Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 242 of 267 · 20 per page

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  I kept on thinking, ‘Yes, of course, of course. I’d forgotten that he thought that—or disliked this, or knew so-and-so—or jerked his head back that way.’ I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.? That it is not happening already? Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes—ten seconds—of the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone. What pitiable cant to say, ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was H. I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest. I remember being rather horrified one summer morning long ago when a burly, cheerful labouring man, carrying a hoe and a watering pot came into our churchyard and, as he pulled the gate behind him, shouted over his shoulder to two friends, ‘See you later, I’m just going to visit Mum.’ He meant he was going to weed and water and generally tidy up her grave. It horrified me because this mode of sentiment, all this churchyard stuff, was and is simply hateful, even inconceivable, to me. But in the light of my recent thoughts I am beginning to wonder whether, if one could take that man’s line (I can’t), there isn’t a good deal to be said for it. A six-by-three-foot flower-bed had become Mum. That was his symbol for her, his link with her. Caring for it was visiting her. May this not be in one way better than preserving and caressing an image in one’s own memory?

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  1. The Universal Need of Salvation.—It arises from the fall of Adam and the whole human race, which was included in him as the tree is included in the seed, so that his one act of disobedience brought sin and death upon the whole posterity. Paul proves the depravity of Gentiles and Jews without exception to the extent that they are absolutely unable to attain to righteousness and to save themselves. "There is none righteous, no, not one." They are all under the dominion of sin and under the sentence of condemnation.778 He recognizes indeed, even among the heathen, the remaining good elements of reason and conscience,779 which are the connecting links for the regenerating work of divine grace; but for this very reason they are inexcusable, as they sin against better knowledge. There is a conflict between the higher and the lower nature in man (the nou'", which tends to God who gave it, and the savrx, which tends to sin), and this conflict is stimulated and brought to a crisis by the law of God; but this conflict, owing to the weakness of our carnal, fallen, depraved nature, ends in defeat and despair till the renewing grace of Christ emancipates us from the curse and bondage of sin and gives us liberty and victory. In the seventh chapter of the Romans, Paul gives from his personal experience a most remarkable and truthful description of the religious history of man from the natural or heathen state of carnal security (without the law, Rom. 7:7–9) to the Jewish state under the law which calls out sin from its hidden recess, reveals its true character, and awakens the sense of the wretchedness of slavery under sin (7:10–25), but in this very way prepares the way for the Christian state of freedom (7:24 and Rom. 8).780

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Barbarian tribes attacked from the north, and the southern state of Chu increasingly ignored the rules of courtly warfare and posed a real threat to the principalities. The Zhou kings were too weak to provide effective leadership, so Prince Huan of Qi, by now the most powerful Chinese state, formed a league of states that bound themselves by oath not to attack each other. But this attempt would fail, because the nobles, addicted to personal prestige, still wanted to preserve their independence. After Chu destroyed the league in 597, the region became engulfed in an entirely new kind of warfare. Other large peripheral states also began to cast aside traditional constraints, determined to expand and conquer more territory even if this meant the enemy’s annihilation. In 593, for example, after a prolonged siege, the people of Song were reduced to eating their children. Small principalities were drawn into the conflict against their will when their territories became battlefields of competing armies. Qi, for example, encroached so frequently on the tiny dukedom of Lu that it was forced to appeal to Chu for help. But by the end of the sixth century, Chu had been defeated and Qi had become so dominant that the Duke of Lu managed to retain a modicum of independence only with the help of the western state of Qin. There was also civil strife: Qin, Jin, and Chu were all fatally weakened by chronic infighting, and in Lu three baronial families effectively created their own substates and reduced the legitimate duke to a mere puppet. Archaeologists have noted a growing contempt for ritual observance at that time: people were placing profane objects in their relatives’ tombs instead of the prescribed vessels. The spirit of moderation was also in decline. Many Chinese had developed a taste for luxury that put an unbearable strain on the economy, as demand outstripped resources, and some of the lower-ranking nobility tried to ape the lifestyle of the great families. As a result many of the shi at the bottom of the aristocratic hierarchy became impoverished and were forced to leave the cities to scrape a living as teachers among the min. One shi, who held a minor administrative post in Lu, was horrified by the greed, pride, and ostentation of the usurping families. Kong Qiu (c. 551–479) was convinced that the li alone could curb this destructive violence. His disciples would call him Kongfuzi (“our Master Kong”), so in the West we call him Confucius. He never achieved the political career he hoped for and died believing that he was a failure, but he would define Chinese culture until the 1911 Revolution. With his little band of followers, most of them from the warrior aristocracy, Confucius traveled from one principality to another, hoping to find a ruler who would implement his ideas.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it. For H. wasn’t like that at all. Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. Passion, tenderness, and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure—and there’s another red-hot jab—of being exposed and laughed at. I was never less silly than as H.’s lover. And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting. Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

