In sustaining his ties to ultimate weapons, Asahara brought to bear highly varied, seemingly contradictory personal characteristics: a genuine religious talent, a form of paranoia that enabled him to function at a rather high intellectual level, a con-man style that involved continuous falsification (both conscious lying and self-deception), a grandiosity of moral claim that justified unlimited mass murder, and a tendency, when control over his environment was threatened, to succumb to paranoid psychosis. His obsession with weapons of mass destruction aside, Asahara was hardly unique. All megalomanic gurus are likely to be some such psychological composite—hence the confusion of observers who focus on just one or two of these characteristics. Certainly, all of them operated in Aum as the guru and his closest disciples, struggling with internal and external crises, managed to generate a powerful momentum toward mass killing and eventually crossed a threshold that allowed for no turning back.
Aum is a Japanese phenomenon but a more general one as well. To begin to explain its emergence we must look at various psychological and historical currents in contemporary and modern Japan, which are replete with violence, national guruism, and apocalyptic temptation. But we are, of course, only dealing with a Japanese expression of our universal psychological repertoire, with feelings now being experienced everywhere, perhaps most strongly in the United States. We all have to face Aum’s significance for the human future and to ponder the question of how to deal with, and what alternatives there might be to, its vision of apocalyptic violence.
