I realize you're asking the question rhetorically, but a brief answer might nonetheless be interesting. Before I start: "I endorse NEITHER Dr. Spock nor Jim Jones."

This is a large topic, an important one, and one about which the public information is largely sourced from one place -- the US government.

Perhaps the events of Jones' last day can be better appreciated if the events leading up to the next-to-last day are examined.

Nobody -- including Jones -- ended up in Guyana with the intention of dying there. Jones' migrations, Indianapolis->Oakland->rural CA ->Guyana had a single "carrot" and a single "stick".

The carrot was a desire to free people from welfare and welfare dependency by pooled assets and self-help. The stick was government interference. Jones had success with the carrot part in all four places, but the government was not about to leave him and his people in peace. He was, plain and simple, hounded to the ends of the earth.

Of course he was a charismatic, megalomaniac leader. So are successful congressmen, senators, insurance salesmen, preachers, generals and drill sergeants. The "media" spin of Jonestown and Jones are so similar to the Waco spin that one should suspect a script based not on what happened, but on what someone felt people ought to believe happened. Notice that nobody called Jones "crazy" until he started saying that the problems of poverty and racism could both be overcome without the government, and he began to have successes in so doing. Until Jones went "outside the system" he was a media hero, feted at political banquets, awarded medals, and so on.

In Oakland, he did some arithmetic to answer the question "what could we do if this congregation simply pooled their welfare checks?" This resulted in heresy: buying food wholesale, buying real estate instead of renting, and other things. At this point he began to be called "crazy" and the usual apparatus of bureaucratic harassment was turned to "on" mode. One of the charges was "child abuse".

I'm not trying to excuse him. But it is too easy to say, "They're all crazy, nobody can understand 'crazy'." Somehow he got 1000 people to follow him into a jungle without using the draft, a feat which only a USMC colonel could match at the time.

A different way of looking at the Jones phenomenon is to ignore Jones and his specifics, and instead ask, "What kind of terrible, hopeless conditions would make 1,000 people believe that life would be better if they followed a madman into the jungle?"

Then we come to the last day. "What is it about being returned to Oakland, CA, at government expense that would encourage at least a significant fraction of 900+ people living in a jungle clearing to voluntarily take cyanide?"

I'm not sure why people followed Jones, but I have a fairly clear idea about why they were ready to follow someone.

Just like Spock, it's not so much "how did Spock or Jones do it?" It's "why were people ripe for [whatever]?". Why did the Macedonian legions follow Alexander? What sane man would get on the Mayflower? What convinced the men at the Alamo to stand fast? The mechanisms of leadership are pretty well mapped out. Where a follower comes from is a harder question, not so simple to answer. I think it starts with the follower saying and believing, "I cannot run my own life".

A Guest (of course)
May 2001