The Holy War of militant Islam against the West and the current crisis of confidence in the American economy have hit the citizens of the Western World with a challenge of an unprecedented kind. They have given you and me--readers, culture-makers, publishers, editors, journalists, pundits, and thinkers--what may be our greatest opportunity and our greatest responsibility since the Depression and the Nazis threatened to topple the Western Way of Life in 1933.

There’s a void in our sense of meaning. We have come to regard “the Western System” as one in which the rich stoke artificial needs to suck money, blood, and spirit from the rest of us. We’ve been told that the barons of industry work overtime to turn us from sensitive humans into consumers—mindless buyers listlessly watching TV while growing obese on the hydrogenated fats, artificial flavors, chemical preservatives, and the cheap sugars of junk food. And some of that is true.

 

Anti-capitalism poster by the early Marxist/Leninist artist Victor Deni, 1919. The vocabulary of Marx subtly dominates the way we see The Western System. This Marxist legacy unwittingly encourages a capitalist error--greed

 

But the problem does not lie in the pistons of the Western Way of Life—it does not lie in industrialism, capitalism, modernism, pluralism, free speech, unfettered information exchange, and democracy. The problem lies in us—in you and me. It also lies in our bosses, in our corporate CEOs, in our intellectual elite, in our super-rich, and in our political leaders. We fail to see what’s under our nose—a set of moral imperatives and of heroic demands that are implicit in The Western Way of Being. We fail to see our magic, our gifts, and our utopian capacities.

 

The engines of the Western System lie in the emotional core of you and me.

 

We are saviors who must wake up to our powers. We have to grab the rush of satisfaction that comes from liberating other human beings. We have to see the line of Holy Grails that we’re achieving. And we have to see the spires and the cliffs between idealism and greed.

Self-revelation can make leaders liberators of their fellow human beings.

 

Howard Bloom’s Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In The Machine shares something in common with his two previous critically-acclaimed books, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century. Reinventing Capitalism is what author Leon Uris called, “An act of astonishing intellectual courage." It is what leading business author Dr. Alexander Elder called, “A brilliant, thrilling book on the human condition.” It is what Gear Magazine Publisher Bob Guccione, Jr called, “an epoch-making and culture-defining treatise.” It is what self-help author Kevin Hogan called, “The Bible…a monumental work…that has instant application in the world.” And it’s what reviewer Michael B. Leach called “nothing less than a reinterpretation of the history of civilization.” Reinventing Capitalism offers a perceptual lens with which to view our culture and our values in new ways.

 

Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from The Big Bang to the 21st Century.

 

Business, commerce, and exchange, Bloom says, are at the heart of Western Civilization. We spend more time at work than at any other activity. Capitalism is what we do each day. But capitalism is not at all what we think.

Bloom’s Soul In The Machine: Reinventing Capitalism reveals a deeper meaning beneath what we’ve been told is crass materialism. It shows how profoundly our obsessive making and exchanging of goods and services has upgraded the nature of our species, has given it new powers, has endowed it with the equivalent of new arms, legs, ears, eyes, and brains. Reinventing Capitalism reveals the ethics, the morality, and the ideals implicit in what we think of as demeaning—in our labors and in our ways of selling them. It shows why what we have is worth living and dying for and why what we do will continue to ennoble the human race. Reinventing Capitalism explains why The Western System nurtures visions far more sublime than those of its enemies, whether those enemies are the global forces of militant Islam, the cynics who use capitalism to cheat, the postmodern anti-Globalist anti-Capitalists, the local Maoist guerrillas of Nepal, the Che-Guevarist guerrillas of Colombia, or the Neo-Indigenous-Culture Revolutionaries of Zapatista Mexico.

Reinventing Capitalism reveals an implicit code by which we live—a code that demands that we uplift each other. Though we don’t know it, capitalism condemns those who use it criminally. Capitalism punishes its thieves and charlatans—those like the wheeler-dealers of Enron who stuffed their pockets but failed to make the contribution they were paid to make.

 

Capitalism calls for heroism…a fact we must learn to perceive.

 

Reinventing Capitalism tells the story of the rise of civilization in a way you’ve never imagined before. It stresses new concepts:

• Stored vision
• microempowerment
• Tuned empathy
• mass moodswings
• Messianic Capitalism
• Prophetic Leadership
• Emotional exchange
• The hells and heavens created by our neurobiology seven times a day
• Secular salvation
• The hungers in the fissures of our brain
• Management by walking outside
• Creative capitalism vs. criminal capitalism
• And visioneering.

Reinventing Capitalism shows the vigor in what we’ve seen as dull. It glistens with new ways to perceive the power hiding in the everyday.

• In the mid 1700s, cotton clothes were a luxury import only the very rich could afford. The masses worked from day to day in stiff fabrics that scratched and tortured the skin. In roughly 1800, capitalism introduced the cotton mill and changed the very nature of the shirt upon man’s back. By the 20th century, capitalism had made a cotton t-shirt the norm even for the poorest Sub-Saharan African.
  

