Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (38 page)

Sexual activities were an integral part of a gradual, general regression of the cult and its members toward primitive functioning and thinking. In each instance, the signs of this regression were clearly present. In 1987, Koresh was charged with the attempted murder of a competing cult leader but was acquitted. Jim Jones had been involved in a paternity suit brought by a cult member. He had also been arrested for making lewd advances to an undercover officer in an adult movie theater.

As the leader becomes more and more tyrannical, demanding allegiance to himself rather than to cult ideals, serious encounters with the law occur. Suspiciousness and paranoia grow. The wagons are drawn into a circle. In Guyana, armed guards patrolled the Peoples Temple commune. Access to Ranch Apocalypse in Waco was also carefully controlled. The paranoia spills over into observation of cult members, too, for any sign of possible betrayal. Spying was rife inside the Waco and Guyana compounds. Jim Jones had his members sign undated suicide notes, which would be used as part of cover stories should he later need to eliminate those members.

Inside the compounds, violence escalates. Child beatings become more brutal and frequent. In Jim Jones’s last days, he had little children dunked into deep wells on the end of a rope for even minor infractions of his rules. Children present serious problems for cult leaders. Although they are seen as those who will carry on the life of the cult, they are also perceived as burdens by “sick” leaders. They require considerable time and effort, they bring in no money, and they detract attention from the leaders. Rebellious children may challenge the leader’s authority when adults have long since stopped doing so. Moreover, during times of crisis, children react to stress with disruptive, acting-out behavior. One reason to break up families is to render children vulnerable and then to raise them communally, so that their only allegiance is to the group.

In the last phases, Jones and Koresh gave endless sermons and harangues. Members were exhausted by their leaders’ incoherent, emotional exhortations to prepare for the Apocalypse. Jones spent an average of 6 hours per day on the loudspeaker, calling attention to the “fascists” who were coming. Koresh drew attention to the ATF agents, who were sure to attack again and prove his prophesied cosmic conclusion.

As the leader’s mental state deteriorates, paranoia and a siege mentality escalate. Cult members are worked to exhaustion, made to make do with a subsistence diet. They are once again deprived of sleep, this time by the endless harangues. The whole idea of escape is made to seem impossible. No one could escape the sound of Jones’s loudspeaker-amplified voice in Guyana, telling the cult members that although everyone must die, they would all soon be resurrected and given the means to remain together, rather than being hounded, persecuted, and dispersed here on earth. In Waco, Koresh decided who could leave and who must stay. During the first 4 weeks of the siege, 34 cult members, including 21 children, came out voluntarily. But in the last 2 weeks, no one was allowed to leave. Later, after it was all over, the FBI believed it had evidence that 20 Davidians who had wanted to leave had been shot as a warning to others.

Members who might want to leave are at war with themselves. The anxiety and fear that has arisen in the cult member is denied, displaced onto other cult members who are suspiciously perceived as possible defectors. The image of the all-powerful, all-knowing leader is preserved through increased acts of devotion and submission. Cult members often project their anger and disappointment at the leader onto the outside world, increasing their own paranoia. Such psychological defenses paradoxically lead cult members to rely even more on the cult leader. Though the emperor has no clothes, none of his subjects is psychologically able to admit it.

In the final weeks, the prospect of death may be welcomed by cult members, for whom life has become so wretched. Deprived of food and sleep, working grueling schedules with no time for relaxation or even spiritual refreshment, cult members may believe that a permanent rest is desirable. They fear the wrath of their now-deranged leader and his certain punishment should they deviate from his instructions. Cut off from the rest of the world and from former family ties, they are hardly able to resist the prospect of mass suicide. Deborah Leighton, a confidant of Jim Jones in Guyana, managed to escape the Peoples Temple but explained that in the last days there, “The concept of mass suicide for socialisms arose. Because our lives were so wretched anyway, and because we were so afraid to contradict Reverend Jones, the concept was not challenged.”

