In The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom sets on an ambitious undertaking, to find a single explanation for why there is evil in the world.
Bloom is a controversial figure. He once suggested that Islamic cultures treat their children harshly, they despise open displays of affections, and the result is a society of violent adults. If only they were given more hugs.
In this book, he has made many comments that have been labelled as racist by Arab pressure groups. In his professional life, he founded one of the largest public relations firms in the music industry. He was a publicist for AC/DC, Michael Jackson, Kiss, Bob Marley and many others.
His thesis is that conquest, terrorism, destructive science, oppressive political systems are all by-products of a natural law, The Lucifer Principle describes the evil we see in the world as an inevitable consequence of the biological urge to power. Philosophically, this principle has Nietzschean undertones, in the sense that history is shaped by man’s will to power. Bloom emphasizes that these battles are not so much fought between individuals as they are by national or cultural groups.
Every nation is a superorganism, a cluster of billions of cells, that attempts to gain power, whenever an opportunity presents itself. And each superorganism has its neural net, or its collective consciousness. What forms this collective consciousness? Memes.
The way in which this superorganism animates its people (organisms) into action is through memes. Memes are clusters of ideas that self-organize; they use people to spread. This idea is not Bloom’s, but is an old idea, of course, that was described by Jung (the collective unconscious) and later by Dawkins. One carrier of a powerful meme that reshaped history was Karl Marx.
There is a global pecking order, and you are either on top or at the bottom. The U.S is currently at the top, but it would be a mistake to think that they will remain there forever. The rest of the world is constantly trying to undermine the position of the U.S, including China. Russia, and Iran.
At one point, Iran’s economy was propped up by the U.S and the Iranians enjoyed considerable development and wealth. But then, when this superorganism became better nourished, a new meme emerged, that was spread by Ayatollah Khomeini. This meme was that the U.S is the Great Satan, and that Iran should not be subservient to the demands of the U.S but should be in a leadership position. This is a consequence of the Lucifer Principle.
When times are difficult, organisms behave more conservatively, as is the case in many other species, including crustaceans.
When a superorganism is winning, it secretes more testosterone, and becomes more ambitious, more risk taking. Testosterone explains the reign of the Mongols, who after each victorious battle, became more bold and powerful. The Iranians, after being empowered, were attracted to the meme of becoming a dominant nation, to gain more resources and more power.
It is not stress that kills people, as many believe, but It is a specific kind of stress that does. The bad stress is what people feel after they have been laid off work or dumped. But there is a good kind of stress, that spurs progress and survival. This kind of stress is necessary. What is the absence of stress? Death.
The point Bloom makes is that we are evil because we need to compete for resources. We compete for resources because we are stressed by our environmental limitations – lack of resources, power, freedom, control. But this stress forces us to innovate, to think creatively, and to make progress.
Each superorganism is engaged in this race, whether it likes it or not. And when nations have opted out, when they have burned their scientific texts, and have opted out of the struggle, they are dominated by other nations. This happened to China – Japan was the country that attempted to dominate it.
The Lucifer Principle, since it is a fact of nature, cannot be stopped. The ecological damage that results from man’s ambitions cannot be prevented by guilt, as some have tried to do. Progress is inescapable, even at the expense of countless lives, nations, and the environment. The only glimmer of hope for mankind is to expand into the cosmos, to colonize new planets and to increase the amount of resources it has access to.
But Bloom makes a major error, he has used biological imperatives to justify human violence and stops there. Interestingly, Bloom is Jewish and naturally, an outspoken critic of the horrors of the Nazi regime. But like Hitler, Bloom looks at biology as a scapegoat for human violence. Long ago, David Hume warned us about the dangers of the naturalistic fallacy. It is the conflation of what is with what ought to be.
It is true that human beings are driven by aggressive drives, and that they are forces of progress, yet the point of human intellect is to keep these drives in check, and to appeal to higher ethical principles. The solution to man’s instinct to evil is unlikely to be found in the colonization of new planets, but rather in the reform of civilizations. And this, far from being an abstract and unrealistic ideal, has been so far the only way we have managed to make moral progress.
Being self-aware of our biological propensity for evil should be a warning to us about ourselves. We should use this knowledge to as a guide to what we should avoid, in the same way that the alcoholic solves his alcoholism by abstinence, and not by drinking himself into a cosmological oblivion.