I watched a 20/20, or a Dateline, or one of those shows last week. It was a repeat, about Warren Jeffs, and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and it’s haunted me all week.
Temple of the FLDS in El Dorado, Texas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Basically, this religious sect, if I understand it correctly, is a less-forgiving, more rigid model of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as Mormons. They believe in plural marriage, living exclusively amongst others who believe the same,educating their own, staying far away from the world at large, etc…
Long story short, the original leader of this church, Rulan Jeffs, passed away, and the position was quickly assumed by his son, Warren, who assured his followers he was a conduit of God.
Trouble was, he was a criminal and a rapist, sentenced to twenty-plus years for aggravated sexual assault on a minor, i.e., he had convinced his followers that girls as young as twelve they needed to feel the power of God exclusively through his penis, on a ceremonial bed, surrounded by onlookers. The man himself said, “If the world knew what I was doing, they’d hang me from the highest tree.”
The image of that bed stuck with me all week, and what I imagined were the terrified faces of his victims. The thought that an entire community of people were complicit with his devious plot, without question, and still follow this man’s word from prison, really shakes me.
And it also opened up a wider issue, the issue of drinking the Kool-Aid, a reference to the Jonestown massacre, in 1978, where hundreds of people died by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at the behest of their leader, Jim Jones.
Wikipedia, not surprisingly, defines drinking the Kool-Aid as “a figure of speech commonly used in the United States that refers to a person or group holding an unquestioned belief, argument, or philosophy without critical examination. It could also refer to knowingly going along with a doomed or dangerous idea because of peer pressure.”
I’m always a just a little bit nervous when I witness a crowd forming. See, in crowds, especially sheltered ones, things can go very wrong. Very literal madmen can take reckless and harmful control over entire groups of people, human rights are violated, and people are destroyed. It’s not a good scene.
Human beings are social creatures, and want to be accepted within their group. Trouble is, sometimes that group acts without regard to the interest of its members, or becomes taken by temporary passion, and people get hurt, even die.
The kicker for me is that the children born into sects, or groups, or – let’s call it what it is – cults, never have a chance. They believe what they are told, and they become part of the machine, unless they have a flash of insight (and are able to act on it) along the way. And even then, they’re threatened with being shunned, rejected, or otherwise ostracized until their beliefs become more congruent to the group’s. This is how groups like this, beliefs like this, survive.
Human beings have this amazing power to unite, to move mountains, but sometimes group dynamics prove dangerous – think the Boston baseball riots of 2004 or the L.A. riots in 1992.
I’d like to say people are mainly interested in the betterment of themselves and their society, however history (and the news) has proven otherwise. Some humans are power-hungry, cold, calculating, and dangerously narcissistic, and would go so far as rape young girls in front of a crowd, in the name of God, to satisfy their desires.
And the worst offenses often occur in a vacuum, behind a cloak of secrecy – there must me some complicity for these injustices to occur, whether its voluntary or not.
Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri have roots in complicity as well – two unarmed black teens essentially killed due to someone else’s beliefs. I cannot speak to Brown’s guilt or innocence regarding the reason(s) for his apprehension – I simply don’t have enough information – but the pervading thought that young African-American men are dangerous, in and of itself, is one of the subtle ways America stays complicit. And it has to stop.
There’s only a stone’s throw between the murder of a young girl’s spirit at the hands of her megalomaniacal leader and the killing of a teen guided by the invisible hand of our beliefs. But we don’t always see it that way. Today, I’m challenging you to do so. Also, to be mindful of the fact that there is danger in both sides – being the person(s) about whom riots start, and those doing the rioting.
So, looking forward, for yourself and others – Be curious, be open, be skeptical, and be independent in your analyses. Never, ever drink the Kool-Aid. It just might save a life.