French painter Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of his wealthy sister-in-law—Emilie Seriziat. The year was 1795—shortly before the invention of the power loom and the mass-production of cotton fabrics. An “elegant” outfit like the one Mme. Seriziat is wearing was available only to the super-rich.

• In the early 1800s, sending an urgent letter to a relative half a continent away could take months or weeks. Then capitalism built the telegraph system, and made sending messages across continents and seas a matter of hours.
  

Samuel F. B. Morse’s first telegraph, 1832. Telegraph lines. Telegraph boys. The telegraph system dramatically upgraded the distance-crunching power of our species.

• In the mid 1840s, a trip from New York to California took a year and a half by either wagon or by sailing ship. Your odds of dying on the way were roughly one in five. Then in 1868 there came a capitalist masterpiece, the transcontinental railway, and snipped the trip down to a week. In the 20th century, capitalism gave the average citizen jet wings and slivered the New York-LA trip from roughly 100 hours to five.

Mankind has been transformed by its machinery. Canyon-crossing took days when we relied on the transport mechanism evolution gave us—legs.

Every one of these capitalist leaps changed the nature of being human. And every one of them set new forces of emotion and of imagination free. But without leaders who can preach, these techno-deeds have been devoid of meaning. Without inspired citizens like you and me, there will be no meaning even for tomorrow’s most elevated dreams.

***

It’s time for all of us—for those in our offices and our homes, and for culture-leaders in boardrooms, universities, and editorial headquarters--to wake up and see that humans are nourished by perception, nourished by passion, nourished by feeling. It’s time for us to see the emotional substance in what we’ve mistakenly labeled with a dehumanized vocabulary, the language of clods, lumps, stones, and numbers—the language of “materialism,” “commodification,” “consumerism,” “derivatives,” “transfer agents,” “utility maximization,” “quarterly profits,” “products,” “markets,” and “supply and demand.”

Norman Rockwell’s art was despised by the intellectual elite while he was alive. But Rockwell saw something many of us in offices, boardrooms, and conference rooms fail to see--the people we serve, the fellow humans to whom we must dedicate our passions, our visions, and our moral commitment.

People are the ones who demand. We do it because we desire, we hanker, we hunger, we’re eager, we’re roused. Or we’re deadened, we’re hurt, we’re unsatisfied, we need. Wanting is an emotional thing. Value is emotionality. So is price. And so is profit. Coin is massed attention. Cash is emotional need.

The task of the capitalist is to feel and to fill others’ unspoken needs.

It’s not the plastic or the silicon in what we make that counts. It’s the passion, stupid! It’s the emotional boost, the emotional satisfaction, the emotional soar, the emotional swiftness, the emotional whisper, the emotional roar, and the emotional solidity.

We desperately need a reinvention and a re-perception of the system that has given Western Civilization its long-term strength and its recent weaknesses. We need the Capitalism of Passion. Those who struck us on 9/11 peddle passion brilliantly. They feed the hunger for meaning with the junk food of emotion—violence and righteous fury. Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine reveals how The Capitalism of Passion offers those of us who are emotionally starved a more solid meal—the exuberance of satisfying others, the exhilaration of feeling wanted, and the elation of creativity. If we don’t learn to smell—and sell—this plate of steak and cup of coffee, you and I may well soon cease to be.

The Knife At Our Throat

Evolution has given us the legacy of war. It has also given us the capacity to compete creatively. We feed and elevate each other when we compete economically.

Here’s the Death-of-Western-Civilization Report as of early 2003. Islam’s been crusading against Dar El Harb, the Land of the Unbeliever, since the first Mohammedan armies swept from the Arab Peninsula in roughly 634 A.D. Those conquering forces took Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, India, Afghanistan, the Western edge of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Central Asia, Somalia, the Sudan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. For most of that time, Islam had the Western world penned in—keeping Europeans out of the vast Islamic Imperium, ruling Spain and Portugal, seizing control of Sicily, Sardinia, and entire regions of Italy, raiding England, Ireland, and the Caucasus Mountains for slaves, conquering lands in Bosnia, Sarajevo, and Albania, and repeatedly attacking Vienna.

Osama bin Laden, in nearly every speech, laments the day in 1922 when the West dissolved the Moslem Empire of the Turks and took Islam’s power to attack away. It is the fondest dream of Osama and of those who follow in his wake to return Islam to the offensive, but this time to do it with Western technology. 9/11 was sent as the merest foretaste of future deeds.

A proud symbol of the ancient Islamic empire: a Turkish harem guard…probably a slave seized in Africa and castrated to eliminate his interest in the women he helped imprison.

