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Not to be confused with Howard Blum or Harold Bloom.
Howard Bloom
BornHoward Bloom
(1943-06-25) June 25, 1943 (age 81)
Buffalo, New York, U.S.
OccupationMulti-disciplinary Thinker, Author
NationalityAmerican
SubjectSociology
Website
howardbloom.net

Howard Bloom (born June 25, 1943) in Buffalo, NY, is a multi-disciplinary thinker and author. Psychology Today describes Bloom as "a passionate polymath and synthesizer of science who wants mankind to understand its place and potential in the universe."[1] Gear Magazine describes him as "the philosopher at the edge of the universe" and “the next Stephen Hawking.” Britain's Channel_4 TV called him "next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Buckminster Fuller." And Mark Lamonica, author of Junkyard Dogs and William Shakespeare and winner of the Southern California Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award says he's "the reincarnation of Plato."[2] The French business magazine L’Expansion is more specific. It pinpoints Bloom as a “specialist in mass behavior” with a keen interest in “cosmology, theoretical physics and microbiology.”[3]


Early life

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Bloom entered science at the age of ten, starting in cosmology and microbiology.[4] In 1956, when he was 12, he built his first Boolean Algebra Machine and worked with future MIT graduate Michael Wolfberg to lay out the concept for a primitive computer able to play the game TacTix. The computing device won several local science fair awards. When he was twelve, Bloom was tutored in creative scientific thinking by Emil Rappaport, head of research and development at the Moog Valve Corporation, a company that made advanced valves for missiles and jet engines. And he was granted a private audience with the head of the Graduate Department of Physics at the University of Buffalo (today called SUNY, Buffalo) to discuss Big Bang vs. Steady State Theory.

At the age of sixteen, Bloom worked at the world's largest cancer research facility, The Roswell Park Memorial Institute, under the direction of Department of Biochemistry Research head Dr. David Pressman, a protégé of Nobel Prize-winner Linus Pauling. Pressman, in the words of a Roswell Park historical chronology, had just won "worldwide recognition for his research on the structural characterization of antibodies and the application of antibodies to define surface antigens, including those found on neoplastic cells."[5]

In 1962, Bloom dropped out of Reed College, hitch-hiked and hopped freight trains to travel from Seattle, Washington to San Diego, California with month-long stops in between in places like Berkeley, San Francisco's Fillmore District, and San Pedro. Others dropped their jobs and mortgages and followed him as he sought Satori, Zen Buddhist enlightenment. Time-Life publications later named the subculture he—and many others—helped found the “hippie movement.” Those years are chronicled in Bloom's unpublished book: How I Accidentally Started the Sixties. [6]

In 1963, Bloom did research on B.F. Skinner's programmed learning techniques at Rutgers' Graduate School of Education under Merrill Harmin, known for his work on “values clarification” and author of the book: Values and Teaching: Working With Values in the Classroom. Bloom also landed his first writing job, editing material for the head of the Middlesex County, New Jersey, Mental Health Clinic. That head was Sol Gordon, who would later go on to write thirty books of psychological advice including: How Can You Tell If You're Really in Love? and All Families Are Different.

Bloom went back to the normal path and entered his freshman year of college at NYU in 1964 at the age of 21. A year later, Bloom edited and wrote for the Boy Scouts of America during a summer vacation, updating the Boy Scout Handbook chapter on masturbation, rewriting field manuals on stalking, tracking, and camouflage, and finally writing Ten Steps to Organize a Boy Scout Troop, the manual on how to build new Boy Scout troops from scratch. Since Bloom had been kicked out of the Boy Scouts for incompetence at Morse Code, the experience convinced him that if you do enough research and you care enough about your reader, you can write on any subject.

Meanwhile Bloom was in hot pursuit of what he saw as “the gods inside of us” -- centers of passion that he explains 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 Prizes and caught the eyes of the art directors of Look Magazine, The Evergreen Review, and, ironically, the magazine of the Boy Scouts, Boys’ Life. The Evergreen Review and Boys’ Life later used Bloom, his artists, and his techniques.

Bloom graduated Magna cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1968, then deviated from the norm again. He 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”.

Career

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Bloom co-founded Cloud Studio,[7] which the New York Times described as an "alternative-culture art-and-design studio that wedded an interest in comics and theater to commercial art and illustration."[8] Cloud Studio created the advertising graphics that helped ABC’s seven FM stations pioneer a new form of programming—progressive radio. Cloud Studio also art directed the first seven issues of a new humor magazine, The National Lampoon.[8] And Bloom invented a new form of animation for NBC-TV.