• From Cultish (2021)

  But to enmesh in a community that uses linguistic rituals—chants, prayers, turns of phrase—to reshape that “culture of shared understanding” Eileen Barker spoke of can draw us away from the real world. Without us even noticing, our very understanding of ourselves and what we believe to be true becomes bound up with the group. With the leader. All because of language. This book will explore the wide spectrum of cults and their uncanny lexicons, starting with the most famously blatantly dreadful ones and working its way to communities so seemingly innocuous, we might not even notice how cultish they are. In order to keep the scope of these stories manageable (because goodness knows I could spend my whole life interviewing people about “cults” of all kinds), we’re going to focus mainly on American groups. Each part of the book will focus on a different category of “cult,” all the while exploring the cultish rhetoric that imbues our everyday lives: Part 2 is dedicated to notorious “suicide cults” like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate; part 3 explores controversial religions like Scientology and Children of God; part 4 is about multilevel marketing companies (MLMs); part 5 covers “cult fitness” studios; and part 6 delves into social media gurus. The words we hear and use every day can provide clues to help us determine which groups are healthy, which are toxic, and which are a little bit of both—and to what extent we wish to engage with them. Within these pages lies an adventure into the curious (and curiously familiar) language of Cultish. So, in the words of many a cult leader: Come along. Follow me . . . Part 2Congratulations—You Have Been Chosen to Join the Next Evolutionary Level Above Human i.“Drinking the Kool-Aid.” This is a phrase you know. Having taken a seat at the table of everyday idioms, it’s probably come up on at least a few dozen occasions over the course of your English-speaking life. The last time I overheard the expression was only about a week ago, as I caught someone casually describe their allegiance to Sweetgreen, the trendy chopped-salad chain: “I guess I’ve just drunk the Kool-Aid,” they said with a side smile, taking their quinoa to go. I, too, once uttered this remark just as reflexively as any other familiar stock saying—“speak of the devil,” “hit the nail on the head,” “can’t judge a book by its cover.” But that was before I knew the stories. Today, “drinking the Kool-Aid” is most often used to describe someone mindlessly following a majority, or as shorthand for questioning their sanity. In 2012, Forbes christened it a “top annoying cliché ” used by business leaders. Bill O’Reilly has invoked the saying to write off his critics (“The Kool-Aid people are going nuts,” he’s told listeners). I’ve even found it in contexts as glib and self-deprecating as “Yeah, I finally bought a Peloton.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Even in this brief excerpt of the Death Tape, you can get a chilling impression of Jones’s rhythmic repetition and deceptive hyperbole. If we can’t live in peace, then let’s die in peace. . . . We have been betrayed. We have been so terribly betrayed. . . . I’ve never lied to you. . . . The best testimony we can make is to leave this goddamn world. . . . I’m speaking as a prophet today. I wouldn’t sit up in this seat and talk so serious if I did not know what I was talking about. . . . I don’t want to see you go through this hell no more, no more, no more, no more. . . . [Death] is not to be feared, not be feared. It’s a friend, it’s a friend. . . . Let’s get gone, let’s get gone, let’s get gone. . . . Death is a million times more preferable than 10 more days in this life. . . . Hurry, my children. . . . Sisters, good knowing you. . . . No more pain now, no more pain. . . . Free at last. The Death Tape is a poem, a curse, a mantra, a betrayal, a haunting. And proof of language’s lethal power. ii.I was a spooky kid who grew up on cult tales, so I’ve been tuned in to Jonestown stories ever since I can remember. My dad often compared Jim Jones to Chuck Dederich, the manic leader of Synanon. Though Dederich never led a “mass suicide,” my dad’s half sister Francie, who spent her elementary school years in Synanon, told me that if Dederich had stayed in power a little longer, she could’ve seen it happening. Synanon wasn’t physically violent while my dad was there, but like Jones, Dederich grew more bloodthirsty over the years. By the late 1970s, he’d appointed a militarized coalition called the Imperial Marines, which carried out dozens of violent crimes, like mass beatings against defectors, whom Dederich labeled “splittees.” One splittee was pummeled so hard, his skull was fractured; he subsequently contracted bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. Just a few weeks before the Jonestown mass deat h in 1978, a lawyer named Paul Morantz, who’d helped a few splittees sue Synanon, was bitten by a rattlesnake Dederich’s Imperial Marines had placed in his mailbox. Dederich was arrested after that, then went bankrupt, and by 1991, Synanon had crumbled. Like most leaders of fringy communes, Dederich never got as far as Jones. But nineteen years after Jonestown, someone got close. In late March 1997, another cult suicide made headlines, reminding everyone of the tragedy in Guyana. This ordeal transpired in Rancho Santa Fe, California, where thirty-eight members of Heaven’s Gate, a group of UFO-believing doomsdayers, systematically took their lives over a three-day period. Their deaths came by ingesting a mixture of applesauce, vodka, and barbiturates before tying plastic bags around their heads.