A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces Of History by Howard Bloom (April 1 1997)

First, here's my obligatory disclosure. I was only able to make it through 3/4 of the book before I gave up. There were two reasons for that. First, the author's concept of the meme as a 'worldview' idea is a little too narrow. A meme is ANY idea. A melody, a phone number, a concept- not just a 'worldview.' Bloom gives the false impression that all memes are to blame. Nope- just the hateful ones!
Second, there's only a certain amount of repitition I can tolerate. The author not only keeps making the same point,- that 'worldview' memes make it easy for unremorseful killing in nature- but he keeps using the same anecdotes- particularly Islam- to back himself up. Other reviewers have said it best- a string of selective anecdotes does not constitute science!! What does it constitute? Pseudo-science.
Although the authors idea of a superorganism is eye-brow raisning (hence, one of my two stars), Bloom gives us no attempts at explaining HOW these individual organisms can be connected. The only psychology each of us knows is her own- how can that lead to a group mind?! Bloom offers no suggestions. Understanders of science know that if you're going to postulate a 'what' (especially an audacious one), you'd better at least be looking for a supporting 'how'. But, hey, when has pseudo-science ever needed to explain it's theories?
I have accounted for one star. What about the other? Bloom writes with a flair that is exciting to say the least. I couldn't stop reading the first two sections. I'll try a backhanded compliment- If it weren't for Blooms exciting prose, I may have stopped before the halfway point.
As for books to read in place of this one (which I strongly reccomend doing) "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel Dennett and "The Meme Machine" by Susan Blackmore are great for memtic theory as related to evolution. "Economics of Justice" by Richard Posner offers a much more solid account of how groups form organically, and "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker shows an infinitely better understanding of psychology.

'The Lucifer Principle' draws together over 25 years of cutting-edge research into socio-biology, memetics, cultural transformation theory, and socio-political theory to examine the hidden impulses that pervade our society. The book has fundamental insights into the nature of Evil, and the longterm - and often unappreciated - power of 60 million year old genetic programs and deep brain structures.
Deftly written with intelligence and wit, Bloom is able to make contemporary science directly relevant to the new reader. He draws on many cultural, historical, and scientific examples to examine key principles: the pecking order, the superorganism (group-mind), and the meme. He writes provocatively on the Closing of the American Mind amidst geo-political chaos, the impact of neuro-biological research on feminism and other debates, and pulls apart group politics and political fanaticism with grat verve. Bloom is criticised by some pro/con extremists as simply attacking Islam, but a close reading of his work shows an awareness of the coming crisis with Islam (Samuel P. Huntington) and the dangers of militancy in attacking the contemporary Open Society. Bloom is not above demolishing other fanaticisms either.
'The Lucifer Principle' has become one of the most influential science books since its publication, hailed by 22 world scientists as a major work. Hidden throughout the text are revelations on Bloom's pioneering use of perceptual engineering within the rock PR industry (his clients included Michael Jackson, Prince, Bette Middler, Simon & Garfunkel, AC/DC, and Joan Jett), and hints at the future direction of the landmark 'International Paleopsychology Project' he now runs. The book is extensively annotated, but is easily readable and accessible - a testament to Bloom's skill as a writer.
Few books will change your life or conceptual worldview. This is definately one of them. Highly recommended.

The negative: A lot of people on here one starred the book because of Bloom's bigotry towards Islam and a few other cultures as well as his glorifying the U.S. as a force of good. This is obviously one-sided. And it is true, he did do this. At the same time, however, I get the feeling he was issuing a warning to his people: Watch out, because every time a nation gets comfortable at the top of the world, some young buck comes a long and knocks it off its high seat. He did however spend a lot of time condemning radical Islam and Islamic violence without really examining the violent tendencies of the United States and the rest of the western world. This book was loosely based off of various things that happened in history. At points it seemed like Bloom just picked random happenings throughout history to support any random point he wanted to make. This wasn't an exhaustive study, it was just a short read. So, like it said in the forward, don't take the book as truth. Use your discernment and wisdom and take everything inside this book with a grain of salt.

The positive: The book basically submits that what we commonly dub as evil is just nature's way of refining its creation--its all part of the evolutionary process. He gives plenty of examples from science and history to support this thesis. Through conflict and darkness, nature's creation grows stronger and adapts, all the while thinning out the herd of less relevant and flexible species. All acts of evil are just one side of a two faced coin, and have some corresponding good associated with them as well. Yes, social and ethnic cleansing are terrible and yes war is destructive. But through wanton destruction and warfare, much good is ultimately produced as well. All good things come at the heavy price of suffering and pain. When Rome conquered the world, many people's paid an extremely heavy price. Genocides were perpetrated. Massive slavery ensued. But for a thousand years, trade, roads, the arts, science, engineering, etc flourished under Rome's dominion. One thing I like about this book is how Bloom relates man to the animal kingdom with studies done on monkeys, rats, etc. His evidence just shows that man, though obviously higher on nature's pyramid than the other species on earth, still has many a beastly trait.

I guess, in summation, if you want to think about it theologically, Bloom is saying that the universe (God) employs the devil to carry out its end. In other words, what we think of as evil is all part of God's plan. What we perceive as a duality is, in the grand scheme of things, in reality a unity that is working to achieve a very specific goal. Nature seems to have an impulse towards evolution. Overtime, the universe and its species become increasingly complex, and the devil plays a very important part in all of this. So while we condemn and judge evil all of the time, we have to give the devil his due, because he's just playing his role.

The book is interesting and I even agree with much of it. For example, pecking orders certainly exist as do superorganisms (I feel their weight every day at work!). However, why should I believe that people commit suicide out of concern for the good of the superorganism? Also, while superorganisms are certainly a factor, why should I believe it is THE dominant factor that the author claims it to be? This isn't science as the author claims it to be. Howard, at least offer up some notion as to how we go about testing your hypothesis. I give the book three stars because it is an entertaining read, but can't give it more than that since it is merely an opinion piece, and not the science the author claims.

Who is Lucifer?

You know, Lucifer---Satan, Baphomet, Old Scratch, Wicked Nick, His Infernal Majesty. The Devil!

That's the Deep, Dark, shadow-haunted question, which reeks of sulphur and brimstone, into which erstwhile publicist and intellectual romper-stomper Howard Bloom takes a merry spelunk.

Bloom, former PR generalissimo and uber-strategoi for pop-culture uber-titans Prince, Michael Jackson, Billy Idol, and Run-DMC, has brewed up a brilliant, acid, caustic, but constantly engaging and entertaining little read in "The Lucifer Principle". It's a deft, dense, and wickedly ripping yarn you can read on the course of a Red Eye from Logan to LAX, and be engaged all the way, and between its covers---given heft by a forest of footnotes---Bloom ponders a singular question:

Where does Evil come from?

It's no idle question: it confounded the Ancients, addled theologians, fired the brains of Popes, Imams, and mountain Holy Men alike, and has set off revolutions, Crusades, Holy Wars, and Inquisitions.

Is it Nurture or Nature, Communism or Capitalism, the Devil or the Deep Blue Sea that takes a thinking ape who can dream of peace and yet sharpens a stick, or thrusts it into his neighbor's guts, or sacks all of the cities of the Northern Steppe and salts the ground on which they stand, or stacks the skulls of his countrymen? Or for that matter, imbues him with a frenzy to set off a bomb in a crowded shopping plaza, or flick the switch that shifts Defcon 1 into blazing, thermonuclear apotheosis?