Bloom was featured on the cover of Art Direction the Magazine of Visual Communication in 1970, edited the rock monthly Circus Magazine, increased its circulation 211%, and was credited by the founder of Rolling Stone’s East Coast office, Chet Flippo, with single-handedly creating “a new magazine genre”, the heavy metal magazine. In the following years, the publishers of Creem Magazine and Hit Parader consulted Bloom and copied the Bloom format. But Bloom called his five years of work in commercial art and magazine publishing "a periscope position"-- a position from which he could see the internal world of pop culture and could make his next move in what he called "a scientific expedition into the underbelly of mass mind, into the beating heart where myths and the forces of history are made."

From 1973 to 1976, Bloom started public and artist relations departments for Gulf & Western's fourteen record companies and for ABC Records and launched the careers of Stephanie Mills and Chaka Khan. But his real lunge into “the dark underbelly of mass mind” occurred in 1976, when Bloom founded The Howard Bloom Organization Ltd,[9] a public relations firm in the music and film industry.

Bloom was publicist and career advisor for Michael Jackson, Prince, 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, Phyllis Hyman, Dave Grusin, David Grisman, Paul Winter, Herbie Hancock, the Simon & Garfunkel Reunion Tour, the 25th Anniversary of the Beatles Invasion of the United States, Queen, AC/DC, Kiss, Aerosmith, Supertramp, Genesis, Phil Collins, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Joan Armatrading, Simply Red, Spandau Ballet, Berlin, 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—The Secret Policeman’s Ball with Pete Townshend and John Cleese-- handled the launch of Farm Aid, and worked with a small slew of major films from Paramount, Disney, Warner Brothers, and New Line Cinema.

Bloom 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 written up 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.[10] 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 point of view, then revealing what makes it tick and in the process altering the way society sees." Then, in 2005, Bloom was awarded the first Lifetime Achievement and Commitment to Excellence Award by the Global Entertainment and Media Summit.[11]

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 (which expressed itself through artists like Prince and Michael Jackson), the country crossover movement, the punk movement, and rap culture. Bloom was a social activist in the days of Martin Luther King, Jr. and beyond. He worked against redlining in Buffalo, New York, his hometown, at the age of fifteen. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked to break down racial barriers in the music industry. He fought on behalf of the right to reach a colorblind audience for artists like Prince, Bob Marley, and Chaka Khan. He was instrumental in getting Black music into two key preserves of all-white entertainment—MTV and FM radio. He was involved with two restorations and re-openings of Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and worked extensively with the United Negro College Fund, with the National Black United Fund, and with the NAACP and its president past-president, Benjamin Hooks.

With Spin Magazine founder Bob Guccione, Jr. and rock manager David Krebs, who launched Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, the Scorpions, and AC/DC, Bloom co-founded the national anti-censorship group Music In Action. Bloom was the organization's day-to-day work horse, battling a campaign by Al Gore’s wife, Tipper Gore, by Susan Baker, and by other wives of high-placed government officials, who had founded the Parents Music Resource Center, the PMRC. The PMRC was a thinly disguised front for the religious right’s “culture war” against what the religious right called "secular humanism". Bloom appeared on television and radio combating what he felt was the "propaganda" of born-again extremism from 1984 to 1991. This "culture war" continues today in the struggle between ultra-conservative Christian groups and "anti-Christian" and "anti-Biblical" secularists, Darwinists, and liberals. In addition, Bloom and Howard Bloom Organization account executive Rhonda Markowitz defended political rock singer Jello Biafra from the attacks of the radical right.

The entertainment industry allowed Bloom to test 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 Bloom’s principles was the view that you make profits only by serving the public with something of powerful merit. In 1988, Bloom left what he called his "participant-observer field trip" into public relations and pop culture and jumped back into the multi-disciplinary form of science he calls "mass behavior".

From 1988 to 2003, Bloom was confined to his bed with chronic fatigue syndrome. For five years, he was too weak to speak. The illness broke up his marriage of 32 years and left him isolated in his bedroom, learning the unspeakable pains of solitary confinement. But during those years, Bloom founded two international scientific groups and wrote three books. In 1995, he started The Group Selection Squad, a group dedicated to legitimizing group selection--the idea that competition between groups helps drive the evolutionary process. His goal was to break the intellectual monopoly of the neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology establishment that said only individual selection and kin selection--only "selfish genes"--counted. His frequent partner in this effort was the leading champion of “multi-level selection” David Sloan Wilson.

