The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces of History by Howard Bloom

– 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. “Evil” is a by-product, a component of creation. In a world evolving into ever higher forms, hatred, violence, aggression and war are a part of the evolutionary plan.

– Lucifer principle is the alter ego of mother nature.

– Entelechy – something complex that emerges when you put a large number of simple objects together. Examine one molecule of water in a vacuum, and you’ll be utterly bored by the lack of activity in your vacuum tube. Pour a bunch of molecules into a glass, and a new phenomenon crops up–a ring of ripples on the water’s surface. Combine enough glasses of water in a big enough basin and you’ll end up with something entirely different: an ocean. Take the 26 letters of the English alphabet, lay them out in front of you, and you’ll have a set of small squiggles, each of which evokes just one or two specific sounds. String a few million together in precisely the proper order and you’ll have the collected works of Shakespeare.

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– The book is divided into 5 sections which dives into 5 concepts… and its sometimes startling implications. Together, these concepts are the foundation underlying the Lucifer Principle.
1: self-organising systems -replicators- bits of structure that function as mini-factories, assembling raw materials, then churning out intricate products. These natural assembly units (genes are one example) crank out their goods so cheaply that the end results are appallingly expendable. Among those expendable products are you and me.
2: the superorganism. We are not the rugged individuals we would like to be. We are, instead, disposable parts of a being much larger than ourselves.
3: the meme. A self-replicating cluster of ideas. Thanks to a handful of biological tricks, these visions become the glue that holds together civilizations, giving each culture its distinctive shape, making some intolerant of dissent and others open to diversity. They are the tools with which we unlock the forces of nature. Our visions bestow the dream of peace. They also turn us into killers.
4: the neural net. The group mind whose eccentric mode of operation manipulates our emotions and turns us into components of a massive learning machine.
5: the pecking order. The naturalist who discovered this “dominance hierarchy” in a Norwegian farmyard called it the key to despotism. Pecking orders exist among men, monkeys, wasps… and even nations. They help explain why the danger of barbarians is real, and why the assumptions of our foreign policies are often wrong.

“The men who are the most honoured are the greatest killers. They believe that they are serving their fellowmen….” Henry Miller

– Stories about our inherent violent nature from Chairman Mao’s teenage followers who tortured the teachers who made mistakes, the peaceful chimpanzees who end up violent when in search for food, even the African tribe which again is peaceful as Dr. Leaky claimed to be a paradise tribe but ended up killing adulterers.

“We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life….” Charles Darwin – The Origin of the Species

– Even the assumption that women make more peaceful leaders proven wrong with examples. They also encourage killers by falling in love with leaders and warriors. Time and again they have gone for courage and bravery, in short violence. Stories and examples of how the mothering instinct is to make sure their own survive even if it means killing offspring that are not theirs, sometimes by pretending to care and indirectly hurting the non-offspring. Now I am confused because later the book talks about also killing their own offspring and their male partners.

– Summary of the selfish gene. Explaining why nature itself is violent it is not humans it’s everywhere in nature.

– Talks about suicide. We do it sometimes to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good of the group. Biologically built in self-destruct mechanism.

– Studies of superorganisms like amoeba and sponges. Amoeba are happy to live alone until they feel that they are going to starve which is when the group together. Sponges can be destroyed into powdery substance in water but they always get back together and reform.

– Separation kills. Examples of how animals would die when the partner dies, how our human immune system drops when the partner is diagnosed with cancer, how kissing increases oxygen intake. Owning a dog or a cat reduces chances of a second heart attack significantly.

– How even the alpha males would break down when people were not watching. Stories of people losing their purpose and dying early or committing suicide. Projecting a positive psyche works.

– Everywhere you look it’s always groups versus groups. And they differentiate each other by uniform, growing beards, acting differently, ETC.

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– The mind plays a trick of perception by making us remember our accomplishments while forgetting our mistakes and flaws.

– Authoritarian personality – Generally, this was an individual raised in a strict home where the father was the clear holder of power. The parents had shown a stern disapproval of hostile outbursts on the part of their children. They had also rigidly prohibited the acknowledgement of any form of sexuality. But hostility and sexuality are both unavoidable aspects of human life. How had the authoritarian personalities coped with their unwelcome aggressive and sexual impulses? Through a technique that Freudians call projection. Like the female researcher who forgot most of the distressing things that happened to her in everyday life, the authoritarian personalities excluded their own aggression and sexuality from their consciousness. Like the people misremembering their own past pay and work habits, the authoritarian types pictured themselves as people in whom sexual and aggressive tendencies did not exist. Aggression and sexuality, they were convinced, boiled up only in the minds of some enemy. E.g. of how a group of women saw subliminal sexual images in children’s books which weren’t there but because of that things had to be changed.

