The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

The Lucifer Principle is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships among 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 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 able to avoid the nuclear crusades that await us in the twenty-first century.

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.