Bloom's thesis this: the Devil is holed up in every single one of us. The desire to brutalize, murder, pillage and destroy, to revel in the weeping of the Enemy's women---all of that "evolved apes behaving badly" stuff---is literally hard-wired into our very genetic guts. It's what binds us into evolution, advances are flag and standard, sews our seeds into the next generation.

It's true: neither Angels nor Beasts, Men can dream up Heaven; but they're mostly capable of living out Hell. The blood-drench 20th century provides all the backup Bloom needs for that, and our young 21st century is already making up for lost time in stuffing the carnage of one hundred years into its first decade.

At its foundation, Bloom's thesis is essentially Social Darwinism: each organism competes for limited resources, food, shelter, sex. But Bloom takes one step beyond into heresy: it is not just individual competition that drives evolution, but social competition. We are like single cells in that respect, welded into competing social organisms, struggling 'superbeasts'.

Bloom breaks his theoretical napalm out into five key ideas:

1)Competition & the Self-Replicators: like semiconductor and cell phones, Nature revels in throwing together chunks of biomass and spitting out new organisms---all in the name of Evolution. Those little self-replicators are you and me, and we're totally, astonishingly cheap and utterly expendable.

2)Superbeast! We're social creatures: no "The Man in Black fled into the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed him" here, children---we're joiners. We're the unsung gladiators of a massive arena battle between macro-organisms larger than ourselves.

3) The Meme: ideas have consquences---one of which is that in just a million years, they've managed to outpace genes in organizing disparate flesh and welding it into a force for global dominion.

4) The Neural Net: Memes ride the tide of a gargantuan global learning machine.

5) The Pecking Order: It's lonely at the top, because everybody is trying to get there. And since no super-organism is clawing away for Downward mobility, something's gotta give. That's going to be *your* place at the table, pilgrim.

Half the fun of "The Lucifer Principle" is in the getting there, so I won't spoil your first encounter with Bloom. Suffice it to say that binds the sinews of his theory together with tasty junkets to the jungle fastness of the Yanomamo, the "Fierce People" of the the store who put a premium on wife-beating and savagery, to the war camps of gorillas and chimpanzees, to a hunt for capitalist rotters in the dark dungeons of China's Cultural Revolution, to the parliament of Victorian England and the Congress of Superpower America, both shambling along a trail of tears branded 'good intentions'.

This is a thick, rich, rollicking read, certainly not orthodox, but all the more prickly and provocative for it. Believe or skewer, you'll be hard pressed to forget "The Lucifer Principle".

The Devil, after all, is in the details.

JSG

The author's use of postmodernist lingo gives a scientific air to what is essentially an entertaining and intelligent set of thoughts about the human condition. His observations seem no wiser than any other theoretician but you will not be bored. He is heavily biased against Muslims and an early excerpt which appeared in the February 1989 issue of Omni magazine on Arabs in which he says their whole society is barbaric because fathers are not affectionate to their children is still a shameful episode in scholarly misrepresentation. (Saying Arabs do not hug their children is like saying that alcohol consumption is virtually unknown in Ireland.) Such scholarship belongs in the tawdry racism of a Leon Uris novel which may explain why Uris endorses him. In any case, the major weakness is not his promoting bigotry (see hte above at the store.com site where the author cites a fairly standard press release from an outraged American ethnic organization as if it is a threat from the Islamic Jihad) so much as his pretense at objectivity and compassion while doing it. At the same time, he is an interesting writer and with the prior warning I give here in mind, read and enjoy.

This is an ambitious piece of writing. The author attempted to use the recent findings from over a dozen disciplines to put together a new picture of human nature. While he is often sucessful in getting us to start thinking, this book is ridden with a number of problems that any serious academic readers will have a hard time to overlook.
The first problem I have with this book is the author's tendency to use anecdotal evidence to support his view. This problem becomes more and more pronounced as he progresses from biology to sociology. Any reader even only casually acquainted with history will know that one can use incidents from history to prove just about any points. It takes a lot more than reciting interesting historical incidents to illustrate principles that he alleges will determine the rise and fall of human societies.
The author also made a passionate attack against the religion of Islam. This attack is interestingly devoid of persuasion and power because it is undermined by the theme of the book. The author's idea is that the Muslim religion is 'barbaric' because it promotes violence against those outside their religion. However, he did no more than citing a few of the more colorful personalities of Islamic Fundamentalism and used the views of these extremists as the view of the whole Muslim world. If he characterized any Muslim who is not actively struggling against Islamic fundamentalism, then he should fault the Republicans for not standing up to racism because they don't do anything to solve the problem.
I would recommend this book, but with a caveat; take any of the conclusions the author drew with a heavy dose of salt. Fortunately, he's provided an extensive bibliography so interested readers can continue his research.

Howard Bloom is an interesting and prophetic writer. For example, Bloom, refusing to sacrifice truth to political correctness, gives an assesment of the Arab/Muslim world where he damn near predicts 9/11. He is also a bit of a contrarian, and this puts him in the rather tenuous position where he supports the very unpopular theory of group selection. And although I'm still not convinced, Bloom makes a strong case that will at least make one re-think one's position (he has me still thinking!) regarding nature's unit of selection.

Bloom uses a series of wonderful historical anecdotes mixed with scientific data to lend credence to his theory of the Lucifer Principle, which basically says that nature has built into us a darker side, and it is through this dark side that nature organizes and creates. He claims nature has built evil into our very being, and that in order to control this evil, we must first understand it.

The foundations for the Lucifer principle rest on five basic concepts:

#1: The principle of self-organizing systems, replicators that are cheap and easily replaced. Humans are not exempt from this process.

#2: Humans, like the cells of our body, are nothing more than parts serving a larger body-a superorganism.

#3: Memes, like genes, are a replicating unit subject to selection or rejection. Memes, as Bloom uses the word, describe ideas or ideologies. Put a cluster of these together, and you get things like Marxism, Democracy, Christianity, Judaism, Communism, etc... These ideologies can act as glue that holds a group together; but they can work equally well to separate, isolate, denigrate, and ultimately kill another group that has a different ideology.

#4: The idea of a neural net, a group mind. If you're not familiar with systems theory, this will be vague, as Bloom doesn't go much out of his way to explain this with great specificity.

#5: Hierarchies and pecking orders. It is this concept that will be most disturbing to those who think world peace is an easily attainable goal if only everyone had enough to eat. Bloom points out that pecking orders exist in almost every species we have studied, including man, and even groups of men we call nations. He takes this insight and explains why our foreign policies are often fundamentally wrong.

Using these concepts, Bloom takes on an exciting intellectual journey through history and science, always looking at the data through the lens of the Lucifer Principle and the foundational concepts outlined above. Bloom sometimes makes daring extrapolations from individual to group, animal to human, group to nation, to support his theory.

My reason for giving the book four stars instead of five is that it doesn't read very smoothly as a whole book. It reads more like several disconnected parts without the author bringing it together often enough for the reader's benefit. Nevertheless, this book pays itself back many times for the time the reader puts into it. I look forward to reading Bloom's book "Global Brain" and his upcoming book on Capitalism. Thank you Howard Bloom!

