The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

Why would a man selling his ability to deal with disease pretend that your affliction is a whim? After all, the symptoms one generation swears are “in your head” are often shown by research to be real a few decades later. But a doctor does not generally confess ignorance. He is selling the illusion of omnipotence: the illusion that through consulti

when we are pathetically attempting to deal with the invisible, when we .have the least evidence of reality, that is when we are most vulnerable to the power of the experts.

The new king of the castle goes through a biological transformation simply because he’s moved up on the hierarchical ladder. For a monkey’s physiology, position in the pecking order is everything.

The ritual drove home the fact that the noble was on top and the peasants on the bottom. The Anglo-Saxon word for someone on the crest of a social heap—lord—was a testament to the put-down power of the handout. The word’s literal meaning: “loaf giver.”

Margaret Mead says every human group makes a simple rule: thou shalt not kill members of our gang, but everyone else is fair game. According to Mead, each group says that all humans are brothers and declares that murdering humans is out of the question. Most groups, however, have very strange means of defining who is human.

Compassionate gestures have a purpose we seldom admit: they confirm our feeling of superiority, gratifying us with the certainty that those who receive our “help” are, indeed, below us. This makes the recipients loathe us. They’d gladly exchange the food and blankets we send for the opportunity to look down upon their “benefactors.”

“Physical affection—touching, holding, and carrying.” The societies that hugged their kids were relatively peaceful. The cultures that treated their children coldly produced brutal adults.

The nation slipping downward averts its eyes, but the country on the rise is often vigorously alert, looking for the tiniest opportunity to lunge toward the top. Instead of turning their backs and hoping for peace, superorganisms on the move often manufacture confrontations.

But why does carnage so frequently follow a boost in well-being?569 One clue may come from the following puzzle: Murder rates rise after a war. You’d think they’d go up the most in the losing nations, whose citizens are frustrated and gnashing their teeth over their misfortune, but they don’t. Murders increase the most in the country that won.

The appeal of prophets often lies in their ability to paint a picture of an irresistible Utopia and to convince us that this better world is almost within our grasp.