Near the end, the minds of cult members have fallen totally under the tyrannical control of the leader. Members have become wholly dependent and have long ago stopped thinking for themselves. When the call to die is given, most of the members go unflinchingly to their deaths by poison, fire, or gunshot, self-inflicted or given by others. The Apocalypse has arrived.

The Lethal Leader: Inside the Deviant Psyche

Throughout the history of mankind, lethal leaders have led their groups to destruction. In our century, Adolf Hitler charismatically enthralled an entire nation in the cultist pursuit of Aryan supremacy. In the process, he plunged the world into war and ordered the murders of millions of innocent people. Joseph Stalin, whose reign was later labeled by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, as “the cult of personality,” murdered more than 20 million of his country’s people. Jim Jones and David Koresh led their followers to murder and suicide. Charles Manson’s domination of his “family” led to the grisly bludgeoning, stabbing, and shooting of seven people. The nation was appalled that Manson’s young men and women would murder repeatedly at his command. Cult leaders who cause death have variously been considered psychopaths, psychotics, or, at best, borderline personalities. It is likely that the above-named lethal leaders have manifested all of these conditions at various times (see Table 10–1), or all at one time, especially as the end neared.

Diagnostic certainty is hard to achieve because most cult leaders were never examined psychiatrically. Adding to the difficulties of making a proper diagnosis are the special circumstances under which their

TABLE 10–1.
Typical psychological characteristics of killer cult leaders

• Mentally disordered
• Deity complex (Christ)
• Sexually deviant/exploitative
• Persecutory beliefs

• Primitive psychological defenses (splitting, projection, denial, regression under stress)

•Charismatic
• Apocalyptic vision (suicide)
• Attracts dysfunctional cult members
• Seeks isolation and control
• Childhood abuse history
• Materialistic

mental aberrations occurred. Even people on the outside can appreciate the mind-warping effects of having to function under extreme stress.

When cult leaders are isolated from the normalizing influences of other communities, they are subject to mutual validation between themselves and their members. The leader’s grandiose conception of self, and the fears, paranoia, and sense of an apocalyptic vision waiting to be fulfilled, are all mirrored back to him and further distort the mental processes. When the cult is actually under siege, as the Branch Davidians were in Waco, fact and fantasy begin to merge. All the deviant mental processes are heightened. As the end approached, Koresh’s behavior became more erratic. He slept until mid-afternoon while cult members worked. At night, when cult members were exhausted and ready for sleep, he raced through the dormitories, ringing a loud bell as a signal for beginning marathon Bible study sessions. During these sessions, Koresh frequently made no sense. It is always possible that the leader, when dealing with elements outside of this cataclysmic pressure cooker, may appear quite normal and may seem to behave rationally.

Psychotic cult leaders blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. They exhibit grandiose ideas about themselves, persecutory beliefs, and a conviction that the end of the world is nigh. The man originally named Vernon Howell combined the names of two Biblical kings and, like David Koresh, declared himself to be the “sinful” incarnation of Jesus Christ. Vernon Howell had been an abused child, an itinerant carpenter, and a would-be rock star. David Koresh was different. He was convinced that he could open the seventh seal of the book held in God’s right hand, as described in the Book of Revelation, which prophesied all the calamities that would take place before the Apocalypse. Charles Manson, when arrested, insisted that he be booked as “Charles Manson, aka, Jesus Christ, God.”

The problem created for the person identifying with Jesus Christ is that he or she has to die before resurrection can take place. When authorities are in confrontation with a psychotic leader who claims that sort of divinity, they would do well to remember this potential problem and to defuse paranoid and grandiose delusions by backing away. De-escalating intimidation and removing the crisis from the limelight are often useful when dealing with a person who has identified so openly with a deity.

Psychopathic cult leaders who are not psychotic never reach such delusional heights (or depths). Throughout their tenure, they maintain a basic sense of reality. Their leadership is based on self-aggrandizement, the exploitation of cult members, and the accumulation of money, power, and sexual indulgence. If cornered by the authorities and unable to see any way out, psychopathic leaders may impulsively choose suicide, taking others with them, if the leaders can no longer stay alive.