While it is unlikely that anyone can read this book and agree 100 percent with the ideas being developed, it does have some profound insights. It seems at first glance to be somewhat mystical in its nature talking of the superorganism and how it 'chooses' different roles for those involved. Ultimately it makes these choices to propagate its own survival, and within that we begin to view what we tend to call 'evil'. But really it is no more or less mystical or material (depending on how you choose to view it) then what individual cells within our own bodies do, fighting and dying and reproducing. What Bloom has done is to see this collection of individual building blocks to create a larger whole (like the human body) and apply it as a template from the most simple cells to the most complex beings, that then comprise another whole. We have trouble recognizing this whole, just as a cell would have trouble 'recognizing' its role as a constituent of a body. If you read Global Brain by the same author you get a clearer picture of how this design scheme is implicit within all of nature from bacteria to humans. It's an interesting theory and well in its infancy if it proves to be of value. I think because of that it cannot be whole heartedly endorsed, but nor should it be outrightly rejected, not until more research has been done. For me it ultimately seems thatBloom attempts to answer the most intractable philosophical questions, such as, 'Why is there evil?' in a biological way. It is very easy to read and gives some great information that would be enjoyable even if taken outside of the research Bloom is doing. A good book.

Bloom takes on the old religious and philosophical question of evil and gives an answer from evolutionary science. He shows that war, genocide, class antagonism-- what is often dubbed "evil"-- can be explained from basic results of survival of the fittest.
The author seems sure he's right, and so the anecdotes he rolls out are there for illustration, not to prove his point. There are some errors in his history, and some of the examples are just silly. At one point, Bloom tries to show womens' aggressive nature by referring to uncertain history (Augustus's wife Livia), a legendary figure (Helen of Troy), and a mallard duck.
The "meme" buzzword gets thrown around a lot, which makes for sloppy thinking: it can denote a single word, a technology, or even a whole culture. The self-destruction of bacteria and human kamikazes are too-readily compared. Group selection is invoked to explain self-destruction. This makes the book exciting, controversial, and less certain than if it were based on orthodox science. Bloom says what he thinks; a lot of people won't like it.
The conclusion is that struggle for dominance among organisms and groups leads to ever higher levels of organization. I found it compelling, disturbing, and ultimately hopeful. If you agree with the thesis, you will love the book. If you disagree, you'll be angry that it's not proven science. But as it says in the Preface: "Don't it read and believe, read it and think."

Howard Bloom's central thesis here is that nation states, tribes, and other human conglomerates are "superorganisms" held together by memes, that is to say, shared ideas. From this he has it follow that it is the health of the superorganism that counts and not the individual. Individuals are likened to the cells of a larger body. They are expendable, and indeed programed to die in order to serve the collective good. The Lucifer Principle itself is our commitment to savagery as the way to settle differences.
This is an old and hoary thesis familiar to all who have studied history, and it is from history that Bloom garners his most impressive evidence. He recalls a litany of genocides and murders from the brutal campaigns of the Roman empire through the Crusades and the conquest of the Americas to the Saddam Husseins, the Ayatollahs, and Pol Pots of today. He also draws on evidence from biology, citing the murderous tendencies of apes and the automatic homicides of ants and other social insects. He goes to great lengths to show that the pecking orders in chickens and rats are similar to those in humans and that when these orders are disturbed or unsettled, violence of the most savage sort ensues. In the end he proposes a pecking order of superorganisms, and using this metaphor, attempts to explain why various nations and religions have to this very day slaughtered one another. Along the way he warns us to remain strong militarily and economically against the barbarians at the gate.
What sets The Lucifer Principle apart from other books with a similar message is Bloom's stark and engaging style and the unrelenting flood of evidence he presents festooned with 782 footnotes and a 40-page bibliography. I've never read a book that makes the assertion that people are animals as thoroughly as Bloom does here. You've heard the mantra: people are animals, but what Bloom does is make sure you realize it's true.
Well, it is true. But so what? We are domesticated animals (we domesticate ourselves), and with the right governance we may yet control the awful savagery that has always plagued humankind. We are nowhere near to doing that now, but extrapolating from the experience of the United States itself, in which a diverse people continue to live without the tribal wars that infect other parts of the world, it might be seen that the rule of law (a "meme," if you will, in competition with the rule of might) will eventually prove triumphant. Even though the culture of the Bible Belt is very different from that of California or New York, there is no chance that the one will be invading the others.
What Bloom is writing about, then, is the tribal imperative under what I call the War System. His "superorganism" is just a metaphor for a large and powerful tribe, a nation state, a religion, a culture. Those who complain this is not "scientific" are correct. Bloom is writing history, sociology and political science. These are disciplines in which one does not "prove" assertions in a scientific sense but instead points to a preponderance of evidence. I think he's done a good job in hanging the murderer sign around our necks, but I don't think humans are as completely sown into the fabric of the superorganism as he thinks.
Bloom allows himself to get carried away by the felicitous logic of his metaphors (memes as the genes of cultural evolution; human organizations as organisms) to the point where he forgets they are just metaphors; that is, handy ways of talking, but not scientific fact. While some people are driven primarily by their emotions and the mesmerizing mentality of the herd, other people are able to live out their lives in relative peace and harmony. Bloom's intense concentration on the violence in human beings blinds him to the fact that, even though history is strewn with vile heaps of human carnage, the vast majority of people have killed no one and are just trying to make a living. My belief is that the War System is on its last legs, and I mean that in a historical sense. I will not live to see its demise, nor will my grandchildren, but perhaps their grandchildren will.
Furthermore, there are powerful forces of change working in the world today from microbiology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc., not to mention globalization, lead by the vested interests in the developed world. These forces are changing humans and human culture so quickly that perhaps in a few generations we will be very different from what we are today, and will have no use for "The Lucifer Principle."
Aside from his overriding thesis, Bloom presents a number of compelling ideas, one of which is that "Contrary to contemporary theory, evolution is not built solely on competition between self-interested loners. It also relies on contests between teams of individuals striving for group survival." He believes that group selection explains "self-destruct mechanisms" within individuals. (p. 70) Another is that when people experience prosperity the level of violence increases. He gives some examples of this phenomena beginning on page 258 and explains it through an increase in testosterone in the newly prosperous. The really downtrodden, he avers, stay that way and have low testosterone levels.
Finally I must point to his prescient (this was written in the early 90s) and compelling analysis of the situation in the Middle East where the tribal mentality still reigns supreme and where most of its inhabitants are under the spell of what Bloom calls a "killer culture." His indictment of Islam and the Arab mentality goes a long way toward explaining 9/11 and the terrorist mind set. He quotes Nobel Prize-winning novelist Elias Canetti who called Islam "a killer religion, literally <a religion of War.>" (p. 225) He supports his indictment with some rather astonishing quotes from Yasar Arafat and the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

This is a brilliant and wonderfully well written book...
dear lovers of truth,
... It is clear and well researched and while it still leaves some questions unanswered it persuades these elves that the evolution of humanity toward enlightenment still has a long way to go. The author does much to convince us, and in this case it is not hard to do so, that Mother Nature uses violence and pecking orders encoded into our genes to sort out the best, strongest, and brightest and does not care how many She needs to kill to do this.
Yet, Mr. Bloom also demonstrates that we are evolving both as individuals and super organisms to a place where we can Master our own nature and find a better way. In that sense, Mother Nature is testing us to find out how long it will take us to stop killing each other and start cooperating for mutual benefit and success.
He also explains how and why civilizations have perished in the world, why America is losing her edge and slipping downward in status, and how we may alter our behavior to get it back.
This is a truly fascinating book and we highly recommend it.
kyela,
the silver elves

This book is an essential read for those interested in memetics. Like Richard Brodie's "Virus of the Mind," it serves not only as an introduction to memetics, but to evolutionary psychology as well. The Lucifer Principle is rich with historical examples of how our memes and genes organize humans into "super-organisms" and spend our lives like Monopoly Money. The last couple of chapters seem to morph into a polemic against the unchecked spread of Islam, which Bloom calls a killer meme, but do READ those chapters before you call for a fatwa on the author.

