case vignette (2)
Paranoid Personality Disorder, Case vignette (3)
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