Item: The head of the group, President Kennedy, early on declared himself in favor of the invasion. That caused the members of the group to feel that they were dealing with a decision already made. To oppose the president might therefore put them in political jeopardy. Groups do better when there is free discussion of all the evidence, not suppression of the opinions of the individual members of the group. In Japanese companies, the lowest member of the group gives his opinion first and so on up the ladder. This prevents the head man from manipulating the group to his own position before the others have had a chance to voice their views.
Item: The importance of the decision, its complexity, and the tight deadline imposed on the group by the president put the members under pressure and duress. Humans under pressure think less well than those who have more leisure for considered thought.
Conclusion: The Bay of Pigs decision is no mystery. The tapes of the sessions are available for review. The group reached the wrong decision because no one was permitted to criticize JFK or his judgment, no disagreement with the majority was tolerated, alternative positions and opposing evidence were not examined, and the group worked in isolation without consulting the public or the public’s elected representatives in the Congress. The Kennedy team failed to consider all the relevant and available evidence. Because of their error in thinking they suffered.
Their suffering was not all bad. One good thing that came out of the Bay of Pigs disaster was that Kennedy and his advisers were humbled. They learned the hard way that they could blunder. Bay of Pigs taught them how to better handle the next big problem that came their way, the Cuban missile crisis.
p. 214 Experiments at the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard University asked 123 subjects to compare one line with three other lines, only one of which was the same length as the first line. As individuals, the respondents answered the question with over 99 percent accuracy. In the social group (which consisted of research assistants instructed to give the wrong answer), the same people accepted the wrong judgment of the group 36.8 percent of the time. One quarter of the subjects remained independent of the group throughout the experiment. Once independent, they never went along with the majority when the majority was wrong. Once dependent, they never failed to go along with the majority when the majority was wrong. Among the independents, most had staunch confidence that they were right and the group was wrong. Some independents felt that the majority must be right but that they had to “call it as they saw it.” Among the dependents, some felt “they are right and I am wrong.” Others yielded so as “not to spoil the result.” Some felt that the majority was under an optical illusion. Most of the dependents felt that their differences with the group were signs of general deficiency in themselves, which they had to hide at all costs. All yielding subjects underestimated the number of times they yielded and said it was better to decide for themselves than go along with the group. Yet they did not follow their own advice. They knew what was best. They did what was worst.
Close to one thousand people died at Jonestown. The members of the Peoples Temple settlement in Guyana, near the Venezuelan border, under the direction of the Reverend Jim Jones, fed a poison-laced drink to their children, administered the potion to their infants, and drank it themselves.
How could such a tragedy happen? How could an entire community destroy itself like that?
There is no mystery. Jim Jones founded his church over twenty years before. Initially, he preached racial brotherhood and integration. His group helped feed the poor and find them jobs. As the congregation grew, Jones increased discipline. In 1965, he and about one hundred of his followers moved to northern California. “Father,” as he was called, assumed a messiah-like presence and actually became the personal object of the members’ devotion. Jones demanded loyalty, enforced a taxing regimen, and delivered sermons forecasting nuclear holocaust and the apocalyptic destruction of the world. In 1977, Jim Jones moved most of his membership to a jungle outpost in Guyana.
One year later, in November 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan visited the site to investigate charges that Temple members were being held p. 215 against their will. Two families slipped messages to Ryan that they wanted to leave with him. As Ryan’s party and these defectors tried to board planes to depart, the group was ambushed and fired upon by Temple gunmen—five people, including Ryan, were killed.
Right after the shootings, Jim Jones gathered the community at Jonestown. He told them that the Congressman’s party would be killed and then initiated the final ritual: the “revolutionary suicide” that the members had rehearsed so many times before and now recorded on tape.
First woman: I feel like that as long as there’s life, there’s hope.
Jones: Well, someday everybody dies.
Crowd: That’s right, that’s right.
And later—Jones: Please, for God’s sake, let’s get on with it. . . . This is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide. (On the tape, voices praise “Dad.” Applause follows.)
Many accounts attest that by the early 1970s, the members of the Peoples Temple lived in constant fear of punishment—brutal beatings coupled with public humiliation, often for trivial or even accidental offenses. Jeanne Mills, who spent six years as a high-ranking member before leaving, wrote, “There was an unwritten but perfectly understood law in the church that was very important. No one is to criticize Father, his wife, or his children.”
“Families are part of the enemy system,” Jones stated, because they hurt one’s total dedication to the “Cause.” Besides splitting parent and child, Jones sought to loosen the bonds between wife and husband. He forced spouses into extramarital sexual relations, which were often of a homosexual or humiliating nature. Many of the forced sexual relations were with Jones himself.
Get the picture?
Let’s step back for a moment and view it on the wide screen.
