(Conversation between Lucifer, Howard Bloom and a certain GJ – statements in italics are quotes from Bloom)
LUC: Howard, you are a merciless exposer of human weaknesses and criticize intellectuals like Erich Fromm who, you say, assign false greatness to man. Eric Fromm, the psychoanalytic guru of the sixties, turned the idea that the individual can control his own universe into a rabidly popular notion. Fromm told us that needing other people is a character flaw, a mark of immaturity. Possessiveness in a romantic relationship is an illness. Jealousy is a character defect of the highest magnitude. A mature individual is one who can drift through this world in the self-contained manner of an interstellar transport manufacturing its own oxygen and food. As a consequence, he had no need for the admiration and reassurance that only the weak long for.
GJ: Your criticism of Fromm does, of course, raise the question of why Fromm’s writings have been translated into most of the world’s languages and are admired by millions of people, while your book, The Lucifer Principle, is either completely unknown to most of them or only touched with tweezers by those who know it?
LUC: As my name implies, I am a light-bringer who blinds the eyes of the simple-minded. Seeing me many blink in sheer horror. Even the old good Lord loves illusions. That is why HE could not tolerate Eve tasting from a certain apple. Your professors are outraged for yet another reason. They loathe any outsider who intrudes into their enclosure. Howard is a genius of the PR industry spoiled by runaway success. He represented rock stars such as Michael Jackson, John Cougar Mellencamp and many other luminaries of the music world. When such an outsider claims to know more about man and nature than they, the state-certified specialists, they turn up their noses in indignation.
GJ: But that wouldn’t stop the large audience from eagerly picking up Mr. Bloom’s theses. Apparently, people don’t want to know anything about enlighteners who mercilessly dismantle their most cherished ideals. In contrast, they love men like Erich Fromm because they arouse their enthusiasm. What is the use of someone showing us our helplessness and our weakness? Mr. Bloom is in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes who was admired for his sharp mind, but no one loved him for that excellence.
HB: My point is not to diminish the human being. Or are neurologists belittling man when they prove that our genes determine our behavior as much as that of any other biological species? My point is to strengthen what is most precious in man: his self-knowledge. If, in the process, I succeed in shattering some of your cherished illusions, then accept that please as an intended side effect, for those who have illusions distort reality. Ideas can trigger the loftiest idealism and the basest cruelty. My book shows how the competition between groups can explain the mystery of our self-destructive emotions depression, anxiety, and hopelessness – as well as our ferocious addiction to mythology, scientific theory, ideology, and religion, and our one even more disturbing addiction – to hatred. 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.
LUC: Howard makes you appreciate how much you depend on me. In the creation of the world, I carefully consulted with the Ancient One when I planted evil in your souls.
HB: Evil is a by-product, a component, of creation. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor – murder, torture, genocide, and war. We need to stare directly into Nature’s bloody face and realize that she has saddled us with evil for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her. By the way, evil is by no means just a male thing. Peru’s Shining Path guerrilla assassination squads were headed almost entirely by women.
GJ: Mr. Bloom, what is so new about exposing evil? The church has spoken of “original sin”, all religions deal with evil and how man should overcome it. And what is more, modern science has found a value-free way of looking at things long before you did. Science shows that animals grow paws and claws and the human grows intelligence – and they do so for the same purpose. All individuals are faced with the imperative of survival, which is won by those who prove superior to their competitors.
HB: Religions have projected evil to a place far from man, mostly to hell; the sciences have done a great service to knowledge by illuminating the mechanisms of natural selection. They show that evolution invented larger claws and higher intelligence not just for play but as weapons that give advantages to the individuals equipped with them. Evil, too, is in the service of natural selection.
GJ: Erich Fromm called for a competition-free society in which everyone develops his inborn capacities, but does so without realizing his personal growth at the expense of others. What is wrong with this ideal? The great psychoanalyst described a society which every well-meaning person must see as a desirable ideal.
LUC: But a foolish ideal, because it blinds you to what reality is really like.
