Howard Bloom Quotes

The notion that individualism came first runs against the very grain of cosmic history. ...grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons. Similarly, replicators—RNA, DNA, and genes—have always worked in teams... The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and echinoderms of the Cambrian age.

The microbial brain—gifted with long-range transport, data trading, genetic variants... and the ability to reinvent genomes—began its operations some 91 trillion bacterial generations before the birth of the Internet. Ancient bacteria, if they functioned like those today, had mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. ...The earliest microorganisms would have used planet-sweeping currents of wind and water to carry the scraps of genetic code...

Primordial communities of bacteria were elaborately interwoven by communication links. ...These turned a colony into a collective processor... The resulting learning machine was so ingenious that Eshel Ben-Jacob has called its modern bacterial counterpart a "creative web."

In our preoccupations with sex, our submission to gods and leaders, our sometimes suicidal commitment to ideas, religions, and trivial details of cultural style, we become the unconscious creators of the social organism's exploits.

The greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group. ...only group efforts can save us from the sporadic insanities of the group.

Men and animals do not merely struggle to maintain their individual existence; they are members of larger social groups. And, all too often, it is the social unit, not the individual, whose survival comes first.

We must build a picture of the human soul that works. ...a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. ...for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her.

From our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to pull apart. From our devotion to higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals come our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor—murder, torture, genocide, and war.

In a strange way, Marcion understood the situation better than the more conventional followers of the church, for Lucifer is merely one of the faces of a larger force. Evil is a by-product, a component, of creation.