Howard Bloom Quotes

By the nineteenth century... new circumstances called for new conformity enforcers... The government locked you in a house of penitence—a penetentiary—where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you without cease.

Humor is a conformity enforcer clothed in the garb of congeniality. It focuses on others' weaknesses, disasters, stupiidities, and abnormalities.

Sociological researchers maintain a mask of objectivity. But... when students in these movements report facts that contradict the tenets of their group's creed, they are... punished for their heresy. ...forcing them "to leave the movement." A similar mechanism of repression is at work in every scientific discipline that I know.

Remember a networked learning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections to those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail.

Through our sentences and paragraphs long-gone ghosts still have their say within the collective mind.

The ultimate repository of herd influence is language—a device which not only condenses the opinions of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on.

Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave.

Almost every reality you "know" at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory.

Individual perception untainted by others' influence does not exist.

Reality is a fabrication slapped together by an often bumbling inner team. ...The proclamation that "there can be no such thing as an objective fact" has a great deal of validity.

In the Vienna of the late 1020s and 1930s there throve an internationally famous philosophical bunch called the logical positivists. ...They said that a key ingredient of knowledge was "sense data," and proclaimed emphatically, in the words of... J.S.L. Gilmour, that sense data are "objective and unalterable." …Good guess, but no cigar!

When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"… Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. ...behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds.

By 1999, over 880 studies suggested that some mutations might... be genetic alterations "custom tailored" to overcome emergencies.

A collective learning machine achieves its feats by using five elements... (1) conformity enforcers; (2) diversity generators; (3) inner-judges; (4) resource shifters; and (5) intergroup tournaments.

If entemologists have things backward, their errors have spawned a host of others central to modern evolutionary science. ...E. O. Wilson is... the founder of a rich and fruitful discipline—sociobiology. And sociobiology has... helped lay the groundwork for the dogma of the "selfish gene."