This tape consists of a series of messages that Jim Jones – and one unidentified male in one segment – gives to the Jonestown community during a series of perceived crises that rocked the Jonestown community in mid-October 1978. Whether Jones addresses the issues of low productivity, people contemplating suicides, runaways, or emigration to the Soviet Union – and whether Jones discusses these matters in conversational, deliberative or excited tones – it is apparent that the calm and steady experiment in socialism has spiraled out of his control, at least for the duration of this tape. Some of the reprimands along the way are out of context (who ran away? what precipitated his demand to stay away from his cabin? what is going on that he feels compelled to order people to smile?), but the overall sense is of a man trying to treat a deep gash with a single Band-Aid.

The first segment begins with a discussion of the troubles in neighboring Venezuela, but Jones reassures his followers, if things get out of hand, they can escape to the Soviet Union. “They’ll take us.” Jones then speaks about the community’s enemies, and reports what Joe Mazor – a detective who was hired by the Concerned Relatives but who defected to the Temple’s side when he saw the determination and love in the people’s faces – says about their enemies, such as Tim and Grace Stoen, Deanna and Elmer Mertle, and other members of “the conspiracy.”

But much of the first segment is an address to people who are discouraged. Jones tells them to take it easy, to let security “rove constantly” without interference, and if anyone is entertaining thoughts of suicide, to “please give your name in the radio room, because it’s a grave and dangerous thing that you’re doing to yourself.” While he wishes he could help them out of this life, he says it’s important to find a way past their depression. He recommends mood elevators and other medication (in a later segment, he speaks of tranquilizers). He recommends that people write him notes – messages in the suggestion box or personal notes for his eyes only – so he can counsel them. Whatever it takes, he says, he wants to “stop good socialists from laying down their lives.”


He makes his strong argument against suicide, for several reasons: they dissipate the energy that could be directed towards their enemies; the same energy drain affects his ability to perform miracles; they will set back their souls 500 generations (a reference he repeats in a later segment); but most of all, he asks the residents of Jonestown to imagine how their enemies would laugh. “Would you want to give them the satisfaction that you’d taken your own life? Let them smear in the press that you hated socialism, that you didn’t believe in equality and justice? Would you want that written? That’s the way they’d write your epitaph. Not that you were a hero, but that you did not like brotherhood socialism, and you preferred capitalism.” He returns to it again and again, not only in this segment, but throughout the tape: “Don’t be so silly as to lay your life down, to give the fascists a laugh, and the newspapers a headline. That is silly, and it is a waste of your whole potential.” He says the same for himself: “I never wanted to give the enemy, capitalism, racist pigs like Ku Klux Klan white bullying cops– I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of killing myself.”


Jones diverts into a melancholy aside about his own life, a heartache involving his “only girlfriend” that he says shaped the rest of his life. “[O]ne thing that I learned from that experience, that people only use you, until they become communist. And I’m glad for that experience … It made me trustworthy. Never again to fall for anyone, to only be in love with you as a family, and communism above all.”

In the second segment, Jones laments that a girl didn’t listen to what he had said the previous night about suicide and had tried to do something. She is now on a medication that makes her “more tranquil.” What’s worse, her betrayal of the cause stemmed from a problem in a “personal romance.” Once she gets better and proves herself responsible, Jones says, “we will not interfere with your sick love affairs.”