Posted by anovagrrl on February 13, 2004 at 13:52:57
In Reply to: Choices, Liberties, and Truth posted by Candy on February 12, 2004 at 22:03:50:
I've been in situations where reality starts to bend and warp in ways that seem unimaginable to normal people going about their lives in the everyday course of events.
Although I am committed to nonviolence, I can understand how someone could might become so enraged that they severely beat or killed someone. We create social realities, and we can co-create relationships and social structures that set up and enable us to behave in an atrocious, animalistic manner.
Berg was systematic in tearing down the inhibitions and barriers that maintain security in social relations. He normalized coersion, lying, theft, physical violence, rape, incest, prostitution, adultery, the destruction of familial bonds...
Murder is about the only major antisocial behavior he didn't succeed in normalizing, although one might make an arguement that he may have succeed at that in The Family's legacy of suicide. Still, he must have concluded by 1980 that he wasn't interested in taking his followers down the road to another Jonestown.
Did Berg ever comment on Jonestown?