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Modern MLM language is defined by the sort of snappy, uplifting quotes you might find printed in flouncy bridesmaid cursive on Pinterest: “You got this, boss babe”; “Channel your inner #girlboss”; “Build a fempire”; “Be a mompreneur”; “#WFH so you can make money like the SHE-E-O you are without having to leave your kids!!” These phrases work initially to love-bomb potential sellers; then, over time, they become loaded with the weight of the American Dream itself, conditioning followers to believe that “giving up” on the business would mean giving up on your very life’s purpose. In the early days, direct sellers introduced their overpriced, chemical-smelling trinkets in person, hosting at-home product demonstrations called “parties.” But these days, many women choose to kick it new school and parade their goods across social media, as their snarky former classmates cringe-scroll past. My best friend Esther is a twenty-six-year-old Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor who posts a lot about cancer-free living and radiates just the breed of health-conscious positivity many MLMs enjoy exploiting. She gets one or two Instagram DMs a week from different direct sales recruiters trying to seduce her into the flock. “Hey girlboss!!! Love your content!!! You’re such a badass!!! Have you ever thought about turning your cancer journey into a business?!?!” She screenshots them all, sends them to me, and deletes.* As far as I’m concerned, an MLM is to a pyramid scheme as a Starbucks Vanilla Bean Crème Frappuccino is to a straight-up milkshake: One is just a glorified version of the other—an assertion that would scandalize any devoted MLMer. “I would NEVER be involved with a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are ILLEGAL,” they tend to say as their stock defense. This phrase is a thought-terminating cliché, and it’s an amusing one, because if you take the logic even one step further, it becomes obvious that simply saying something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s not real or that you’re not involved. You can’t rob a bank and then, when accused, just say, “I didn’t do it, robbing banks is illegal,” to prove your innocence. In the city of Mobile, Alabama, it’s against the law to throw plastic confett i, but that doesn’t mean plastic confetti doesn’t exist or that people don’t use it. Sometimes citizens of Mobile throw plastic confetti without knowing it’s illegal, and sometimes they know plastic confetti is illegal but use it anyway because they don’t realize the confetti they’re using is made of plastic. Either way, it’s still a thing, and it’s still not cool. Pyramid schemes are indeed outlawed, and for good reason. They have the capacity to cheat people out of a couple hundred dollars or drive them all the way to bankruptcy and despair. They can shatter entire communities, even national economies, like those of Albania and Zimbabwe, which have been decimated by schemes both pyramid and Ponz i. It’s no surprise, then, that pyramid schemes don’t announce themselves as suc h.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  As it turned out, Fred’s declining desire was influenced—but not caused—by his fascination with centerfolds. Much more important than Janette’s changing body was the fact that she had become increasingly passive in recent years, to the point where Fred was no longer sure if she particularly enjoyed sex with him anymore. Luckily, the two of them had always talked openly about most things, although it had been years since they had discussed sex. Spurred on by a deeper understanding of his eroticism and a reduction of his guilt, Fred initiated an extremely productive dialogue with Janette. Once she felt assured that his intention was not to criticize her but to improve their sex life, she acknowledged her increasing passivity in bed. She explained how Fred’s tendency to be sexually aggressive had led her to conclude that he preferred her to be submissive. She was just trying to give him what she assumed he wanted. She also divulged that her passivity was making sex less interesting for her too. As she grasped how much Fred missed feeling her unbridled desire, she gradually felt freer to let her excitement show. And in response, Fred’s passions once again began to stir. Fred might have found a solution to his problem without examining his peak turn-ons. And, of course, this couple’s ability to communicate so productively and become sexually experimental—skills that many sex therapy clients lack—were essential to their success. But by freeing him from the discouraging and mistaken belief that only physical perfection could excite him, Fred’s memories of peak sex greatly accelerated his progress. As I saw the benefits of investigating peak turn-ons in dozens of sex therapy cases, including ones much more difficult than Fred’s, I wondered if similar memories might also help with problems not directly linked to sex. Soon I had an intriguing opportunity to find out. Sabrina: Rediscovering vitality After she had struggled with “blue moods” for several years, Sabrina’s depression was getting worse. “Nothing matters that much anymore,” she lamented. “I’m lonely most of the time. I’ve forgotten how to have fun. I feel ugly. And I’m not even sure my husband loves me.” With that she burst into tears. It was easy to see she was suffering from a “love depression” based on the belief—shared by all the women in her family—that men are incapable of loving women, and therefore she was doomed to a life of dissatisfaction. Speaking of her husband, Ted, she complained, “If he’s not working, he’s puttering in the damn garden. He hardly ever notices me, let alone holds or kisses me.”

