Howard Bloom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Howard Bloom is a multi-disciplinary thinker known [1] for breaking down the walls between scientific specializations and for merging the sciences with the arts [2][3], [4] and the humanities. He is the founder of paleopsychology [5], is important in evolutionary psychology, and is working to establish two new fields, mass behavior and Omnology[6], [7]. Bloom is the author of two books: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century.
Bloom is a former Visiting Scholar in the Graduate PsychologyDepartment at New York University and a core faculty member at The Graduate Institute [8] in two fields—Conscious Evolution and Organizational Leadership. He is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, [9], a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, a founding council member of The Darwin Project, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab[10]; a member of The American Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Psychological Society, The Academy of Political Science, The Aerospace Technology Working Group, The Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society for Human Ethology, and is an advisory board member of The Institute for Accelerating Change.
In theoretical physics, Howard Bloom is the co-author and supporter of the hidden-time [11] approach to quantum theory[12], developed by Pavel Kurakin and George Malinetsky of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences[13].
Bloom entered science at the age of ten, starting in cosmology, theoretical physics, and microbiology . He built his first Boolean Algebra Machine when he was twelve, conceived a game-playing computer that won a Westinghouse National Science Prize [14] the same year, worked at the world’s largest cancer research facility, The Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute [15], when he was sixteen, and did research on Skinnerian programmed learning [16] at Rutgers Graduate School of Education[17] before entering his freshman year of college at NYU. Meanwhile he was in hot pursuit of what he saw as “the gods inside of us”--centers of passion that he tried to reach through the sciences and the arts simultaneously. As a student at New York University, he edited and art-directed an experimental graphics and literary magazine that won two National Academy of Poets [18] Prizes. He graduated Magna cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, then turned down four graduate fellowships in clinical psychology, jumped ship from the standard academic approach to science, and went on his own version of Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Bloom set sail for what he called “the dark underbelly of mass passions, the heart of our culture’s myth-making machine”. Bloom co-founded Cloud Studio [19], was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, edited Circus Magazine[20], was credited by the founder of Rolling Stone’s East Coast office, Chet Flippo, with single-handedly creating “a new publishing genre”, the heavy metal magazine, then founded The Howard Bloom Organization Ltd[21], a public relations firm in the music and film industry. Bloom was publicist and career advisor for Michael Jackson, Prince[22], Bette Midler, John Mellencamp, Bob Marley, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, Luther Vandross, George Michael, Lionel Richie, Hall & Oates, Kool & the Gang, Stephanie Mills, Chaka Khan, Phyllis Hyman, Dave Grusin, David Grisman, Paul Winter[23], Herbie Hancock, the Simon & Garfunkel Reunion Tour, the 25th Anniversary of the Beatles Invasion of the United States [24], Queen, AC/DC, Kiss, Aerosmith, Supertramp, Genesis, Phil Collins, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Joan Armatrading, Simply Red, Spandau Ballet, Berlin[25], Spiro Gyra, ZZ Top, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and Run DMC. Bloom and his firm publicized Amnesty International’s first effort to gain visibility in the US, handled the launch of Farm Aid, and worked with a small slew of major films from Paramount Pictures, Disney[26], Warner Brothers Pictures, and New Line Cinema.
In 1984, Bloom, former Aerosmith-manager David Krebs, and founder of Spin Magazine Bob Guccione, Jr., founded an anti-censorship group--Music In Action--to counter an anti-rock music campaign spearheaded by Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator and future presidential candidate Al Gore. Mrs. Gore, along with Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker, and Nancy Thurmond, wife of Senator Strom Thurmond, had founded the Parents Music Resource Center, the PMRC to oppose what they perceived as trends in popular music harmful to minors. Among other things, the PMRC claimed that Ozzie Osbourne's lyrics contained subliminal nessages encouraging suicide, that AC/DC was a devil-worshipping group whose initials stood for Anti-Christ/Devil's Children (AC/DC had named itself after a label above the electrical cord of a vacuum cleaner), that Kiss was another devil-worshipping group whose name meant Knights In Service to Satan, and that that Styx, yet another band of Satan-worshippers, had pro-Satanic messages "backward-masked" (run backwards at subliminal levels) in its albums. Bloom reviewed the literature of the PMRC, spotted materials containing naive or malicious errors, material he felt had been planted by the fundamentalist religious right, and went on television and radio to combat the PMRC's claims. He and the staff of the Howard Bloom Organization also initiated a grassroots petition campaign that delivered 50,000 signatures in favor of freedom of expression in music to the Justice Department in Washington, DC. Bloom and Howard Bloom Organization staff member Rhonda Markowitz defended political rock singer Jello Biafra from PMRC attacks, attacks that, among other things, inspired a court case against Biafra, a legal attack that could have put him in jail for a year for distributing "harmful matter" in the Dead Kennedys album Frankenchrist.
