Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History - Softcover

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Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The European Sociobiological Society, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who's Who in Science and Engineering since the publication's inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions: he went underground for 20 years to penetrate what he calls "society's myth-making machinery"-the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into "the dark underbelly of mass emotion" he founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the American East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication's sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones' Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre--the heavy metal magazine. Bloom then sought further ways to infiltrate modernity's mass mind. He formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he'd invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. "When you're at the center of the sort of attention-storm which hits when you're working with a superstar," Bloom says, "it's as if the laws of physics change. Hormones charge you up in ways you never imagined. You were accustomed to thinking through major decisions for days. Now you're forced to learn to analyze crises and execute solutions in minutes.

"More important is the impact of a communal ritual like a rock concert. The star onstage is taken over by a self he doesn't know, one which seems to surge through him as if he were a length of empty pipe. The force of this strange passion welds the audience in an almost transcendent bond." Bloom's task was to first feel the experience, then to dissect it scientifically. "The model for this work," he says, "came from William James, who attempted to sense the ecstatic experience of mystics, then to probe it scientifically, a process which led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience."

Bloom's forays into power and its manipulations were intense. "In the music and film industry everyone knew that money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an equal with the entertainment industry's elite, many of whom I either had to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists, but used their intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to others. Yet even the best-intentioned employed boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees. Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes."

The political subculture was the one which revealed the most disturbing side. Bloom founded the US's Music in Action, a national anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate Al Gore. Says Bloom, "Tipper and the right wing religionists who used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. They perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince the press and public that their falsifications were true." Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Bloom and the antidote he invented, "perceptual engineering," which he defines as "a way of finding a valid truth which the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It's what we do in much of science--seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick and in the process altering society's views."

In 1981, Bloom organized the material he'd unearthed and began the formal research for a new theoretical structure which would reveal itself in The Lucifer Principle. However he continued pursuing scientific truths in unconventional ways. In 1995 Bloom headed an insurgent academic circle called "The Group Selection Squad" whose efforts precipitated radical re-evaluations of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. Paleopsychology's mandate is to "map out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present."

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that with his unusual insights Bloom has "raced ahead of the timid scientific herd" often "vaulting over their heads" with a "grand vision" that "we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand." In The Lucifer Principle, Bloom brings those understandings from dimness into the light.

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The Lucifer Principle is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships between genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that "evil" is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric. In a sweeping narrative that moves lucidly among sophisticated scientific disciplines and covers the entire span of the earth's, as well as mankind's, history, Howard Bloom challenges some of our most popular scientific assumptions. Drawing on evidence from studies of the most primitive organisms to those on ants, apes, and humankind, the author makes a persuasive case that it is the group, or "superorganism", rather than the lone individual that really matters in the evolutionary struggle. But, Bloom asserts, the prominence of society and culture does not necessarily mitigate against our most violent, aggressive instincts. In fact, under the right circumstances the mentality of the group will only amplify our most primitive and deadly urges. In Bloom's most daring contention he draws an analogy between the biological material whose primordial multiplication began life on earth and the ideas, or "memes", that define, give cohesion to, and justify human superorganisms. Some of the most familiar memes are utopian in nature - Christianity or Marxism; nonetheless, these are fueled by the biological impulse to climb to the top of the hierarchy. With the meme's insatiable hunger to enlarge itself, we have a precise prescription for war. Biology is not destiny; but human culture is not always the buffer to our more primitive instincts we would like to think it is. In these complex threads of thought lies the LuciferPrinciple, and only through understanding its mandates will we be able to avoid the nuclear crusades that await us in the twenty-first century.

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"The Lucifer Principle is a tour de force, a brilliant and seminal work." -Sol Gordon, Ph.D., founder: The Institute for Family Research and Education

The Lucifer Principle is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships between genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that "evil" is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric.

In a sweeping narrative that moves lucidly among sophisticated scientific disciplines and covers the entire span of the earth's, as well as mankind's, history, Howard Bloom challenges some of our most popular scientific assumptions. Drawing on evidence from studies of the most primitive organisms to those on ants, apes, and humankind, the author makes a persuasive case that it is the group, or "superorganism," rather than the lone individual that really matters in the evolutionary struggle. But, as Bloom asserts, the prominence of society and culture does not necessarily mitigate against our most violent, aggressive instincts. In fact, under the right circumstances the mentality of the group will only amplify our most primitive and deadly urges.

In Bloom's most daring contention he draws an analogy between the biological material whose primordial multiplication began life on earth and the ideas, or "memes," that define, give cohesion to, and justify human superorganisms. Some of the most familiar themes are utopian in nature-Christianity or Marxism; nonetheless, these are fueled by the biological impulse to climb to the top of the hierarchy. With the meme's insatiable hunger to enlarge itself, we have a precise prescription for war.

