Robert J. Lifton
Author, Destroying the World to Save It

"Destroying the World to Save It"

Thanks so much.  Since Mr. Van Dine was kind enough to mention my avocation, my bird cartoons, I’m going to share one of them with you right now because I think it represents best my feelings at such a moment.  One has the danger when one is introduced so generously of believing in what’s said.  An antidote to that is this particular bird cartoon, which I like to consider my existential classic.  In this particular cartoon, a small, enthusiastic, young, naive bird looks up and says, “All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling I am me,” and an older, bigger, more jaundiced, more skeptical bird looks down and says, “You were wrong.”  On that note, I begin.

I’m very happy to be here at the World Affairs Council, and I’ve been really made to feel comfortable here.  I’ve enjoyed the dinner, and I’ve enjoyed the company of people I’ve met here.  So, I have certain reluctance to kind of ruin the occasion by bringing some of the grim images that I have to bring to you.  A person like me can get a little sensitive about how people feel when he walks into a room because they can wonder, one thinks, “What new horrors is he bringing us now?”  So, what I suggest is that you invite me back here next year, and I’ll give a talk on human virtue, loving kindness and sexual pleasure.  For tonight, I’m going to talk about apocalyptic violence, unfortunately.

What is apocalyptic violence?  Well, it can be violence on a large scale, but what characterizes it is violence in the service of the end of the world, of the destruction of the world in order that there may be some renewal, some new beginning.  There’s always that aspect of renewal and when you define apocalyptic violence that way, you then have to see it taking place in many parts of the world.  For instance, in the Middle East, Israeli terrorism and Arab terrorism both are in the service of blocking the peace process, but it’s more [than that].  It also has to do with speeding the return of the Messiah, or the Holy War.  So, this is an apocalyptic kind of projection beyond even the peace process.

Various cults in the United States, in America, in Europe and all through the world, whether it’s Solar Temple, People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate, all have much of this apocalyptic kind of potential for violence or have expressed it.  I’ll talk also toward the latter part of my remarks about [the] Oklahoma City [bombing] and the radical right and their version of apocalyptic violence.  Also, the genocides that we’ve seen so recently and so tragically in the world, whether in Cambodia, Rwanda or Yugoslavia, are also expressions of apocalyptic violence, of some kind of violence in the name of a vision or fantasy of renewal or spiritual purification.

We can’t help but agree with the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbaum when he says, “The old century has not ended well.”  It so happens that I’ve done work on various subjects--some of which were mentioned in that kind introduction--that converge in Aum Shinrikyo, as though Aum seems to condense all the horrors of the 20th century.  For instance, I did a study of Chinese thought reform, a so-called brain washing in the mid-‘50s when I was a very young psychiatrist and I did a study of Hiroshima survivors in the early ‘60s, and from them became concerned with much of our psychological relationship to nuclear weapons and the problems of the nuclear age.  I did a subsequent study of Vietnam veterans, particularly anti-war veterans, and you remember the imagery of destroying villages, of destroying areas in order to save them.  I also did a study of Nazi doctors where one could learn that you carry out genocide not only with professional killers but with killing professionals.  All of these had much to do with Aum Shinrikyo, and had to do with my choosing to do that study.

But I’ve done still one more study, of the protean self, and I mention this because it has to do with the potential for resilience--that is, for recovery from violent experience into some sort of renewal.  The difficulty with the protean self or the many-sidedness that all of us have within us, in some degree, has to do with the potential of people who commit evil also being protean.  You’ll see that when I talk about Shoko Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo, this could be a kind of evil dimension of the protean self.

I did the study by interviewing ten former members and one actual member [of Aum Shinrikyo].  This is the way I’ve done all of my studies.  I’ve tried to interview people who have been acted upon by history in some important way or have themselves acted upon history or some combination of that, and then have tried to supplement that by immersing myself in the history of that aspect of their lives and the history of the culture or country that they derive from.  So that in Japan, I tried to familiarize myself with all that I could about Aum Shinrikyo, having extensive discussions and consultations with Japanese scholars and journalists who were studying the cult, and tried to add my experience over many decades of working in Japan, periodically, and doing various prior studies there.  In this work, I want to try to lay it out to you as a kind of mosaic, just briefly to give you a sense, an overview of it.  I’ll be taking you on a kind of cultic journey you might say, which will include what Aum did, just the details of what they did, very briefly something about the emergence of the Guru and Guru-disciple relationships, the experiences of one disciple, just to give you the kind of fantasy that people can have in Aum Shinrikyo, and the relationship of megalomania to weaponry, which is a grave one and was mentioned in the introduction.  And then finally, some of the overall characteristics of this kind of violent cult engaging in apocalyptic violence, and how they apply right here in our own country.

