OBEY

Damn it’s been a long time since I’ve written. When I fall into one of these funks/depressions I don’t get around to doing much. More often than not, I end up sitting around watching TV or just Internet surfing.

The good thing about that is that the Internet has some pretty cool stuff on it. This last Tuesday was the 25th anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre so I did a little reading up on the whole situation. It’s incredibly scary and was an incident that was very well documented, because the leader of the People’s Temple who set up the Jonestown commune recorded hours and hours of audiotape. Many of the recordings are online and NPR has a fantastic audio documentary made in 1981 posted to their Web site.

If you’re unaware of the story, the gist of it is that the leader of the People’s Temple cult flew nearly 1,000 of his followers to South America and attempted to set up a socialist/communist style commune of which he was the head, if not its one sole god. As with all things in this vein it ended badly, extremely badly. In the end over 900 people were killed or voluntarily committed suicide by drinking cyanide.

Give most people a charismatic, authoritarian leader and they’ll obey anything and everything that leader says. I find it so hard to reconcile this willingness to obey, this total lack of logic or reason but it’s been so well documented. (The Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment are perfect examples.)

What bothers me the most is not knowing what I or those I know would do. Would I, could I do something like the above.

Click: http://forgetomori.com/2008/skepticism/best-pareidolia-ever/

Can you see the child?