– Every group chooses to hate something or another for example Muslims hate infidels. Christians and the rich. Democrats and Republicans. Even the vegans who lie to themselves of being non-violent want to eliminate meat eaters.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the system atic organization of hatreds. Henry Adams

– The similarity between cellular differentiation and individuals who perform certain roles depending on what situation and location they are in. When different alpha males were all put in one group they all allotted themselves where one became alpha, the other became the joker, the bully no one likes, and finally the geek who was not good at sports and got picked on.

– Talks about the evolution of sea organisms. Cells found they had excess calcium and found a way to deposit them in the corridors where they didn’t need them, which in turn evolved to bones helping the organism move from sea to land.

– Memes are ideas that leap from mind to mind. A melody wells up in the reveries of a solitary songwriter. It seizes the brain of a singer. Then it infects the consciousness of millions. That melody is a meme. A scientific concept starts as a vague glimmer in one researcher’s thoughts. It ends up with whole schools of adherents. That concept is a meme. Each flips from the puddle of one brain to another, crazily copying itself in the new environment. But the memes that count the most are the ones that assemble vast arrays of resources in startling new forms. They are the memes that construct social superorganisms. Talks about Marxism and Leninism as memes.

– Memes can restructure societies within a few centuries.

– Stories of how rats would pee on food that was poisonous so that the family would not eat it. At the same time they would be vicious with non-family members.

– The need for humans to believe in something even when it is clearly a sham. It gives them a sense of control and tests in the rats show that more control helps improve health and increase his life.

– There are tribes where when the shaman failed the tribe would still praise him for his bravery for ‘facing such bad demons’.

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– People have lost all hope are 4 times likely to die.

– Eskimos believed if they’ve got a slab of ice and form a circle the gods would be pleased and would keep them warm but it was really thermodynamics. Indians worshipped the cows so the cows eat while Indians starve but in reality they did it because they would run out of meat to eat.

– The travelling salesman problem is where you have more than 200,000 options for the best route to choose when going door-to-door. Explains serial processing versus neural nets. Neural nets are made by electrical models and can find solutions 10,000 times faster. Only issue is that they are only valuable 10% of the time. Our human networks are just like this but way more effective.

– Bees are able to calculate where their next source of food will be. And just like bees bringing unfavourable food to the hive were shunned, humans do the same with ideas and thoughts that are not favourable. They thrive when they work in favour with the group. Some people are known to shrink and become sickly overnight or grow and look powerful overnight just because of the group. Just watching the news you are exchanging favourable ideas with thousands of people.

Men were designed for short, nasty, brutal lives. Women are designed for long, miserable ones. Dr. Estelle Ramey

– Men are disposable right from birth. The female egg just sits there to be won, male sperm have to fight each other and race to win. Men are less immune to diseases and more likely to face dangers. Castration helps men’s immune system being in higher gear which means elimination of maleness helps men. Men are so disposable because it just takes one man to re-populate a significant amount of the population. So send a man to war because they are disposable and women and children first. YAY!

– Monogamy is the practice of the North while polygamy is the practice of the south because in the south food is ready readily available to the man accumulate wives.

– Back when men needed to build rail roads and do the heavy lifting they were more needed but now in the information age, women are just as good on computers. Women could just access frozen semen whenever they wanted to multiply but they still seem to need men emotional level. (And some more statements on why men are still not 100% expendable).

– Humans are built to eat meat. The craving for it is wired deeply into our system. There is one hormone–cholecystokinin–designed to carry a message from the full stomach to the brain, quieting the appetite. The digestive system refuses to send that hormone on its way until fats and proteins move from the stomach into the intestines. In other words, your body withholds this hormone to keep you hungry until you’ve swallowed some meat. What’s more, as anthropologist and food expert E.N. Anderson puts it, “We need unusually large amounts of protein and cannot synthesise as many of the amino acids as some mammals can.”. Monkeys that find a rabbit does not rescue it but smashes it on the head and takes it back to the village where even the alpha-est of alphas become sycophantic beggars for a little morsel.

– Stick-tossers and killers accumulate the most number of women.

– Experiment of rats put together were all scared of each other until one male and one female bonded. After which they terrorise the rest, kill them one by one stealing their food or going for the neck.

– Story of Oliver Cromwell.

– Breakdown of Mohammed’s start in Mecca to Medina and his military success. The armies were victorious through bloodshed from Vienna, all the way to India and further. In Constantine eyes, Christ was the God of war.

There is no nation, it seems, which has not been promised the whole earth…. Elias Canetti

– Every super organism is out to spread itself, be it country, amoeba or anything else while it sees other organisms as enemy.

– The war between Sunni and Shiites. The Islam of wealth, sophistication and ultimately corruption, or the Islam of purity, self-denial, and attention to the poor.

– Today’s medical beliefs were one groups ideologies taken over power from another group. For example the war between homoeopathy and allopathy. Allopathy can only cure 50% when homoeopathy can cure the other 50%.

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– A monkey’s whole physiology will change if he gets to the top of the pecking order. Lots of historical examples including the Hindu system.

– Talks about Islam’s views on taking over the world and how they see infidels as lesser beings than dogs. From Latin Americans to Idi Amin, every supergroup has done something like this.