HB: In fact, even in the animal kingdom equality without competition cannot be found. Strict pecking orders exist with chickens as well as with chimpanzees and gorillas. Nature intended it that way. She wanted the strongest, most assertive and most intelligent individuals to pass their genetic makeup to their offspring. All others should and must be subordinate. These facts have been known to science at least since Darwin. But today’s science has made a serious mistake by relating natural selection exclusively to individuals. I agree with Thomas Hobbes when showing that the pecking order opposes groups, nations, and superpowers to an even greater degree. As long as there have been human groups, they behaved just like all other primate hordes: They fight each other. This too is natural selection, of which Darwin was well aware, by the way. /He/ saw competition taking place at several levels, including that which occurs between individuals and that which occurs between groups. When discussing ants, he acknowledged that evolution could easily induce individuals to sacrifice their self-interest to that of the larger social unit. In his later writings, he proposed that a similar process occurs among human beings.
GJ: Please, how can it be a purpose of evolution that states merciless fight each other, torture their opponents to death, or exterminate entire peoples? Such a terrible picture of nature was up to now only envisaged by Arthur Schopenhauer, for whom the will – today we would say: evolution – was the principle of pure and meaningless evil.
LUC: Schopenhauer was a realist. He never doubted my existence. On the other hand, he erred as only a German philosopher can err. Pure evil is by no means without meaning – by God, no one should be allowed to disparage me in this manner. Nature does pursue a definite purpose. She not only wants the strongest, most assertive and most intelligent individuals to emerge victorious but also the strongest groups and nations. And within the latter, it increases the will of individual members to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the group.
GJ: Don’t you see the stark contradiction to the instinct of self-preservation as postulated by modern science? Individuals whose highest purpose is their own self-preservation will not voluntarily sacrifice themselves for others.
HB: It is just not true that self-preservation is the only instinct, also its opposite, the death instinct, is an inborn drive. Back in 1897, the seminal French sociologist Emile Durkheim compiled a set of statistics that demonstrated the rise of self-inflicted deaths after the market crashes of 1873 and 1882, and coined the term “altruistic suicide.” Durkheim seemed to sense that beneath the surface, the suicide was destroying himself to rid the wider social group of a burden. Sociologist and ethnologist Marcel Mauss, a relative and follower of Durkheim, was even more specific. He noted an occasional “violent negation of the instinct for self-preservation by the social instinct.” The fact is, if individual selection’s survival instinct is our ruling force, then self-destruct mechanisms should not exist… But animals of all kinds are born with a virtual arsenal of built-in poison pills.
For nature single individuals just do not constitute values as such but are mere figures in the big chess game of collectives that assert themselves against each other. The individual figure gets sacrificed if this is a benefit for the group. E. O. Wilson, in his keystone book “Sociobiology”, cites numerous examples of behavior in which individuals sacrifice themselves for the good of the larger whole. But current theory continues to explain these away.
GJ: We have not forgiven Konrad Lorenz for consistently comparing us to ducks, geese and other creatures. Supposedly realistic realists like the Austrian ethologist simply overlooked the fact that it is the privilege of man to overcome himself and nature. Our human greatness is based on the fact that each of us is more than his past.
HB: Quite nice, but did we succeed in overcoming ourselves and our past? Not at all. Human groups, nations and superpowers still fight for precedence with strength and intelligence just like our animal ancestors, e.g. the rats. /Their cordial contact/ only extends to family. Rats will mercilessly hunt down members of a rival clan. And if a nonrelative accidentally stumbles into their nest, the homey little creatures who a moment before were hugging one another will turn on the guest with the foreign genes and tear him limb from limb. /The great American ethnologist/ Margaret Mead says every human group makes a simple rule: thou shalt not kill members of our gang, but everyone else is fair game. According to Mead, each group says that all humans are brothers and declares that murdering humans is out of the question. Most groups, however, have very strange means of defining who is human /rather than barbarian, outsider, heathen, capitalist, communist, etc./.
Luc: But undoubtedly you have risen far above your animal ancestors in two remarkable ways. First, because we have turned the claws, paws and fangs of our distant ancestors into tenfold supersonic intercontinental missiles with nuclear heads. And these apocalyptic paws have fallen into the hands even of mid-sized states like Iran or dwarf states like North Korea and Israel.
HB: Four of the seven nations that lead in building the bomb — Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Algeria — see America as their major enemy. And, second, that is by no means all. In addition to physical weapons, we are also making use of mental weapons that are at least as effective.
