Is global capitalism on its last legs? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does Western civilization even deserve to survive as it is now? These are just some of the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009. In "Genius of the Beast", visionary thinker Howard Bloom takes readers on a sweeping tour of human history, from the Stone Age to the present, presenting a radical new vision of capitalism and Western civilization. Arguing that underneath the economic mechanisms of capitalism lay hidden imperatives that have allowed man to create material miracles based on immaterial things, Bloom shows that what many believe to be the end of capitalism is merely the beginning.
"I know a lot of people. A lot. And I ask a lot of prying questions. But I've never run into a more intriguing biography than Howard Bloom's in all my born days. What's so striking, besides the you-gotta-be-kidding details, is the coherence of the narrative -- the arc that still has Bloom thinking and striving with regard to space, science, transcendence, and simple clarity, 55 years later. Sweet." Paul Solman, Business and Economics Correspondent, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer _______________
Howard Bloom has been called "the Darwin, Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st Century" by Britain's Channel4 TV and "the next Stephen Hawking" by Gear Magazine.
Bloom calls his field "mass behavior" and explains that his area of study includes everything from the mass behavior of quarks to the mass behavior of human beings. He is the founder of three international scientific groups: The Group Selection Squad (started in 1995), The International Paleopsychology Project (1997), and The Space Development Steering Committee (2007), which includes Buzz Aldrin, Edgar Mitchell (the sixth man to set foot on the moon), and decision makers from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Air Force. And he's the founder of a mass-communications volunteer group that gets across scientific ideas using animation, The Big Bang Tango Media Lab (started in 2001).
Bloom comes from the world of cosmology, theoretical physics, and microbiology. But he did 20 years of fieldwork in the world of business and popular culture, where he tested his hypotheses in the real world. In 1968 Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on what he calls his Voyage of the Beagle, an expedition to the dark underbelly where new myths, new historical movements, and new shifts in mass emotion are made.
The result: Bloom generated $28 billion in revenues (more than the gross domestic product of Oman or Luxembourg) for companies like Sony, Disney, Pepsi Cola, Coca Cola, and Warner Brothers. He accomplished this by taking profits out of the picture and focusing on passion and soul. He applied the same principle to star-making, helping build the careers of figures like Prince, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Billy Idol, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, John Mellencamp, Queen, Kiss, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, Run DMC, and roughly 100 others. Bloom also plunged into social causes. He helped Launch Farm Aid and Amnesty International in the United States, created two educational programs for the Black community, put together the first public-service radio advertising campaign for solar energy, and co-founded the leading national music anti-censorship movement in the United States, an organization that went toe-to-toe with Al Gore's wife Tipper and with the religious extremists manipulating her.
A former visiting scholar in the Graduate Psychology Department at New York University and a former Core Faculty Member at The Graduate Institute in two fields--Conscious Evolution and Organizational Leadership--Bloom is the author of four books: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History ("mesmerizing"--The Washington Post), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century ("reassuring and sobering"--The New Yorker), How I Accidentally Started The Sixties ("a monumental, epic, glorious literary achievement." Timothy Leary), and The Genius of the Beast: A Radical re-Vision of Capitalism ("exhilaratingly-written and masterfully-researched. I couldn't put it down."--James Burke).
But Bloom's chef d'oeuvre is a project of the kind that normally only lunatics undertake, the 5,700 chapters of what he unabashedly calls "The Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul." Pavel Kurakin of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow says that with the Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul, "Bloom has created a new Scientific Paradigm. He explains in vast and compelling terms why we should forget all we know in complicated modern math and should start from the very beginning. ...Bloom's Grand Unified Theory... opens a window into entire systems we don't yet know and/or see, new...collectivities that live, love, battle, win and lose each day of our gray lives. I never imagined that a new system of thought could produce so much light."
Concludes Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution's End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, "I have finished Howard Bloom's 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."