The Jihadists—the preachers of Holy War—want everything. The world! As Osama sees it, the boundaries of Islam’s nation-states are dividing lines that Westerners contrived to weaken the Ummah—the vast family of Islam. It is time, says Osama, for a global caliphate.

Mujahed (Holy Warrior) with rocket propelled grenade.

It’s won a third of the population of Africa. It’s won all up and down central Asia. Its biggest wins have been in three huge states—India (where Islam has held sway periodically from the 11th Century on), Indonesia, and Malaysia. Islam’s won more than fifty nations and is infiltrating Europe furiously. Islam is the second-biggest religion in Britain. There are six million Moslems in France, and many of them are kicking up a fuss. There are Islamic communities and Islamic terror centers in Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, and Denmark. And they’re growing rapidly. 1.2 billion Moslems are spread around the world. They are urged by a mass of worldwide Islamic websites to perform Dawa—to resist assimilation and to convert you and me—peacefully with words if possible, otherwise violently.

The logos of a World Wide Website that promotes violent Jihad. Jama’at ud Da’wa explains to the world’s Moslems that there is no choice in the matter. “ Allah made it binding on the Muslims to fight in His way. Warfare is ordained for you, though you dislike it. ”

One of Jama’at ud Da’wa’s many web pages is titled “Dr. Mohsin Farooqi takes a look at the history of Muslim rule in Europe to remind the Muslim Ummah of its glorious past.” Dr. Farooqi crows about the days when, “Muslims from North Africa ravaged the coasts of Spain, Italy and France and even occasionally of England and Ireland devastating the cities and villages and carrying away booty and captives. …The terror of Muslim invaders…hung over Europe for centuries.” Farooqi’s detailed history ends with an ominous phrase: “…… to be continued.”

Many of the Moslems in the West are peaceful and productive. Some of them are not. Do the militants among those in Europe and America want to eradicate the Western way of life? You bet. Do some of those militants see the Moslem communities of the United States, Britain, and Europe as beachheads and as launch pads for conquest? Yes.

So what do we have to lose? Everything. The current crisis of capitalism isn’t just a normal economic rise and fall. It’s part of a bigger picture. We are fighting for our very way of life.

Was there joy in this new ability? Was there celebration of this newfound mastery? Were there games to see who could make the best stone blades and who could skin the fastest? Did fans and clans feel passion as they urged their champions on? The tools remain. The cheers are gone. But I suspect they happened.

One thing we know for sure. The ability to predict your destiny and to control it changes hormone flows in the body and the brain. It ups the level of immune system activity, hikes the level of health, tweaks the ability to see and think, and makes humans stand up straighter. Stone tools were humanity’s first handmade hormone boosters. They were also the first form of Capital.

Let’s take a minute out to rewrite Adam Smith and the potent but outmoded concepts with which he helped found economics in 1776. Capital has traditionally meant machines, buildings, tools, shafts, hafts, instruments, plans, savings, and the training that we use to make things that others wish for. Smith called capital stored labor. And he was right. But he picked up just one piece of the puzzle and left the others scattered on the floor. Breakthroughs come from more than just the work of those who carry out another’s intention. Every piece of capital begins as a new invention.

Capital is stored imagination. Capital is stored stress, stored vision, stored diligence to persist, and stored ability to inspire others to complete a task that seems impossible or frivolous. Capital is stored passion! The Acheulian hand axe of 1.5 million b.c. was a stone tool humans used for over a million years. It owed its existence to a mob of innovators and creators—

• the first man or woman insane enough to try to chip one stone with another
• the crazed obsessives who tried one stone after another and discovered that some can hold an edge far better than others
• the gossipers and promoters who spread the skill and made the strange behavior of the chippers universal
• the lunatic 900,000 years later who realized you could flake not just one side of a blade but two…and could double your cutting power.

In 110,000 B.C. the first totally emotional industry sprang up. This one catered to human vanity. In Spain, early humans developed makeup—complete with a palette of 70 shades—all of them red. We don’t know whether this ochre rouge was used to improve the natural pink that makes a woman seductive or to highlight the bright red that accompanies a mano a mano battle. The many shades hint to those of us in the evolutionary sciences that humans used this skin-paint to fill another basic emotional craving—the desire to both blend in and to stand out—the need to show that I’m a part of this group, I’m one of you, but I’m also someone special you must pay attention to, I’m me. The markings of fashion and of makeup serve these same emotional needs today.

Ochre carved with what may be the first human art.
70,000 BP (Before the Present).

Emotions are the heart of capital and trade.

Late Stone Age Natufians 11,000 years ago. The Natufians lived in caves in the Near East and gathered the seeds of wild grasses with a new invention, the sickle—a curved blade made of flint set in a handle made of bone.

