She attributes Jones with neither coercion or intimidation of his followers. She, in fact, places the blame for the mass suicide squarely on those who pursued Jones s teachings. By distancing ourselves from the people in Jonestown, we forget the fact that, contrary to popular opinion, we are very much like them. By portraying the members as individuals, and not as a group of maniacal worshippers, Moore makes the group human. Most importantly, she chooses to refute the popular opinion of the cults that emphasize the faults of followers of people like Applewhite and Jones.
Decent people do wrong, they do evil, even as they explain and rationalize it.
And sometimes their arguments even make sense, she gives the members of the group credit for their own humanity and freedom to choose their own lifestyles. It denies the fact that they were human beings with rational minds and logical methods of making choices just as we are. The viewpoints of Newsweek and the Jonestown petition are not wrong, they just do not acknowledge that there was another facet to the behavior of the members, namely free will and choice. By placing most of historical agency on Jones and Applewhite, we overlook the role that the members of their respective groups had in determining the outcomes of their own lives. By understanding that the agency of these mass suicides ought to be distributed equally to both the leaders of the groups and the members, we can more clearly reconstruct the events that happened at Jonestown and Ranch Santa Fe and better portray their roles in the history of New Age movements.