r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 12h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

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u/hashtagthoughtbomb 10h ago edited 8h ago

Jim Jones was a civil rights activist in his early years, and his church The People's Temple had a fully integrated congregation. He also set up a soup kitchen in his church and donated groceries and clothing to those in need.

He was awarded a Martin Luther King Jr Humanitarian Award in 1977, less than two years before ordering the mass suicide murder of over 900 people in the Jonestown Massacre.

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u/totalperspec 9h ago

Fred Phelps was also a big proponent of African American civil rights before becoming the rabidly homophobic Westboro Baptist Church guy we remember from the Iraq War years.

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u/arcodash 8h ago

I really wonder if he truly had a change of heart in his last years (he was excommunicated from the church for this) or if it was just dementia.

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u/CaptainAwesome06 7h ago

Fred Phelps? How did he get excommunicated from his own church?

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u/showyerbewbs 7h ago

When you build a product that is fueled by hate and run out of things to hate on, you have to start eating your own.

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u/CaptainAwesome06 7h ago

Couldn't have happened to a better man...

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u/smellyjerk 2h ago

He softened and wanted his church to have a kinder approach. That's what was why they gave him the boot.

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u/CaptainAwesome06 2h ago

That makes sense. You wouldn't want your pastor to espouse the teachings of Jesus or anything. Especially any of that "be nice" crap.

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u/Kalse1229 32m ago

Pretty sure that was a Twilight Zone episode.

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u/arcodash 7h ago

His own children excommunicated him and isolated him from everyone else, iirc we only learned this when one of his grandchildren who isn't associated with the church wrote this in a book.

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u/TVCasualtydotorg 6h ago

Wasn't it his son in laws?

I know his daughter, who was prominent in all the docs, has been sidelined as they've taken control of the church.

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u/arceus555 7h ago

He suffered from dementia in his final years. His behavior lead to the other members believing he was condemned

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u/McJohnson88 2h ago

Allegedly, very close to the end of his life, he had a moment where he looked out at the Equality House across the street from the church & muttered "you are good people." The rest of his church considered this blasphemy & kicked him out.

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u/CaptainAwesome06 2h ago

I'm not sure I'm read to believe that one. Looking at Google Maps, Westboro Baptist Church is across the street from some houses. There's nothing near there called Equality House.

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u/BrotherChe 1h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_House

The Equality House is a rainbow-colored house in Topeka, Kansas, that is situated on the corner of 12th and Orleans Street, across from Westboro Baptist Church, an anti-LGBT hate group. 

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u/CaptainAwesome06 1h ago

Got it! It's weird that it has it's own Wikipedia page but isn't named on Google Maps.

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u/calilac 42m ago

Might've been named on the maps at one point and then removed, I know they got targeted for vandalism quite a few times and something is easier to target if it's on a map.

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u/unassumingdink 5h ago

I mean, it's fully possible to believe in Civil Rights for black people and still hate and fear gay people. Source: the entire 1960s, '70s, and '80s.

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u/tophernator 6h ago

I never really understood the logical consistency of their policies. They hated gay people, but also protested the funerals of dead soldiers, often combining the two waving homophobic placards at funerals of people who as far as we know weren’t gay. The whole thing seemed quite dementia coded to me.

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u/MostlyWong 6h ago

They hated gay people, but also protested the funerals of dead soldiers, often combining the two waving homophobic placards at funerals of people who as far as we know weren’t gay.

They were trying to make the point that Don't Ask/Don't Tell (gays in the military?!? Oh no!) and the growing acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in the United States and our government policy was the reason those soldiers were dead. That the United States was being "punished by god" for the acceptance of gay people, and the deaths were directly linked to that. Certainly couldn't be starting an unprovoked war in the Middle East was a bad idea across the board and maybe their god was upset about that rather than gay people existing.

It's not logical in any way, but that was the point those protests were trying to make.

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u/drainbamage1011 6h ago

They were also notorious for provoking angry/violent responses from the public so they could sue and use the settlements to fund more protests. So there may not be a consistent logic other than being provocative.

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u/Sea-Emotion6710 5h ago

Yep they protested a catholic highschool near me once. Its a wealthy all-boys school so the game was pretty obvious, provoke the boys and sue the parents for money

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u/IAMATruckerAMA 4h ago

I'm sure you're right but I'm enjoying the idea that your all-boys Catholic school didn't host a gagging gaggle of giggling gays

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u/Pyrhhus 6h ago

Dementia coded… or part of me always wondered if the whole thing was a deeply committed False Flag. The Westboro Baptist Church being so completely unlikable, so detestable to anyone remotely sane was a huge part of what really started to break the cultural default away from the low grade homophobia that used to be the background norm.

