Robert J. Lifton’s Destroying the World In Order to Save It tells the story of Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas in a Tokyo subway in 1995. The gas attack killed eleven (13, by other sources) and injured thousands more. And even that was lucky; had the Aum scientists succeeded in making a purer form of the gas, the results would have been worse.
The center of Aum Shinrikyo was a guru called Asahara. His doctrine was an eclectic mix of traditions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian millenarianism, Nostradamus, whatever movies he had seen recently. He called himself Christ, the Lamb of God, and the only fully enlightened master in Japan. And he preached of a coming doomsday, a nuclear Armageddon which only he and his followers would survive.
The cult started as a yoga class in Asahara’s one-room apartment in Tokyo in the late 1980s. This was a time of many new religious movements in Japan, much like how the 1970s was an age of cults in the US. Aum grew quickly and obtained official recognition as a religious organization.
Early on Asahara attracted students from the educated elite, and so the movement spread through high status networks, attracting a much more skilled and wealthy group of adherents than did US cults like The People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate. It also had a greater proportion of university students and graduates than did other new Japanese religious movements of the time. When the cult turned deadly, these educated members would be important in providing the expertise to acquire and manufacture weapons.