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The Lucifer Principle

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The Lucifer Principle THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE A SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION INTO THE FORCES OF HISTORY by Howard Bloom Copyright 2000 by Howard Bloom Introduction copyright 1997 by David Sloan Wilson Comments on The Lucifer Principle "A revolutionary vision of the relationship between psychology and history. The Lucifer Principle will have a profound impact on our concepts of human nature. It is astonishing that a book of this importance could be such a pleasure to read." Elizabeth F. Loftus, immediate past president, American Psychological Society, author of Witness for the Defense and The Myth of Repressed Memory "Readers will be mesmerized by the mirror Bloom holds to the human condition, and dumbfounded by the fusillade of eclectic data that arrives with the swiftness and intensity of a furious tennis volley. His style is effortless, engaging, witty and brisk.... He draws on a dozen years of research into a jungle of scholarly fields...and meticulously supports every bit of information...." Washington Post "Unlike anything you've ever read before. An act of astonishing intellectual courage." Leon Uris "a philosophical look at the history of our species, which alternated between fascinating and frightening. Reading it was like reading Dean Koontz or Stephen King: I couldn't put it down. ...Masterful.... Best Non-Fiction Book of the year." Mark Graham, Rocky Mountain News "Bloom's work marshals a quantity of evidence reminiscent of Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species." Dorion Sagan, Wired "Addresses a topic that more timid and conventional sources are not inclined to confront: the nature and causes of human evil. ...Vigorous...fervent...a freshly viable theory of human social evolution." The Washington Times "Great fun to read, and crammed with fantastic information." Martin Gardner, creator and author of The Scientific American's "Mathematical Games" section 1956-1986, author of over 100 books, including The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition "Provocative...explosive...feisty...a string of rhetorical firecrackers that challenge our many forms of self-righteousness." Chet Raymo, Boston Globe "Elegant...the highest quality of brain food...[a] revolutionary new vision of human nature...[a] monumental work...heady stuff from a wonderful, original thinker...simply stunning...." Lawrence Hall, Newark Star-Ledger "The Lucifer Principle is a tour de force, a brilliant and seminal work." Sol Gordon, founder, The Institute for Family Research and Education, author of When Living Hurts "Draws heavily on biological and anthropological evidence to show that human beings are not by nature isolated, self-interested individuals but have powerful natural inclinations toward social groups, and that much of the violence and cruelty that has characterized human history is rooted in competition between groups for status and domination." Francis Fukuyama, Foreign Affairs "Challenging" Horace Barlow, Royal Society Research Professor of Physiology, Cambridge University Part 1 - When Evil Comes Disguised as Love Part 2 - Bloodstains in Paradise Part 3 - Why Humans Self-Destructv Part 4 - One Man's God Is Another Man's Devil Part 5 - Man - Inventor of the Invisible World Part 6 - The Mysteries of the Evolutionary Learning Machine Part 7 - Ideology is Theft Part 8 - Who Are the Next Barbarians? Part 9 - The Rise and Fall of the American Empire The Luciferian Paradox Part 1 WHEN EVIL COMES DISGUISED AS LOVE TABLE OF CONTENTS WHEN EVIL COMES DISGUISED AS LOVE Introduction by David Sloan Wilson Prologue Who Is Lucifer? The Clint Eastwood Conundrum The Whole Is Bigger Than the Sum of Its Parts The Chinese Cultural Revolution Notes Introduction The author of this book is an intellectual, originally trained in science, who decided to avoid the limitations of an academic career. Instead of conducting laboratory experiments and competing for federal grant dollars, he put his interest in mass human behavior to work by playing a key role in the careers of rock stars such as Michael Jackson and John Cougar Mellencamp. Meanwhile, he continued to read widely and do what all scientists, as intellectuals, should do; attempt to understand and explain the nature of the world around him. His experience " at the center of our culture's myth-making machinery" may have taught him more about human nature than a university career. Perhaps we should regard him as an anthropologist who has spent many years observing a strange tribe--us. In the course of his inquiry, Howard Bloom became convinced that evolution could explain the fundamentals of human nature and the broad sweep of human history. He is not alone. It is no longer heretical to study our own species as one of evolution's creations, and