The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

by Shankar Vedantam

  Masami Takahashi’s father was thirteen years old when he signed up to be a kamikaze pilot at the end of World War II. The Yokarin Institute that trained Japanese suicide bombers was an elite school, and competition to enter the school was fierce. His father’s fellow kamikaze recruits told Takahashi, a psychologist who eventually moved to Chicago, that the notion of dying for Japan had been dinned into every student. The only question was whether you would die in a glorious way or in a boring way. Thousands of young men eventually signed up for ever more exotic suicide missions, agonizing only about whether the war would last long enough for them to have their turn in the spotlight. Eventually, there were corps of suicide glider pilots and suicide torpedo operators—who had just enough oxygen to keep them alive underwater to steer a torpedo into an advancing battleship. Others volunteered to become suicide land mines, to be buried under the sand on beaches and kept alive long enough to detonate themselves once American tanks rolled ashore. The young men told one another endless stories about the heroes who had gone before them, and dreamed of the day they would similarly become heroes. While Shinto ideas provided some of the vocabulary for the missions, Takahashi discovered that his father and most of his father’s friends, who were “not lucky enough” to go on suicide missions because the war ended, were hardly religious. Many were atheists, or Christians, unlikely to be persuaded by Shinto ideas. They were also perfectly ordinary people who did not think they were doing anything unusual or heroic.

  Ariel Merari found that by erecting monuments to suicide bombers and honoring their families, by setting up intricate rituals that confer meanings that are readily understood by everyone else in the tunnel, suicide terror groups create “psychological points of no return.” For example, suicide bombers in Sri Lanka would enjoy the rare honor of a private meal with the shadowy leader of the LTTE before going out to detonate themselves. Today’s suicide bombers know their families will be helped and honored once they are dead, and they themselves are honored before going off on their missions. The videos that groups such as al-Qaeda have suicide bombers make before they go out to die have propaganda value, but they are also a powerful psychological tool. Once you have boasted on videotape about what you are going to do—and reaped the psychic rewards of your group’s adulation—not completing a mission means turning your back on the things that make your life meaningful. “Once the terrorist does this,” said Merari, referring to the suicide bomber’s videotape, “he’s already dead—mentally.”

  The central insight of all this research is that suicide terrorism is only a special case of a larger phenomenon. The hidden brain’s drive for approval and meaning, and the ability of small groups to confer such approval and meaning, is what is common to the world of the elite corporate executive and the young marine, the terrorist organization and the missionary order that sends idealistic people into harm’s way. At a conscious level, brave soldiers, idealistic missionaries, and suicidal terrorists might tell you they are motivated only by patriotism, by service, and by religion. At an unconscious level, however, they are motivated by the same thing—the drive to be part of something larger than themselves, to see themselves as special, to be part of a group whose well-being and survival matter more than their own lives.

  Once a terrorist group has established the idea that a particular cause is important and worthwhile, that joining a movement will set ordinary people apart from their peers, no one needs to go out and recruit people. They will show up on their own.

  Marc Sageman put it simply: “People want to be suicide bombers because they are the rock stars of militant Islam.”

  The researchers Eli Berman and David Laitin have developed a theory about the groups that sponsor suicide terrorism. Since large sums of money are typically placed on the heads of terrorists, ordinary members stand to gain enormously by betraying their comrades. Berman and Laitin asked a simple but very interesting question: Why does this not happen very often? The reason, they concluded, is that terrorist groups behave much in the manner of exclusive clubs. People in terrorist groups have tremendous solidarity and can trust one another implicitly because they have been self-selected by rules that make it very difficult to get into the club in the first place. Unlike book clubs and gyms—associations where everyone can join but few people stay for any length of time—exclusive clubs go out of their way to limit membership. There is a high bar to join, and the dues are expensive, and even if you are wealthy, you might not be able to find a spot unless you have close contacts among existing members. Clubs that erect social barriers or require applicants to go through prolonged periods of apprenticeship before they become full members effectively weed out candidates who are not fully committed and prepare the groundwork for the elite few who are chosen to develop intense loyalties to one another. The same thing happens with religious sects that impose years of penance and prayer before new recruits can become full members. This might be why ritual acts of hazing and cruel punishments for trivial offenses are meted out to new recruits in organizations where group solidarity is crucial. It seems paradoxical that a terrorist organization—ostensibly an outcast group—should make things so difficult for people to become members, but Berman and Laitin convincingly argue that such rules are the only way these organizations can survive.

  Peoples Temple was a very exclusive club. It was true that Jones and others actively recruited new members, but it was also true that they made it really difficult for people to stay. Only die-hard believers were willing to put up with the insane requirements. While this meant that many people quit, it also meant that those who stayed were ever more cohesive and likely to be surrounded by others just like themselves. The tunnel was being sealed of leaks. Annalisa, another sister of Larry Layton, briefly flirted with the group, but dropped out. The authoritarian ways of Peoples Temple did not sit well with her. By contrast, Layton’s mother, Lisa, got drawn in and stayed, finding in the group comfort and meaning that she did not have elsewhere in her life.