Twelve thousand years ago the Ice Age ended, the glaciers melted, and the Near East became a paradise. Its seas of grass were top-heavy with delectable seeds. Its meadows were grazed by armies of roastable, stewable red deer and of the nine-foot-high, bakeable wild bull Bos taurus. Nature had granted humans a new summertime, and the living was easy. But even in the laziest of days humans thrive on challenge, on creating new opportunities, new ways. Emotional brain-centers like the nucleus accumbens and the mossy fibers of the hippocampus drive us to seek and to create new novelties.

Ten thousand years ago, in the late Stone Age tribes of hunters contrived a new civilization-knitter. This culture-weaving forward leap satisfied the human need to meet, to greet, to clump, and to cluster. It also slaked the thirst for new amazements. It did it with capital--with stored imagination and stored emotion. It took capitalism to new levels of the impossible…to what Dallas CEO coach O. Woodward Buckner—who helped inspire this book--calls “unreasonable future outcomes,” inconceivable utopian realities.

If you scrimped, saved, traded, swapped, and slaved, you could make a stone axe on your own. But cities were the product of vast teamwork done on stone.

Excavation of another radical invention. These were the first stone walls and watch towers in human history—the walls of Stone-Age Jericho, built 10,000 years ago.

The inspiration that gave birth to the first city—Jericho--10,000 years ago was the notion of shaping stones bigger than a giant’s torso. For a hundred thousand years, boulders had been obstacles men and women had tripped on, had walked around, had hidden behind, or had leaned against when it came time to sit. Boulders were nature’s cast-offs, overgrown pebbles too big for any use. The first human who thought of employing them for a grander purpose was a prophetic leader, a redeemer to the nth degree. Think of all the impossible steps he had to foresee:

• Leveraging a massive rock out of the ground or from the base of a nearby cliff.
• Chiseling its surface with mere stone tools. Hammering for weeks or months if that’s what flattening its surface would take.
• Organizing teams to do the chiseling. Persuading others to take time out from hunting and gathering. To do what? A task that must have seemed worse than useless at the time.
• Getting those teams to lug each hulking hunk to a central place—again, for what? For no practical purpose anyone with common sense could see.
• Piling the stones atop each other, fitting them into each others’ jigsaw shapes. For what? Just to make a heap? What in the world could a heap of boulders be good for? Who could tell? A boulder-pile had never proven useful for a thing—not in the entire time this planet had hosted human beings.
• Extending the heap upward and outward until, years later, it finally made some sense. Aha, it was something formerly only made of wood—a palisade, a mega-fence.

The result was a masterpiece of capital--of stored inspiration, stored imagination, stored leadership, stored persistence, stored labor, and stored organization. It was a radically new way of housing humans in something better than a cave. It was a new way to gain control over where your homes were placed. It was a new way to protect you from more than cold and rain. It was a new way to defend yourself when your rivals came to raid. It was a new way to gather many tribes in one common place. It was a new way to lead lives…a way in which you could pick and choose your calling, your career, your specialty.

And it was a new way to upgrade the art of trade. This masterpiece of stored emotion, stored vision, and stored promotion was a form of capital we mistakenly take for granted--the stone wall, the stone building…and the entire stone city.

The creation of stone walls had an unintended consequence—it led to the lifestyle breakthrough called city living. And it pulled this off in the Stone Age, a whopping eight thousand years before the heyday of ancient Rome.

A notion like this must have seemed a manic, raving dream. It must have felt insane even to the man or woman who first daydreamed it.

We humans don’t take kindly to insanities. Wild ideas scare us, they fill us with anxiety. They make us fear we’re losing it, straying grotesquely from the beaten path we call reality. Grandiose ideas riddle us with doubt, a feeling that sets our body churning in a frenzy—filling it with self-destructive hormones—glucocorticoids. To have an idea so long-term and so complex, to stick with it, to preach it with such fervor that you make others see it too, to recruit a team, to teach them, to organize them, to evangelize them, to reaffirm the goal in their emotions day after seemingly-useless day and year after year seemingly-useless year with nothing to show for the sweat and pain--that is what CEO-coach Buckner calls “leadership beyond reason, leading from the future,” beckoning from a vision so vividly that you can make others taste a paradise they’ve never seen. Jericho required seeing an absurd goal so intensely that you can take it from mere daydream into being. This is what leadership at its truest means—leading from the future toward unreasonable expectations, leading past the impossible to the point of victory.

It’s the passion, stupid! Jericho was a treasure trove of human emotionality. Its mortarless boulder walls provided a feeling for which the human soul cries out—security.

Norman Rockwell’s visual statment on the importance of security.

These Stone Age hi-tech fortifications were 6.5-feet thick and four times the height of a man. They were surrounded by a trench nine-feet deep and 27-feet wide, and protected by lookout towers.

The citizens of Jericho were the first humans to be freed from the narrow limitations of living in a tribe. They could exult in strolling down the street to meet and greet the folks of other clans, swapping knowledge, skills, arts, crafts, beads, pottery, and, in all probability, stories, song, and poetry. This was capitalism’s gift—empowerment—taken to the nth degree.

