Summary of Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The Lucifer Principle is a complex of natural rules that work together to weave a fabric that sometimes frightens and appalls us. Every one of the threads in that tapestry is fascinating, but the big picture is more astonishing still.

#2 The Lucifer Principle takes new data from a variety of sciences and shapes them into a perceptual lens through which to reinterpret the human experience. It argues that evil is woven into our most basic biological fabric.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822547759

IRB Media

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Insights on Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Lucifer Principle is a complex of natural rules that work together to weave a fabric that sometimes frightens and appalls us. Every one of the threads in that tapestry is fascinating, but the big picture is more astonishing still.

#2

The Lucifer Principle takes new data from a variety of sciences and shapes them into a perceptual lens through which to reinterpret the human experience. It argues that evil is woven into our most basic biological fabric.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The idea that the individual can control his own universe is a popular notion that was promoted by Eric Fromm, the psychoanalyst. However, this belief is based on a scientific fallacy that has become mainstream dogma.

#2

The stress response, with its high levels of corticosteroids and its clammy manifestations of anxiety, is a part of a fight-or-flight syndrome. But the stress response is not just a mechanism for self-defense; it is also debilitating because it shuts down our thought processes, cripples our immune system, and occasionally turns us into stupefied blobs of jelly.

Insights from Chapter 3

#1

The first principle of the Lucifer Principle is that complex things emerge from simple objects when you put them together. Entelechies are a example of this. Cultures are a result of the crowd being large enough.

#2

The five concepts are the meme, the neural net, the pecking order, the group mind, and the nature of despotism. They explain how our visions bestow the dream of peace, but they also turn us into killers.

Insights from Chapter 4

#1

In the mid-sixties, Mao Tse-tung tore the fabric of Chinese society apart. He unleashed the most primitive emotions, which ripped across China. However, the frenzy he had freed was not some freak child of his philosophies; it was the simple product of passions that squirm inside us every day.

#2

The Cultural Revolution was a campaign launched by Mao to regain control of China. It began innocently enough with a literary debate in the newspapers, but soon moved onto the schools. Students were encouraged to write their own excoriations of the traitors, as one newspaper put it.

#3

The students at the Three Family Village school were also assigned to find and expose any teachers who had bourgeois tendencies or were guilty of revisionism. They would publicly shame their teachers, and some teachers couldn’t take the humiliation.

#4

The Red Guards went on a campaign