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u/Malphos101 6h ago

I wonder if he got a tumor.

So many cases of people changing personalities that turn out to be brain tumors....its obviously a low percent but over a few billion people? Makes you wonder

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u/magicmom17 7h ago

APPARENTLY he had a change of heart about gay people at the end of his life which no one predicted. https://baptistnews.com/article/grandson-says-fred-phelps-changed-mind-about-gays/

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u/IAMATruckerAMA 4h ago

Not much time left for grifting. Time to loophole God with a deathbed confession 

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u/NorthernSpankMonkey 2h ago

I read a dozen articles from that link of yours, that was a breath of fresh air and of quite a progressive mindset for a baptist publication. Are they a psyop to make them seem more palatable as a group or is it legit?

U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton (left) with his son-in-law at Vintage Church in Harker Heights, Texas, Sunday, Aug. 30. (Screencap) Ken Paxton went to church on Sunday, and his son-in-law prayed over him for God to give him victory over Democrat James Talarico and “the kingdom of darkness” in November’s U.S. Senate race.

Nevermind...

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u/McJohnson88 2h ago

Something I've noticed before is certain (but sadly nowhere near all) shitty people making an effort to be less shitty in the final year or so of their life, but obviously without knowing it's the last year of their life. (H.P. Lovecraft basically writing "I wish I wasn't so racist when I was younger" & the Ultimate Warrior mending bridges he'd burnt years prior due to ego were the examples that came to mind.) It reminds me of the idea of terminal lucidity, except on a larger scale. I'm not sure what you'd call it; "terminal empathy" maybe? I dunno, I just think it's an interesting phenomenon.

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u/Brassens71 6h ago

The whole "God hates f**s" thing was Phelps exploiting the American legal system. Basically set up a situation where you're going to get physically attacked by people, and then sue those people.

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u/Starbuckshakur 6h ago

Fucking Mitch McConnell was at the March on Washington.

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u/DueRest 6h ago

Tragically the Westboro Baptist Church still lives on despite his death. When there was a Ghost concert at the Kansas City T Mobile Center last year, they showed up to be awful.

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u/PopularWalrus4121 5h ago

There's a guy who trolls them sometimes, dressed in a full on Lucifer costume with a sign that says "I love Westboro" or something like that. It's awesome.

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u/YossiTheWizard 4h ago

I've heard his son Nate (who ran away as a teenager) give a talk, and even got to chat with him a bit. Super nice guy, and it's great to see that someone can be after being raised in that.

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u/dewdewdewdew4 2h ago

Being rabidly homophobic and supporting civil rights for African Americans is hardly mutually exclusive...

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u/Functionally_Drunk 2h ago

I stood face to face with Phelps at a protest in the 90s. That man had the deadest most soulless eyes I have ever seen in another human being. Chilled me to the core.

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u/MilkChocolate21 3h ago

Someone above commented that his family said he never liked Black ppl. He did it for money.

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u/giftedearth 9h ago

A lot of the people who died at Jonestown were Black. Jones sucked them into his cult by genuinely helping them. 

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u/justprettymuchdone 8h ago

Yeah, I think this often goes unremarked upon and it's an essential part of the story. Jones was a megalomaniacal, obsessive madman, but he also led a church that dedicated itself to helping people. The reason the elderly signed over their checks to him, early on, was because he was using that money to care for them! He always had darkness to him, but the step by step devolution of the Peoples' Temple is in part the story of a man who took a church of faithful Christians and carefully, slowly taught them to worship him instead.

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u/thirty7inarow 7h ago

I do wonder if that was his intent from the start, if at some point he just decided he liked the power, or if it was a slow progress of decisions that got him to where he was at the end.

Like was he always skimming the coffers and propping himself up as the hero? Or did he start out genuinely just wanting to make a difference?

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u/justprettymuchdone 6h ago

I read an incredible biography on him, Raven. I highly recommend it. The biographer made a really solid, I think, argument that he was always self-aggrandizing and narcissistic, but that he was initially more or less content with power and control over smaller groups of people, but the addiction grew.

It was one of those things where initially he was more or less happy that he had control over his wife, and then his small congregation, and then a larger congregation, and it just sort of kept snowballing and then in the end, nothing was ever quite enough for him.

Hence Jonestown.

It was a place where he was fully in control and could completely isolate And cut off everyone there from the outside world. He decided what reality was, only him. And he could keep everyone from escaping no matter how bad it got.

And in the end, even that was never quite enough.

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u/papalionking 2h ago

There was also very much real addiction going on. Dude was doing a LOT of drugs in the years preceding the collapse of it all.

