Culture and Psychodynamics of Mass Suicide
Mass suicide is the simultaneous suicide of members of a community. Typically a reaction to oppression, the suicides serve as a lethal escape for the defeated and colonized populations. Suicides are also committed based on a delusional perception of reality without there being a real threat.
The mass suicides of the past few decades, linked mainly to religious sects, occur as an act of self-assertion. However, cultist mass suicides have been committed and documented as early as the 2nd century BC.
Excavations carried out at Ur, the ancient Mesopotamian residence of Sumerian kings, in 1955 discovered that the tombs of the kings terminated with a mysterious well that turned out to be the venue of a funeral rite. The death of a god-king was considered to be a passage into another dimension where he would continue to live. The men and women of the court followed him by poisoning themselves to continue to serve their king.
In 133 BC, when the Roman Senate ordered the destruction of the Spanish town, Numantia, its inhabitants slit the throats of the women and children. Then, they set fire to the city and challenged each other to death.
The Jonestown suicides are perhaps the most popular mass suicide in contemporary history. Under the instruction of cult leader, Jim Jones, 605 adults, and 304 children ritualistically killed themselves in the town of Jonestown, Guyana.
Starting his career as a Methodist minister, Jim Jones went on to form a new church, the Church of Unity and Community. He propagandized an upcoming nuclear disaster that would destroy the world except for a few chosen survivors. He convinced 150 people to follow him to Redwood Valley, California.
Jones grew in power and influence and gained the support of prominent politicians and the press. He befriended the obsessive and paranoid Timothy Stoen, who became Jones’ right-hand man. He helped Jones control the cult through charisma, reason, magic, and planning.
Following personal feuds between Jones, Stoen, and Stoen’s wife, who bore Jones’ son, and negative publicity, Jones established the community of Jonestown in Guyana and directed a mass migration there proclaiming the place to be a communist utopia.
Soon after, Jones declared a fake siege by fascists that threatened to kill the community. He gathered his followers at the central pavilion and instructed them to consume a cocktail containing cyanide indicating that as a more honorable way to die. 918 individuals poisoned themselves to death, which was recorded in the harrowing death tape.
There have been many instances of mass suicide worldwide since. In September 1985, 68 members of a spiritual cult killed themselves in Mindanao, Philippines. Following a blind guru, Ca Van Liem, 53 peasants killed themselves with weapons in a South Vietnamese village in October 1993.
Endogenous factors have increasingly become the dominant reason for the suicide of a group. The leaders and members are closely interrelated and hold sectist beliefs that their countercultural interpretation of a doctrine is the truth. The sect unites the need of its members to submit to a higher power and the capacity of a charismatic leader to exert a dominative force.
A typical aspect of the sect’s conception of life is a hostile attitude towards the outside world, perceived as vacuous and inferior. They perceive that the apocalypse, the end of life as it is known, will bring the fight between good and evil to an end. The group believes to be anchored to an entity superior to their own individualities that promises them continual life.
The charismatic leader often suffers from a chronic, delirious disorder and belies the anguish of not knowing under a mask of confident certainty. Leaders take on both the roles of the child fulfilling its imagination and the mother nurturing the masses making the people depend on them.
The gesture of dying together for a higher purpose and in opposition to the world that didn’t accept them appeals to the ideal of martyrdom and helps reason the sacrifice. This destruction is the extreme response to the feeling of insignificance brought on by the outside world.