Howard Bloom

Richard Metzer, creative director, The Disinformation Company, host of Channel 4 TV Britain’s Disinfo Nation said

I have met God, and he lives in Brooklyn… Howard Bloom is next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Buckminster Fuller…he is going to change the way we see ourselves and everything around us.

Howard Bloom is bringing together space scientists to explore beaming solar power from space and setting up a colony off-planet in case humanity is extinguished due to warfare. He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.
 
Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that with his unusual insights Howard has “raced ahead of the timid scientific herd” often “vaulting over their heads” with a “grand vision” that “we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.” In The Lucifer Principle and his new book Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, he brings those understandings from dimness into the light. He also hopes to bring light to this planet in the form of solar energy from space.
 
He is the author of the forthcoming book (first draft already available for sale), Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine — A Radical Reperception of Western Civilization.
 
He states: “Ours is a culture that must know why it matters…and that must feel the impulse to matter far, far more. Ours is a culture that must look up, that must look toward the sun, that must aspire to the stars, and that must realize that we are not an empire about to fall but a civilization in embryo, one that has the potential to do things for humanity that humans in the past have never even dreamed.”
 
Other publications include Dodging the Nuclear 9/11, Instant Evolution: the influence of the city on human genes, Jericho-If Only Walls Could Talk, The Rape of the Sabine Women, Islam’s War Against The West, Diving In the Microworld, Chimpanzees and Romans, Beyond the Supercomputer: Social Groups As Learning Machines, Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-biotic Evolution, and Conversational (Dialogue) Model of Quantum Transitions.
 
Howard has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.
 
Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Howard turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery” — the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, he more than doubled the publication’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre — the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, he formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he’d invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.
 
Howard worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.
 
The pinnacles of fame provided surprising scientific revelations. “When you’re at the center of the sort of attention-storm which hits when you’re working with a superstar”, Howard says, “it’s as if the laws of physics change. Hormones charge you up in ways you never imagined. Time perception alters. You resolve crisis in minutes, seeing solutions instantly which previously would have taken you weeks.”
 
Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Howard and the antidote he invented, “perceptual engineering”, which he defines as “a way of finding a valid truth which the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It’s what we do in much of science — seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick and in the process altering society’s views.”
 
In 1981, he organized the material he’d unearthed and began the formal research for a new theoretical structure that would first reveal itself in The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. However he continued pursuing scientific truths in unconventional ways. In 1995 he headed an insurgent academic circle called “The Group Selection Squad” whose efforts precipitated radical re-evaluations of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. Paleopsychology’s mandate is to “map out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present.”
 
Read his interview with R.U. Sirius. Listen to his two short interviews with The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement (CSRI).