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to the on-line home of the Expert Witness
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Hosted by Michael
Levine - one of the most highly decorated DEA agents in that agency's
history, and co-hosted by Producer / Engineer / Webmaster Mark
Marshall.
The Expert Witness Radio Show primarily
centers around issues of government ineptitude and media complacency -
with a particular focus on politics and the intelligence community.
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The
Genius of the Beast...
Listen
(mp3 - 13mb)
"The
first decade of the twenty-first century gave the Western World one skull-cracking
slap after another. The Great Crash of 2008, the downing of New York’s
World Trade Center, the implosion of major corporations like General Motors,
Chrysler, Merrill Lynch, and Citibank, and the growth of China to superpower
status--these were wakeup punches. They handed you and me--CEOs, researchers,
artists, students, and thinkers--what may be our greatest opportunity
and our greatest responsibility since the Great Depression and the Nazis
threatened to topple the Western way of life in the 1930s.
Our civilization is under attack. But
many of us don’t want to defend it. Why? There's a void in our sense of
meaning. We’ve been told that the "the Western system" is one in which
the rich stoke artificial needs to suck money, blood, and spirit from
the rest of us.1 We've been told 9 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 artificial flavors, chemical preservatives,
and the cheap sugars of junk food. And some of that is true.
But the problem does not lie in the
turbines of the Western way of life--it does not lie in industrialism,
capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in
the lens through which we see. Emotional flows have powered our past and
will drive our future, too. But we’ve never had the perceptual lens to
bring them into view. Capitalism works. It works for reasons that don’t
appear in the analyses of Marx or in the statistics of economists. It
works clumsily, awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes savagely.
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical re-Vision of Capitalism attempts to
show you how and why."
The above is an excerpt from Howard
Bloom's latest book The Genius of
the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism Putting Soul In the Machine.
Tonight, Howard returns to the show to speak with Mike and Mark about
this amazing book.
About the guest:
Howard
Bloom, 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.
Bloom 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, Bloom 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, Bloom 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, Bloom 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.
Bloom 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
a skill 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," Bloom 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.
"More important is the impact of a communal
ritual like a rock concert. The star onstage is taken over by a self he
doesn't know, one that seems to surge through him as if he were a length
of empty pipe. The force of this strange passion welds the audience in
an almost transcendent bond." Bloom's task was to first experience
the exaltation, then to dissect it. "The model for this work,"
he says, "came from William James, who attempted to feel the ecstatic
experience of mystics, then to probe it scientifically, a process which
led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience."
Bloom's forays into power and its manipulations were
also intense. "In the music and film industry everyone knew that
money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply
what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the
responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an
equal with the entertainment industry's elite, many of whom I either had
to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message
of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists but used their
intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to
others. Others were far more ethical. Yet even the best-intentioned employed
boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees.
Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social
animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes."
The subculture of Washington politics was, to Bloom,
the most disturbing of them all. Bloom founded Music in Action, a national
anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with
Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate
Al Gore. Says Bloom, "Tipper and the right wing religionists who
used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. They
perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince
the press and public that their falsifications were true."
Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity
are devoted to Bloom 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."
Says British neuroscientist Dr. John Robert Skoyles
of Howard Blooms science and of his photography, "Michelangelo
walked around a piece of marble trying to sense the work within. Bloom
hunts the banal of modern environment trying to sense the aesthetics hidden
away in what we overlook."
In 1981, Bloom 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 Bloom 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."
Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written
that with his unusual insights Bloom 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, Howard Bloom brings those
understandings from dimness into the light.
.More about Howard at his website.

Mike on Inside
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