If one just states briefly what Aum did, you know about their release of sarin gas in the subway attack in Tokyo in March 1995, where 12 people were killed and 5,000 injured.  There had been a previous gas attack in Matsumoto, which hadn’t been identified with Aum, but which Aum was responsible for the year before.  And then there were terrorist acts after that attack where they were trying to protect the Guru from arrest, where they tried to release gas additionally from other places, and even sent a letter bomb trying to kill the Governor of the Tokyo area.  But more than that, they stockpiled biological and chemical weapons and tried very hard to obtain nuclear weapons, unsuccessfully, fortunately.  In addition to that, they probably murdered about 80 people over the ten years of their life as a cult, many of them members who tried to deviate or leave, or people whom they may have considered to be enemies of their group.

Their larger plan, which did not lack for ambition, was to release an infinitely greater amount of sarin gas some months later in November, which would be in Asahara's fantasy a means of involving Japan and then America, and then Russia, and other major countries so that this would be a way of triggering World War III, which would in turn bring about a biblical Armageddon.  In that sense, there was this impulse to destroy the world to save it.  Of course it was fantasy, but the point is fantasy was related to the acquisition of potentially world-ending weaponry.  So one question that must haunt one in doing this kind of study is, “How did Aum Shinrikyo come to cross a crucial threshold from merely anticipating Armageddon to taking active steps toward bringing it about, and, indeed, trying to acquire the weaponry that might make that possible?”

Just a word about the guru and his myth: you can look upon the guru of a cult like this as everything or nothing.  He’s everything, he creates the cult, it’s his vision that dominates the cult and he demands absolute subservience from his disciples.  But on the other hand, he can be seen as a creature of the hungers of his disciples, and he’s nothing without disciples.  So both of those have to be taken into account.  Really, the guru lives out the myth of the hero or call to greatness: a series of ordeals which he triumphs over, and then in some way, makes some discovery about the meaning of death which he brings back to his people and to their knowledge of how to live.  In the case of Asahara, his source of his guruism is elusive--it usually is.

We come upon the guru in some dramatic moment that he or she has been responsible for, and then we look back on his childhood and try to understand how he got there.  But you can never totally explain one’s adult life by one’s childhood because the self is constantly in motion, self-process I call it, and it isn’t ever a single result of a particular single influence in childhood.  In the case of a guru, he is likely to have certain visions of some new truth, which becomes the truth, and he can convey to disciples the feeling that he knows, and in the case of a guru who has what we call charisma--charisma is a term we often use, but it’s hard to define.  My understanding, the way that I would understand charisma, is that a guru can evoke in people around him the sense that he knows a way to make their life more vital and give it more meaning, and also to connect them with some eternal principle.  So he offers vitality and immortality and that’s a rather powerful combination.  One can understand why people can follow a guru everywhere, as they did into violence with Aum Shinrikyo.

In the case of Asahara, without going into detail, he’s blind in one eye and nearly blind in another eye, but has some sight in his eye, and he was forced to go to a school for the blind even though he would have been eligible for an ordinary school because he did have some sight.  And he developed, in childhood, various resentments.  He was an angry young person, according to people who remember him there.  He was domineering and manipulative with other students, sometimes violent, very taken with drama, and was also a little paranoid, because when he failed to win any elections for class president, he complained to his teachers that they were bad-mouthing him, and they said no, the other students were merely afraid of him.  So you can see some of these characteristics that did enter into his later guruism, but you can’t necessarily fully explain that quality of charisma that I described through that.

There’s much more one could say, but let me say that a guru must have visions.  Asahara had two main visions around which he claimed to form Aum Shinrikyo.  The first was a vision of having the Hindu god Shiva come before him and declare him to be, Asahara to be, the leader of an army of the gods in a struggle against the forces of darkness.  That’s a kind of militarized vision for a spiritual purpose, and that of course suited him.  Shiva had to be an important god because Shiva is the god of yoga, which Asahara concentrated on, and also Shiva is famous for dancing the cosmos to its death and then to its rebirth.

