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The Cult At The End Of The World
a book by David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall
(our site's book review)
The Aum story examines a New Age high-tech cult of homicidal zealots. These losers recruited scientists from top Japanese laboratories, got into illegal drugs, connected up with the yakuza and with veterans of the KGB, and enlisted doctors to drug patients and perform Frankenstein experiments on them. And, of course, the one, overriding question here is: Why was anyone willing to go along with their grotesquely immoral and irrational ideas—ideas originating from a blind and bearded madman so full of hate and insanity he wanted to take out as many humans as possible with weapons of mass destruction.
Aum was a New Age high-tech cult of homicidal zealots that performed Frankenstein experiments on victims
The psychology of how the minds and emotions of alienated, anomic individuals who have no meaning or purpose in their lives can be easily exploited and manipulated into atrocious behavior has become an old story. As we look back on Stalin, Hitler, the Jonestown mass suicide at Guyana, the Waco wackos, the Heaven’s Gate suicides, and the Bhagwan Rajneesh cultists in Oregon, we see that the 20th century had no scarcity of such exploitations. It’s easy for us to see why the exploiters would brainwash people in order to get them to hand over their cash, which most religious cults do.
If a person gets a mini-lobotomy in a certain area of his brain, he can be made immoral
But to brainwash them simply to get them to do evil is beyond the understanding of most Americans. It takes realizing that millions of humans on this planet are insane, or close to it, and if not restrained will do as much evil to as many as they can as fast as they can. The root causes of insanity are a combination of genetic, biochemical, and environmental factors. Brain damage can do it. (If a person gets a mini-lobotomy in a certain area of his brain, he can be made immoral, science found out, and such people as Carl Sagan reported this in a book called Broca’s Brain.) Rotten luck can change dark cynicism into homicidal nihilism. Child abuse is a perfect way to drive someone crazy or nearly so.
The essence of the article is that ordinary people can now get their hands on weapons of mass destruction—they can even make them, with the Internet guiding their every move. “We are reaching a new stage in terror, in which the most fanatic and unstable among us [and there are millions] can acquire the most powerful weapons.”
Beam me up, Scotty . . .
Terrorists can get WMDs now, so beam me up, Scotty