    5

    5

    Prologue

    The Lucifer Principle is a book with a peculiar mission.  Its goal is to

    provide the reader with a new way of looking at his world. The Lucifer

    Principle takes fresh data from a variety of sciences and shapes them into

    a perceptual lens, a tool with which to reinterpret the human experience.

    It attempts to offer a very different approach to the anatomy of the social

    organism, a new way of understanding the operation of its tendons,

    bones and joints.

    In the process, The Lucifer Principle contends that "evil" is a

    by-product of nature's strategies for creation and is woven into our most

    basic biological fabric.  This argument echoes a very old one.  St. Paul

    proposed it when he put forth the doctrine of original sin.  Thomas

    Hobbes resurrected it when he called the lot of man brutish and nasty.

    Anthropologist Raymond Dart brought it to the fore again when he

    interpreted fossil remains in Africa as evidence that man is a killer ape.

    Old as it is, the concept has often had revolutionary implications.  Why?

    Because it has been the thread on which men like Hobbes and St. Paul

    have hung dramatic new visions of the world.

    I've attempted to employ the subject of man's inborn "evil" like

    those who turned to the subject in the past--to offer up a restructuring of

    the way we see the business of being human.  I've taken the conclusions

    of cutting-edge sciences--ethology, sociobiology,

    psychoneuroimmunology and the study of complex adaptive systems,

    among others--to suggest a new way of looking at culture, civilization,

    and the mysterious emotions of those who live inside the social beast.

    The goal is to open the path toward a new sociology, one which escapes

    the narrow boundaries of Durkheimian, Weberian and Marxist concepts,

    theories that have proven invaluable to the study of mass human

    behavior while simultaneously entrapping it in orthodoxy.

    <<  <  GO  >  >>