many books are appearing on the subject. However, The Lucifer Principle does not merely report on the rapid developments that are taking place within academia. Howard Bloom has his own vision of evolution and human nature that many scientific authorities would dispute. He is a heretic among former heretics. The bone of contention is the organismic nature of human society. Thomas Hobbes and many others of his time regarded individuals as the cells and organs of a giant social organism--a Leviathan--" which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended." Today this idea is regarded as no more than a fanciful metaphor. Evolution is thought to produce individuals who are designed to relentlessly pursue their own reproductive success. Society is merely the byproduct of individual striving and should not be regarded as an organism in its own right. Even individuals can be decomposed into selfish genes whose only purpose is to replicate themselves. It is a mark of Howard Bloom's independence of thought that he resisted the extreme reductionism that pervades modern evolutionary biology. He believes that the Leviathan, or society as an organism, is not a fanciful metaphor but an actual product of evolution. The Darwinian struggle for existence has taken place among societies, as well as among individuals within societies. 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. That is the vision of evolution and human behavior found in The Lucifer Principle and at the moment it can be found no where else. When Howard Bloom wrote The Lucifer Principle, he studied numerous developments taking place within the halls of academe, but was unaware of others. Evolution is increasingly being studied as a process that operates on a hierarchy of units. Even individual organisms are higher level units, composed of parts that were themselves free-living organisms in the distant past. Truly organismic societies have evolved in insects and even some recently discovered mammal species. As for ourselves, human society may turn out to be far more organismic than the vast majority of evolutionary biologists imagined only a few years ago. These discoveries are unfolding within the scientific community, and many of them have been anticipated by Bloom. Scientists and other Academicians might find themselves treading a path forged by an outsider. As a scientist who has been developing a hierarchical view of evolution from within academia, I have learned from Howard Bloom and value him as a fellow traveler. I do not agree with everything he says and I sometimes blush at the way he says it--not with the reserve of a scientist but with the brashness of a mass media denizen. Of course, that only makes the book more fun for the average reader. Many of Howard Bloom's ideas must be passed through the scientific verification machine before they can be accepted. Until then, your motto for The Lucifer Principle should be not "read it and believe," but "read it and think." --David Sloan Wilson Binghamton, New York Prologue The Lucifer Principle is a book with a peculiar mission. Its goal is to provide the reader with a new way of looking at his world. The Lucifer Principle takes fresh data from a variety of sciences and shapes them into a perceptual lens, a tool with which to reinterpret the human experience. It attempts to offer a very different approach to the anatomy of the social organism, a new way of understanding the operation of its tendons, bones and joints. In the process, The Lucifer Principle contends that "evil" is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and is woven into our most basic biological fabric. This argument echoes a very old one. St. Paul proposed it when he put forth the doctrine of original sin. Thomas Hobbes resurrected it when he called the lot of man brutish and nasty. Anthropologist Raymond Dart brought it to the fore again when he interpreted fossil remains in Africa as evidence that man is a killer ape. Old as it is, the concept has often had revolutionary implications. Why? Because it has been the thread on which men like Hobbes and St. Paul have hung dramatic new visions of the world. I've attempted to employ the subject of man's inborn "evil" like those who turned to the subject in the past--to offer up a restructuring of the way we see the business of being human. I've taken the conclusions of cutting-edge sciences--ethology, sociobiology, psychoneuroimmunology and the study of complex adaptive systems, among others--to suggest a new way of looking at culture, civilization, and the mysterious emotions of those who live inside the social beast. The goal is to open the path toward a new sociology, one which escapes the narrow boundaries of Durkheimian, Weberian and Marxist concepts, theories that have proven invaluable to the study of mass human behavior while simultaneously entrapping it in orthodoxy.
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