In 1997, Bloom issued a manifesto for a new discipline, paleopsychology, and founded The International Paleopsychology Project. The term "paleopsychology" had been coined in 1987 by Kent G. Bailey in his book: Human Paleopsychology: Applications to Aggression and Pathological Processes. And the phrase "mass behavior" had been used by Bruno Bettelheim in his 1943 Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology article: "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations." But Bloom was the first to suggest that these two catchwords become fields of study.

In 2000, Bloom wrote a manifesto for yet another new field, Omnology.

From 2002 to 2003, Bloom was a Visiting Scholar at New York University's Graduate School of Psychology, sponsored by neurobiology pioneer Edgar E. (Ted) Coons, a leader in research on the hypothalamus.

From 2004 to 2006, Bloom was a Core Faculty Member at Connecticut's Graduate Institute.

In 2005, Bloom addressed an international quantum physics conference in Moscow, Quantum Informatics 2006, on “Why Everything You Know About Schrodinger’s Equation is Wrong.” In other words, why everything you know about quantum physics is wrong. He expected to be drawn and quartered. But he was received with smiles of pleasure. Then the concepts he had espoused appeared in a book by the conference’s organizer, Dr. Yuri Ozhigov’s 2008 Constructive Physics (http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2859).

In 2007, he founded The Space Development Steering Committee with Buzz Aldrin, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth astronaut on the moon; Paul Werbos, Program Director for Computational Intelligence at the National Science Foundation; Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center; Peter Garretson, Head of the Future Technology and Science Branch of the Air Force; Mark Hopkins, CEO of the National Space Society; Amara Angelica, editor of Ray Kurzweil's website KurzwelAI; Feng Hsu, Senior Risk Analyst at NASA; and Ed McCullough of Boeing's Phantom Works.

Views on Islam

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Bloom has been attacked three times by groups like CAIR and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee since the publication of an article called: “The Importance of Hugging” in Omni Magazine. That article highlighted violence in Western culture and violence in the Arab world. Westerners did not complain. Arab pressure groups in the United States did. They threw four days of sit-down strikes in the offices of Omni, then melted away when a bomb hidden in a Toshiba radio-cassette player brought down Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people.

Yet Bloom has an intense following in the Moslem world. He appears frequently on Saudi Arabia's KSA-2 TV, on Iran's English-language Press-TV, and on Iran's Arab Language Alalam-TV. He has debated one-on-one with senior officials from Hamas and Egypt's Moslem Brotherhood on Alalam. And he has appeared on Syria’s Ekhbariya TV.

Mohammed Alabbar, a member of the ruling council of Dubai, wrote in Dubai's Khaleej Times: "...I'd like to share with you something from a book, The Genius of the Beast: a Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, by Howard Bloom, that so resonated with me that I passed it on to His Highness Shaikh Mohammed [the man behind the creation of modern Dubai]. In the book, Bloom explains why capitalism cannot die. However injured, it will lick its wounds, adapt and survive. The key to next generation capitalism, he writes, lies in a big picture view that’s utterly unlike anything you’ve previously perceived. A big-picture view that will startle you. A big-picture view with which you can ignite the world, and help transform society. Where better to come up with that big-picture view — that next generation of capitalism —than Dubai?...."[12] These words came from a speech Alabbar gave to the Arabian Business Forum on November 29, 2010.

In addition, Bloom created a two-day intensive training for CEO's called Reperceiving Leadership in 2007 and gave it to ten CEOs and General Managers in Kuala Lumpur the capital of the Moslem nation of Malaysia.

Topping it all off, Dr. A.P.J. Kalam, the eleventh president of India and a Moslem, called Bloom's Genius of the Beast "...full of beautiful thoughts. This book is indeed a visionary creation based on vast experience in multiple fields...."

Writings

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Bloom has published four books: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1995); Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2002); The Genius of the Beast: A Radical re-Vision of Capitalism(November 25, 2009); and The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates (August 24, 2012).

Bloom’s book: How I Accidentally Started the Sixties [13] has only been published in a series of twelve episodes by an Amazon.com experimental program (now defunct) called Amazon Shorts. But Timothy Leary called it, “a monumental, epic, glorious literary achievement.”

Three international conferences were convened on the early drafts of The Genius of the Beast. Those conferences were in New York (December 2005), in Amsterdam (March 2006), and in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia (August 2006).

Bloom’s publications in science range from: “Conversation (dialog) model of quantum transitions" [14] in arXiv.org with George Malinetskii and Pavel Kurakin of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences; and "The Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-Biotic Evolution"[15] in PhysicaPlus to "Instant evolution. The influence of the city on human genes: a speculative case" [16] in New Ideas in Psychology.

