Increasingly widespread among ordinary people is the feeling of things going so wrong that only extreme measures can restore virtue and righteousness to society. When the world comes to be experienced as both hateful and dead or dying, a visionary guru can seize on such feelings while promising to replace them with equally absolute love and life-power. Nor are any of us completely free of those inner struggles. The sentiments that created Aum Shinrikyō are part of the spiritual and psychological ambience each of us inhabits day by day.
Apocalyptic violence has been building worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. Having studied some of the most destructive events of this era, I found much of what Aum did familiar, echoing the totalistic belief systems and end-of-the-world aspirations I had encountered in other versions of the fundamentalist self. I came to see these, in turn, as uneasy reactions to the openness and potential confusions of the “protean” self that history has bequeathed us. I had been concerned with these matters since the mid-1950s, when I first studied “thought reform” (or “brainwashing”) in Communist China and then among American cultic religious groups. I came to recognize the power of a totalized environment for mobilizing individual passions in the creation of fierce, often deeply satisfying expressions of collective energy.
