The Story of a Deranged Narcissist

Imagine a paranoid narcissist who can read a crowd. One who would invent crises to create apprehension among his followers and immediately strike back at those who opposed him. One who made a pledge to his loyalists that ”they are going to make history.”

If all of that sounds frightening and very familiar, it should. It is the predicate for any deranged individual who thinks that he alone has the answers.

That was the underlying psychosis that drove Jim Jones, of Peoples Temple fame,  and that ultimately lead to his death and the deaths of nine-hundred men, women and children in Guyana, in November of 1978

A story of derangement, of politics and of a unique place and time, it is now brought back to life by award-winning investigative journalist and bestselling author Jeff Guinn in The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.

My conversation with Jeff Guinn:

Forget what you think you know about Jonestown

Occasionally there are events, that even 33 years latter, we remember as if they were yesterday. When this happens, its usually because of both the enormity of the event, as well as some deeper resonance inherent in that event itself.

Such was the massacre of one thousand people in Jonestown on November 18, 1978. What perplexes us to this day is both how so many people, from diverse backgrounds, could be taken in by one demagogue and how could that man who was once the darling of San Francisco in the early ‘70s and a human rights activist, become so deranged. In understanding this, perhaps we’ll have a keener insight into both the human need to belong and into individual psychopathology

With the benefit of 50,000 pages of recently declassified documents, Julia Scheeres takes us back to that fateful time in A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown.

My conversation with Julia Scheeres:

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