In addition, he had a second vision the following year in which he claimed to achieve final enlightenment.  Well, it’s very hard to tell whether somebody achieves final enlightenment, because nobody is inside of that vision but the particular person himself.  Some doubts, of course, were raised by Japanese journalists later on when they visited a religious teacher whom Asahara had consulted in the Himalayas where he had the second vision, and the teacher made the quiet comment that he was surprised that Asahara could come back in a few days and claim final enlightenment because it requires a lifetime in most cases.

In any case, a leader like this can be a combination of a person who has had visions in which he’s convinced of his god-like status on the one-hand and [he can be the] ultimate con-man on the other.  So he went around and he had pictures taken with other religious leaders including the Dalai Lama, and then he brought them back and claimed to have been warmly welcomed, and to have been received by, these religious leaders as another great religious leader in the world.  All through his destructive behavior, the con-man dimension was very prominent. 

We learn from studies like this that the human psyche is very complicated, and it can include genuine religious talent, which this man had along with, as it turned out, not only his con-man tendency, but his violent tendency, his criminal tendencies, his paranoia and his megalomania.

Just a word about a couple of visions of one of the young people whom I interviewed, to give you the feel of what it was like.  This was a man whom I called the “gentle Armageddonist,” who was very drawn to Asahara and to Aum because he believed in the predictions of Nostradamus.  Nostradamus was, as you know, the16th century French mystic, who predicted that the world would end in the year 2000, according to the Book of Revelation.  Everybody uses the Book of Revelation, from Nostradamus, to medieval cults, to Asahara, to Heaven=s Gate, just about every group you can name.  But in Japan, the prophecies of Nostradamus have probably been more popular than even here, or anywhere in the world.  There have been hundreds of editions of translations of these prophecies, and millions and millions of books about them.  So that tells us that Japan had a very strong apocalyptic impulse underneath its staid exterior.  Certainly, Asahara was very much formed by that, and influenced by that, and this young man was drawn to Asahara because they were thinking the same kind of things about the inevitability of the world’s end.

One of the visions that he had was a kind of triangle in which Asahara was the top and disciples like himself were at the bottom of the triangle or pyramid, and they were irresistibly drawn up to Asahara until they merged.  He, himself, merged with Asahara so that he said to Asahara--but was also Asahara talking at the same time--“Is this the experience of nothingness?” Then the voice came back, which was Asahara=s but also his own, “Yes, you are experiencing it for the first time.”  It’s this merging, or becoming what they called a clone of the guru, that was essential.  In the process, one is given deep pleasures of mystical experiences because you undergo various kinds of meditation, very intense exercises of prostration such as throwing yourself on the ground a thousand to ten thousand times, and rapid breathing exercises which cause de-oxygenation so you lose oxygen in rapid breathing and that makes you vulnerable to mystical experiences or high states.  Sometimes the process includes the use of drugs later on, including LSD.

The second kind of vision was that he was this disciple sitting and calmly meditating with a group of other disciples while there were great fires around and the earth was falling into the sea in a kind of scene that combined nuclear holocaust and biblical Armageddon.  That was a kind of vision of surviving the end of the world and being protected from that destruction by one’s meditation--that is, by Aum Shinrikyo's mystical wisdom.

Aum Shinrikyo had a sequence in its killing.  The first death occurred seemingly accidentally, but not entirely accidentally, because of the cruel training procedures that they used, which sometimes included hanging someone upside-down for a period of time, or thrusting them into ice-cold water, which could be fatal, or [into] very hot boiling water.  It was done for the sake of training and boiling off one’s bad karma, but it also could be punitive.  In covering up the early killing, when someone wants to go to the authority and describe it, or [feels] the need to prevent it from becoming known, [it could] lead to more deaths.  Killing always led to more killing. In other work I learned that atrocity begets atrocity, but there was the extending of the killing and the justification for killing into a larger and larger framework that could be done by two principles--one of them was an ancient Jewish thought, “forcing the end.”  What that means is not just waiting for Armageddon to come, or in this case, for the Messiah to come, but instigating violence.

It is known that you must have violence before the Messiah can come, and that can speed up the Messiah’s return.  This is a similar feeling to what some of the medieval cults felt when they wanted to instigate violence to bring about the return of Jesus.  It was finally declared to be a heresy, because it was decided that this should only be God’s decision and should be done at God’s pace.  A cult that obviously seeks to force the end in this way can be more dangerous, particularly when there is weaponry involved.

