The Big Picture Jigsaw How Bloom’s Nine Books Fit Together

Why is Howard Bloom’s April 2020 book called Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: a Search  for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock & Roll?  Why the subtitle, A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll?

All of Bloom’s work is a hunt for the soul of groups: for the soul of friends, for the soul of cliques, for the soul of subcultures, for the soul of movements, for the soul of nations, and for the soul of civilizations. Bloom calls his field “mass behavior,”  from the mass behavior of elementary particles to the mass behavior of you and me.  Here’s how that focus on mass passion has played out in Bloom’s seven books.

  • The
    Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History     is
    about the competition between groups and how the group seduces, kidnaps, and
    recruits the individual.  The Lucifer Principle is about how group
    souls grab hold of you and me.
  • Global
    Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st
    Century     is about how this planet became a massive innovation-sharing
    network four billion years ago.  And about two competitions between
    groups, the competition between humans and microbes, and the competition
    between human subcultures like conservatives and liberals, Shiites and Sunnis,
    and militant Islam and the West.
  • The
    Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism     is
    about the form of mass behavior we call an economy.   And about the exuberant mass creativity we
    call Western Civilization.
  • How
    I Accidentally Started the Sixties     is a humorous memoir about the rise
    in 1962 of a new social force–the hippy movement.  
  • The
    Muhammad Code: How a Desert Prophet Brought You ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram     is
    about the rise of the biggest empire the world has ever seen, an empire eleven
    times the size of the conquests of Alexander the Great, five times the size of
    the Roman Empire and seven times the size of the United States.  The rise
    of Islam is one the best-hidden stories of group soul and mass passion in human
    history.
  • The
    God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates     is about how a
    profoundly social and communicative cosmos has self-assembled in one of the most
    puzzling acts of mass creativity ever seen.  The God Problem also proposes five heresies that could change the
    way a key mass mind thinks–the mass mind we call science.
  • Einstein,
    Michael Jackson & Me: a Search  for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock
    & Roll     is about the lessons in mass passion that Bloom learned by
    plunging into the belly of the beast, diving into the dark underbelly where new
    myths and movements are made.  The lessons Bloom learned by focusing that beast’s
    attention. The lessons he learned by adventuring with Michael Jackson, Prince,
    Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Queen, Kiss, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Billy Joel, Billy
    Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Kool and the Gang, ZZ Top, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Chaka Khan, and Joan Jett.  And the lessons
    Bloom learned hunting down a mystery: what is the secret self that leaps from
    you like a flame when you have a few drinks, you dance, when the strobe lights
    and the music get you, and when a self that you do not know dances you like a
    puppet for thirty minutes?  And how in the
    world does your internal fire feed the forces of history?