Dear Editor,
I write about two separate issues that are, however, connected by our attitudes to learning, as individuals and as a society.
1. Every year, on November 18, if I have a class (I teach at UG), I would announce to my students that it’s the anniversary of Jonestown. I’d then point out that it was very much a Guyanese tragedy in that it happened because of a failure of our local institutions, and quite probably a failure of our politics. I might also mention that Jonestown embodied both the sides of trust and cooperation. As a very successful agricultural community carved out of the jungle in Guyana, the “People’s Temple Agricultural Project” was without doubt the triumph of cooperation and leadership. Those who are offended by this description must read on.
Trust and cooperation – social capital – are known to also have the power to produce evil. We know only too well that it takes a certain honour among thieves for gangs to operate successfully. We can say the same sorts of thing about drug cartels, gold and diamond smuggling operations, and most certainly about corruption.
People began trusting Jim Jones long before People’s Temple came to Guyana. Once in Guyana, the senior members of the People’s Temple cooperated with Jim Jones in a way that guaranteed that the tragedy would eventually occur. All that was needed was a tipping point, which just happened to occur on November 18, 1978, when a threat to that cooperation, and to the beliefs that supported the cult, triggered a sense that all was lost. Yet, to the very end, cooperation prevailed as ordinary members who had trusted Jones were killed if they were reluctant to drink the Kool Aid.
In the case of the tragedy of Jonestown, there was trust and cooperation within the People’s Temple. But there was also cooperation between the leadership of the State and the leadership of the People’s Temple. Even if there was little trust between the leadership of the State and the leadership of the People’s Temple, there was something else that was also a powerful force: There was an alignment of interests, as both Jones and the local politicians were passionate about the ideology they shared, and both putatively wanted that ideology to translate into (respectively) a communist community and a Marxist-Leninist country.
The interests that were at issue were non-pecuniary, but we (now) know how powerful a mixture of beliefs and ideologies can be. When aligned they can lead to a Jonestown tragedy, just as they could lead to the election by freedom loving people of a president with autocratic instincts. The question before us should not be whether Jonestown can be a tourism product (it certainly could), but it’s whether we can learn, especially as a society.
A low probability, high-impact event occurred in Jonestown because of a failure of our institutions and our politics. The People’s Temple were allowed to operate as a state within a State on account of an alignment of interests. The level of cooperation made the very unlikely happen: The remarkable Jonestown project as well as the horrific Jonestown tragedy. We didn’t ask questions, but rather, we provided a shield of opacity. And of course, we defended the 30,000 acre lease that was given to the People’s Temple.
2. As apparently appreciated by Jones himself, people are not always able to learn from the past. A wonderful opportunity to learn from Uruguay’s experience with renewable energy and energy transition has been created by the University of Guyana GREEN Institute (UGGI), in the form of a Webinar tomorrow (Friday, December 13, 2024).
As Director of the UGGI, I have diligently ensured that a number of agencies, such as the Guyana Energy Authority, the Office of the Prime Minister, the IDB, the Office of Climate Change, the Private Sector Commission, received an invitation to join this carefully curated webinar.
I am taking a positive view of things, and remain hopeful that the words “energy transition” might not prevent invitees from seizing this learning opportunity by registering at https://qr.link/pPbf2v.
Sincerely,
Thomas B. Singh (PhD)
Director
University of Guyana GREEN
Institute
& Senior Lecturer
Department of Economics
University of Guyana