Bloom’s writings have also appeared in The Washington Post, Wired, Knight-Ridder’s Financial News Service, The Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, Omni Magazine, The Independent Scholar, Entelechy—Mind and Culture, Across Species Comparisons and Psychopathology, and in five anthologies: the Disinformation Company’s series of three books: You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know is Wrong, and Abuse Your Illusions; in Research in Biopolitics; and in NASA’s Cosmos & Culture, edited by NASA Chief Historian Steven J. Dick. Cosmos & Culture also includes chapters by intellectual superstars like philosopher of the mind, Daniel Dennett; cosmologist and theoretical physicist, Paul Davies; evolutionary biologist and memeticist, Susan Blackmore; SETI Institute Chief Astronomer, Seth Shostak; founder of Big History, David Christian; and author of the world's leading astronomy textbook astrophysicist, Eric Chaisson.

Bloom’s book, Global Brain, was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium in 2010, with participants from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.

In addition, publications like Psychology Today report that Bloom has a "Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul" growing in his computer. According to Psychology Today writer, Nando Pelusi, The Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul is a half-century long project Bloom began in 1956, a project that now contains over 7,100 chapters. Bloom's collaborator in theoretical physics, Pavel Kurakin of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says of Bloom's Grand Unified Theory: "...Bloom has created a new Scientific Paradigm. It explains in vast and compelling terms why we should forget all we know in complicated modern math and should start from the very beginning. It explains why we should model the BASIC phenomena of the Big Bang from the first microsecond. Bloom’s vision calls on us to trace the evolution of mass moods from the Big Bang to the present. It took me time to understand what Bloom meant. And I admit that I was skeptical at first. But when Bloom’s system finally hit me, I realized that something truly great was happening here. Even if we put aside all of the implications of Bloom’s approach for physics, all of the implications of Bloom’s approach for society, and look only at the implications for biology, Bloom has created a new approach to Darwinism. Bloom’s Grand Unified Theory is... SUPER! I fail to find the words to explain how powerful a tool it is. It opens a new and deeper insight into the evolution of species! It opens a window into entire SYSTEMS we don't yet know and/or SEE, new, un-trivial collectives that DO EXIST and evolve outside the line of sight of previous scientific views, collectivities that live, love, battle, win and lose each day of our gray lives. I never imagined that a new system of thought could produce so much light....”[17]

Publications

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Books

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  • Bloom, Howard K. (2012). The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books. ISBN 9781616145514. OCLC 764387290.
  • Bloom, Howard K (2010). The Genius of the Beast : A Radical Re-vision of Capitalism. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-59102-754-6. OCLC 318873448.
  • Bloom, Howard K (2000). The Global Brain : The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. New York, NY: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-29584-6. OCLC 43207426.
  • Bloom, Howard K (1995). The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press. ISBN 978-0-87113-532-2. OCLC 30436518.

Articles

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Audio

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Video

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References

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  1. ^ http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20080118-000002.html Retrieved September 30, 2013.
  2. ^ http://www.prometheusbooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1945 Retrieved September 30, 2013.
  3. ^ http://www.lexpansion.com/economie/actualite-economique/le-capitalisme-doit-renouer-avec-son-role-messianique_182052.html Retreived September 30, 2013.
  4. ^ http://www.buffalofilmfestival.com/howardbloom.html Retrieved September 30, 2013.
  5. ^ http://www.roswellpark.org/about-us/history/1950s-1960s Retrieved September 30, 2013.
  6. ^ http://www.howardbloom.net/sixties1.htm Retrieved September 30, 2013.
  7. ^ http://www.angelfire.com/comics/cloudstudio/EYES_ONLY/eyes_only11.html Retrieved September 30, 2013.
  8. ^ a b http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E1DD1730F936A35756C0A9639C8B63 Retrieved September 30, 2013.
  9. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20090823005311/http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id152/pg1 Retrieved September 30, 2013.
  10. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20060216044202/http://www.ascap.com/resource/resource-4.html Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  11. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20051230101501/http://www.globalentertainmentnetwork.com/bios.htm Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  12. ^ http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle09.asp?xfile=data/business/2010/November/business_November702.xml&section=business Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  13. ^ http://www.howardbloom.net/sixties1.htm Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  14. ^ http://arxiv.org/ftp/quant-ph/papers/0504/0504088.pdf Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  15. ^ http://physicaplus.org.il/zope/home/en/3/mabat_bloom_en Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  16. ^ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0732118X01000046 Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  17. ^ http://www.amazon.com/The-Lucifer-Principle-Scientific-Expedition/dp/0871136643 Retrieved October 1, 2013.
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