Bloom relies on somewhat spurious anecdotes to make his case that organisms have a genetic code that drives them toward social competition, rather than simply individual competition. If he were able to argue his case, rather than attempt to persuade us through the use of well-removed anecdotes from history and biology, then he might have convinced me. In fact, I'm not at all certain whether or not he is wrong or right. He simply fails to convince.

The material is interesting, but the format grows tiresome, as he makes his argument in one or two paragraphs of each chapter and then relies on some historical vignette for the other 80-90% of the text. By the time you have reached 50 repetitions of this format, it is likely you too will have grown as weary of this book as I have become. And you will be only half way through!

In "The Lucifer Principle," Howard Bloom has written a lucid, thrilling and engaging account of possibly the most important idea of our generation - the meme. Postulated as the mind's equivalent to genes, memes are the replicating core of ideas, spreading through society and culture with varying degrees of effectiveness. What exactly is a meme? What makes a meme effective? What are its effects on society? How can memes be used to our advantage and how are they being used consciously and unconsciously to promulgate terror and fascism? These are but a few of the facets that Bloom tackles in this most important book. He has gathered expert information and woven it together with his own brilliant insight and conjecture to create a popular classic of social science that must not be ignored. I would advise statesmen to gain an understanding of this emerging field to remain relevant and heal the ills of our modern society. This brilliant book is the place to start.

I wrote this review for my Grandchild who will be entering college this September. I recommended this book to her because I felt it had an excellent perspective on world history and world cultures. Here is what I told her:
Howard Bloom's thesis is: As a planet, we must learn to live together with respect for each of the cultures. If we don't organize a planetary world order the result may be that we blow ourselves up. Very plausible!
In formatting world order a conflict arises between competing tribes. The evolution of our DNA and our brain, especially, begins billions of years ago and our genetic material contains remnants of the first reptilian brain which was programmed with basic motor skills and survival techniques. Mr. Bloom describes the evolutionary process of the brain as first forming into a unit the size of a peach seed and increasing in size with each level of evolution--evolving from basic survival to an organism capable of calculating equations and having sensitivity to our fellow man and the historical stages throughout time.
Unfortunately, it is the peach pit remnant in our brain that houses our innate survival genes and which we revert to in tense situations and which causes us to ultimately reach low-level tribal feelings of conflicts. However, during the billion-year course of evolution, we developed filters in the brain which we have learned to apply when we find ourselves in a warlike relationship. Easy to say, but difficult to practice as history will teach us. One of the final developments of the DNA and brain gave us the ability to dream and stratagize plans to build a peaceful world. Again, easy to say: We live in a disparate world where third world countries are struggling to find a piece of bread and it's very reasonable for them to think that, "We have all the bread". Hence, we experience events such as the World Towers Destruction. Note: This book was copyrighted in l995 before the Towers fell and as such the Towers are not a part of this book. We all understand the icon of the Towers and we learn from Mr. Bloom's historical descriptions that these events have taken place for thousands, or millions, or... of years all over the world.
In the first world countries we find we no longer are in a survival mode but are on a higher plane of evolution and technology with time to create ideas which lead to ideologies and Mr. Bloom terms these ideas as "memes". Individual organisms do not exist alone by the very nature of man because we either die out of lonliness which creates illness or we self-destruct. Instead the individual organisms segregate themselves by "memes" and form superorganisms who debate and fight for their individual ideas of religion or political systems.
We learn how we arrived at the threshhold of blowing ourselves up and by studying we can see the process and the steps to be taken to achieve world order. We are not promised early results, even after milleniums of history, but we have the hope and no choice but to take that path to peace. Since l946 we have statistics that show that the preferred way to achieve this world order is to form democratic communities and nations. These stats show that democracies make fewer attacks on their neighboring tribes or countries.
One of the important reasons to read this book is to gain a comprehension of the historical process of the evolution of the socialization of our planet. By gaining this understanding, we find a sense of control in our individual being and the very accomplishment of being in control protects our health and quality of life simply because we lessen the stress and anxiety such as posed by wars.
Read this book to learn how man developed through the ages and how this development staged us for our predicaments today. Understand why this is and you will eliminate a lot of worry and stress from your life.

In "The Lucifer Principle," Howard Bloom has written a lucid, thrilling and engaging account of possibly the most important idea of our generation - the meme. Postulated as the mind's equivalent to genes, memes are the replicating core of ideas, spreading through society and culture with varying degrees of effectiveness. What exactly is a meme? What makes a meme effective? What are its effects on society? How can memes be used to our advantage and how are they being used consciously and unconsciously to promulgate terror and fascism? These are but a few of the facets that Bloom tackles in this most important book. He has gathered expert information and woven it together with his own brilliant insight and conjecture to create a popular classic of social science that must not be ignored. I would advise statesmen to gain an understanding of this emerging field to remain relevant and heal the ills of our modern society. This brilliant book is the place to start.

I wrote this review for my Grandchild who will be entering college this September. I recommended this book to her because I felt it had an excellent perspective on world history and world cultures. Here is what I told her:
Howard Bloom's thesis is: As a planet, we must learn to live together with respect for each of the cultures. If we don't organize a planetary world order the result may be that we blow ourselves up. Very plausible!
In formatting world order a conflict arises between competing tribes. The evolution of our DNA and our brain, especially, begins billions of years ago and our genetic material contains remnants of the first reptilian brain which was programmed with basic motor skills and survival techniques. Mr. Bloom describes the evolutionary process of the brain as first forming into a unit the size of a peach seed and increasing in size with each level of evolution--evolving from basic survival to an organism capable of calculating equations and having sensitivity to our fellow man and the historical stages throughout time.
Unfortunately, it is the peach pit remnant in our brain that houses our innate survival genes and which we revert to in tense situations and which causes us to ultimately reach low-level tribal feelings of conflicts. However, during the billion-year course of evolution, we developed filters in the brain which we have learned to apply when we find ourselves in a warlike relationship. Easy to say, but difficult to practice as history will teach us. One of the final developments of the DNA and brain gave us the ability to dream and stratagize plans to build a peaceful world. Again, easy to say: We live in a disparate world where third world countries are struggling to find a piece of bread and it's very reasonable for them to think that, "We have all the bread". Hence, we experience events such as the World Towers Destruction. Note: This book was copyrighted in l995 before the Towers fell and as such the Towers are not a part of this book. We all understand the icon of the Towers and we learn from Mr. Bloom's historical descriptions that these events have taken place for thousands, or millions, or... of years all over the world.
In the first world countries we find we no longer are in a survival mode but are on a higher plane of evolution and technology with time to create ideas which lead to ideologies and Mr. Bloom terms these ideas as "memes". Individual organisms do not exist alone by the very nature of man because we either die out of lonliness which creates illness or we self-destruct. Instead the individual organisms segregate themselves by "memes" and form superorganisms who debate and fight for their individual ideas of religion or political systems.
We learn how we arrived at the threshhold of blowing ourselves up and by studying we can see the process and the steps to be taken to achieve world order. We are not promised early results, even after milleniums of history, but we have the hope and no choice but to take that path to peace. Since l946 we have statistics that show that the preferred way to achieve this world order is to form democratic communities and nations. These stats show that democracies make fewer attacks on their neighboring tribes or countries.
One of the important reasons to read this book is to gain a comprehension of the historical process of the evolution of the socialization of our planet. By gaining this understanding, we find a sense of control in our individual being and the very accomplishment of being in control protects our health and quality of life simply because we lessen the stress and anxiety such as posed by wars.
Read this book to learn how man developed through the ages and how this development staged us for our predicaments today. Understand why this is and you will eliminate a lot of worry and stress from your life.

