Jim Jones Jr. believes that despite high aims of building a peaceful community in Jonestown, followers of the People’s Temple were misguided because they adhered to a principle of revolutionary suicide.
     “It’s easy to die for a cause, but it’s harder to live for it,” Jones told a room full of Skyline students and faculty in a discussion Nov. 15.
     Jones, the adopted son of religious cult leader Jim Jones, was out of town playing basketball on Nov. 18, 1978, the day 913 people died in Jonestown, Guyana. The Jonestown massacre is the largest mass suicide in modern history. Jonestown was home to the People’s Temple, led by Jones, Sr., who sought to build a community separate from the social injustices in the United States.
     Jones told the Skyline audience that followers of the Temple were passionate about the idea of living in a better society. As a teenager growing up in the Temple, Jones said that he enjoyed living in the jungle in Jonestown.
     Jones also said that his father was a “great manipulator,” who used brainwashing techniques that included long days of hard work, food and sleep deprivation, and late-night sessions of rhetoric to help control followers of the Temple.
     “I had been taught all my life that revolutionary suicide was a good thing,” Jones said.
     Followers went along with Jones, Sr.’s belief in revolutionary suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, though it is believed that many were forced and murdered.
     Throughout the dialogue, Jones was repeatedly asked “the million dollar question.” Would he have committed suicide with the rest of the People’s Temple if he were in town on the day of the massacre?
     “I don’t know if I would have took the poison,” Jones said.
     Jones said that, along with his brothers, he felt like he could have impacted the events that occurred if he was in Jonestown on the day of the mass suicide. On his first visit back to Jonestown 20 years after the massacre, Jones said that when he found the vats where the Kool-Aid had been made, he was affected.
     “That (seeing the vats) made it real for me,” Jones said.
     When asked how he introduces himself to those he meets, Jones said that at first he didn’t want to deal with reactions to being the son of Jim Jones, cult leader.
     “For the first 10 years, I didn’t tell anybody,” Jones said. “For many years, I did live in shame.” Now when he reveals his name to new people, sometimes, he said, “They’ll make a Kool-Aid joke.”
     Jones has a close relationship with surviving family members and now lives in the Bay Area as a pharmaceutical salesman raising three sons, who he had to explain the Jonestown massacre.
     Jones said that he wouldn’t trade his life for another, as he cherishes sharing his experiences with the world.
     “To live a life and have a purpose,” Jones said. “Now that’s powerful.”