  One technique Jones used to cement loyalty was sessions of ritual confession, where people given the honor of joining his elite planning commission acknowledged doing and thinking vile and horrible things. These “catharsis” sessions began with Jones or one of his aides bringing an accusation against someone. People who denied the charges were pilloried and screamed down, and relentlessly interrogated until they admitted their guilt. If you were a member of the elite circle, it was understood that you would strike the first blows against people you loved—any hesitation would ensure the group turned on you for putting a personal relationship ahead of loyalty to the group.

  Sessions ran as long as twenty hours, with victims required to stand still as others tore into them. Very soon, members realized that the quickest way out of these sessions was to take the lead in castigating themselves. If someone leveled an accusation, it was best to admit to things that were far worse. This would be seen as a sign of loyalty and openness. So people admitted to impure thoughts, to illegal acts they may or may not have committed, and to just about every kind of sexual perversion. The sessions made people feel incredibly vulnerable; at various times, nearly every member was pilloried and humiliated and forced to submit to the will of the group. Many of the sessions were secretly taped for use as blackmail against members who might later stray from the group. The sessions had a powerful psychological effect—they underscored that loyalty to Jones came before all other relationships.

  Members were often punished after their confessions. Sometimes, the punishment involved Jones having sex with the victim’s husband or wife, after which both victim and spouse had to thank the leader for giving them absolution. Jones was rewriting the norms of human behavior within the tunnel; those who disagreed left, but those who remained implicitly agreed to relinquish the values of the outside world. The sessions sucked members deeper and deeper—the only way to explain the bizarre rituals to yourself was to reject all ideas from outside the tunnel. Ordinary expectations about human dignity and decenc
y made the catharsis sessions unbearable.

  Shortly after Larry and Carolyn Layton joined Peoples Temple, Jones seduced Carolyn. At a public session shortly afterward, he had Carolyn declare that Larry Layton was an inadequate husband and lover and that she wanted a divorce. Larry Layton was speechless, but before he could regain his footing, Jones assigned him a new partner, a young blonde named Karen Tow. Outside the tunnel, such interference in people’s personal lives would have been grounds for fights and lawsuits, or at least a parting of ways. Inside the tunnel, these manipulations cemented the conviction that Jones ran not only the organization but the personal lives of all its members.

  In time, as Layton fell in love with Karen, Jones seduced her as well. When Layton admitted to Jones that he was upset, Jones put him on the floor for a catharsis session. Something had to be wrong with Layton for him to not realize that Jones slept with the women in their interest. Layton was made to stand still as the congregation lit into him. All the people he loved and admired reminded him of every occasion when he had ever done anything wrong. Then they started to beat him up—physical punishments were increasingly becoming part of the catharsis sessions. Soon, he was bleeding. When he tried to fight back, he was castigated for being a coward and abandoning nonviolent principles.

  Men and women alike were forced to confess they wanted to seduce Jones. Usually these confessions followed episodes where Jones had forced himself on them. After raping Layton’s sister Debbie, Jones told her that he had sensed that she needed a sexual relationship with a divine presence. As he had done with countless others, Jones made a public announcement afterward that Debbie had forced him into sex. The usual barrage of accusations and calumny descended on the young woman for bothering Jones with her trivial needs. During a visit to Los Angeles, Jones raped Larry Layton, too. Jones told Layton that the pain was training for the day when government agents would come and imprison members and torture them. Jones later told a congregation of nearly a thousand people what had happened between him and Layton. Larry Layton later said in court testimony, “It was the most painful and horrible experience I had ever had, and that—and then to be humiliated in front of the congregation afterward was just—it just destroyed my self-worth.”

  Everything inside the tunnel was turned upside down. There were times when Larry Layton was not sure whether he hated Jones or loved him. “I blamed myself for the things that happened to me. And although a part of me hated Jones, I—I came to think it was just evilness in me that I hated him.” Jones convinced Layton that he “had been a horrible person in another lifetime and that’s why these things were happening to me. And plus he—he would use the whole congregation. It was not just like he would turn against you. The whole congregation would like scream at you, and yell at you, and, you know, everybody would get up and give instances where I had, you know, mistreated them or done something wrong.”

  In addition to the psychological elements that go into constructing the suicide terrorist’s tunnel, many groups cut off physical contact between recruits and the outside world. As Peoples Temple flourished in California, Jones went to extraordinary lengths to cloak his group in secrecy. When journalists threatened him with exposés, Jones launched his followers on their final step to total seclusion. Through much of the 1970s, Jones had been preparing an escape to Guyana, where he had leased thousands of acres of land and begun work on a utopian outpost. Fueled by paranoia about CIA and FBI threats, and actual threats of exposure from journalists and officials who were starting to take a closer look at his activities, Jones and a large number of followers decamped for Guyana in 1977. They took with them many incriminating confessions from the catharsis sessions to blackmail members left behind in America who might speak ill of the group. Jones also moved a large supply of guns and ammunition to Guyana.