GJ: An appalling doctrine. What about these spiritual weapons?
HB: They are our ideas, which I call “memes” borrowing this term from Richard Dawkins. Every religion is a web of ideas that binds people together, often so tightly and instantaneously, that it chains them together into a single superorganism that – driven by a common will – may hence completely change and reshape reality. Humans grab at ideas because ideas knit them together in groups of people who agree with them. They provide the comfort of companionship and mutual aid. That’s one way memes seduce humans into their power. Behind this seduction, however, we glimpse another reality. An ideology is usually a high-minded mask for a group’s itch to take power and resources from other social groups.
LUC: No religion has accomplished this effect as visibly as Islam. It has preached mercy towards one’s own group and persecution towards all others. /Islam/ imposes a host of admirable responsibilities on its adherents: for example, zakat, the presentation of regular, substantial contributions to the poor. Allah also demands that his followers “give glad tidings to those who believe and work righteousness,” “cover not Truth with falsehood nor conceal the Truth when ye know [what it is],” and “treat with kindness your parents and kindred and orphans and those in need.”
The approach to non-believers is quite different. In A.D. 624, the Prophet announced the concept of the jihad – the holy war. He said in the blessed book, the Koran, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them… And slay them wherever ye catch them.” Elias Canetti, in his Nobel Prize – winning book Crowds and Power, calls Islam a killer religion, literally “a Religion of War.”
The founder of the Iranian Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini shares this opinion. “Islam does not allow peace between… a Moslem and an infidel.” And: “Any nonreligious [i.e., non- Islamic] power, whatever form or shape, is necessarily an atheistic power, the tool of Satan.” Khomeini’s works advocate vigorously converting or murdering all those who do not embrace Allah’s holy meme. /They/ urge a holy war on the nations of the West.
HB: Ideas are our special human invention. In their effectiveness they are as powerful, often even more powerful than physical weapons – and much more terrible, too. In the schoolyard, in a company, or on a soccer team, when individuals vie for a higher place in the pecking order, they settle for headlocks and scuffles, or the alpha male’s chairs are sawed off. Such fights are comparatively harmless, although there are always losers and winners. But when in the competition between groups, nations and superpowers memes are used – that is ideas and ideologies, religions, doctrines and dogmas – whole battlefields full of corpses are usually left behind. The Nazis invented the terrible idea of Untermenschen (subhumans) in order to exterminate their fellow human beings. The Marxists invented the evil to be destroyed in the shape of the bourgeois – any human being with property such as a simple peasant or a small factory owner. Mohammed invented the infidels and handed them over to the believers for slaughter. As for medieval Christians, the Crusaders waded with utmost fervor in the blood of Muslim pagans. But they were all just continuing what humans have always done since the dawn of civilization: dividing the world into two opposing spheres with “us” on one side and “them” on the other.
LUC: My friend Howard was the first to realize that the good Lord and my humble self paved your way to perfection by means of ideas. The survival of the fittest drives evolution – not only by tooth and claw but also by the very craziest memes. Stripped of their moral disguises, the slogans of freedom, peace, and justice are often weapons that those attempting to achieve hierarchical superiority use to stuff the rest of us into the lower ranks of the pecking order. Even the idea of Christian charity has served you as a weapon to carry out the destruction of all those who did not profess Christianity.
GJ: How primitive this Social Darwinism! We enlightened people of the 21st century have overcome such a sick way of thinking long ago! And let me add that the idea of memes being powerful weapons is not new after all. Max Weber saw “The Protestant Ethic” as a weapon that helped capitalism to victory. And in his famous work “Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse,” Émile Durkheim advocated an even more fundamental position. For him, ideas serve the same purpose as, for example, the war dances of early tribal societies before the start of a battle. They were meant to mentally streamline all individuals into one collective whole bound on wiping out the enemy.
HB: That’s right. The measure of the success of a web of memes – a myth, a hypothesis, or a dogma – is not its truth but how well it serves as social glue. If a belief system performs that function well enough, it can trigger the growth of a superorganism of massive size, even if its most basic tenets prove dead wrong.
GJ: But again, what you say is dead matter – long-forgotten history! In modern secular societies like for instance the states of Europe, religious dogmas and myths play at most a secondary role. Every individual is allowed to put together his or her own personal worldview. We rightly reject as absurd the idea that ideologies- religious or secular – weld us together or even serve as weapons to suppress others – let alone to fight them.
