What I Learned From Rita Shay in 1978

I was in high school when Jones Town happened. It was a most shocking story that unfolded in real time on the news. My history teacher Rita Shay would talk about it and drew parallels with other malignant narcissists like Hilter. She described how cult leaders got people to buy into them as some kind of messiah. Once they did, the leader would demand greater and greater acts of contrition to prove their loyalty.

Despite how dangerous the requests from the leader were, once people had bought into the messiah story, they were all but powerless to not obey.

As a rebellious teenager this seemed ridiculous to me. How could perfectly sane people, so blindly follow a person who clearly did not have their best interests at heart? The mass suicide at Jonestown where 909 people took their lives because Jim Jones told them too was unimaginable. But it happened.

I will not name the malignant narcissist who currently lives in government housing, but we should all be fearful of how the stories of these types of people end. And the ending is not just for the narcissist, but also for the followers who doubled down on following them. The confirmation bias we all have to try and justify our own earlier decisions makes this all predictable.

85 people survived Jones town because their will to live or other random circumstances saved them from certain death. We need people adjacent to the power to wake up and shake themselves free of their cultish devotion and stop the narcissist. Following the current path will not end well. Just look to the fate of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials. Eventually everyone pays the price.

Rita Shay was a Radcliffe educated, Princeton Review Scholar, who I also heard rumored had worked for the CIA at some point. She was a great history teacher who I learned so much from. I took US history from her and topics in History. (That was probably not the name, but I can’t remember the exact title of the course, despite it being my favorite course senior year.) She would often call on me in class to represent the American worker point of view as I had spent the summer between my junior and senior year working in a printing factory. It was something very few, if any, of my boarding school classmates did in the summer.

I wish she were alive to discuss all the parallels going on now, with past history. She had a great way of weaving the stories together and predicting the outcomes. But I am thankful she does not have to witness what is going on. It would break her heart.