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u/paupaupaupau 7h ago

My sense is that narcissism is like addiction. That the trait is always there, but the need only gets stronger. And at some point, it overwhelms everything else about who you were.

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u/Ferelar 5h ago

Yep. And a deep enough long term addiction suddenly running full speed into the brick wall of potential narcissistic collapse probably means that that narcissistic person will engage in some pretty out there behavior any way you slice it

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u/gotenks1114 3h ago

Like starting a war with Iran.

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u/ceelogreenicanth 1h ago

Just like invading Russia. Or a mass murder suicide of your family.

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u/AllShallBeWell 1h ago

At one point, Jim Jones was hospitalized and either accidentally or 'accidentally', they put him in the black wing of the hospital. He refused to leave, and instead went around making beds and emptying bedpans for the black patients. If it was a long con, he committed to the bit for quite a while.

One reading of Jim Jones is that he was at one point a true believer in all the arc of history bending toward justice stuff, and then he saw MLK and JFK both get murdered, and felt that those in power were never going to let society get better.

Go listen to Alabama 3's "Mao Tse Tung Said" (on YouTube, not the abridged version some streaming services have) for snippets from Jim Jones. Guy knew how to give a speech.

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u/unassumingdink 5h ago

If you look up videos from when he was still preaching in the U.S., it's actually insane how charismatic he was. Even if you mute the audio, you can still see it.

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u/justprettymuchdone 5h ago

He wasn't just a preacher, he was a REALLY GOOD preacher. Incredibly effective. People like to believe they're immune to being taken in by a cult but Jim Jones had a lot of people fall for his rhetoric who were educated and had good families, the people we usually think of as less vulnerable. His charisma was huge when it came to bringing people in.

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u/gotenks1114 3h ago

the story of a man who took a church of faithful Christians and carefully, slowly taught them to worship him instead.

Wow. Good thing that doesn't happen anymore.

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u/TheMobHasSpoken 3h ago

There are pictures of Jim Jones with Roslyn Carter and San Francisco mayor George Moscone (who was murdered, along with Harvey Milk, just a week or two after the events at Jonestown). People really thought he was doing good work at the beginning.

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u/TargaryensRock 7h ago

I watched a Doc about Jonestown a long time ago and one survivor, a white gentleman, had a black partner and biracial child and felt the cult was the only place they were accepted as a family. He was away when it went down; he lost his wife and child to the events at Jonestown. How awful that finding a community that accepted their family during a time and place that didn't do so turned into a worse kind of hell. It's own unique kind of evil..

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u/tashkiira 7h ago

It's worse: Jim Jones Jr. was black--a boy he and his wife had adopted. He survived because the Jonestown local team was at a basketball tournament.

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u/NotSoWishful 5h ago

I’m a 36 year old black man who grew up in the predominantly black south and I didn’t know this about Jim Jones and his massacre until I listened to a podcast about it a few years back.

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u/Hellknightx 5h ago

People always remember Jonestown for the mass flavor aid poisoning murders. But something that doesn't seem to get talked about as much is how Jim Jones sent armed gunmen to shoot and murder Leo Ryan, a sitting US Congressman.

Leo Ryan was an incredible person, too. While a member of Congress, he was the chairman of a committee to oversee prison reform in the US. Because he was such a cool dude, he opted to use a fake name to insert himself into Folsom state prison as an inmate just so he could get a closer look at prison conditions.

He also took a job as a substitute teacher just to document poor conditions in inner-city LA schools. He flew a team to Jonestown to investigate people being held there against their will. As he was leaving with rescued hostages, he was ambushed by gunmen sent by Jim Jones, who shot up his plane and killed everyone on board.

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u/KakeLin 2h ago

Ugh of course someone in Congress who actually wanted to do good got killed

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u/No_Gas4560 30m ago

And that explains why its infested with majority Republicans now

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u/Vondi 9h ago

>mass suicide 

It was mass murder. People were made to drink the poison at gunpoint.

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u/FappatoriUniti 7h ago

This isn’t correct either. The most accurate title would be a mass casualty event or, more commonly, mass murder-suicide. There certainly were willing and eager participants, in as much as there were those who were forced and coerced. Due to the state of the bodies upon recovery, however, we have no way of ascertaining the numbers.

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u/hotpocketsinitiative 7h ago

It also is likely that most who drank willingly didn’t think it was real. Jim Jones was known for faking suicide attempts as a loyalty test. They didn’t have to start forcing people until they started seeing people actually die from drinking the flavoraid

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u/FappatoriUniti 7h ago edited 6h ago

Lots of people believed it was real, just as lots of people didn’t. You make a good point but the event isn’t as simple as one man hoodwinking a thousand.