LUC: Absurd because you are masters of forgetfulness. It is just over half a century since the diabolical idea of Nazism was eradicated from your minds. Just three decades have passed since no less bloodthirsty communism of the Stalinist type suffered an equal fate. You do not want to see that what ruled a large part of the world with iron grip only a couple of years ago may at any time arise anew.
HB: Militant ideas are currently experiencing a frightening renaissance. Just look at the Internet. Unfortunately, there are good reasons for such a rebirth.
GJ: What do you mean by good reasons?
HB: People cannot exist in isolation. The pronounced individualism that Erich Fromm conjured up as an ideal was never more than a fairy tale. We are not the independent individuals we would like to be, but the dispensable parts of an organism that is much larger than ourselves. Each of us is sewn by invisible threads into the superorganism. We are cells in the beast of family, company, and country. If those social ties are severed we begin to shrivel and die.
GJ: But there again you get caught in an obvious contradiction. On the one hand, the members of every group – from chickens to primates up to humans – are in competition, that is, in constant struggle, with and against each other. On the other hand, they are supposed to stick together so tightly that even the lower ranks cannot live without the group. How does that fit together?
HB: For sure, it even fits devilishly well, because the frustration of the badly off is a welcome force to be directed at external enemies. As soon as the public scorn is directed against outsiders, non-believers, non-humans or subhumans, everyone suddenly feels quite close to his group mates. Propaganda is set in motion that sends shivers of patriotism down the spines of the lower classes. Suddenly the downtrodden feel how much they are needed. This sudden awareness of their value to the group tends to excite them so much that they gladly let their masters lead them to the slaughter. The more frustration the lower classes endure in peacetime, the greater their willingness to be trained against any common enemy. The diversion of frustration and anger against those outside the group always proved to be the means of choice to keep a horde together.
GJ: That is a Machiavellian theory. If true there would have to be many societies with a tremendously large potential for violence.
HB: Certainly, especially in the Middle East, where a majority of the population cannot find work. There, frustration was unleashed a few years ago during the so-called Arab Spring. But it is not only poverty and unemployment that drive young people to the barricades. Often, it’s less about daily bread than about the sense of self: the idea one has of oneself. We assume that humans /merely/desire, food, clothing, and shelter, but we forget that people crave something far more vital: status and prestige.
LUC: Pre-revolution Iran provides a poignant example.
HB: Right. Iran did very well under American tutelage. Poverty plunged, education and health care spread through the land, women gained new freedoms, and the standard of living skyrocketed. American policymakers were proud of their accomplishments. By the measure of food, clothing, and shelter, the U.S. had helped Iran accomplish miracles. But both our State Department and the shah had forgotten that pride, dignity, and dominance – the needs of the pecking order impulse – can be far more pressing than the demands of the body. Though the country owed much of its progress to the Americans, a rabble-rousing clergyman said the Yankees had placed the Iranians in chains and robbed them of their self-respect. The cleric understood the needs of the pecking order far better than the shah. The fathers of our foreign policy feel that by alleviating hunger, poverty, and disease, we can pull the pins out from under the urge to shed blood and make the third world love us. The philosophy hasn’t worked.
LUC: The gift of prosperity was worth nothing in their eyes. They chased the shah to the devil and called for a slobbering Ayatollah, who plunged them into poverty and terror, but gave them the enthusiastic feeling that they were the only ones in possession of a wonderful doctrine of salvation. The ayatollah had turned the pecking order upside down. The Americans, the children of the devil, were /now/ at the bottom. And the Iranians – the blessed of Allah – were on the top.
HB: /So it was and/ the lesson is simple: Helping those less fortunate than ourselves is a moral necessity, but don’t expect it to bring stability. And certainly don’t look for gratitude, or peace.
GJ: Attention! There we just heard the usual Islam-baiting, the same as the ill-fated Thilo Sarrazin inflicted on Germans a few years ago.
LUC: Your starry-eyed intellectuals did not want to hear the truth then or now.
