No truth was more central to Aum than the principle that world salvation could be achieved only by bringing about the deaths of just about everyone on this earth. Disciples described their embrace of this vision and their understanding of its evolution from Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian doctrine, but they always assumed that the world-ending violence would be initiated by others, not by the cult itself. Yet Asahara’s idiosyncratic version of these traditions came to focus on the Buddhist concept of poa, which, in his distorted use, meant killing for the sake of your victims: that is, to provide them with a favorable rebirth. One can speak, then, of a weapons-hungry cult with a doctrine of altruistic murder—murder ostensibly intended to enhance a victim’s immortality. The doctrine sanctified not only violence against the world at large but the killing of numerous individuals who ran afoul of the guru’s aspirations.
At the heart of Aum’s violence—and its violent world-ending fantasies—was the interaction of a megalomanic guru with ultimate weapons of annihilation. Such weapons were profoundly attractive precisely because they enabled him to feel that he alone had the power to destroy the world. The existence of the weapons, then, effaces age-old distinctions between world-destroying fantasy (whether of paranoid schizophrenics, religious visionaries, or even ordinary people in their dreams) and the capability of actualizing that fantasy. That blurring of categories was noted by a thoughtful psychoanalyst, Edward Glover, within months of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He spoke of the atomic bomb as “less a weapon of war than a weapon of extermination [and therefore] well adapted to the more bloodthirsty fantasies with which man is secretly preoccupied during phases of acute frustration.” He concluded, “The capacity so painfully acquired by normal men to distinguish between sleep, delusion, hallucination and the objective reality of waking life has for the first time in human history been seriously weakened.”