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  D. For Jesus, as for other Jewish teachers of his day, what God wanted was for his people to keep the commandments that formed the heart of his law, the commandments to love God above all else (Deut. 6:4) and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Lev. 19:18; Mark 12:28-34), E. Even though the commandment to love is simple, it is also all encompassing. Giving oneself over to the command is necessary to enter God’s kingdom, which is the ultimate goal of all existence. 1. The kingdom is to be sought after as one’s most prized possession (cf. the parable of the pearl of great price; Matt. 13:45^16). 2 . Nothing else in human existence should be of any ultimate concern — not even food and clothing (Matt. 5:39^12; 6:33). 3 . Trying to live for things of this world while committing oneself totally to God would be like a slave trying to serve two masters — it can’t be done (Luke 16:13). 4 . Thus, one should give up everything — all possessions and everything that binds one to this world — in light of the coming kingdom (Mark 10: 17-21). Those who give up their lives in this world will gain much in the kingdom that will soon appear (Mark 10:29-31). F. This emphasis on giving up everything for the kingdom means that Jesus was not a major proponent of what we now call “family values.” 1. In fact, he was quite unambiguous that parents, siblings, spouses, and even children were to have no importance in comparison with the kingdom (Luke 14:26). 2 . Jesus appears to have realized how divisive this teaching could be, but he claimed that he would split families up rather than keep them together (Luke 12:51-53). 3 . As with other hard saying of Jesus, these should not be explained away so that they no longer mean what they say. Instead, they should be placed in their own apocalyptic context. G. Jesus’ teachings on marriage considered in this context are different than some modem interpretations. 16 ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1. In his society, it was unusual for a man to be unmarried (as he was). Some were ascetics, as the evidence indicates Jesus was. 2. Jesus never taught against marriage. 3. In Mark 12, Jesus argues with the Pharisees over bodily resurrection, showing his belief in bodily resurrection into a state of no marriage. 4 . Thus, Jesus may be saying, “don’t get married” (in view of the coming judgment). H. Jesus did not advocate a strong structure to promote a healthy society, because he thought society was diseased and soon to be destroyed. III. Jesus “maximized” the commandment to love and “minimized” everything else in comparison. A. This can be seen in the so-called “antitheses” preserved now in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel (Matt. 5:21-48). 1. The law says not to murder; if you really love your neighbor, though, you won’t even get angry with him.

• From Cultish (2021)

  ” It’s something that ’90s Time writer couldn’t have predicted: a world where seekers satisfy their spiritual desires with a hodgepodge of nonreligious rituals practiced largely online. It’s a world where our closest confidantes can be found on Beyoncé fan forums and private Peloton Facebook groups, and where one’s ethics and identity are wrapped up in the influencers they follow, targeted ads they click through, and memes they repost. Twenty years post–Heaven’s Gate, most zealous fringe groups rarely convene IRL. Instead, they build an online system of morality, culture, and community—and sometimes radicalize—with no remote commune, no church, no “party,” no gym. Just language. In lieu of a physical place to meet, cultish jargon gives followers something to assemble around. When I first downloaded Instagram in the summer of 2012, I couldn’t help but notice how curious it seemed that the app called its account holders “followers” instead of friends or connections. “It’s like a cult platform,” I remember saying to pals. “Is it not encouraging everyone to build their own little cult?” I didn’t even know the word “influencer” back then (the term didn’t become popular until 2016, according to Google search data), so I couldn’t have foreseen that “spiritual influencers” would soon become a whole category of new religious leader. Less than a decade after Instagram’s launch, thousands of astrologers, self-help sages, and holistic wellness guides like Bentinho Massaro and Teal Swan, who might have never even developed an interest in metaphysics before the internet (much less monetized it), use apps and algorithms to spread their gospel. These digital gurus fulfill modern America’s renewed demand for New Age ideas with images of tarot readings, updates on the cosmos, and abstract talk of frequency fields and galactic perspectives. Their high-octane feeds provide just as much eye candy as a beauty or “lifestyle” influencer, but the promises are far greater. The Instagram mystic doesn’t operate on a business model but a spiritual mission; they aren’t just selling spon con and merch, but transcendent wisdom. Double-tap and subscribe, and you’ll obtain access to higher vibrations, alternate dimensions, even life beyond death. “I’ve asked myself, if Buddha or Jesus lived today, would they have a Facebook page?” Bentinho Massaro posed in a 2019 interview, adding that he finds that Instagram lends itself particularly well to the divine. “The pictures have an energy,” he told the reporter, his glacial eyes glittering. Brent Wilkins’s suicide was a rare and concretely tragic example of the fate that can befall a seeker who submerges too deeply in the warped “reality” of an online guru. But for most people, someone like Massaro is just another account to thumb past. Unlike the cults of the ’70s, we don’t even have to leave the house for a charismatic figure to take hold of us. With contemporary cults, the barrier to entry is the simple frisson of tapping Follow.