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In Jones' cultish socialism, the spiritual and political were joined. In their terrific surrender, cultists reduce a multiform, contradictory world to cant formulas, and thus they become as dangerous as anyone whose head resounds with certainties.
Cults are apt to become miniatures of the great totalitarian systems built on Nazi or Hegelian and Marxist foundations.
There are eerie similarities of style: intolerance, paranoia, submission.
Such movements, wrote Historian Norman Cohn, strive to endow "social conflicts and aspirations with a transcendental significance — in fact with all the mystery and majesty of the final, eschatological drama." To be human is to live inside history, to accept a reality that does not respond to dogma or a megalomaniac's discipline. One escape is that found by the people in Jonestown. — Lance Morrow