Jericho looked for other dreams and found them. It was built on the site of an oasis, so it had a monopoly on the local water supply. Jericho turned itself into a rest-stop, a paradise on a trail that traders followed. The capitalists of Jericho invented inns and transformed their town into the grand hotelier of its time, offering new forms of relaxation and haven in the midst of travel.

Fantasy is critical to prophetic leadership.

The mere existence of Jericho upscaled the ambitions of the human enterprise. There’s a good chance that Jericho’s presence inspired the traditional hunter-gatherer groups in its vicinity—the Natufians--to stop harvesting seeds at random and to deliberately plant them, thus inventing farming. Agriculture fed more than the stomach—it satisfied the human need to know where your next meal was coming from. Capital did what it does today—it raised the level of desire. It empowered mightily.

We take the bounty given us by the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago for granted. We should never be blind to basic satisfactions. Filling them is one of capitalism’s implicit commandments.

Within two thousand years, other cities had sprung up. Catal Huyuk, 1,500 miles from Jericho in today’s Turkey, was based on another act of unbelievable imagination. Take mud. Yes, mud, that irritating stuff that slows you down when you walk the fields in the rainy season, that stuff that wells up to your ankles and leaves its track wherever you put your feet.

Here’s a little secret evolution used long before the first human arrived. Where others see garbage, you must see gold. Where others see an irritant, you must see an opportunity. Why? So you can delight, satisfy, and upgrade your fellow humans’ lives.

The inventors of Catal Huyuk took mud and shaped it in rectangles of a standard size and shape. Then they left these geometric lumps in the sun to dry. Catal Huyuk’s inventors inspired many of their clan-mates and acquaintances to do the same. Like the wall-builders of Jericho, they created teams from what were tribes. They gave others a vision of new possibilities in their lives. They excited others with their flame. When enough bricks were made, they fired up the passions of the masses that they’d gathered, and proposed a new form of collaborative enterprise--piling these modular mud units in carefully-planned straight lines. Once the baked-mud rectangles had all been slid in place, the leaders and the teams they inspired must have looked with awe at what they’d done. They’d created the first brick housing complex—two stories high by roughly a quarter of a mile long.

A neighborhood in one of the first brick cities, Catal Huyuk, founded roughly 8,500 years ago. Catal Huyuk’s 35 acres of apartment complexes were made from seven ingredients: imagination, persistence, passion, evangelization, organization, wood, and mud.

Oh, how the place was made to satisfy. Each family had an apartment of three rooms—one for sleeping, one for cooking and for eating, and one for storage. Every apartment came complete with a carefully crafted hole in the eating room floor--a built-in hearth and oven. This first garden-apartment development catered to feeling—to the need not just for security from marauders, but for a place to sleep, for a roof over your head, and for a place to call your own. For the first time ever, it guaranteed a nuclear family’s privacy. Once again, capitalism had upgraded the range of human possibility. It had made the unreasonable an everyday mundanity. Capitalism had given a frontier of new empowerments to humankind.

Interior decoration in Catal Huyuk 8,000 years ago—5,000 years before the rise of Greece’s city-states. The walls were painted with vivid images of goddesses, hunters, and, in the bottom right hand corner, of the city’s ground plan and the nearby volcano that gave Catal Huyuk its rich store of exportable treasure: obsidian.

When humans upgrade their powers, they upgrade their species. Thanks to emotional exchange, by 8,000 years ago, when Catal Huyuk’s first brick was cast, humanity had outpaced biology and put itself through three radical upgrades. It had gone from Homo sapiens sapiens—man equipped by nature with a brain that could store and create new knowledge—to Homo silex fabrica—man the stone trader and manufacturer--to yet another incarnation, what some in evolutionary science would call another extended phenotype—Homo urbanis--man reinvented by his own invention, the city.

New technologies, new abilities, and new forms of teamwork generate new dreams. Yes,

One of mankind’s perpetual aspirations—The Garden of Allah. The creator of this illustration was a contemporary of Chesley Bonestell’s--Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966). Bonestell and Parrish helped energize Western men and women to lift their sights, imagineer, and dream.

Thanks to the invention of the Rogallo wing, we humans
can now fly. Hang-gliding over Paris.

Table of Contents
Soul In the Machine
Reinventing Capitalism
A QUICK RE-VISION OF WESTERN HISTORY
By
Howard Bloom

Maxfield Parrish caught the spirit of Emotional Capitalism when he used Prometheus—the Greek god who stole fire and brought it to man—to advertise Thomas Alva Edison’s new invention, the light bulb (1919).

Moses Before The Burning Bush, by Domenico Feti 1613. Moses was forced to look deeply into himself and to sell his visions passionately. His next task was to sense and fill the needs of those followed him through 40 years of what often seemed like lunacy.