Cult leaders may display some of the following characteristics of a borderline personality, particularly during a crisis:

• The tendency to split the world, people, and themselves into good and bad
• Unstable yet intense personal relationships that alternate between extremes of idealization and devaluation
• Impulsiveness in sex, spending, and substance use
• Rapid mood swings
• Intense but poorly controlled anger
• Recurrent suicidal threats or behavior
• Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
• Uncertainty about personal self-image or sexual identity
• Under stress, temporary breaks with reality or manifests transient paranoid thinking
All of these personality traits become exacerbated as cataclysmic
psychological stress takes hold and the cult’s end draws nearer. These
reactions are also intensified by the psychology of the cult as a whole.
The good-bad splitting occurs on a wider basis. The world is divided
into us and them. The outside is seen as threatening and evil, whereas
the cult inside is seen as threatened and good. Mutual reinforcement
of this view by the cult leader and followers can fire up hostility and
aggression against the outside world. Hitler saw the Jews as evil and
required their elimination. His followers did not disagree with the task
he set out for them. Jim Jones saw the enemies as the CIA, the FBI,
and the Ku Klux Klan.
Charles Manson looked upon blacks as the source of evil and
destruction. He hoped that his murders would provoke blacks into
starting a race war and bringing about Armageddon or, as he called it,
Helter Skelter. Manson and his white followers would be transformed
into deities and rule the Earth when the blacks discovered that they
were incapable of managing it themselves. For Charles Dederich, the
leader of Synanon, the government and the news media constituted
the evil empire. For other militant religious cults, the enemies are their
members’ natural parents.
Three prominent psychological defense mechanisms are frequently used by deviant cult leaders: 1) good-bad splitting, 2) projection, and 3) projective identification. These mechanisms are particularly evident in persons with borderline personality disorder. In
good
-
bad splitting
, the cult leader devalues and rejects the “bad”
parts of the world (and oneself ), and idealizes and embraces the
“good” parts. Jim Jones saw his cult as a socialist utopia. He hated the
outside evil forces that would, in his belief, destroy that utopia. For
those who so split the world, awareness of the hated part of the self is
submerged and
projected
onto the world outside. In a cult, this mechanism impels the cult leader to further distance his or her group from
society. Such projection of the bad and hated self onto the outside
world also contributes to the group’s suspiciousness and to its siege
mentality. Once it became apparent to Jim Jones that his cult’s boundary could no longer be secured, he made the deranged but clear choice
to preserve the cult’s identity in spirit, even if he could no longer preserve it in reality—and chose mass suicide.
An understanding of
projective identification
also is crucial to deciphering the sorts of massacres that occurred at Jonestown and Waco. Projective identification is a primitive mental mechanism that goes through three steps:

1. The person projects (attributes to others) intolerable inner feelings while still maintaining a certain awareness of what is projected.
2. The person who projects tries to control the individual on whom the unacceptable feelings have been projected.
3. Unconsciously, when interacting with that individual, the projector leads that individual to experience what has been projected onto him or her.

This process is made clearer by the following example:

John, a person who fears loss of control over his aggressive impulses, is persuaded to accompany friends on a hunting trip. While walking with the hunters, John is seized by the fear that they could turn their guns on him. Even though he recognizes his own past fears that he might shoot someone, if he had a gun and momentarily lost control, John nevertheless continues to be anxious that he could be killed. He attempts to control the hunters by dissuading them from doing any more hunting, suggesting that they go home earlier than planned. The hunters, noting John’s anxiety, sense his fear of guns and also become briefly concerned about their own safety.

Projective identification produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. In denying one’s feelings and attributing them to someone else, the individual behaves in a way that causes others to respond in kind. Thus, when the borderline person’s hostility is returned, he or she finds confirmation of his or her original paranoid thinking.