GJ: If truth is a poison for the peaceful coexistence of people, we better keep it under lock and key. After all, an overwhelming majority of Muslims wants to live in peace with their neighbors. Sarrazin may have told the truth when he cited a whole range of scientific evidence that a religion that preaches fighting infidels does not provide a good basis for integration into German society. But this truth was not “helpful,” as Chancellor Merkel rightly noted. And many Germans took it as an insult to their self-esteem that someone understood the relationship with migrants differently than they themselves wanted to understand it. You might call that wishful thinking. But that was worth more to them than the deeply sobering analysis of the Berlin senator.
LUC: Like so many incorrigible idealists you believed that the best way to march into the future was with your eyes closed. In that sense, you should have forgotten Nazi crimes long ago.
GJ: Here in peace-loving Europe, we don’t want to hear messages preaching eternal struggle and never-ending competition.
HB: You imagine yourselves to be a protected island, while the superpowers point their missiles against each other, wage cyber wars and march their troops on your borders. Like the ostrich, you think you are out of danger if only you hide your head in the sand. /But/ to both body and brain, taking it easy is death; vigorous activity, on the other hand, is life itself. Humans need to vigorously pursue goals, to wrestle with problems, and to master them. The nation moving up embraces adventure. The country moving down abandons the strange and buries its head in the familiar. It tries to march backward in time.
LUC: True, all vigorous nations pursue the goal of catching up with or being ahead of the others. Hegel already saw through this game two hundred years ago. Hegel said the ultimate tragedy is not the struggle of an easily recognized good against a clearly loathsome evil. Tragedy, he said, is the battle between two forces, both of which are good, a battle in which only one can win.
HB: From the first to the last page, the message of my book boils down to the demand: open your eyes to reality as it is, then you are most capable of creating the reality as you want it to be! Illusions blind you to the requirements of action.
GJ: Mr. Bloom, you demonstrate this demand with the example of the United States, which, as you say, is blindly staggering into descent, although knowledge of the history of the fallen British world power should prevent it from making the same mistakes.
HB: Until 1870, Britain had been without question the strongest nation on the earth, yet she had spent the least on military hardware. From 1815 to 1865, a minuscule 3 percent of her GNP had gone into military budgets. Her strength had come from the spinning jenny, the steam-driven loom, the Cunard steamship, and the railroad. But Britain forgot that industrial innovation was the key to her power. It lost its economic superiority to Germany from the seventies of the 19th century. The British world power rested on its laurels, from then on it was far less innovative than Germany.
/British/ big business was defending itself through counterproductive mergers and takeovers, and the gap between rich and poor was growing ever greater as England was slipping downward in the pecking order of nations. /In this situation/ floundering British industrial titans dreamed of holding on to their old position by force. From 1880 to 1900, Britain raised her warship tonnage by 64 percent, and she nearly doubled the number of men she kept in arms.
Today America seems to be following the path that led the British to their downfall. In 1945, the United States produced 40 percent of the world’s goods. By the mid-eighties, our share was half of that. Until the early seventies, we were the biggest exporter in the world. Today, we are the biggest importer. Our federal deficits are soaring, and the amount of money we’ve borrowed from the citizens of foreign countries is so large that we are now the biggest debtors since the prehistoric invention of the loan. Meanwhile, throughout the eighties our military budgets climbed dramatically. Like the English under Victoria, we were trying to fool ourselves with the notion that weapons are the real source of strength.
LUC: And meanwhile, two very ambitious upstarts are pushing up: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. But that my friend Howard could not possibly know, because he published his great book back in 1997. At that time, Japan’s star was still high up in the sky, but Japan was too small to seriously challenge the United States. Now, however, we are witnessing an entirely different confrontation. This time, things are just the same as with chimpanzees, when the existing pecking order is shaken. The two pretenders in China and Russia are taking every opportunity to grab the legs of the American alpha dog. China is abrogating the Hong Kong Treaty, it brazenly claims the entire South China Sea for itself, and scouts for an opportunity to incorporate Taiwan into its territory. Russia, too, is pursuing an increasingly aggressive policy – albeit in response to a previous NATO enlargement. Putin has annexed Crimea in violation of international law and is propping up eastern Ukraine so that it can keep the West on its toes with military pinpricks.
GJ: Wait a minute! Why should Russia continue to keep the West on tenterhooks? After all, it has already achieved its goal. No one is seriously willing to dispute Russia’s possession of Crimea.