If you are looking for a stimulating read, then paperback edition at the store's prices is not a bad investment. The book includes a sweeping overview of human history, discussions of interesting tidbits of anthropology and an attempt to show how memes influence behaviors of human society. Memes are presented as virulent ideas that take hold upon the masses, seemingly beyond the victim's will. Memes are thus comparable to biological and software viruses, but no scientific proof that memes exist is provided, whereas we have conclusive proof that the other kinds of viruses do exist.
The author makes the case that religions are memes. Indeed, the author points out some destructive aspects of Hinduism (citing proof that the Hinduism was designed by a Iranian ruling class that conquered India in the distant past) were deliberately crafted. In the case of Islam, the author cites proof that Mohammed was mentally ill and that his conversations with the angel Gabriel were delusions. However, the founders of Christianity seem to escape similar judgement. Perhaps this is because the author researched Christianity's origins in depth and found that Christianity had a perfectly altruistic basis. I suspect though that the author went looking for references that described the origins of Hinduism and Islam in negatives, but didn't look for similar references for Christianity. Or perhaps he did, but didn't find any. In any case, the credibility of the author's veiled portrayal of Christianity as a superior religion would have been bolstered if he'd been up front with his research. In the interest of full disclosure, the author should have stated what his religious beliefs were.
The book is also an exercise in bashing 1980s U.S. culture and advancements, and points out that U.S.'s failure to capitalize on its research lead in technology like VCRs as evidence that the U.S. in in decline. Although the book is somewhat dated (1997), even in 1997 we saw the U.S. achieve prohibitive leads in software, the Internet, computers, and an open minded base of U.S. consumers that embraced these technologies. The author seems to miss the fact that the profit margins in software, ISP service, and PCs are higher than VCRs, and the author doesn't note that in 1997 the U.S. economy was roaring, while the rest of world was still sputtering. The U.S.' prohibitive lead in productivity is ignored. The author notes that history has shown that time and again, a seemingly invincible power is overthrown by its neighbors, but he doesn't even consider the advantages that the U.S.'s geography has in preventing a fate that the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Chinese empires suffered. As a citizen of one the U.S.'s two closest neighbors, I'm well aware of the might of the U.S., and can assure Mr. Bloom, that at no time in the future will Canada's barbarians ever succeed in taking down the U.S., if for no other reason, than the U.S. wields the biggest stick on earth. A stick which on one hand, Bloom criticizes the ancient Chinese for de-constructing which led to being defenseless from the hoards, but on another hand, he criticizes the Reagan administration for re-building.
Bloom also criticizes the quality of 1980s rock music as further evidence of U.S. decline. I suppose Disco from the 1970s was superior? In any case, comparing quality of pop music seems like a poor way to measure cultural decay.

Reading this book has really opened my eyes, suddenly everything became quite clear to me. Suddenly I saw the similarities between the petty politics of the office and the power politics of nations, I understood and was even able to PREDICT in some cases the behaviour of these groups.
Mr. Bloom has stripped away ALL illusions and laid bare the dark soul of the human condition. This book is like a scientific boat ride into Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."
Using unfaltering logic and historical examples Mr. Bloom shows that beneath humanity's high flung ideals and "just causes" lurks another drive, a drive much more primordial, this drive he has dubbed; The Lucifer Principle.
It takes a mind not only piercing but totally, even ruthlessly, honest to be able to see through the idealistic facades mankind uses to make the circumstances of his life bearable. Howard Bloom has done that with The Lucifer Principle.
Be warned, reading this book will disturb you, one MUST be a truth lover to read this book. But The Lucifer Principle also offers us hope, that in better understanding ourselves, by bringing into the light that which was hidden and corrupting from within, we might better be able to avoid some of the more tragic aspects of our own dark nature.

This is a very provocative speculation about the nature of human beings and human groups. It is built on biological science, but interpreted in a highly idiosyncratic way. A definite page-turner, with a lot of scientific and some scholarly references, but how accurate is it?
This is a selective but often chillingly familiar guided tour through human history. Bloom cleverly and casually crosses fields of study, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes making literal comparisons, and often being unclear as to which he intends. The result is an intriguing mixture of science, historical interpretation, and science fiction. The flavor is distinctly Darwinian, but with a twist.
"The Lucifer Principle" itself is a simple acknowledgement that in the natural world we take the bad with the good, often as the flip side of the good. The same forces that promote cooperation also promote barbarity.
Bloom starts out with a vivid presentation of the Darwinian vision emphasizing the competition of vehicles for the benefit of their replicators, the "selfish gene" theme at its most lurid. "Survival of the fittest" has its way. At that point, Bloom introduces the twist. He proposes something that sociologists latched on to, but which most evolutionary theorists of recent years have avoided like the plague. He raises the spectre of the "superorganism."

The superorganism was once a popular theme of old structuralist anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss, who saw society as a complex machine driven with the help of a common cognitive structure of individuals in terms of certain themes. Bloom's superorganism is a much more ambiguous blob, held together by "memes" which hook into our primitive drives.
The structuralists mostly saw the superorganism from the top-down, attempting to find patterns in culture that revealed its nature. Bloom instead derives the superorganism from the bottom-up by showing how people who share culture tend to form alliances. The alliances take on the direction given by the "memes" which exploit biological drives.

The idea that groups of organisms can share a fate so closely that they live or die as a unit is something that evolutionary theorists backed off from because it seemed that the genetic self-interest of organisms would nearly always tend to overpower any tendency for traits to arise "for the good of the group." We might end up with traits that help us exploit living in groups, which Matt Ridley calls "groupishness" in contrast to
"selfishness," but it is still genetic self-interest.

Bloom departs from this mainstream view by making the argument that mechanisms for suicide have evolved for both cells (apoptosis, programmed cell death) and individual self-destruction. These same things are explained in very different terms in mainstream evolutionary biology, as either artifacts of adaptations, or adaptations for one set of conditions that become maladaptive in other circumstances.

Evolutionary theorists tend to avoid seeing self-destruction as adaptive. The common theme, Bloom points out, is loss of connectivity with the group. When neurons can't hook up during the wiring of a nervous system, they commit hara-kiri. When humans can't hook up with each other, Bloom theorizes, they also tend to go off and remove themselves from the gene pool. An intriguing possibility that make a new interpretation of "learned helplessness" and "stress" research. This is perhaps Bloom's most interesting and potentially fruitful idea. Bloom builds much better technically on the group selection aspects of his thinking in "The Global Brain."
In "The Lucifer Principle," he just introduces the idea of the superorganism and applies it to various selected historical events.
It is in explaining how individuals can be wired to self-destruct, that the concept of group selection is raised, entirely without fanfare. The diseases we attribute to "stress" Bloom says are nothing of the kind, but diseases of disconnection from the superorganism.
The adaptive benefit would have to be to the superorganism rather than to the genes of the individual in order for Bloom's argument to work. He doesn't mention how controversial this idea is in the book, probably avoided for rhetorical purposes.
Bloom is an entertaining writer who uses the most dramatic examples he can find to make his points well. If there is a general weakness in his writing, it is that he often avoids confronting how exceptional some of his ideas are.
The Lucifer Principle uses alternating chapters cleverly to introduce fundamental biological themes like dominance hierarchies and recent extensions like memes, and at the same time bring in Bloom's "superorganism" and apply those themes in a novel way to groups rather than individuals. So we frequently end up with huge groups of human beings compared dramatically in their behavior to individual animals. We have superorganisms vying for their place in the pecking order, having a collective shift in perception, becoming bullies when they are frustrated. All illustrated with selective and sometimes idiosyncratic historical accounts.

