Milieu Control

Jim Jones moved about a thousand members of Peoples Temple from California to a clearing in the Guyanese jungle, reachable only by air and river. Passports and money were held by the leadership, mail and phone contact were monitored, Jones's voice was broadcast over loudspeakers for hours a day, armed guards patrolled the perimeter, and the community rehearsed mass suicide in drills he called "White Nights." When Congressman Leo Ryan visited in November 1978 and some members asked to leave with him, gunmen killed Ryan and four others at the airstrip; more than 900 residents, about a third of them children, then died by cyanide poisoning, many under coercion. Survivor accounts stress that in that setting no outside information or second opinion was available to anyone.

Aum Shinrikyo recruited physicians, chemists and engineers from Japan's leading universities as well as tens of thousands of lay followers. Committed members gave their assets to the group, cut contact with their families and moved into closed compounds, where diet, sleep, reading and contact with outsiders were controlled by the leadership and doubters were confined or, in several documented cases, killed. Inside that closed world its scientists produced sarin. The group released it in Matsumoto in 1994, killing at least seven people, and on the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995, killing at least twelve and sending more than five thousand to hospital. The CDC's review notes how little outside scrutiny a registered religious organization had attracted despite years of complaints from families.

Marshall Applewhite ("Do") and Bonnie Nettles ("Ti") began gathering followers in 1975 with the teaching that a spacecraft would carry them to a "level above human." Members gave up possessions, jobs and contact with their families, took new names, and lived communally under detailed rules for dress, diet and daily schedule, each paired with a "check partner" so that no one was left alone with private doubts. There were no guards or fences. Sociologists Robert Balch and David Taylor, who had observed the group since the 1970s, stress that members could and did leave; those who remained for two decades had narrowed their social world to one another. In March 1997 thirty-nine of them, Applewhite included, died by suicide in a rented house near San Diego as the Hale-Bopp comet passed. Investigators found no sign of struggle, and farewell videos showed members cheerful.