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Christine approached the mic at the front of the pavilion and tried to defend her fellow members’ right to live, suggesting they look for alternative outs, spare the children, flee to Russia maybe. “It’s not that I am afraid to die, but . . . I look at the babies and I think they deserve to live, you know?” she contested. “I still think as an individual I have a right to say what I think, what I feel. . . . We all have a right to our own destiny as individuals. . . . I feel like as long as there’s life, there’s hope.” Jones let her speak; he even complimented her “agitation.” But ultimately, the choice was made for her. “Christine,” he said. “Without me, life has no meaning. I’m the best thing you’ll ever have.” Later that afternoon, everyone under that canopy—including Christine, the guards, and eventually Jones himself, who took a pistol to his head—was gone. You can get just the tiniest sense of Jones’s coercive preaching style in a piece of audio known as the Jonestown Death Tape. The forty-five-minute recording captures the final speech Jones gave in the pavilion. “Death is not a fearful thing, it’s living that’s cursed,” he proclaimed from his pulpit, as parents, by his command, squirted fluid-filled syringes into their babies’ mouths, then had no choice but to administer their own doses or have someone else finish the job for them. Upon swallowing the bitter punch, followers were escorted outside one by one, where they perished, bodies convulsing, collapsing, and coming to stillness on the lawn. Forever a peacock, Jones made the Death Tape himself; now it’s public record, and you can listen to it online. Survivors like Odell Rhodes, who was one of only thirty-three to evade the poisoning that day (he hid under a building until nightfall), maintain that Jones doctored the tape, stopping and starting to whiteout bursts of protest, commotion, and cries of agony. The Death Tape is a subject of intense fascination; at least half a dozen different people, including religion scholars and FBI agents, have taken cracks at transcribing it, eyes pinched shut, headphones turned all the way up, trying to catch and confirm every last line. If listening to nearly a thousand people squabble with Jones and each other mere moments before the infamous tragedy weren’t hair-raising enough, the Death Tape’s haunting soundtrack makes it stranger than fiction. There’s a score of faint music playing underneath all the talking, which sounds like it was added later for effect; as it turns out, the tape originally contained a series of soul tunes.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Jones taped over them, resulting in a “ghost recording” of muffled, tempo- warped melodies. At the very end, after the speech is over, you can hear “I’m Sorry,” a 1968 R&B song by the Delfonics, played at half speed like a church organ. Even in this brief excerpt of the Death Tape, you can get a chilling impression of Jones’s rhythmic repetition and deceptive hyperbole. If we can’t live in peace, then let’s die in peace. . . . We have been betrayed. We have been so terribly betrayed. . . . I’ve never lied to you. . . . The best testimony we can make is to leave this goddamn world. . . . I’m speaking as a prophet today. I wouldn’t sit up in this seat and talk so serious if I did not know what I was talking about. . . . I don’t want to see you go through this hell no more, no more, no more, no more. . . . [Death] is not to be feared, not be feared. It’s a friend, it’s a friend. . . . Let’s get gone, let’s get gone, let’s get gone. . . . Death is a million times more preferable than 10 more days in this life. . . . Hurry, my children. . . . Sisters, good knowing you. . . . No more pain now, no more pain. . . . Free at last. The Death Tape is a poem, a curse, a mantra, a betrayal, a haunting. And proof of language’s lethal power. ii. I was a spooky kid who grew up on cult tales, so I’ve been tuned in to Jonestown stories ever since I can remember. My dad often compared Jim Jones to Chuck Dederich, the manic leader of Synanon. Though Dederich never led a “mass suicide,” my dad’s half sister Francie, who spent her elementary school years in Synanon, told me that if Dederich had stayed in power a little longer, she could’ve seen it happening. Synanon wasn’t physically violent while my dad was there, but like Jones, Dederich grew more bloodthirsty over the years. By the late 1970s, he’d appointed a militarized coalition called the Imperial Marines, which carried out dozens of violent crimes, like mass beatings against defectors, whom Dederich labeled “splittees.” One splittee was pummeled so hard, his skull was fractured; he subsequently contracted bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. Just a few weeks before the Jonestown mass death in 1978, a lawyer named Paul Morantz, who’d helped a few splittees sue Synanon, was bitten by a rattlesnake Dederich’s Imperial Marines had placed in his mailbox. Dederich was arrested after that, then went bankrupt, and by 1991, Synanon had crumbled.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  The happiness into which it invited me was insipid. I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way. It frightens me to think that a mere going back should even be possible. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all, to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal—something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else. Thus H. would die to me a second time; a worse bereavement than the first. Anything but that. Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one. Still, there are the two enormous gains—I know myself too well now to call them ‘lasting.’ Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum—nor all that fuss about my mental image of her. My jottings show something of the process, but not so much as I’d hoped. Perhaps both changes were really not observable. There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for some time. The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this. I have lost the fruition I once had of H. And I am far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some time have of God. But by praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing. But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I’ve described H. as being like a sword. That’s true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have balanced it.