 

The silent scream of History

The Businessman As Seer And Servant
The Evolution Of Trade
Adam Smith’s Error—Capital Is More Than Just Stored Labor, It’s Stored Vision And Persistence, Stored Passion And Persuasion, Too
Marx’s Seductive Muzzle
Taylorism And Scientific Management
Sloan’s Place In Corporate History—“Decentralization With Coordinated Control”—1957
False Synergies Are Suicide—The Merger-And-Acquisition Craze
Deming, Peters, Quality Circles And Management By Walking Around
Messianic Capitalism—Management By Walking Outside

THE POSITIVE POWER OF NOVELTY LUST

The Case For Consumerism
Two Evolutionary Needs—Control And Novelty
The Hungers In The Fissures Of The Brain

Reinventing CAPITALISM
The care and feeding of emotion

Economics—Cash Is Massed Attention, Coin Is Emotional Need
Value Is A Passion Called Desire—Massmoods And Markets
Credit Is A Feeling Called Belief
Small Business And Explorer Bees
Global Competition—He Who Feels Will Lead

Passion Points
The Science of the Human Soul

Passion Points—Imprinting And Soul
The Presence of The Ancestors
Rousing The Soul of a Company
Selling Secular Salvation--Profits Through Self Revelation
Don’t Be Deceived By Your Mask
The Secret Of Tuned Empathy
When Selfishness Is A Blessing
Soul And The Art Of Selling
Prophetic Leadership—Feeling The Group You Serve Within You

This dollar is my body and my blood

Transubstantiation—Making Spirit Flesh
Microempowerment—Reinventing The Mundane
Inventions That Turn Garbage Into Gold
Offering An Ego-Stake
Guerilla Meeting Mastery
Visioneering—Dare to Use Your Fantasies

MESSIANIC CAPITALISM
SET MY PEOPLE FREE

The Poisonous Power Of Greed
The Big Lie Versus The Big Truth—In Business, Honesty Is The Force
Don’t Just Pitch, Deliver
Seeking The Golden Mean—Caring Capitalism Vs. Criminal Capitalism
Corporations In A Coma—Rousing the Dead from Bureaucracy
Let Us Save The Hollow Men—Set Your People Free

A child hang-gliding—a product of the spare time, the vision, and the
technology of Western Civilization.

About the author
Howard Bloom

Companies for which The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd. generated billions of dollars in gross revenues.

 

Howard Bloom, a visiting scholar in the Graduate Psychology Department at NYU, is the author of two critically acclaimed books, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century.

From 1968 to 1988, Bloom did fieldwork in the world of business and mass media. As a $3,500/day consultant, Bloom's applications of his theories generated billions of dollars in revenue for companies like Sony, CBS, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, EMI, ABC, Gulf and Western, MCA/Universal, Manesmann, Polygram, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, and Disney.

Bloom helped Sony launch its first software operation in the U.S. (Sony Video), helped establish the three films that put the new Disney on the map, and advised the strategists putting together a new venture called MTV.

Reinventing Capitalism incorporates the techniques Bloom honed to help clients like Warner Brothers, Polygram, and CBS open revenue streams of over $200 million per year per company from projects that would otherwise have been shelved or sidelined.

 

Gear Magazine, Spring 2001.

 

Bloom is also the founder of two scientific fields, mass behavior and paleopsychology. He is the founder of three international scientific groups: The Group Selection Squad, The International Paleopsychology Project, and The Science of the Soul Initiative. He is a founding member of the Epic of Evolution Society, a Founding Council Member of The Darwin Project, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Political Science, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the International Society of Human Ethology.

Bloom is an advisory board member of Youthactivism.org, and executive editor of two books by his scientific colleagues: William Benzon’s Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books) and Dorion Sagan and Dr. John Robert Skoyles’ Up From Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence. Bloom appears in Who’s Who In America and has been featured in every issue of Who’s Who In Science and Technology since the publication’s inception.

From 1968 until 1988, Bloom infiltrated the highest levels of corporate and popular culture to research what he calls "the dark underbelly of mass emotion." In the process, he generated profits by turning business on its head. In 1968 he co-founded the leading avant-garde commercial art studio on the East Coast and was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine. In 1971 he became head of an obscure music magazine, Circus. This monthly covered a musical form Bloom had never listened to before—rock and roll.

Bloom from the cover of Art Direction Magazine, 1972.

 

Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific methods, Bloom boosted the publication's sales 211% and made it the highest-circulation music monthly in America. Bloom was credited by veteran Rolling Stone editor Chet Flippo with inventing a new genre-the heavy metal magazine.

In 1975, Bloom created a Public and Artist relations department for Gulf & Western’s fourteen record companies. He was credited with increasing the value of these companies dramatically—so dramatically that Gulf & Western was able to sell its music operation to ABC for a hefty profit.