  Larry Layton, for all his years of service and obedience, was not invited to come along to utopia. A few months later, however, his sister Debbie—who had moved with Jones to Guyana—defected from Peoples Temple, bringing word to the United States that Jonestown was little more than a concentration camp. On the day Jones learned that Debbie had vanished, he summoned Larry Layton from California. Layton’s family tried to stop him, but he was dead set on following his orders. Besides obedience, there were family ties that drew Layton to Guyana—his mother was in Jonestown and was suffering from cancer.

  Layton’s wife Karen was in Jonestown, too. Layton entered Guyana on May 15, 1978. In the following weeks, as Debbie Layton tried to warn U.S. officials that Jones was making preparations for a mass suicide, Larry and Lisa Layton systematically debunked Debbie’s claims to the media and questioned her credibility.

  According to a transcript of one conversation with a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Larry Layton said, “I am not surprised about what she is saying. She had been stealing thousands of dollars from me and others…. I imagine she is probably still on drugs.” Lisa Layton chimed in, “Seniors are treated beautifully here. We are socialists, and socialists treat their seniors very beautifully.” Larry Layton jumped in again and reprised the familiar techniques that had been used in the catharsis sessions. “I would appreciate being able to say just a couple of words to refute these mountains of lies printed by my little sister…. She is a thief! And that is the reason she is attacking us, because she stole money from her mother. That is why she is telling these ridiculous lies. And the reason they are being printed is because we are socialists.”

  Jones set up armed guards to patrol his utopia. During the night, people in Jonestown heard gunfire, and Jones would tell them in the morning that his guards had fended off attacks by mercenaries employed by the CIA. Sometimes he had followers stay up all night armed with machetes, to take on the invading hordes. He ranted about conspiracies, and planted people who tried to induce other members to defect. People grew afraid to discuss their concerns about Jonestown with one another, since their confidants might have been working for Jones. As he had done from the start, Jones continued to provide services for people, continued to minister to their spiritual needs, and claimed to heal their illnesses.

  Larry Layton pleaded with Jones to heal his mother’s cancer. Lisa Layton was in terrible pain, partly because there was little medical treatment available at Jonestown. But Jones said that Debbie’s defection and her loss of faith had left him unable to help the Layton family. Jones had told people for years that it was their faith in him that allowed him to cure them. Larry Layton was crushed. He could do nothing but watch as his mother died, racked with pain. In public speeches, Jones spent hours railing against Debbie Layton for betraying them all. Larry Layton felt intolerably guilty. Everything that was wrong at Jonestown seemed to be his fault. Richard Janaro was assigned to the same cabin as Layton that September. Layton was unshaven and largely silent, Janaro later recalled. “I’m all right,” he would snap. “Leave me alone.”

  All of the paranoia that Jones had nurtured erupted when Representative Leo Ryan arrived in Guyana with an investigative team in November 1978. Within the tunnel that was Jonestown, it was the ultimate confirmation that enemies would never leave the idealists alone. On November 17, Ryan’s party entered Jonestown and conducted interviews with residents. Many told him that they would not dream of leaving. “For a lot of you that I talked to, Jonestown is the best thing that ever happened to you in your lives,” Ryan said in a speech, and the statement was met with a standing ovation. Tensions were running high the following day, however, as it became clear that fifteen people wanted to leave. There were nearly a thousand Americans at the camp, and the defectors comprised only a tiny fraction, but for Jones and others it was confirmation that they had been fatally betrayed.

  Larry Layton finally saw his chance to redeem himself. After everything that had happened, the death of his mother, his sister’s defection, and his own sense of guilt, he finally saw a way to turn himself into a hero. Layton asked Jones for permission to join the defectors, and to blow up their departing plane.
“Well, I can go in there with dynamite, you know,” Layton would later recall about his conversation with Jones. “He said, ‘No, we don’t have the means anyway.’ I said, ‘Well, I can use a gun,’ but he still was negative on it.” But after conferring with some aides, Jones agreed to the plan. One of the leader’s mistresses, Maria Katsaris, emerged from a meeting with Jones and told Larry Layton, “It is okay. You can go ahead and use a gun.”

  Layton told Representative Ryan that he wanted to defect, too. The other defectors were suspicious. But the congressman allowed Layton to come along, and made arrangements for Layton to be searched before he boarded the plane. Survivors recall Layton was deathly silent as the defectors were transported to the Port Kaituma airstrip five miles away. One recalled him being in an almost “trancelike state.”

  Was Layton thinking fearfully about his impending death? That makes sense only from outside the tunnel. No, Layton was afraid that his mission would go awry. For many years, Jones had told his followers that the number sixteen was unlucky. As Layton rode to the airstrip, he realized that with his addition, the party of defectors now numbered sixteen. It was a bad omen. There was worse to come. Layton had expected there would be only one plane at the airstrip that would carry the congressman and the entire party, one airplane that he could destroy, and thereby wreathe himself in the glory that had eluded him all his life. But after the party got to the airstrip, two planes arrived. Since more defectors had signed up than Ryan had expected, the congressman had ordered a second plane.