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Having received tips from followers’ families that they were being held captive against their will, Ryan decided to fly down and check in, and he brought a few reporters and some delegates along with him. Jones, impresario that he was, did everything to conceal the rotten truths of the place while putting on a show for the Congressman (a lavish dinner, confident banter). But Jones knew there was no way they’d let him off the hook. At the end of the visit, Ryan and his crew returned to the small Jonestown airstrip to leave, and several residents followed them, trying to escape. Jones had ordered his militia to tail the defectors, and as soon as they began to board, thinking they were in the clear, the squad turned on them. They opened fire and killed five people: one Jonestown defector, three journalists, and Congressman Ryan. This event sparked the infamous “suicide.” Contrary to popular belief, the tragedy wasn’t premeditated, at least not how the press painted it to be. And most of its victims did not die voluntarily. Popular Jonestown coverage spun a story that Jones regularly hosted ghoulish suicide rehearsals known as White Night s, where his mind-controlled minions would line up like lobotomized communicants and swallow cups of punch in preparation for the “real” suicide on November 18, 1978. But this wasn’t what happened at all. Surviving Peoples Templers contend that the real White Nights were much subtler events, and you didn’t have to be “mind controlled” to participate. Originally, Jones used the phrase “White Night” to denote any sort of crisis, and the possibility of death as a result of that crisis. He chose this particular phrase to subvert the fact that our language tends to equate the color black with negativity: blacklist, blackmail, black magic. He decided the phrase “White Night” destabilized that concept. Not a bad point, but a really bad motive. Over time, as Jones grew more deranged and power-starved, the term evolved to mean a slew of insidious things. Some say White Night described occasions when Jones convinced followers to arm themselves with makeshift weapons and stay up for days on end, prepared to defend their Promised Land to the death against attacks he swore were coming but never did. Others remember the term referencing the dozen or so meetings when people approached a microphone and declared their willingness to die—that very night, if necessary—for the Cause (the Peoples Temple term for living in service of the group, not the self). There’s also the story that White Nights were weekly events when Jones would keep the group up all night to discuss community concerns. And then there are those who’ve said a White Night was simply any meeting in which Jones mentioned death. The congressman’s visit confirmed what Jones had suspected for a long time: He couldn’t keep this thing up forever. Jonestown was a failure. Too many people were trying to leave. He was doomed to be found out and dethroned.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  we individually were to walk through the awful human aftermath of our bombing raids would the experiential horror be joined to the intellectual label, and we would learn, in a total way, the incredible things we have done. But we have been schooled for years to stress only the cognitive, to avoid any feeling connected with learning. We have been denying a most important part of ourselves, and the awful split I have described is one result. Another result is that the excitement has, in large measure, gone out of education—even though no one can take the excitement out of real learning. I have days when I think that educational institutions at all levels are doomed, and perhaps we would be well advised to bid them farewell—state-required curricula, compulsory attendance, tenured professors, hours of lectures, grades, degrees, and all that—and let true learning begin to blossom outside the stifling hallowed walls. Suppose every educational institution, from kindergarten through the most prestigious Ph.D. program, were to close tomorrow. What a delightful situation that would be! Parents and children and adolescents and young people—even a few faculty members, perhaps—would begin to devise situations in which they could learn! Can you imagine anything more uplifting to the spirit of all our people? It would be sad and it would be utterly marvelous at the same time. Millions of people would be asking the same question: “Is there anything I want to learn?” They would find that there are such things, and they would invent means by which they could learn them. Closing all schools would forever kill the attitude best expressed by a student (unpublished paper) in a self-directed course (facilitated by Robert Menges) at the University of Illinois: What is educational has been viewed by me as something to do before I can finally be left alone to do something I want to do. . . . When I came home from first grade my mother asked me, “How did you like it?” She says I answered with a question, “How long do I have to go?” Until this course I had never thought about how I learn, or why.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Of course it’s easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent—non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it quite frankly, we don’t ask for Him? One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe. After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. ‘Them as asks don’t get.’ I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers. At any rate I must keep clear of the spiritualists. I promised H. I would. She knew something of those circles. Keeping promises to the dead, or to anyone else, is very well. But I begin to see that ‘respect for the wishes of the dead’ is a trap. Yesterday I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle ‘H. wouldn’t have liked that.’ This is unfair to the others. I should soon be using ‘what H. would have liked’ as an instrument of domestic tyranny, with her supposed likings becoming a thinner and thinner disguise for my own. I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother’s death when my father mentioned her. I can’t blame them. It’s the way boys are. I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. And not only in boyhood.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Christine approached the mic at the front of the pavilion and tried to defend her fellow members’ right to live, suggesting they look for alternative outs, spare the children, flee to Russia maybe. “It’s not that I am afraid to die, but . . . I look at the babies and I think they deserve to live, you know?” she contested. “I still think as an individual I have a right to say what I think, what I feel. . . . We all have a right to our own destiny as individuals. . . . I feel like as long as there’s life, there’s hope.” Jones let her speak; he even complimented her “agitation.” But ultimately, the choice was made for her. “Christine,” he said. “Without me, life has no meaning. I’m the best thing you’ll ever have.” Later that afternoon, everyone under that canopy—including Christine, the guards, and eventually Jones himself, who took a pistol to his head—was gone. You can get just the tiniest sense of Jones’s coercive preaching style in a piece of audio known as the Jonestown Death Tape. The forty-five-minute recording captures the final speech Jones gave in the pavilion. “Death is not a fearful thing, it’s living that’s cursed,” he proclaimed from his pulpit, as parents, by his command, squirted fluid-filled syringes into their babies’ mouths, then had no choice but to administer their own doses or have someone else finish the job for them. Upon swallowing the bitter punch, followers were escorted outside one by one, where they perished, bodies convulsing, collapsing, and coming to stillness on the lawn. Forever a peacock, Jones made the Death Tap e himself; now it’s public record, and you can listen to it online. Survivors like Odell Rhodes, who was one of only thirty-three to evade the poisoning that day (he hid under a building until nightfall), maintain that Jones doctored the tape, stopping and starting to whiteout bursts of protest, commotion, and cries of agony. The Death Tape is a subject of intense fascination; at least half a dozen different people, including religion scholars and FBI agents, have taken cracks at transcribing it, eyes pinched shut, headphones turned all the way up, trying to catch and confirm every last line. If listening to nearly a thousand people squabble with Jones and each other mere moments before the infamous tragedy weren’t hair-raising enough, the Death Tape’s haunting soundtrack makes it stranger than fiction. There’s a score of faint music playing underneath all the talking, which sounds like it was added later for effect; as it turns out, the tape originally contained a series of soul tunes. Jones taped over them, resulting in a “ghost recording” of muffled, tempo-warped melodies. At the very end, after the speech is over, you can hear “I’m Sorry,” a 1968 R&B song by the Delfonics, played at half speed like a church organ.

• From Cultish (2021)

  In one image, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Maria Katsaris (one of Jones’s lovers and a member of his innermost circle) grins while placing a genial index finger on the tip of a toucan’s beak. Scrap the historical context, and it looks like the sort of humble, off-the-grid elysium where I could’ve seen any number of my progressive LA pals going to escape the Trump administration. A pet toucan sounds nice. Today, most Americans have at least heard of Jonestown, if not the name, then the iconography: a commune in the jungle, a manic preacher, poisoned punch, corpses piled in the grass. Jonestown is best known for the mass murder-suicide of over nine hundred followers on November 18, 1978. Most of the victims, including more than three hundred children, met their fate after consuming a lethal concoction of cyanide and trace amounts of tranquilizers, which were mixed into vats of grape-flavored juice made from the powdered fruit concentrate Flavor Aid. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is a metaphor derived from this tragedy. Our culture erroneously remembers the elixir as Kool-Aid, not Flavor Aid, due to the former’s status as a genericized trademark (like how some people call all tissues “Kleenex,” even though there are also Puffs and Angel Soft). But Jonestownians died by the cheaper shelf-brand version, which they ingested—most orally, some by injection, and many against their will—under extreme pressure from Jones, who claimed “revolutionary suicide ” was their only option for “protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Folks didn’t go to Guyana to die a bizarre death; they went in search of a better life: to try Socialism on for size, or because their churches back home were failing, or to evade the racist American police (sound familiar?). With the Promised Land, Jim Jones guaranteed a solution for every walk of life—and with all the right words delivered just so, people had reason to believe him. Jones, whose character alone has been the subject of several dozen books, made famous what are now recognized as all the classic red flags of a dangerous guru: On the surface, he seemed a prophetic political revolutionary, but un derneath, he was a maniacal, lying, paranoid narcissist. As the story tends to go, his devotees didn’t find that out until it was too late. In the beginning, more than one survivor swore to me, there seemed nothing not to love. Born and raised in Indiana, Jim Jones was a promising new pastor in his twenties when he created his first congregation there. A rock-ribbed integrationist, he and his wife were the first white couple in the state to adopt a Black child, and they soon filled their home with many other non-white kids. Jones called his household the “Rainbow Family ,” which sent a message that he walked the walk of racial justice not only at church, but in his personal life, too. Jones’s image wasn’t just progressive and pious, though. He was handsome, too—an Elvis doppelgänger in his youth.

