This past week, I saw a new documentary about Jim Jones and the events that led to the Jonestown suicides in 1978, a year that, depending upon which version of history you believe, I was either a sheltered suburban youth or a decade away from being born. Either way, I was not exposed to those gruesome facts at the time and discovered them only by accident years later when the world had moved on to other atrocities and the passions surrounding those fateful events in Guyana had somewhat cooled. It’s a topic I find fascinating because given my daily ideological battles, it’s easy to fantasize about running off to a distant land to start a utopian community where everyone agrees with you, but I would never do it because, while I have the soul of an idealist, I ultimately distrust any form of dogma, even my own, and I’m also deathly afraid of tropical insects.

Despite their violent downfall, it’s difficult to be overly judgmental of People’s Temple, a group of cultists that part of me wants to dismiss as lunatics but who had every reason to believe they were effecting the positive social changes of integration and equality. The apostates and Jonestown survivors interviewed for the film are thoughtful and sincere when discussing that period of their lives, and the editors do an admirable job of contrasting the loving message of the group with the sinister undertones that were more obvious in retrospect. As one of them said, no one thinks they’re joining a cult, but rather a group of people with similar ideals, and those of People’s Temple appeared to be beyond reproach, other than the fact that it was run by a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex. But that part wasn’t on the pamphlets.

Ironically, on the train on our way home from the movie theater, a group of religious people gathered to proselytize. They were boisterous and young, and their faces bore the happy glow of those who are thrilled by their ignorance. “Here’s some information about a Christian church,” they would say, handing out badly photocopied flyers to people who were minding their own business. “You just never know when you’ll need one. I mean, you just never know, right?” With the slick instincts of hucksters, they avoided those who they knew would be a tough sell while zeroing in on the easy marks, and within moments they had lured several people on the crowded car into praying with them and revealing their innermost secrets. “Why does this sort of thing always happen when you’re around?” my husband asked me as the beatific carnival unfolded around us. Why indeed. Why does it happen at all? I think it’s lovely that, in a lonely and unforgiving world, full of confusion and heartache, there are places that offer acceptance and direction to those who find themselves lacking either. I was just going to continue by writing that the price of surrendering the self in exchange for comfort and safety may be too high, but isn’t that what we ask of people who live in secular society, as well? Something of the individual must be repressed to live in harmony with any community, I suppose, and the greater the desired accord, the greater the price of admission. In Jonestown, social harmony was enforced by authoritarian edict, mental and emotional manipulation, and if those failed, guns and other terrors. Not an atom of it makes rational sense except for the basic desire to create a fair and loving society, a desire that was perverted with little difficulty by that smooth-talking evangelist in sunglasses.

Ultimately, what the cultists gave up in exchange for a feeling of security was the part of themselves that could see the world as it was instead of in the terms of what they wanted it to be. Succumbing to Jones’s paranoid delusions, they contributed to the conditioning that led to their own downfall by participating in what were called “white nights,” practice runs for the scene that eventually played out on November 18, 1978. After Congressman Ryan was gunned down at the jungle airstrip, the good Reverend called his flock together and entreated them to poison their own children first and, while the youngest ones thrashed and foamed at the mouth from the effects of the cyanide, to gulp it down themselves. This gut-wrenching incident was captured on audiotape and replays in gruesome detail during the documentary, interspersed with accounts from the few survivors on how they watched their families and friends die around them. Although we can hear a few voices try to reason with Jones, these are mere drops in the vat of Flavor Aid, easily overridden; in the end, their dreams of a utopia on earth dashed, over nine hundred people were persuaded to meet up in heaven and try again.

Thirty years later, the audience of the film will find this literally stunning. As the story unravels on the screen, we will not breathe or twitch a muscle, not because this is so foreign to our experience, but because it is not. What happened in the space of one day in Jonestown is the ultimate expression of all forms of authoritarianism. This is how empires fall, religions clash, and corporations implode under their own weight—although usually in slower motion. Throughout history, innocent people have been all too willing to act against their best interests by predators who compel them, whether by force or by charisma, that their sacrifice will bring them peace, or acceptance, or love, or prosperity, or whatever the antidote is to the prevailing fear.

In the end, Jim Jones was not the main character of Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple. We do not get his perspective, only the speculation of his victims, but that doesn’t mean he’s an enigma. His trajectory of consolidating power and wielding it with an iron fist over his followers, while at the same time posing as a kindly patriarch, is neither new nor particularly interesting. Jim Jones has existed throughout history in the form of petty dictators and corrupt religious leaders, and despite the minor blip of Jonestown, he survives to this day in multiple incarnations. The fascinating part, to me, is the decision to sell one’s soul to such a figure, especially in the cases where this flies in the face of common sense. When Jim Jones wears the face of George W. Bush or Kim Jong-il, after all, it stands to reason that he is viewed with a certain level of credence by his people. But when Jim Jones is Jim Jones, or David Koresh, or Pat Robertson, or Fred Phelps, or Chris Simcox, or whichever fiery pastor sends people out to find easy marks on the subway . . . well, I want to understand the process by which surrender of key elements of self seems like a good bargain, no matter what glorious cause is offered in exchange. In the end, I fear the film fails on that basic level, but it’s a failing we can forgive because we can’t expect any ninety-minute experience to explain such an intrinsic, although primitive, aspect of human nature. But the sad thing is, as such, we all know the answer in our hearts anyway. The only question is, when we are offered the same deal, whatever flavor of Kool Aid seems tastiest to us, whether we will be strong enough to back away from an imaginary paradise and vanish into the dark confusion of the surrounding jungle.