HB: Opportunity. When the Vikings saw that they had the opportunity to steal all of the people in a tribe through warfare, well, for one thing, they loved warfare. It was their ideal. Their ideal of a heaven. The Viking idea of heaven was to go to a place, Valhalla, where men did nothing but make war, because that was paradise. Now why was it paradise? Because it was exhilaration. And why was it exhilarating? Because the pleasure of bloodlust is built into us as much as the pleasure of sugar is built into us!

RM: Yeah, I can see that in myself. I'm a friendly enough person, but I'm incredibly competitive. When my will is thwarted in any way, I become evil incarnate. It's sheer bloodlust. It's the adrenaline flow happening.

HB: Yes and that adrenaline flow is built into us, not at a primate level, not at a level we got from our tribal hunter-gather days, it's built into us from our days as bacteria. Bacterial behavior explains our mass behavior. We are nothing but bacterial colonies. We are as primitive as that. Our behaviors go back 3.5 fucking billion years and you happen to be talking to the only person who has been tracing those behaviors back that far right now. I'm the only person doing that in a systematic manner.

RM: How long will it take to get a "meme" like that out and until it's firmly established in the culture?

HB: It's getting out there. It's already getting out there. If The Global Brain follows the example of The Lucifer Principle, I designed these books to be around, 15 years minimum and if I have the strength to do the promotion I need to do on this one, then this book will be around for 15 years. You know what happens with The Lucifer Principle: one person tells another person who tells another person and many of the people who read it say that it changed the whole fucking way they look at the world. They can't even watch the news the same way anymore.

RM: I'm sure I must've said that very thing to about 50 people. I can't rave enough about The Lucifer Principle. I was reading the bit that talks about the thuggish behavior of certain monkey tribes and flipping the channels and the juxtaposition of seeing fat old (Republican) Henry Hyde and Bob Barr at a Monica-related press conference and then flipping past a scene from one of the Planet of the Apes films where an orangutan and a sanctimonious chimp were discussing the fate of a human in captivity awaiting trial and I immediately saw Hyde as the haughty, puffed out, fatuous orangutan and Barr as the tight-assed, effete chimpanzee. One of those sublime intersections that modern culture so rarely affords. I even saw your thesis in between those cracks, if you take my point. It's hard to shake it, that's for sure.

HB: Well, here's one aspect of memetic penetration: Kids 18 years old are reading The Lucifer Principle in their college classes. That means it's going to be guiding their perceptual framework for the rest of their fucking lives.

RM: But how long does it take? I've noticed that in the science reading that I do, and I try to read all the major books that come along, it's always ideas that have been around for 30 years, but before they could reach a mass audience, language had to evolve to the point where such concepts could be explained in a pop way before they really could have impact. You have a very, very readable style. I'd say that you made reading a dense scientific thesis no more difficult than reading a Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins novel.

HB: The goal was to make the book conversational. But to answer your question, Thomas Kuhn said that a new paradigm doesn't take hold until the old generation has died off . . .

RM: The old generation is dying off and not just in science!

HB: Yeah, but fuck that! Look what have I been practicing all these years? What have I been fascinated by? Behavior. What have I learned? The practicalities of mass behavior. And what did I invent? Something called perceptual engineering. And perceptual engineering is something that is designed to turn things around, not in 20 years, but in a year. You can be a total outsider and a year later you can be on the cover of the New York Times Science section. This is what I learned from selling rock and roll. This is what I learned from being a publicist. I can create a scientific and cultural revolution right here, right here from this bedroom, with the International Paleopsychology Project. Because I'm selling truth. I am possessed by it.

RM: You're very messianic, that's for sure. If I wasn't so 100% convinced that you’re right and of the importance of your work, I would think that you were paranoid and delusional. But I don't. The worldview and the new perceptual framework provided by The Lucifer Principle could become a new religion. It's an all- encompassing worldview. It obligates the reader to agree with its central ideas using utterly passionate examples and arguments. Aren't you worried that you might be creating a new "ism"? Doesn't every new school of thought lead to a new orthodoxy?

HB: Max Weber says that any movement starts out with a charismatic leader who is in touch with 'the Force' basically--a charismatic leader who is charged with energy and who is able to break through the boundaries of existing custom and let people's souls out. But within a generation after he's gone, everything that he laid down to liberate people is turned into a new bureaucracy, a new set of habits, a new set of clichés and it is stripped of its essential meaning. It gets stripped of its soul.

When I entered the scientific world and became a part the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, which is a group that's, well, they are the Evolutionary psychologists right now, the fashionable scientists of the moment, they disgusted me. They were not scientists, they were religionists. They had dogma and they had heresy. Anyone who disagreed with their doctrine was a heretic.

Now in science, you treat your own idea as a provisional hypothesis, always up for revision. So you treat other ideas as alternatives that must be considered seriously. Because without that there is no science. If you begin to treat other ideas as heresy and then treat the people who adhere to those ideas or dare speak them as heretics, if you eliminate their opportunities for tenure, destroy their careers, blackball them from publication, and punish them in an Inquisitorial manner for holding an idea which disagrees with your theory, your dogma is no longer a science, it's a religion. Evolutionary psychology has become a religion and I couldn't stand that because the scientific ethic is my ethic. Truth is my religion. So I started the International Paleopsychology Project and this is where the revolution is happening. With the International Paleopsychology Project's New Paradigm book series, I'm working with scientists and science authors, to pull forth ideas which will build the perceptual foundations for the next two generations down the road. There are bidding wars going on for these books. Not tell-all memoirs by Monica Lewinsky. Books of theory that hold your attention with the grip of a novel. And there are bidding wars for these books. The editors at several major publishing companies are starting to be able to see what's coming. They know this is important stuff.

I'm working to establish a new science so that the next generation can stand on our shoulders. Sir Isaac Newton said that he only saw what he saw because he was able to stand on the shoulder s of scientific giants before him, The goal is to allow a generation ten years from now to see things that for us were almost impossible to understand and that we had to struggle to get a grip on. They'll no longer have to struggle to see what we tried to see, but they can struggle to comprehend what's beyond, things that would shock, surprise and absolutely delight me, that would confuse me because they would be so alien. If I came to understand the insights that kids two generations down the road will wrestle into submission, that would paradise for me. That's my job, to bring together the shoulders of these scientific giants who will lift the vision of generations to come. And that's what I'm going to do. With every last bit of strength that I've got left in this body.