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u/Practical-Big7550 2h ago

Don't forget that a number of people visiting the site were shot as they left which triggered the whole event.

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u/lblacklol 6h ago

I would respectfully disagree.

There were willing and eager participants because he manipulated those people. Maybe they drank it willingly in that moment, but it was only because he fostered that action over months and years with lies and deceit.

Mass casualty event makes it sound like he's being alleviated from blame. That's not fair to the victims. I could be convinced to think of it as a mass murder-suicide, but with an extremely heavy emphasis on the murder part.

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u/FappatoriUniti 6h ago

Where do you draw the line? Who else is called a murderer? The nurses and administrators? The parents who murdered their children? The problem is with trying to tightly define the event is, simply, that it’s impossible to do.

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u/VasyaFace 3h ago

Yes, the administrators and THE PARENTS WHO MURDERED THEIR CHILDREN are murderers.

How is this even a question?

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u/hashtagthoughtbomb 8h ago

Yeah you're right. Edited.

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u/Imdoingscience 6h ago

Some of the children were also killed on his order by having their throats slit and the initiating event of the whole thing was the church members murdering a member of congress who was there (at the request of the family of one of the women being held there against her will) to investigate.

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u/Hellknightx 5h ago

Mass murder-suicide is the official term. The murderers killed themselves, too.

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u/airfryerfuntime 4h ago

Most of the participants were 100% willing.

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u/Nelmquist1999 5h ago

Gunpoint? I'm pretty sure they were somewhat oblivious, because I made an essay on this cult and I don't remember Jim or anyone holding a gun at people who drank straight up poison.

It was likely cyanide mixed with Cool-Aid, hence the term "drinking the Cool-Aid"? I don't remember so don't quote me on that

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u/potvoy 5h ago

It was Flavor-Aid. The children were forced. People were shot trying to escape. Drinking the poison must have seemed like the less violent option. In the recording I unwisely decided to listen to, people are arguing with him and begging for their and their children's lives. It was much more complicated than the stereotype of brainwashed people committing suicide.

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u/Xalipu 5h ago

There’s a Reddit user that was a member of that cult as a child who posted recently, that was a fascinating read.

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u/Steve_the_Samurai 7h ago

I believe he was the first person in Ohio to be a white man to adopt a black child.

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u/CMidnight 6h ago

I think that is more a testament to Jones's charisma than an actual desire to see change. Framing his message in terms of civil rights as a way to sell his cult.

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u/Bazrum 6h ago

He also sold spider monkeys door to door! In fact, some of his first congregants joined because he knew them from selling them monkeys!

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u/numbersthen0987431 6h ago

There are a lot of bad things his cult did long before they mass suicided themselves.

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u/HeavyDutyJudy 4h ago

For anyone who wants to learn more about Jim Jones and Jonestown I highly recommend the San Diego State University digital archive. I was especially moved by the tape of some of his followers trying to change his mind about the mass suicide decision, not everyone was willing to die and they were all lied to about why they were dying. All because of one man’s narcissism. It’s unbelievably tragic.

https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/

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u/YouOk5627 1h ago

Yeah he was a big time addict

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u/Entire-Notice3592 6h ago

That’s the scary part. Someone can look like a hero while hiding something truly horrific.

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u/TheBSQ 2h ago

It’s sometimes forgotten that they also murdered SF congressman Leo Ryan who’d gone to Jonestown to investigate what was happening there. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Ryan

And then 10 days later, SF’s Mayor Moscone & Harvey Milk were murdered (unrelated).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_George_Moscone_and_Harvey_Milk

And just a few years before in 1973/1974 there were the “Zebra Murders” where a racially motivated group was shooting random people, one of which was Art Agnos, who survived and later became Mayor of SF.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_murders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Agnos

And to think only a few years before that, you had Charles Manson living in SF & the Zodiac Killer running around. 

It was a wild time for SF. 

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u/algy888 6h ago

Sure, but I’m guessing “he” did all these “good” works off the backs of people who were true believers slavishly devoted to him and his message.

Amazing what you can do with free labor who hand you their money as well.

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u/Hot-Government823 4h ago

I thought Jim Jones was a rapper

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u/NOT-packers-fan2022 6h ago

Well, it wouldn’t be shocking at all for people to live through that and decide “you know what, fuck this, I tried, nothing changed, I don’t want to be here anymore, let’s go to glory to folks.”

But it was a long time ago, right?

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u/SpongeBobLX 2h ago

In a way, Jim Jones did achieve equality by screwing over both black and white people in his cult equally.