Bloom also helped Sony launch its first software operation in the U.S. (Sony Video), helped establish the three films that put the new Disney on the map (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People, and Outrageous Fortune), and advised the strategists putting together a new venture called MTV. Bloom was profiled in New York Magazine, which called him the most thorough and efficient publicist in his field. Delta Airlines in-flight magazine went further and called him one of the most powerful people in pop publicity. Bloom was written up in 20 pages of the leading textbook on music publicity, The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity[27]. The text covered Bloom’s invention of "perceptual engineering," which he defines as "a way of finding a valid truth that 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." Then in 2005 Bloom was awarded the first Lifetime Achievement and Commitment to Excellence Award by the Global Entertainment and Media Summit[28].
As a scientist working undercover to find the human passions and their variations, Bloom helped give voice to underdog subcultures like the gay community(whose music was known to the public as disco, the newly emerging black middle class, the country crossover movement, the punk music movement, and the rap music culture. Bloom tested his scientific hypotheses on mass behavior in the real world, helping corporations like Sony and Disney make $28 billion, more than the gross domestic product of Luxembourg or Oman. Primary among his principles was the view that you make profits only by serving the public with something of powerful merit.
In 1988, Bloom came down with a devastating case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and was confined to his Park Slope, Brooklyn, bedroom until 2003. During that time, he wrote three books, The Lucifer Principle, Global Brain, and How I Accidentally Started the Sixties [29]. Despite being too weak to speak, in 1995 he used his PC and the Internet to found The Group Selection Squad, a team of 40 scientists from around the globe who opposed the Neo-Darwinian dogmatists of the evolutionary biology community. Bloom overturned the taboo against a concept called group selection. His campaign reached its turning point when it landed evolutionary biologist and champion of multi-level selection David Sloan Wilson on the cover of Science Times, the New York Times' Science Section. Within a year the editorial staff at Nature Magazine, one of science's top two cross-disciplinary journals, abandoned its rigid resistance to group selection and declared that it had regarded group selection as a legitimate approach "for years".
Bloom’s writings have appeared in The Washington Post, Wired, Knight-Ridder’s Financial News Service, The Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, Omni Magazine, New Ideas in Psychology[30], The Independent Scholar, Entelechy—Mind and Culture[31], Across Species Comparisons and Psychopathology and in two book series: Research in Biopolitics and the Disinformation Company’s series of three books: You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know is Wrong, and Abuse Your Illusions.
Bloom has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, the CBS Morning News, CBS Nightwatch, CNN, BBC-TV, Spanish Public Television’s Redes, and the Australian Broadcasting Company’s equivalent to 60 Minutes—Lateline. Holland’s VPRO-tv aired a three-hour special on Bloom’s theories about violence and a separate special on Bloom’s and Robert Jay Lifton’s views on the relationship between fandom and fanaticism. Holland’s KRO starred Bloom in a one-hour television special based on his book Global Brain. Britain’s Channel4 TV profiled Bloom in a half-hour segment that increased ratings from a normal eleven to a sixteen share in its time slot. And as of February 13, 2006, Bloom had appeared 23 times on the highest-rated nationally-syndicated overnight talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast[32] with hosts Art Bell and George Noory.
Bloom’s videolectures and live electronic speeches have been used at conventions of businessmen, scientists, media professionals, information specialists, and avant-artists from Amsterdam, New York, Houston, and Boulder, to Nevada’s Burning Man Festival, San Francisco’s Exploratorium, Acceleration Studies Foundation’s Accelerating Change Conference at Stanford University, San Francisco’s 21st Century Leadership Program, and Australia’s Electrofringe Festival. Bloom’s videos are shown to university students from San Diego to Latrobe, Australia.
As of 2005, Bloom had two articles in physics publications, a rare achievement for a multi-disciplinarian: “The Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-Biotic Evolution”[33] in PhysicaPlus, the online publication of The Israeli Physical Society; and ““Conversation (dialog) model of quantum transitions”[34] in arXiv.org, an online high-level physics and math resource founded by the Los Alamos National Lab.