– Studies of 400+ cultures prove that tribes that hugged and showed physical affection were less violent or did not enjoy mutilation while killing. More infant physical affection means less adult violence. But Muslim fathers anger is equal to God’s anger. So solution is allowing handholding in Arabic countries for peace ;).

– Various cultures would rather give more and receive less because the givers have a disdain for the ones they help. The pecking order is so important to people but at the same time so fickle.

– A lot of these dramas are caused not by poverty but more by new prosperity.

– Testosterone is the very elixir of feistiness. It helped you look for flights and will also help you win the fight. For example the Arabs lived simply and moderately until the oil fortune came alone, then murderous groups were born.

– ‘Peace’ is used by people on top to stay on top so the people in the bottom don’t cause a fuss, while ‘justice’ is used by the people in the bottom trying to get to the top.

– To stay at please you have to run and to get anywhere you have to run even harder. The red Queen examples where countries advanced at the same time so they didn’t really beat each other.

– When the super organism has been failed then something close to home must be 1st to take the blame.

– Frustration aggression: when we take out our frustrations on smaller weaker ones than us after we have been frustrated by a bigger stronger aggressor. E.g. whenever cotton prices shot up so did lynching of blacks.

– Learned pessimism: 2 dogs in a cage get electric shocks when they try to escape the cage. One figures out how to switch it off, other doesn’t get a switch so in future life the switchless dog never tries to escape and gives up easily.

– The more we opt out of competition, the lower our position is likely to be. Stress helps, it releases chemicals to strengthen more than just the immune system. Added synapses, etc.

– Tennis time vs beach time. When you have lots to do you are on your toes and when you’re lazy you atrophy kinda thing.

The holy trinity of the lucifer principle:
1 – super organism, 2 – idea (memes) and 3 – the pecking order.

– But there is a dark side to this movement toward the light. Like a sculptor carving a figure from stone, nature creates by destroying. Her hammer and chisel strike over and over again. Each time there is a shower of chips. And as the splinters pile up on the floor, a new form emerges where the blade has been at work. The sculptor at the end of his day simply sweeps away the heaps of useless dust and shards of stone. So does nature. But those discarded scraps in the natural workshop are the bodies of creatures who moments before were alive, creatures like you and me.

Contents
Who Is Lucifer?
The Clint Eastwood Conundrum
The Whole Is Bigger Than the Sum of Its Parts
The Chinese Cultural Revolution

BLOODSTAINS IN PARADISE
Mother Nature, the Bloody Bitch
Women–Not the Peaceful Creatures You Think
Fighting For The Privilege of Procreation
The Greed of Genes

WHY HUMANS SELF-DESTRUCT
The Theory of Individual Selection…and Its Flaws
Superorganism
Isolation–The Ultimate Poison
Even Heroes Are Insecure
Loving The Child Within Is Not Enough

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ONE MAN’S GOD IS ANOTHER MAN’S DEVIL
Us Vs.Them
The Value of Having an Enemy
The Perceptual Trick That Manufactures Devils
How Hatred Builds The Walls of Society’s Bungalow

MAN–INVENTOR OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD
From Genes to Memes
The Nose of a Rat and the Human Mind–
A Brief History of the Rise of Memes
How Wrong Ideas Can Be Right
The Village of the Sorcerers and the Riddle of Control
The Modern Medical Shaman
Control and the Urge to Pray
Power and the Invisible World
Einstein and the Eskimos

THE MYSTERIES OF THE EVOLUTIONARY LEARNING
MACHINE
The Connectionist Explanation of the Mass Mind’s Dreams
Society as a Neural Net
The Expendability of Males
How Men Are Society’s Dice
Is Pitching a Genetically Acquired Skill?
Oliver Cromwell–The Rodent Instincts Don a Disguise

IDEOLOGY IS THEFT
The Invisible World As A Weapon
The True Route to Utopia
Why Men Embrace Ideas–And Why Ideas Embrace Men
Righteous Indignation=Greed for Real Estate
Shiites
Poetry and the Lust for Power
When Memes Collide–The Pecking Order of Nations
Superior Chickens Make Friends
Wordviews As The Welding Torch of the Hierarchical Chain

WHO ARE THE NEXT BARBARIANS
The Barbarian Principle
Are There Killer Cultures?
Violence In South America and Africa
The Importance of Hugging
The Puzzle of Complacency
Poverty With Prestige Is Better Than Affluent Disgrace
Why Prosperity Will Not Bring Peace
The Secret Meaning of “Freedom,” “Peace” and “Justice”

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
The Victorian Decline And The Fall of America
Scapegoats and Sexual Hysteria
Laboratory Rats And The Oil Crisis
Why Nations Pretend To Be Blind
How The Pecking Order Reshapes The Mind
Perceptual Shutdown And the Future of America
The Myth of Stress
Tennis Time and the Mental Clock

THE LUCIFERIAN PARADOX
The Lucifer Principle
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About The Author

Bibliography
Notes

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