All in all, it works very well as narrative, and introduces some novel ideas that could have profound implications. If Bloom is right about "superorganisms" leveraging human primitive drives through bits of culture, the result doesn't look good for our species. There is certainly a lot of food for thought here, especially if Blooms sometimes radical caricatures are taken for their larger lessons rather than as gospel.

Bloom is particularly hard on Islam, not as people but as a culture, both for the success of its spread and the historical brutality of its adherents. He makes the distinction
between extremists and the rest of us, to avoid stereotyping Muslims as violent fanatics, but also points out that it is the extremists than often end up driving the bus. Bloom also uses the "meme" concept very casually, and sometimes in conflicting ways, in order to simplify his explanation of culture and build on his main theme of superorganisms climbing the pecking order.
An anxiety-provoking and well-narrated book that I hope gets a lot of things wrong, but I fear might be all too accurate. He certainly pulls together and makes sense of an amazing diversity of ideas.

Perhaps Bloom is one-sided in his analysis of "Killer Cultures" like Islam etc. There are numerous examples of barbarous actions by the other side of the coin too (Christianity for one), some that are much more fascinating because of their blatant hipocrisies. But an intelligent reader will not only recognize this, but will actually conjure up his own bloody examples, at the very thought of "Killer Cultures". The analysis of man as an instinctively aggressive being was fascinating. For myself, I instantly thought of another the American Civil War, and its "Killer Angels". The horror one can extract one human being on another is amazing and Bloom explores some of those roots. This book starts the thought process and encourages you to think on these levels. It's not complete, nor is it apparently all-encompassing, but it is provoking and entertaining. That's what good books are for.

Do you ever watch the news and wonder what forces are at work? After watching scenes of school shootings and workplace violence are you left perplexed? Answers are here for these questions and many others. Mr. Bloom has spent many years researching many fields of learning to arrive at broad truths about human nature. Bloom takes a sharp blade to abstract and difficult to predict entities like power, idea and human will and dissects them like so many refrigerated lab frogs. I don't mean to imply that Bloom has every answer and all learning ends here. I do want to say that this is a great book to read if you are hungry for answers and are willing to accept what many people have learned with age; the world is tough and ruthless and humans and nature are designed to keep it that way. The Principle is raw. Beware Celestine Prophecy adherents! The book can be disturbing.Thanks for your time and I hope you will read the Lucifer Principle. I learned a great deal and am reading it again.

This interdisciplinary book is a chilling look at how and why evil inhabits our souls. While mankind has traditionally looked to religion for these answers, Bloom uses the lenses of anthropology, history, philosophy and genetics to analyze our contentious nature.
What is most chilling about this book is the absolutely clear anticipation of September 11th. Bloom didn't predict the time nor the means, but he certainly predicted this war, right down to our adversary.
I am struck by the reviews written about this book. Most are highly favorable toward the book. While there are not many negative reviews of this book, those that are negative are VERY negative. (It would seem the more academic the background, the more negative the review.) I believe that this is because this book is not at all politically correct. It confronts complex issues in a straightforward way, a well documented way, and describes evil as being evil. There are no punches pulled in this book.
This is not a right wing, fundamentalist writing this book. Bloom is a sophisticated, modern, urban liberal. Perhaps that makes the book more chilling.

The Lucifer Principle is a courageous work. It brings to the forefront a reality that most of us chose to ignore: behind costumes of civility, human beings are barbarians. It would be easy to take this work as pessimistic indictment of the human race, but it's more of a challenge. Bloom illustrates the fallacies we incorporate into our logic as means to justify the annihilation of people outside of our social groups. Now that these forms of trickery have been identified we can began eliminating them from our collective psyche. The Lucifer Principle is a loud and convincing cry against complacency; otherwise the highest ideals of civilization will be trampled into obscurity by those on the war path.

Howard Bloom's book "The lucifer principle" is contravercial. This is because the theory on which he writes does not have much support in the scientific circle. The theory is global thinking, of which he has wrote another book (global brain). It basically states that much of which we do is actually due to the groups we are a part of. While I actually find his theory to make sense logically, I admit that it could easily be slightly off or even completely false. However, there is much more to this book than just the theory. By reading it, copious facts are introduced to the reader ranging from the conquest of oliver cromwell to the usage of pecking order in chickens, chimps, and humans. Also, Bloom writes with genius. One can read this book for hours without stopping, which is difficult to say with most science books. I do not agree with everything in this book. But, alot of what I have read helped shaped my own thinking. The work is essential reading for people concerned with evolution, psychology, history, or philosophy.

Fascinating. Riveting. Spellbinding. And documented to a fare-thee-well. This is one of the best written, most well organized, and accurate examinations of human animal behavior and the reason(s) for that. It offers a very simple "solution" (i.e., parental demonstration of affection) and by illuminating our current situation (individually and as a nation) so starkly and brilliantly, it certainly shows very clearly what does NOT work. If politically active people read this book, that should end a lot of less-than-efficacious expenditures of taxpayers money. Remember, this book was first written and published a full 6 YEARS before the WTC and Pentagon attacks on 9-11-01. If that isn't enough to convince you of the accuracy of his predictions and conclusions, nothing else ever will . . . .

This was an excellent book. I particularly enjoyed the mockery of the portrayal of Islamic Fascism, as well as the convincing attempt to portray this as not necessarily the most popular branch, but certainly more popular than people believe. His discussion of the popularity not mattering in preference to the power was also interesting, and amusing. All told, it was an amazing, not to mention prescient (it was written in 1995 after all), satire of the opinions of the Neo-Conservative.

What's that you say? It was meant to be taken seriously? You're joking, right? Drat. Guess I will have to rethink my review.

Seriously, this book is nearly a joke. After spending the first half of the book or so writing convincing, but flawed, arguments, the author degenerated into two sections about Islam and the role it plays as the "barbarians" of the Twenty-First Century. He claims that this is a historic role, as well, despite the fact that, were it not for Islam, we wouldn't have many of the classical works that we do today. Ignore that fact at your peril, Mr. Bloom, as it flies in the face of the behavior of your other cited Barbarian groups, many of whom were not particularly literate. And some of whom, at least, were pluralistic.

So, to list off the myriad scientific and cultural misunderstandings of our dear Mr. Bloom would take more time and space than I have or the store will allow. But, a smattering of the more egregious scientific sins will likely suffice. First, Mr. Bloom is not, nor has he ever been, a sociologist or a scientist. Instead, we are told that he was trained as a scientist, but then decided to avoid the strangling world of academia in favor of promoting the careers of Michael Jackson and John Cougar Mellencamp. This does not, I believe, qualify him as a source of authority on many issues. Likely, he failed as a scientist, and he then looked around for a career he could excel at. Apparently alarmist psuedo-scientific writings was it.

So, on with the misunderstandings. First of all, our dear Mr. Bloom claims, foolishly, that our brain is made up of three parts. He calls this the triune brain. He claims that it is descended from three types of ancestors. The "animal" brain comes from reptiles, amphibians, etc., and seems to be comprised largely of the cerebellum and the brainstem. The "mammalian" brain involves the remainder of the cortex, and the "human" brain is the newly derived neocortex. What he fails to understand, utterly, is that this may be biologically true, but fall far short of accuracy. Intelligence and awareness, along with other nervous functions, are emergent properties. Speech is largely controlled by the Broca's region, found in the cortex. Mammals aside from us do not speak. Discussion of whether this is due to our larynx aside, this points out a serious flaw in the author's thinking. The origin of our brains plays little or no role in their current function. Go look up the idea of analogous physical features, Mr. Bloom.