The second concept, which they themselves embraced, was called “Phoa.”  In Buddhist and in some Hindu traditions “Phoa” means a spiritual exercise that one wants to perform when one is dying, sometimes with the help of a guru, in order to enhance one’s rebirth into a higher spiritual level.  The way that Asahara and Aum used [this tradition] was that people of high spiritual attainment themselves could actually kill someone in the name of “Phoa,” because they would then grant him, by this act, a higher reincarnation.  I came to call this altruistic murder, which is the best term for it--I think.  In that way, one is extensively benefiting the person one kills, which even the Nazis did not do.  They killed Jews and others whom they considered inferior, but they never claimed that they would go to some better place because the Nazis killed them.

Altruistic murder allowed them to extend the idea of killing ever more broadly, so that when they actually perpetrated that sarin gas release in 1995, when they returned to the guru for his blessing, they were told to say a thousand or ten thousand or one hundred thousand times that “it was good to be given Phoa by the great god Shiva and the victor of truth.”  In other words, this was a Phoa that they were transmitting to the world from higher spiritual authorities, and the principle here is that you can only kill very large numbers of people when you do it in the name of virtue, and that is certainly what Aum Shinrikyo was doing.

I mentioned megalomania. Megalomania is crucial because the combination of megalomania and ultimate weapons means in functional terms that the individual self replaces the world; one has nothing to do with the currents of the world, except as they affect the individual self and reads everything only through the individual self.  When that individual self of a megalomaniac kind combines with ultimate weapons, you have ultimate danger!  In that way, one can say that the very existence of nuclear weapons creates a grave danger, because it is an attraction, an allure to megalomaniac personalities who can begin to feel that I alone, or with one or two disciples, am capable of destroying the world.

In the case of Asahara, one can say that he had a functional paranoia and a functional megalomania.  What I mean by that is he could function fairly effectively and run his cult, do some rather clever things, however evil they were, with his paranoia.  You could see this, for instance, in the Unabomber--an American situation.  He was rather brilliant, but he was highly paranoid.  He was brilliant in deceiving the FBI in some of his writings.

So, you can have functional megalomania and functional paranoia, which does not break down until the cult is under great duress or the leader feels its dissolution, or when the guru’s closest disciples--as it happened after he was arrested in the case of many of them--begin to denounce him.  Once they denounce him, or one of them calls him a false guru, the whole guru-disciple relationship is broken, and the guru is likely to undergo a switch from plain paranoia and megalomania into paranoia-psychosis, becoming literally mad.

I would emphasize that in the case of Asahara, even though he attempted to use only biological and chemical weapons, the biological weapons were unsuccessfully deployed because it is very hard to know how to release them.  However, the chemical weapons were released a little more successfully.  Behind all that was his nuclearism, his embrace of nuclear weapons, and rendering them a kind of deity.  I originally described the phenomenon of nuclearism when I was looking at American and Soviet dependence on nuclear weapons, and near embrace of them as a near deity.  But now there occurs what I would call, “trickle-down nuclearism”--to borrow a term from a previous leader.  In “trickle-down nuclearism,” it is not only the great powers who were drawn to nuclear weapons, but there can be medium-size countries like Iraq, which wants to obtain [nuclear weapons], and it is a very dangerous situation.  This can trickle down to non-governmental cults of a smaller kind, as in the case of Aum Shinrikyo, and, of course, that is profoundly dangerous.

If one is to summarize just very briefly in terms of what I have been saying about the characteristics of such a destructive and violently apocalyptic cult, you will recognize them.  First, there is a kind of totalized guruism, the absolute control over the disciples that can be paranoid or megalomaniac as I have described the anticipation of an apocalyptic event--the end of the world--and more than that, an ideology of killing to heal.

Two terms that I came upon while working with Nazi doctors were: altruistic murder and forcing the end.   “Forcing the end” means not just waiting, but making Armageddon happen.  Then there is the relentless impulse toward world-rejecting purification.  You have to be very wary of anyone who hates the world too much.  You have to hate the world and see it as defiled totally in order to seek to destroy it.

Another characteristic is the shared state of what I call “aggressive numbing.”  That is a state in which killing is seen as an ordeal that has to be honored in the killer.  It is rather like Hitler, when he wanted to address his leading S.S. generals and praise them for their ordeal, which they sought themselves through in killing millions of Jews.  That is what I called a state of “aggressive numbing,” along with an attraction to ultimate weapons in the ways that I have described.

