THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE

Abstract

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. The Lucifer Principle is organized as a dessert tray for the intellect. But is the tasting worth the effort? That's for you to say. I can only promise one small thing. When you've finished The Lucifer Principle, you are unlikely to see the daily events around you in the same old way again.