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Jonestown: the name of the commune is destined, like Watergate and Viet Nam, to pass into our vocabulary as a synecdoche, a symbol for something larger. The victims cannot be dismissed as mere crazies: many were poor, elderly blacks, but a number were well-educated younger people from seemingly comfortable backgrounds. What united them was partly a fear of freedom, partly a defect in will that led them to surrender blindly to any powerful leader, any strong faith — things they somehow were not able to find in U.S. society and so rejected it. They did so even though the leader was a charlatan, and the faith insane.
Jim Jones used the cloak of the First Amendment to deprive his followers of the very things that it was designed to guarantee: their freedom to worship and speak as individuals. That so many would shut off their minds and abdicate their roles as questioning, feeling, thinking beings was a stark reminder that, after centuries of what rationalists would like to think of as progress, in 1978 the line dividing civilization from savagery was still tragically fragile.