There also, finally, is a tremendous attraction to science and technology, both for making the weapons and for trying to combine or claim a combination of sacred spiritual truths with scientific truth.  In the scientific age, any self-respecting cult has to claim scientific truth, as well as its religious claims.  In all this, I would emphasize the guru and the cult claim to own death, the right to bring people to death, and to decide who lives and who dies.  There is an element of profound survivalism in this--that is, they are embarking on this as a means of their survival, however fantasy that survival is.  You have to look for survival or survivalism in relation to some of these desperate issues in our time.

Finally, in turning to ourselves, we would make a great mistake if we just dismiss this as a distant Japanese cult that has nothing to do with us.  That is quite the contrary.  Although we have not had any Aums, happily, in the American society yet, we have had Aum-like emotions and attitudes.  For instance, if you look at the Charles Manson cult--active in these parts in the late ‘60’s--of course it was a criminal gang as we know, but he was also an apocalyptic leader who tried to force the end.  In his case, to force a race war he had his disciples write on the walls with blood in the Polanski mansion, where some of the murders were committed, words like “black,” “pigs,” or “death of pigs,” so that he could, in his fantasy, create the impression that the murders were done by blacks. He thought the whites would rise against the blacks, and the blacks would rise against the whites, and there would be a great race war, which would lead to Armagaddon, and he, Charles Manson, would take control.  Of course, it was a wildly mad fantasy, but rather parallel to Asahara’s.

Jim Jones of The People’s Temple, Guyana, in 1978: 920 [people] participated in a combination of mass suicide and large-scale killing.  Over half of them turned out to be murdered.  You must remember, both with Manson and Jim Jones, although they had the psychological quality of paranoia and megalomania to have done what Asahara had tried to do, we did not think in those terms, nor did cultic leaders think of themselves possessing these ultimate weapons.  They saw themselves as potential victims of the weapons, so that Jones would change the location of his cult from Indiana to California and then to Guyana, because he thought these were relatively safer places in the nuclear war that he anticipated.  It is only after we have been living with nuclear weapons for fifty years now, that cultic leaders can imagine themselves acquiring and using them, and that is, of course, a new and dangerous development.

I mentioned Heaven’s Gate.  I won’t dwell on it, but Heaven’s Gate was the suicide of thirty-nine people.  It is very different from that of Aum Shinrikyo, and even they were in an apocalyptic situation in which they saw the world being spaded under.  They were, in committing suicide, in their eyes, rather not committing suicide but instead going to the next level and simply divesting themselves of their bodies.  There were many parallels to Aum Shinrikyo.

Finally--the American radical right, the greatest parallel of all.  If you think about Timothy McVey and his killings in Oklahoma City with a fertilizer bomb, you have to also think of the books in which he read about how to make a fertilizer bomb.  The book goes on to describe a vast apocalyptic event taking place in the form of a violent revolution of the heroes of the “white race,” who are triumphant over the American government, and the triumph lies in mass killing through nuclear and other weapons of all Jews and all non-whites, first in the United States and then all through the world.  You cannot imagine a more apocalyptic or murderous vision than that.  It has all the characteristics--without going into details--which I have described for this kind of apocalyptic cultic behavior. 

The Turner Diaries is a fictional novel by a man named William Pierce.  It is a neo-Nazi novel, needless to say.  I describe it as the text of becoming a guru, because there is no right-wing guru of any important standing so far, but this does not mean that things will always remain that way.  If you read this novel, at the end of it, it says, “This promise of a white world was assured on the hundred and tenth anniversary of the Great One.”  Well, the “Great One” was none other than Adolf Hitler.  You had a guru in this neo-Nazi novel, after all.

In saying all this, I want to emphasize that I don’t do this in despair.  I do it as an act of hope.  My belief is that in this study, and the studies that others and I have done, there are very frightening situations that threaten us all.  One is stating, inferring or declaring that there are alternatives.  Apocalyptic violence is by no means the only path we need to take and we are capable of mobilizing our own sensibilities and to derive life power in other more life-enhancing directions. 

I will close with two quotations, because they can say these things more directly.  The first is an interesting folk saying; it is sometimes thought to be derived from Buddhism.  Although it has no clear relationship to Buddhism that anyone can find, it does really reflect what I have been talking about: “Each man has been given a set of keys, which can open the gates of heaven.  The same keys however, can open the gates of hell.”  And finally, a line from the great American lyric poet Theadore Roethke: “In the dark time, the eye begins to see.”

Thank you very much.