Dazed n Confused Magazine, Britain, July 2001

 

In 1976, Bloom founded The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd. and helped guide the careers of Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Queen, Kiss, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, AC/DC, Run-D.M.C., Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Joan Jett, Billy Idol, Simon & Garfunkel, Diana Ross, and Bette Midler, among others. Bloom specialized in establishing new subcultural movements within the music community—crossover country music, heavy metal, rap, disco, punk, and black crossover.

Bloom is featured in such basic texts as The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity, which contains 20 pages on his "perceptual engineering." techniques. He has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, the CBS Morning News, CBS Nightwatch, CNN, BBC-TV, Spanish Public Television’s Redes, and the Australian Broadcasting Company’s equivalent to 60 Minutes—Lateline. Holland’s VPRO-tv aired a three-hour special on Bloom’s theories about violence; Holland’s KRO starred Bloom in a one-hour television special based on his book Global Brain; and Britain’s Channel4 profiled Bloom in a half-hour segment that increased ratings from a normal eleven to a sixteen share in its time slot.

Bloom’s videolectures and live electronic speeches have been used at conventions of businessmen, scientists, media professionals, information specialists, and avant-artists from Amsterdam, New York, Houston, and Boulder, to Nevada’s Burning Man Festival, San Francisco’s Exploratorium, San Francisco’s 21st Century Leadership Program, and Australia’s Electrofringe Festival.

Illustration of Bloom by artist Will Robertson, used for Bloom’s electronic appearance at the San Francisco’s Exploratorium’s QuantumVIZ: Social Networks, Planetary Visualization & Dynamic InfoScapes.

 

Dr. Christopher Boehm, Director of The Jane Goodall Research Center, says that, “Howard Bloom should be taking notes on what he is doing every minute of the day. He is single-handedly creating a scientific revolution.” Gear Magazine says, “Howard Bloom may just be the next Stephen Hawking. But he’s not just interested in science, he’s interested in the human soul.” And Britain’s Channel4 TV concludes that, “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."

One of the many things Bloom is poised to change is the perception and the practice at our culture’s core—its business.

 

Opinions
On
Howard Bloom
His Books
And
Media Appearances

Blooms video lecture on “Leadership in a Networked Age”

 

"For those who worry that our ingenuity has upset nature's equilibrium, Bloom has a message that is both reassuring and sobering. 'We are nature incarnate,' he writes. 'We are tools of her probings and if, indeed, we suffer and we fail, from our lessons she will learn which way in the future not to turn.'"

"Readers will be mesmerized by the mirror Bloom holds to the human condition, and dumbfounded by the fusillade of eclectic data that arrives with the swiftness and intensity of a furious tennis volley. His style is effortless, engaging, witty and brisk.... He draws on a dozen years of research into a jungle of scholarly fields...and meticulously supports every bit of information...."

"Provocative...explosive...feisty...a string of rhetorical firecrackers that challenge our many forms of self-righteousness."

“Howard Bloom is a) for real, b) with brilliant ideas, c) more fun than a pair of mongooses.” Dr. Alexander Elder, author, Trading for a Living: Psychology, Trading Tactics, Money Management.

"When organizing our international conferences, an electronic appearance by Howard Bloom is a must. In all my research, reading, and exposure to complex ideas, I've never encountered a person who has Bloom's reach and depth. He seems to know things nobody else in the world knows, and he delivers his insights with a personal passion that is Messianic. Unlike other great thinkers, Bloom has ventured into the real world-in harm's way-to test his ideas and confront the Dragon in his own lair. What's more, he's survived to tell the tales. Howard Bloom is a global treasure." Don Beck, Ph.D., co-director, National Values Center, co-author of Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change, and creator of ® : The Search for Human Cohesion in a World of Fragmentation

"Draws heavily on biological and anthropological evidence to show that human beings are not by nature isolated, self-interested individuals but have powerful natural inclinations toward social groups, and that much of the violence and cruelty that has characterized human history is rooted in competition between groups for status and domination." Francis Fukuyama,

"Howard Bloom may just be the new Stephen Hawking, only he's not interested in science alone; he's interested in the soul." Aaron Hicklin, Gear

"Howard Bloom is the Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the new millennium." Bonnie De Varco, former archivist for the Buckminster Fuller Archive

“Bloom takes a broad —make that very broad —view of history, closely examining, in a manner never explored before him, the biological and psychological roots of mass behavior with his science of Paleopsychology. What Bloom gives his readers is a new and extremely compelling revisionist history of the entirety of the history of life on this planet —microbial, mammalian and otherwise —and nothing less. His books are absolutely essential —and riveting —reading. Yes, it’s true, missing out on Bloom would be like missing out on Newton, Darwin, Freud or Fuller. You’d lack a fundamental cornerstone of modern intellectual life….” Richard Metzger, creative director, the Disinformation Company, author of Disinformation: The Interviews

"I have finished Howard Bloom's two books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I
doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom's on the planet." Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution's End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg.