HB: The winner is never satisfied, because victories tend to make him still more aggressive. Testosterone levels go up in the winners and down in the losers. Testosterone makes winners restless, confident, and aggressive. The nation moving up embraces adventure. The country moving down abandons the strange and buries its head in the familiar. It tries to march backward in time.
LUC: As our friend Howard demonstrates with many examples, aggressive adventure is called for primarily through memes, by which a nation invokes its own uniqueness. Usually you call that chauvinism.
GJ: I agree. Putin welds Russians together by pushing them into the role of victims. “We liberated Europe from fascism, but the West does not recognize our achievement but falsifies history to diminish our merits.” Putin conceals the fact that the Soviet Union, insidiously invaded by Hitler, did indeed liberate itself – but only itself. In Eastern Europe it soon supplanted Nazi totalitarianism with its Stalinist counterpart. From Poland to Hungary, Russian occupation was by no means experienced as liberation. East Germans, Czechs, Hungarians and Poles protested in uprisings against the Soviet yoke. Putin turns this evident truth into a malicious falsification of history.
LUC: My friend Putin is a gifted master of propaganda. It is not by chance that he was a man from the secret service. The day of victory over fascism, May 9, is now celebrated with utmost pomp, fanfare, solemn avowals to the fatherland, glorification of Russian might and overwhelming public emotion. As breathtakingly pompous as under the Nazis, or in today’s China or North Korea, the Russian government is celebrating the oceanic feeling of collective destiny, something you in the West hardly know, because each individual leads an isolated private existence. Propaganda extolls the feeling of belonging to the great Slavic brotherhood, it evokes a glorious past and sends goose bumps down people’s spines at endless professions to homeland, veterans and all Russian compatriots. That is the positive side of collective emotional exuberance. If the system of belief pulls together a large enough superorganism, the faithful will, indeed, taste a bit of heaven.
HB: But few see the other side of the coin. They do not suspect that the purpose of the collective ecstasy so cleverly orchestrated by the government is the same as that of chimpanzees and our ancestors when they performed their dances of war: it is meant to arouse willingness to sacrifice one’s own life for the community when called to the flags.
Beware, I tell you. The Russian war machinery not only consists of supersonic missiles (against which US defense bases are powerless for the time being), it consists furthermore of people who are united in the awareness that the rest of the world is against them and that it is therefore their mission to prove to a decadent and malicious West that the Russian people will never give in.
GJ: That may well be true. Even those who see through Russian lies feel strangely touched by the intensity conjuring up a new collective sense of brotherhood. The agonizing self-doubt that afflicted the Russian people under Gorbachev and Yeltsin after the collapse of the Soviet Union has given way to a combative self-confidence since Putin is at the helm. I would like to note, that patriotism, when expressed in love for one’s people, one’s homeland and for the positive aspects of a shared history, gives expression to a respectable feeling. I think that those people are more deplorable who do not like their own countrymen, their own homeland and their own history – as is the case for many Germans.
LUC: My friend Vladimir Putin has accomplished an even greater feat. He feeds and fuels resentment. “Us against the rest of the world” – that’s the new attitude welding Russians together. With the state pouring much of its resources into the military machine, many Russians are objectively worse off under Putin. But skillful propaganda has nevertheless achieved its goal. The frustrated many do not blame the government for their miserable situation, they blame the hostile West. Putin is using an instrument that the Chinese under Xi Jinping have mastered just as well. Patriotism is perverted into a sharp weapon by turning it into resentful chauvinism. By now the Chinese are fully convinced that they have the better economy, the more efficient government, and that they are the better people, who naturally deserve to be at the head of the world community.
HB: But watch out! They are not so stupid as to openly reveal their true intentions. On the contrary, Russians as well as Chinese, when talking about the future as they conceive it, invariably proclaim that there should be no alpha-nation, no pecking order, no top and bottom but a multipolar world of equals. For as far as they are concerned, they would, of course, never seek world domination. Unfortunately, history tells a very different lesson. Rebellion against the hegemon always proceeds in this manner. In order to bring the bystanders to their side, the beta and gamma males make themselves small; they whitewash their drive to the top by portraying it as a blessing for all concerned.