Next, there is a brief period of mockery for Mr. Bloom's advocation of Freudian psychology. Ha ha! Further comment is unnecessary.

In a more overarching theme, and giving grounds for my comment that he likely failed in science, Mr. Bloom CONSISTENTLY mistakes several scientific ideas. One is overinterpretation of data. I cannot cite any particular cases off-hand, but in multiple locations through the book, he will interpret data far beyond reasonable and credible levels to attempt to make some grand point, often a highly contentious one. A hint Mr. Bloom: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. It is a basic tenet of science. Further, he mistakes the ideas of causation and correlation, which is a funamentally trained difference in all sciences. I CAN think of an example on this front. He cites the correlation of animals/Islamic families failure to treat their children with compassion and affection with increased potential for violence. This is not really something that can be argued. It has been proven time and again. However, whether this CAUSES the violence has not. To merely gloss over this fact suggests to me that the world of science should rise up and refuse to acknowledge that this man was EVER successfully trained as a scientist.

In short, the book is interesting enough in its speculations, but the deviant understandings of data, along with the ethnocentric observations are irritating and call into question the trends that he attempts to prove, simply because you must wonder, without independent confirmation of EVERY fact, whether he has misinterpreted them as well.

In addition, he has a glaring logical problem that I will address quite briefly. Despite citing a mass of "proof" that humans are predictably going to turn toward violent and status-seeking behaviors, Mr. Bloom claims that pluralistic societies (in space, perhaps) will find a way to peacefully spread our memes and overcome our "primitive" nature. Mr. Bloom, you are living in a fantastic land of delusion. A non-violent spread of memes is merely the next logical method of spread: without your followers being killed, your meme will spread more successfully. Much like increased birth rates amongst believers, this is simply a propagation method. It is no better, or worse, than forcefully converting others to your policies.

In short, a controversial book, riddled with problems and a few gems. If you have the time and the money to waste, go ahead and read it. If you have something better to do (like pick your nose with a fork), I would suggest that instead. Good luck with this.

Harkius

This probably deserves less than 4 stars, but I think some of the implications of these social "drives" deserve discussion. I did find some of the conclusions somewhat forced and the historical documentation sadly anecdotal. Ultimately, the idea of fearing fundamentalism and violent revolutionaries is pretty sane, but frankly the inevitable encroachment of McDonalds and corporatism is scary as well. I skimed the last half of the book for interesting content (to agree or poke holes in) after I got down his concepts from the first half.

Overall the aspects of the authors biography which piqued my interest in this book as I browsed the jacket in a bookstore, were it's downfall. Although the author has good scientific training, in his professional life he comes from outside the traditional realm of science. I thought he would offer an interesting perspective as an educated outsider. Boy was I wrong. I cringed when the author 'debunks' the objections to group selection in such a superficial manner without mentioning how 'cheaters' would thrive if group selection occurred. He also uses ants, one of the best verifiers of the selfish gene theories, to attempt to debunk kin selection and the selfish-gene hypothesis. He calls germs an 'invisible world' and skips over the miraculous successes of modern medicine to say that doctors don't really cure people and that they may even learn something from shamans and sorcerers. He thrives on correlations without causation such as his description of why muslims are more violent because their parenting style involves less touch. Equally compelling could be their restrictive sexuality as a cause for violence. After all, the 9/11 murderers were awaiting their 72 virgins which they couldn't get in real life. There is much to his theory and much that I liked about this book but there are so many cringe-worthy pages that I can't rate this book highly.

An excellent read that weaves elements of biology, psychology, political science, and religion into a persuasive argument of how societies compete for supremacy. It explores the virus-like features of ideas and how they shape the behaviors of large collectives. Finally, it looks at some of the characteristics of contemporary Islamic ideology and the basis of its ongoing struggle for global supremacy.

It's been shown by scientists that human biology can be used as a plausible basis for analyzing the behaviour of individuals, and a good case is apparently being made in the scientific community that there is a similar link between biology and sociology. But historical analysis is something entirely different, and in The Lucifer Principle, Bloom fails completely. This book is little more than a collection of sound-bytes---often taken out of context---arranged to justify Bloom's political ranting.
This is not to say that Bloom doesn't have some interesting thoughts. One appealing idea he adopts is that of the meme, which acts as a glue that holds together a superorganism. In other words, our natural tendency to form into groups for survival also binds us into groups which are joined together by nothing more than an idea. I can't vouch for the science behind this assertion, but it is a powerful metaphor.
However, it is a considerable leap from evolutionary theory to the study of history, and Bloom's simple-minded analysis of historical and current events falls far short of bridging the gap. Each chapter averages 6 ½ pages long, and many treat more than one event---hardly enough for anything more than a cursory exposition, let alone an intelligent analysis.
What's worse, Bloom seethes with anger towards certain religious and ethnic groups like Moslems, Arabs, Germans and Japanese. They're all "barbarians" to Bloom, and this blind rage keeps him from doing any sort of meaningful analysis. The book's title should act as a warning that there's no historical nuance here. Each chapter in the last half is dedicated to dividing the world's groups into Good and Evil, and for Bloom there is no middle ground. This creates a massive inconsistency in his argument, since it is founded on evolutionary science, which is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral.
Jacques Barzun says in From Dawn to Decadence that when studying History, "...it is wiser to speak of conditions rather than causes, and of influences rather than a force making the change...", but this is advice Bloom ignores. Bloom is making the age-old mistake of trying to impose a series of "scientific" laws on history---and doing it incompetently at that. Here's a random sample of some of the many boneheaded conclusions from Bloom's book:
-The people in Arab society are prone to evil because Islamic fathers don't cuddle their children enough (p. 243)
-World War I was the result of a "Teutonic...testosterone high" (p. 280) caused by the Germans' ascending economic fortunes
-Michael Jackson is a family man that "(brings) us back to the values of our past" (p. 302)
-"We Americans have attempted to use every one of the old (diplomatic) techniques to establish peace" (p. 250), yet the "barbarians" keep dragging the U. S. into wars they don't want.
-Someone named Allan Bloom is a threat to America for having erroneously denounced MTV and Rock n' Roll, and thus is diverting American energies from the real threat of Barbarian Invasions. (pp. 282-6) (Apparently this has some connection to the subject of the book.)
The other paradox of The Lucifer Principle is that although Bloom claims that human history rests on biology, he is unable to see that our common biology makes all human cultures open to the same criticism. Instead, his technique is to play off the "Good" America against various "Evil" cultures. The chapter entitled "The Secret Meaning of `Freedom', `Peace' and `Justice'" screams out for a dispassionate word or two on American foreign policy, since this is obviously the most relevant example at the close of the 20th century. But Bloom is incapable of seeing that the same evils of "Mohammedan" society exists just as strongly in his own backyard.
I should have been forewarned by the foreword where Bloom's friend tactfully expresses his own reservations about the book. Or maybe I should have read the acknowledgements first, where he makes a point of thanking his friends from his years as a rock-promoter, the respected historians John Mellencamp, Billy Joel, Daryl Hall, Peter Gabriel and Joan Jett. And then there's special mention of the input of his publishing colleagues (Bloom published the Heavy Metal magazine Circus) at noted academic journals such as Spin, Rolling Stone, New York Woman, and Details.
I still think that evolutionary theory has something relevant to tell us about who we are as human beings and why we act the way we do. I hope I will find it in another book. This one is just pop-psychology pretending to be the Missing Link between Science and History.

howard bloom's The Lucifer Principle is called "A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History" because it is just that. While the opinion-to-fact ratio gets rather high sometimes, it is still a truely awe-inspiring work of literature on human nature. It not only teaches us about human nature, but teaches us that human nature is not so much human as it is universal. "Evil" is not a creation of society or modern technology, but rather something rooted deep down inside all creatures of life. 'Tis a great book.