All the ingredients of groupthink are there: the cohesiveness preserving the group’s harmony, the insulation, the high stress, and the strong directive leadership. All these factors worked together to create the abrogation of clear thought and the denial of the reality of what Jones was—which caused the consequent deaths of 914 people.
There is no need to go through Jones’s statements one by one to remind you of the multiple errors in thinking they display. Unfortup. 216nately, the horror of this lesson will not end with this group. Others will follow. You can bet on that. Don’t be part of it. Don’t let it start.
Jeanne and Al Mills were among the most vocal of the Peoples Temple critics following their defections. They topped an alleged “death list” of the Temple’s enemies. Mills had repeatedly expressed fear for her life even after Jonestown. Over a year after the Jonestown massacre, Jeanne and Al and their daughter were murdered in their Berkeley home. On the final tape of Jonestown, Jim Jones had blamed Jeanne Mills by name. He promised that his followers in San Francisco “will not take our death in vain” (Newsweek, 1980).
Bo (Marshall Herff Applewhite) and Peep (Bonnie Lu Nelson) founded one of the most unusual flying saucer religions ever to emerge out of the New Age concept that ufonauts (astronauts who travel in UFOs) could be channeled (communicated with by telepathy).
Bo and Peep had an experience (in a cave somewhere, probably in Oregon) that convinced them that they were the two witnesses mentioned in Revelation 2 who would be martyred and then resurrected three and a half days later, an event they called the Demonstration. They were surprisingly effective in recruiting devotees to their new religion. The followers adhered to a strict routine, remained isolated from society in general, and immersed themselves in the intensity of a structured lifestyle designed to prepare them for a pick-up by their Space Brothers, who would, after special cloning in a special cloning bank on the UFO, give them new bodies and new jobs gloriously flying the saucer around space.
Under the conditions of isolation and instruction, the followers became more and more convinced that these teachings of t
he Two (Bo and Peep’s alternative moniker) were real.
Later the Two changed their teaching somewhat and began to describe themselves as extraterrestrial walk-ins named Ti and Do. A walk-in is an entity who occupies a body that has been vacated by its original owner. An extraterrestrial walk-in is one from another planet. The walk-in situation is somewhat similar to possession, although in possession the original soul is merely overshadowed rather than completely supplanted by the possessing alien.
Now that you know that background, chart the following narrative, picking out the elements that identify groupthink. From those elements, predict the ultimate clash with reality that will befall the group because of its crooked thinking.
p. 217 The Bo and Peep cult—a group that in the wake of events is probably as familiar to you as Heaven’s Gate is—made the news on March 26, 1997, when the bodies of thirty-nine men and women were found in a posh mansion outside San Diego, all volunteers for a mass suicide who had taken barbiturates and placed plastic bags over their heads.
Messages left indicated that they were stepping out of their “physical containers” to ascend to a spaceship that was arriving in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet. They left behind a video and a Web site explaining that they believed that Hale-Bopp, or a part of it, would crash into Earth and cause widespread destruction. Marshall Applewhite, their leader, predicted that the comet crash would probably signal the end of the world. He further advised that our calendars were off, that the year was not 1997 but 2000. Since he felt that there was a general agreement that the world would end precisely two millennia after the birth of Jesus and that it was 2000 and not 1997, he concluded the end had come.
According to Applewhite, aliens had planted the seeds of current humanity millions of years ago and were coming to reap the harvest of their work in the form of spiritually evolved individuals who would join the ranks of flying saucer crews. Only the selected members of the Heaven’s Gate community would be allowed to advance to this trans-human state. The rest of them and us would be left to suffer the dismal fate of living in the poisoned atmosphere of the planet, which would soon be engulfed in cataclysmic destruction caused by Hale-Bopp.
Said Applewhite, “The Earth’s present civilization is about to be recycled—‘spaded under.’ Its inhabitants are refusing to evolve. The ‘weeds’ have taken over the garden and disturbed its usefulness beyond repair.”[2]
If you are interested in the details, the final scenario, and the March 22, 1997, announcement that the Heaven’s Gate “Away Team” has returned to a level above human in distant space, consult the group’s Web site, www.heavensgatetoo.com.
The people of Heaven’s Gate, like the people of the Peoples Temple and President Kennedy’s cabinet, had a rather high opinion of themselves. Each group envisioned itself as having a central role in some historically important event. Each group “knew” that it was unfailingly right. Each group was isolated from society in general under the direction of a charismatic leader, and highly motivated. Each group denied the evidence that indicated their view might be wrong and felt it had a distinct mission and destiny.
p. 218 In the case of the cabinet members, they “knew” they were going to rid the Americas of Godless communism. In the case of the Jonestown religious group, the main event was the end of the world in which they would play a key part. In the case of Heaven’s Gate, the Space Brothers were, after the pickup, going to end time, destroy the world, and transform the faithful into superior beings who would cruise the galaxies forever.
