In 1981 the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh bought a sixty-four-thousand-acre ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, and set about building a city. Within four years Rajneeshpuram had a population of several thousand, its own airstrip, buses, shops, a dam and a police force.
Rajneesh himself entered a period of public silence and was largely inaccessible. Practical authority passed to his secretary, Ma Anand Sheela.
The conflict with the surrounding county was real on both sides. Local residents and the state government used land-use law to obstruct the commune, and there was substantial hostility toward the sannyasins. The commune's response escalated in stages, and the escalation is the case.
To win the 1984 county elections, the commune bused in several thousand homeless people from cities across the United States under a program called Share-a-Home, intending to register them as voters. When the county moved to block the registrations, an alternative plan was pursued: reduce turnout in The Dalles, the county seat, by making people ill.
In September 1984, members of the inner circle cultivated Salmonella Typhimurium in the commune's own laboratory and contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants in The Dalles. Seven hundred and fifty-one people fell ill and forty-five were hospitalized. Nobody died. It remains the largest bioterrorist attack in United States history.
The same group also plotted the murder of the US Attorney for Oregon, poisoned two county commissioners, and attempted to kill Rajneesh's personal physician.
The mechanism worth extracting is delegation. Rajneesh's personal charisma created a bounded moral community: within it, sannyasins were engaged in something transcendent, and outside it were people obstructing that. Sheela then operated inside that boundary as an administrator, and the poisoning was planned in meetings, with staffing and logistics, as a task.
Two structures made that possible. Diffusion of responsibility across a hierarchy, so that each participant performed a fragment — culturing the bacteria, driving, pouring — and none experienced themselves as the author. And the siege frame, which is chapter 72's dynamic: an external threat consolidates a group and licenses actions against outsiders that would otherwise be unthinkable, and the hostility from Oregon was genuine enough to make the frame credible.
The therapeutic practices at Rajneeshpuram — marathon encounter groups, dynamic meditation involving prolonged hyperventilation and catharsis, sexual permissiveness — produced states of high arousal and identity dissolution that are, in the terms of this part of the guide, suggestibility-increasing.
Sheela fled to Germany in September 1985. Rajneesh publicly denounced her, invited investigators in, and pleaded guilty in 1985 to immigration violations, and was deported. Sheela was extradited, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and product tampering, and served twenty-nine months.