r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 13h 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/giftedearth 11h 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 9h 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 8h 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 8h 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 4h 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 8h 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 7h 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 5h ago

Like starting a war with Iran.

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u/ceelogreenicanth 2h ago

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

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u/AllShallBeWell 3h 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 7h 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 6h 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 5h 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 4h 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 8h 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 8h 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 6h 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.