In each case, reality came crashing down on their heads. The Bay of Pigs invasion failed when the invaders were captured and later ransomed. The Jonestown people died without the world ending. Hale-Bopp continued on its merry way without disrupting Earth in any significant manner. In fact, we’re still here! The prophesies proved wrong. The events predicted did not occur. Nevertheless, many people died needlessly in vain. These people, if not clinically mad, have reached what George Rosen called “The wilder shores of sanity.” Their defective reality testing is not as defective as a real-life schizophrenic, but it is close. The more your thinking strays from reality, the more dire the consequences.
Notes
1. All the information on the Bay of Pigs fiasco comes from Irving L. Janis, Groupthink, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1982), pp. 14-47. Janis cites minutes of the meetings, diaries, memoirs, letters, and prepared statements given to investigating committees. The miracle is that his account jibes with the freedom of information documents released in 1999. The declassified documents on Operation Zapata (the code name for the Bay of Pigs operation) are now available from the National Security Archives (briefing book no. 29) and are featured, in part, electronically on the national security Web site and at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB29/. JFK appointed General Maxwell Taylor to investigate what went wrong at the Bay of Pigs. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. covers the same territory and quotations in his book A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy and the White House, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1965). For those interested, I highly recommend the CIA’s Oral History of the Bay of Pigs and the Annenberg Foundation’s Discovering Psychology Series with host Phil Zimbardo (professor of psychology) where Irving Janis (author of Groupthink) is interviewed, segments of the Cabinet sessions are viewed, and then the two social psychologists comment on the errors in thinking.
2. Robert W. Balch, “Waiting for the Ships; Disillusionment and Revitalization of Faith in Bo and Peep’s UFO Cult,” in The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds, ed. James R. Lewis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 163.
7 – Scams, Deceptions, Ruses, Swindles, Hoaxes, and Gaslights
p. 219 This chapter expands your understanding of reality by telling you about the structure and function of the common frauds and deceptions. By understanding the way con men work, you will understand how to protect yourself from many types of fraud. Along the way, you will also learn how to protect your interests in transactions that (though strictly speaking are legal, nevertheless) fall into a gray zone. Face it: There is no clear dividing line between honest deals and some frauds, and there is an element of deception in most business transactions.
Pedigreed Dog Scam (PDS) is the granddaddy of some of the greatest con games, including boiler room sales of worthless stock, Florida real estate, gold mines, oil rigs, gas leases, and so forth. Here’s how it works.
A man comes into a bar accompanied by a dog (usually a mongrel terrier). The man tells the bartender that the dog is a rare breed. Papers might be produced that prove that the dog is a champion. But the man can’t stay. He has to meet with his bankers and he can’t take the dog to the bank. Would the bartender watch the dog for two hours for ten dollars?
After the dog’s owner has left, another customer appears, orders a drink, notices the dog, and comments on how good the dog looks. Out of the blue, the second customer offers $100 for the dog. Of course, the bartender can’t sell the dog because he isn’t the owner.
“Listen,” says customer number two. “I am not going to bamboozle you. That dog is a pedigree. I know dogs. I would be willing to pay $5,000 for it right now. What do you say?”
The bartender now has considerable pain in turning down such an p. 220 offer, but he does mention that the real owner will soon return. The bartender tells customer number two that he will pass the offer on to the real owner.
Customer two: “See what you can do. I have to go somewhere. I’ll be back in three hours. If you can get the dog for me, I’ll pay you $5,000 for it, and I will give you $200 for your trouble.” Customer number two then exits.
A short time later, customer one returns. He is upset. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. My deal fell through. I need some dough.”
At that point, the bartender says that he would be willing to take the dog off the guy’s hands, say, for $500. But of course customer number one would not hear of parting with such a valuable dog at such a low price. Eventually, the price work
s up, and the money is paid. Now with the original owner gone, the bartender waits and waits and waits for the prospective buyer, customer number two, to return. Needless to say, the second stranger never comes back. He never returns because he was the shill. He was part of the scam.
Con men use this swindle when they need fast cash. It is thus known in the business as a short con. When the victim is no longer a bartender but a rich businessman, and the property is no longer a mutt but a gold mine, an oil well, some expensive jewels, or swampy Florida real estate, the profits can mount to several hundred thousand dollars. Beware; whatever the property might be, you can bet that in reality it is still a dog.
Principle: All fraud is divided into six parts.
With the pedigreed dog scam in mind, work through and learn the six classical anatomical parts of fraud so that when someone is trying to flim-flam you, you will recognize the pattern and be prepared to resist.
Anatomy of fraud:
Part one: the come-on. The come-on is usually worked by the roper, the person whose job it is to get the victim into the scheme. The roper is a con man who establishes confidence somehow and someway, sometimes by presenting credentials, most times by the sheer force of personality and salesmanship.
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 26
