A Brief History of the Mind by William H. Calvin

Author:William H. Calvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

RATIONAL argument alone often cannot overcome those who simply and passionately believe. Yet logic is often bent and distorted in the service of those belief systems; it can even override everyday experience. As Fyodor Dostoevsky noted, “But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses in order to justify his logic.”

I doubt that this was a problem before the behaviorally modern transition. There is nothing like logic in the aid of strong beliefs to provide the motivation to override ethics and find hypocritical excuses for committing acts of violence. It is most familiar from extreme political beliefs, but consider two examples of how professedly peaceful religious cults have, once they became wealthy via give-us-everything contributions from their members, turned to using biological and chemical terrorism.

In 1984, members of the religious cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh sprayed the salad bars of four restaurants in The Dalles, Oregon, with a solution containing salmonella. The idea was to keep townspeople from voting in a critically contested local election; 751 people became ill. This cult merely obtained mail-order biological salmonella samples and cultured them. (This is low-tech kitchen stuff.)

The second cult, in contrast, recruited technically trained people in considerable numbers and engaged in indiscriminate slaughter. Aum Shinrikyo (“Aum” is a sacred syllable that is chanted in Hindu and Buddhist prayers; “Shinrikyo” means supreme truth) is a wealthy religious cult in Japan (recently renamed Aleph), with many members in Russia. Their recruiters aggressively targeted university communities, attracting disaffected students and experts in science and engineering with promises of spiritual enlightenment. Intimidation and murder of political opponents and their families occurred in 1989 by conventional means, but the group’s knowledge and financial base allowed them to subsequently launch substantial coordinated chemical warfare attacks.

In 1994, they used sarin nerve gas to attack the judges of a court in central Japan who were about to hand down an unfavorable real-estate ruling concerning sect property; the attack killed seven people in a residential neighborhood. In 1995, packages containing this nerve gas were placed on five different trains in the Tokyo subway system that converged on an area housing many government ministries, killing 12 and injuring over 5,500 people.

During the investigations that followed, it turned out that members of Aum Shinrikyo had planned and executed ten attacks using chemical weapons and made seven attempts using such biological weapons as anthrax. They had produced enough sarin to kill an estimated 4.2 million people. Other chemical agents found in their arsenal had been used against both political enemies and dissident members. While they were also virulently anti-Jewish, apocalyptic scenarios dominated the sect’s doctrine and the Tokyo attack was said to be an attempt to hasten the Shiva version of Armageddon. Only cult members would survive it, they claimed, thereby purifying the world by ridding it of nonbelievers. (No mention seems to have been made of the enormous cleanup job the true believers would then face.

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