GJ: Then the eternal game would just repeat itself for all eternity? At some point, the alpha male at the top – in this case the United States – is so weak that it has to abdicate to make way for China or Russia – just as Rome, Habsburg and Great Britain had to abdicate in the past?
LUC: Within a group, the alpha male is forced to retire when pushed aside by an upstart. That is of no concern to the rest of the world. But between nations, rise and fall are decided not by bites but by swords, guns and now missiles and nuclear bombs. That’s how the Creator, in his wisdom, set it all up. Howard calls this “natural selection” between superorganisms held together by ideas (memes). Evolution is not just a competition between individuals. It is a competition between networks, between webs, between group souls.
HB: True. But missiles and bombs require a strong economy. That’s why the United States must do everything in its power to accelerate technological innovation and return strength to the economy. We have to stay ahead in the technological race because that race will continue – as well as the merciless competition at its base. No individual and no nation can escape this destiny. With our dream of eliminating competition, we try to wish the pecking order away. But the fact is that we will continue to live in pecking order structures whether we like it or not /and/ the brutal fact is that the more we opt out of competition, the lower our position is likely to be. That holds true in our lives as individuals, and it holds even more true in our life as a nation. If you’re not on top, you’re going to sink.
GJ: Wrong! At one point you say yourself that this ghoulish spectacle must come to an end. To our species, evolution has given something new – the imagination. With that gift, we have dreamed of peace. Our task – perhaps the only one that will save us – is to turn what we have dreamed into reality. To fashion a world where violence ceases to be.
Here, you admit the truth. Nevertheless, you fail to acknowledge that we have to create this new world right now, that is, in the coming decades of the present century, because thanks to our intelligence we have increased potential violence to such an extent that for the first time in human history we are able to extinguish ourselves and, what is more, all life on the planet. Even if the gruesome game will never end among individuals, among nations that can destroy each other at the push of a button, it must end once and for all: We must stop the race of nations.
In this pressing necessity lies a break with all previous history. Until yesterday, it was still possible for the ruling nation to be knocked off its throne by another younger and stronger one. For hundreds of thousands of years, this iron law has held true among humans as in the animal kingdom, promoting “natural selection.” But in the 21st century, this law can and must no longer apply. For victory with today’s weapons no longer selects the strongest but kills all of us indiscriminately: the victor as well as the vanquished.
HB: Certainly, all are aware of this radically changed situation – all, including, of course, Biden, Xi, and Putin -, but this awareness has not in the least attenuated the need to sit at the head of the table and preside over the others. That’s why I implore my compatriots to push competition and technological progress with all their might. /Some/ self-proclaimed champions of the public interest are attempting to stop critical areas of scientific advancement: In many intellectual circles, even the concept of progress has been turned into a dirty word. This is a pernicious development. If we want the U.S. to remain at the forefront of the global community, we can only achieve this through competition and technological progress.
LUC: Dear Howard, with my gift for seeing into the future, I’ll allow myself a little warning. The progress you hail so much could cost you dearly. There is not even a guarantee that the inferno will not be unleashed by mere chance – I mean, technological chance. With ever-shorter warning times against a nuclear first strike by the enemy, you have programmed computers to automatically retaliate (as there is not enough time for humans to check). For the sake of survival, you should tame that kind of “progress” that instead of taking you to the top may finally catapult all of you out of existence.
GJ: If I understand Mr. Bloom correctly, nothing significant has changed in our psychological disposition from the Stone Age up to the present. In every group, someone wants to be on top – that’s what we call competition. In the world community, one nation wants to set the tone – that’s what we call the race of nations for greater economic and military power. But now, due to incredible technological progress, something radically new has entered the stage. Since the second half of the 20th century, each superpower has fabricated enough bombs to make the globe uninhabitable for humans. The victory of one over the other, does no longer lead to a mere replacement as in the past but carries the risk of collective demise.
I conclude from this fundamentally new situation that for human reason there remains but one way out this impasse: agreement on a world regiment. But such unification becomes more and more difficult when Americans, Russians and Chinese stir up hatred against each other. We must fight this hatred. /Because/ our task – perhaps the only one that will save us – is to turn what we have dreamed into reality.
GJ and Lucifer: Mr. Bloom, Howard thanks for this debate.