Public Intellectuals and the Struggle Over Mind Control

Abstract This chapter analyses the struggles over ‘brainwashing’ and ‘mind control’ debates in public intellectual discourse. This chapter begins with a dichotomy of ‘authoritative intellectuals’ who provide authoritative, monological accounts of traumatic events, and ‘dialogical intellectuals’, who create dialogical and polyphonic trauma narratives. It then shows how anti-cult intellectuals and activists were successful in disseminating the authoritative narrative that Asahara had mind-controlled his followers. By contrast, religious scholars were marginal to these debates, as some academics had made positive assessments of Aum in the past. This chapter then explores the works of two dialogical intellectuals who offered counter-narratives to the orthodox ‘mind control’ paradigm: novelist Murakami Haruki and documentary film-maker Mori Tatsuya. Murakami's collection of interviews and Mori's documentary films both employed dialogical methods to produce multiple and open-ended narratives about the causes and consequences of the Aum Affair.