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Even now, having finished interviewing the victims, I can't simply file away the gas attack saying, “After all, this was merely an extreme and exceptional crime committed by an isolated lunatic fringe…. wasn't there a similar need for a parallel analysis of “us”?
Asahara himself…. Irredeemably delusional and paranoiac…. Most of us laughed at the absurd off-the-wall scenario that Asahara provided…. But were we able to offer “them” a more viable narrative?… Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on a “narrative” in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of “insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares?
Aum Shinrikyo was a Japanese cult devoted to enlightenment, world transformation, and the purification of humanity through cataclysmic destruction. Siphoning ideas from esoteric Buddhist, Hindu, and sundry other apocalyptic doctrines from the Book of Revelation to the prophesies of Nostradamus, its vatic leader Shoko Asahara declared himself the prophetic incarnation of various deities and enlightened beings such as Shiva, Christ, Buddha, and the God of Light, and exhorted the sacred imperative to cleanse humanity of sin through violence and nuclear Armageddon.2 Founded in 1987, Aum had soon amassed some 40-50,000 worldwide followers, and in 1995 poisoned the Tokyo subway with sarin gas, killing 13 and injuring thousands more.3