This book provides a fascinating perspective on history and current society.

If you are looking for a strictly academic work, this is probably not for you. Instead, this book looks at parallels between trends and processes in various parts of the world, and in various parts of history. If you are looking for brilliant insights and a unique perspective, strongly consider this book.

Wow! What an incredible work! Eye-opening, mind-bending and fascinating with every turn of the page. With chapter titles like Mother Nature: the Bloody Bitch, how could he lose? Learn more about history in a single sitting than your boring high school teacher taught you in 4 semesters. How memes explode into violence. This book will change your thinking permanently, and forever.

Violence is not only common to our species, but in all species as well. Mr. Bloom does a great job of covering a wide range of topics concerning aggressive behavior. This book is a great place to start your research.

The book is apolitical and offers an unbiased, dispassionate, review of human history from a scientific viewpoint. Bloom wrote about our status seeking impulses and their biological roots. He discussed the mystery of altruistic, self-sacrificing impulses.

In effect, this book reveals 'the man behind the curtain,' and if the reader remains naive about any human behavior or motivation after having read it, it is his own darn fault.

The subject matter of this book, which is primarily human behavior, is not presented pleasently, but it is presented in an unbiased and refreshingly cold and objective manner. Though I questioned some of Mr. Bloom's inferences, and this book is full of them, I found this book to be very thought provoking. The extensive bibliography shows that the author did his homework. There is a lot of insight concerning REAL human nature here!

Loved reading this book. It is true this world is full of orgasmic chaotic evil. That's why everyone chooses to go about their daily existence with delusional blinders on. You will not find the devil within these pages, but what might be revealed to you is the nature of the beast or in other words, the evil that men do. (Perhaps)

Pretty well-writen assortment of opinons, based upon what seems to be a pretty large base of written material. However, this book is definitely NOT what it seems by reading the back of it: this is Bloom's version of reality. He cannot prove any of it, nor, it seems, does he really want to take the time to do so. This book is an interesting read for people who are entertained by opinions of fellow amateur non-academic (or even anti-academic) intellectuals.

If you ever wondered why there is so much violence in the name of God - why terrorists view the U.S. as evil or why/how empires fall, then Lucifer Principle should be on the top of your reading list. Howard Bloom's witty writing never made me yawn the way my history courses did. In fact, I've learned more about history from reading this one book than I did in 16 years of formal education. Thanks Howard! T-

What a surprise to get views on different angles of human behavior. Relating the pecking order to societies and to countries is a new approach to world domination. I liked the description of the results of hugging and the subsequent withdrawal of loving care. That is a real insite into men gone awry. I expected a religious angle but was pleased to read the athiest view. Less religion, less strife. Do read it. It will make you think!

A superficial rehash of the ideas of others supported by overgeneralization from haphazardly selected studies. If you have an interest in evolutionary psychology, memes, or the relationship of the individual to the "superorganism" there are so many other (and much better) books that are well-researched and thought out. The extensive reference list provides the appearance of scholarship and comprehensiveness, but the reader should be aware that this is illusory at best. If you are a nascent social Darwinist looking for rhetoric with which to back up your arguments, this may be the book for you. But if you want to learn something about evolution and the modern mind, seek out the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, and read Richard Dawkins, David Buss, Steven Pinker, and Robert Wright.

If there ever was a book that explained the forces which govern society's behavior in understandable terms, this was it - and written in a way that makes the book hard to leave for a minute. There is no arguing with Bloom's premises, they're clear and proveable on the face although some might prefer a more religious explanation for man's behavior. I'd venture to say the title may put some people off, be that as it may, the content is pure sense.

An absolutely incredible book that draws upon anecdotal, utterly readable, examples from just about every scientific discipline to create a solid case for looking at the human condition in a whole new light. You will not see politics, religion, or psychology the same way ever again once you've read The Lucifer Principle.

While there is no doubt this man possesses a fine brain, it is a shame that he would devote the thrust of his book to bash Islam and Muslims. Of about 250 pages, over 35 contain misinformed expressions of his loathing for Islam and Muslims.
The excerpts from the Quran that he chose to illustrate his ideas are partial and thus grossly distorted. His charcterizations of Islam and Muslims are about as accurate as a bigot saying "Catholics eat human flesh and drink human blood" or "Jews sacrifice Christian children".
Except his target is Islam.
His arguments appear to be delibrately distorted but they would sound convincing to those who do not know any better about Islam or Muslims.
There is so much bigotry and so many misleading statements about Islam and Muslims that it hard to consider the rest of the material with any respect or objectivity.
This book sits proudly with the "..The Elders of Zion" type of "literature".

If you are someone who never read anything other than Tom Clancy novels then you may find this book fascinating. It will justify all the prejudice you hold about the World.
However, if you do have some background knowledge in History and Evolutionary Biology, then you will certainly see this book for what it really is: a shallowly researched and not well thought out theory of an armchair intellectual.

Bloom fails to deliver any proof to support his theory. The overwhelming amount of anecdotes and experiments with animals that are given in the book might fool the casual reader that Bloom knows what he is writing about but none of those examples proves his theory. He claims that Selfish Genes and Kin Selection do not explain certain phenomena yet he fails to deliver on the promise to prove the alternative explanation: Group Selection. Group Selection is simply taken as something that exists and does not need to be proven.

Bloom is so unable to provide logical reasoning that he is forced to attribute events to the intervention of a divine intellect that has a plan for us. Religious people refer to this intellect as God. Hitler called it Providence. Bloom is using the term Evolution for the same purpose.

Evolution has a plan for us and violence is part of it. This is what Blooms' theory is all about. It is silly. It is stupid. Evolution has no plan for us. Evolution has no direction. Evolution is not a mystical force that leads us to a higher purpose. Evolution is just a term that scientist use to explain the effect of random mutations on spices. Evolution or Nature if you will does not have a plan for us. It does not have a plan at all.

Bloom may have read Dawkins' Selfish Gene but apparently he didn't understand it. I doubt he ever read E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: it's a hardcore science book, not a popular reading that an armchair intellectual would like. Kin Selection explains the behavior of individuals and groups a lot better than Bloom's mystical Lucifer Principle, whatever that is.

Last but not least, Bloom is taking events out of context and is twisting them in a way that will fit his theory. Whenever he doesn't falsify events, he simplifies them to a point where one can reach a misleading conclusion about what happened. Numerous historic events that contradict the main theme of the book are conveniently forgotten. It's a typical example when one deliberately seeks a trend and finds it.

What are some of these reviewers going on about? Trying to crush a meme perhaps? This book is truly brilliant. It's the new Bible. In fact I would replace those Gideon Bibles that lurk in bedside draws in hotel rooms with this blinding stonker. 'The Lucifer Principal' is the truth. Go buy...

First 2/3's where very thought provoking. Then it got a little tedious. Very different way of looking at things. Would love to see Bloom and Friedman collaborate on a book, forces of nature and geopolitics combined!