Biology is not destiny; but human culture is not always the buffer to our most primitive instincts we would like to think it is. In these complex threads of thought lies The Lucifer Principle, and only through understanding its mandates will we be able to avoid the nuclear crusades that await us in the twenty-first century.

Howard Bloom has done cancer research at Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute and research on programmed learning at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education. He is a member of the New York Academy of Science, the American Psychological Society, and the Academy of Political Science. He has published extensively in periodicals ranging from Omni and the Village Voice to the Independent Scholar. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Who Is Lucifer?

"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! ...For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my stars above the stars of God.... I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High." (Isaiah, 14:12-14)

Eighteen hundred years ago in the city of Rome, an influential Christian heretic named Marcion took a look at the world around him and drew a conclusion. The god who created our cosmos couldn't possibly be good. The universe was shot through with appalling threads--violence, slaughter, sickness and pain. These were the Creator's handiwork. Surely He must be some perversely sadistic force, one who should be banished from influence over the minds of men.

More traditional Christians found another way of dealing with the problem of evil. They created the myth of Lucifer. Lucifer was a magnificent angel, a courtier of God, a prime noble in the kingly halls of heaven. He was trusted, powerful, charming, awesome in his self-possession. But he had a flaw. He wanted to usurp the seat of heavenly power and seize the throne of God himself. When the plot was uncovered, Lucifer was hurled from heaven, exiled beneath the earth, and tossed into the dreary realms of hell. The ancient gods who had been his co-conspirators were cast into the lightless subterranean caverns with him.

But Lucifer still bore some of the attributes of his creator and former master. He was an organizer, a would-be crafter of new orders, a creature bent on pulling together forces in his own manner. The fallen angel did not long lay facedown in the muck of the lightless caverns. His first step was to mobilize the squabbling gods trapped with him in hell, regimenting them as a new army.

Then Lucifer set forth to conquer the earth, using as his pawn a fresh godly invention, an innocent pair Jehovah had planted in a garden--Adam and Eve. The Great Seducer tempted Eve with the apple of knowledge. She could not resist the Luciferian fruit. Eve's sin against God corrupted all mankind. Ever since that time, man has aspired to the Lord, but found himself a victim of the devil.

Marcion the heretic said God was responsible for evil. Mainstream Christians absolved the Almighty of responsibility by blaming all that's wrong on the Prince of Darkness and on man. But, in a strange way, Marcion had a better handle on the situation than the more conventional followers of the church, for Lucifer is merely one of the faces of a larger force. "Evil" is a by-product, a component of creation. In a world evolving into ever higher forms, hatred, violence, aggression and war are a part of the evolutionary plan. But where do they fit? Why do they exist? What possible positive purpose could they serve? These are some of the questions behind The Lucifer Principle.

The Lucifer Principle is a complex of natural rules each working together to weave a fabric that sometimes frightens and appalls us. Every one of the threads in that tapestry is fascinating. But the big picture is more astonishing still.

At its heart, The Lucifer Principle looks something like this. The nature scientists uncover has crafted our viler impulses into us--in fact, they are a part of the process she uses to create. Lucifer is the dark side of cosmic fecundity, the cutting blade of the sculptor's knife. Nature does not abhor evil; she embraces it. She uses it to build. With it she moves the human world to greater heights of organization, intricacy and power.

Death, destruction and fury do not disturb the mother of our world. They are merely parts of her plan. Only we are outraged by the Lucifer Principle's consequences. And we have every right to be. For we are casualties of nature's callous indifference to life, pawns who suffer and die to live out her schemes.

One result: from our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to tear each other apart. From our devotion to a higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals come our excuses to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities are often the generators of the actions we most abhor--murder, torture, genocide and war.

For millennia men and women have looked at the ruins of their lost homes, at the people precious to them whom they will never see alive again, and they have asked that spears be turned to pruning hooks and that mankind be granted the gift of peace. But prayers are not enough. To dismantle the curse that mother nature has built into us we need a new way of looking at man, a new way of reshaping our destiny and undoing the secret pleasure we take in the shedding of blood.

We must build a picture of the human soul that works. Not a romantic vision that nature will take us in her arms and save us from ourselves, but a recognition that the enemy is within us, and that nature has deposited it there. We need to stare directly into nature's bloody face and realize that she has saddled us with evil for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her.

For Lucifer is almost everything men like Milton imagined him to be. He is ambitious, an organizer, a force reaching out vigorously to master even the stars of heaven. But he is not a demon separate from nature's benevolence. He is a part of the creative force itself. Lucifer, in fact, is mother nature's alter ego.