***

"A soaring song of songs about the amorous origins of the world, and its almost medieval urge to copulate." Kevin Kelly, Editor-at-Large, Wired, author New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control

"arresting...deft...graceful...Howard Bloom is something we do not much encounter anymore:...a polymath. 'The Lucifer Principle' is a corking good read, the sort of book that fills the reader with a desire to grab the phone and pick a fight with the author roughly every three pages, just to see what will happen. ...heretical ...infuriating ...entertaining and challenging --which, now that I think of it, is a fair description of a good companion." L.J. Davis, author of The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a Future Nobody Wanted

"Unlike anything you've ever read before. An act of astonishing intellectual courage." Leon Uris, author of Exodus, Trinity, and The Haj

 

"Powerful" Ellen Langer, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of Mindfulness

 

"Controversial yet compelling," Howard Gardner, Harvard University, author of
Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century

 

"You are a true inspiration, a model of the leader who gives to his people, a secular prophet. Your contributions are like diamonds! Brilliant! As the diamond refracts light better than other transparent substances, so your intellect creates rainbows of insight." Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D., President, Solutions Consulting Group, Inc., author of Psychotherapy in the Age of Accountability

 

“Howard Bloom is the only person I know with knowledge of and interest in the behavior of all organisms, processes in evolution that have been going on for billions of years, but also the most ephemeral cultural phenomena. Bloom's probably the only person alive today who can make original and insightful comments on current political developments in the US, Far East or Middle East with the benefit of knowledge of the evolution of the universe in the past 13 billion years. It’s as if Bloom were an immortal observer from a different universe.” Marcel Roele, science writer for Holland's Algemeen Dagblad, Intermediair, and HP/De Tijd. Former board member of European Sociobiological Society and former book review editor of the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems. Author of: De eeuwige lokroep: Over seks, sekseverschillen en relaties; and De mietjesmaatschappij: Over politek incorrecte feiten.

 

"In the '70s, celebrities went to feel good doctors for 'Super vitamin' shots; b complex or something. The celebs usually felt euphoric and exhilarated for days. My six interviews with Howard Bloom have made me feel the same way. Our chats leave my brain spinning with so many new ideas, I'm inspired to push harder and think deeper. Howard, keep thinking, and above all, keep writing!" Jon Beaupre, KPFK-FM and KCET-TV, Los Angeles

More Quotes
On
Bloom

“Many thanks for appearing at the RLG Annual Meeting in Amsterdam. …It was the call to a future many in this community have imagined dimly. How you managed to echo what you hadn’t seen—the other speakers talked of agents, simulations, virtual communities and context as knowledge—astonished me. I was a fan before, now I’m an admirer and grateful advocate.” James Michalko. President. Research Libraries Group, re video lecture on the Future of Knowledge-Generation, Amsterdam, April 23, 2002.

"Thank you so much for such a stimulating, awesome convention last weekend. I have to admit the most powerful piece, the one that really moved me and literally brought me and my girlfriend to tears, was the video of Howard Bloom." D. Shawn Bosler, The Village Voice, writing to the organizers of the DisinfoCon 2000 convention.

"Congratulations on last night's show. I have honestly never seen anything like this before. It's televisual narcotics for the spirit. Howard Bloom is quite probably a genius." Bill Fairhall, viewer, Channel 4, Britain's half-hour profile on Howard Bloom.

"I just watched the Channel Four TV show for the first time last night with some of my best friends. I just wanted to let you know that you made me cry. You are simply one of the most wonderful human beings I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. You put so succinctly, so poetically, and so powerfully a message I have long been trying to articulate--a message of the wonder and hope that is finally close for all of us. Your appearance on that show, Howard, moved me beyond words. It just resonated inside of me, with something I have put my faith in since I was a little kid. You are going to touch so many people, Howard. You touched me dearly, and I wanted to thank you for it. Even now, tears are coming to my eyes. Thank you so much. You are such a brilliant light, Howard, a fantastic, brilliant, light. Thank you, thank you, thank you." Nick Hodulik

“Why am I scared? Because I am 18 years old and used to think of myself as liberal through and through. Now I can't. I used to spit on the American flag because of political blunders, now I can't. I used to forgive ultra-Conservatives, excuse away religious fundamentalists, cheer on pacificists. I thought I had a mind! I thought I had free will! I thought I had goals and dreams and wonders and I thought I was ALIVE! Now nothing matters. Nothing. I am a hairy lad, and I have read more books on more subjects on more opinions than I have hairs. And none have sent me into the crazed spiral of self-doubt and worry that this book has. I am nothing now. Nothing. Everything is useless. Everything is pointless. But now I have eyes.