• From Cultish (2021)

  They completed the act within the 9,200-square-foot mansion they shared, under the direction of their grandfatherly leader, Marshall Applewhite, who perished alongside his supporters in the same bizarre, theatrical manner. A sixty-five-year-old seminary school dropout who went on to obtain a master’s degree in musical theater, Applewhite boasted a snow-white buzz cut, saucerlike eyes, and a passion for sci-fi tales. Like many power abusers in his category, Applewhite claimed prophet status—more specifically, that he and his by then deceased coleader, Bonnie Nettles (who passed away from liver cancer in 1985), were elevated, extraterrestrial souls temporarily inhabiting earthly bodies. Jim Jones had lost the loyalty of many of his nine-hundred-plus followers by the time of their deaths, but Applewhite retained his small congregation’s steadfast support through the end. On the day of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, all thirty-eight followers remained convinced of the following scenario: A heaven-bound spacecraft trailing the Comet Hale–Bopp was going to bypass Earth in March 1997, allowing followers a chance to leave this “temporal and perishable world,” board the flying saucer, and transport themselves to a distant space dimension Applewhite swore was the Kingdom of God. Using a soft but firm, paternalistic tone of voice, Applewhite spoke in long strings of esoteric space talk and Latin-derived syntax to make his small, pseudo-intellectual following feel elite. According to his credo, the earth as we know it was on the verge of being recycled, or spaded under , so that the planet might be refurbished . “The human ‘weeds’ have taken over the garden and disturbed its usefulness beyond repair,” avows the Heaven’s Gate website. As of 2020, the site remains upkept by two surviving followers, though it doesn’t seem to have undergone much of a redesign (it reads emphatically GeoCities; let’s just say there’s some cherry-red Comic Sans happening). But Applewhite had a way out—all his followers had to do to “overcome their genetic vibrations” was “exit their vehicles” so their spirits could reemerge aboard the spacecraft and carry them to a physical and spiritual Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human. Earthly bodies were merely “containers” that could be disregarded for a higher existence. The souls who did not “graduate” along with them would inevitably reach “a certain degree of corruption” and ultimately initiate “a self-destruct mechanism at the Age’s end” (aka, the apocalypse). For the exclusive Away Team, death was not only “nothing to fear,” but a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to enter a world that was “everlasting and noncorruptible.” Like Jones, Nettles and Applewhite also went by many names: The most famous were “the Two,” Bo and Peep, and Ti and Do (pronounced tee and doe , like the notes on a scale). In Heaven’s Gate, every student chose a new first name as well (and renounced their last name), which, per Applewhite’s instructions, ended in the suffix –ody . There was Thurstonody, Sylvieody, Elaineody, Qstody, Srrody, Glnody, Evnody, etc.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  PERSONAL JOYS AND DIFFICULTIES In this period, I have had some painful and many pleasant experiences. The greatest stress revolves around coping with Helen’s illness, which during the past five years has been very serious. She has met her pain and her restricted life with the utmost of courage. Her disabilities have posed new problems for each of us, both physical and psychological—problems that we continue to work through. It has been a very difficult period of alternating despair and hope, with currently much more of the latter. She is making remarkable progress in fighting her way back, often by sheer force of will, to a more normal life, built around her own purposes. But it has not been easy. She first had to choose whether she wanted to live, whether there was any purpose in living. Then I have baffled and hurt her by the fact of my own independent life. While she was so ill, I felt heavily burdened by our close togetherness, heightened by her need for care. So I determined, for my own survival, to live a life of my own. She is often deeply hurt by this, and by the changing of my values. On her side, she is giving up the old model of being the supportive wife. This change brings her in touch with her anger at me and at society for giving her that socially approved role. On my part, I am angered at any move that would put us back in the old complete togetherness; I stubbornly resist anything that seems like control. So there are more tensions and difficulties in our relationship than ever before, more feelings that we are trying to work through, but there is also more honesty, as we strive to build new ways of being together. So this period has involved struggle and strain. But it has also contained a wealth of positive experiences. There was our golden wedding celebration three years ago—several days of fun in a resort setting with our two children, our daughter-in-law, and all six of our grandchildren. It is such a joy to us that our son and daughter are now not only our offspring, but two of our best and closest friends, with whom we share our inner lives. There have been numerous intimate visits with them individually, and similar visits with close friends from other parts of the country. There is the continuing and growing closeness with our circle of friends here—all of them younger. For me there have been the pleasures of gardening and of long walks. There have been honors and awards, more than I believe I deserve. The most touching was the honorary degree I received from Leiden University on the occasion of its