The Genius of the Beast

[adventurer]

This is advice from Howard Bloom. At the end of his new book "Genius of the Beast." He is saying to entrpreneurs, game desginers, changemakers and innovators in the 3rd millenium:

." Feed the flames of identity-hunger, feed the flames of those whose souls flicker in the way that yours does, too.  Dare to be Promethean.   Steal the fire of the gods and give it to those you brush past in the street. 

Stop and talk to strangers. Visit neighborhoods and towns you’ve never seen.  Do what saints and saviors do.  Go among your people.  People you’ve never imagined meeting.  Get to know them. Stand up for them at meetings. Fight for them when plans are laid.  Bring humanity new ways of being, new ways of seeing, and whole new forms of life and play.

Stretch the range of human powers, as the first stone toolmakers did.   

Give us ways to show that we belong and yet stand out, as the creators of the first ground-stone makeup kit in India did.

Stretch the range of fantasy the way the makers of the first stone-walled city, Jericho did.

Stretch the reach of comfort and security the way the makers of the first brick city--Catal Huyuk--did. 

Give us new metaphors with which to puzzle out our mysteries--mysteries that range from private insecurities to the wheeling of the cosmos--as the first shepherds and the first explorers did. 

Give us pride and higher aspirations the way the first pyramid builders did.

Turn our trash to treasures as the Mesopotamian deal-recorders who turned squabbles into writing did. 

Give us goals and meaning, as Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed did.

Surprise us--satisfy our lust for novelty and choice--the way Phoenician merchant-sailors did.

Give us power over our moods as David and the real-life equivalents of Orpheus did.

Give us new tools with which we can connect in global productivity teams, as Croesus of Lydia, inventor of money, and as the Roman and Venetian bankers did. 

Validate us in our moments of confusion, as the Greek oracle creators and the Roman dream-book publishers did. 

Upgrade the convenience of the everyday as the Roman concrete creators and their aqueducts did.

Stretch the breadth of our horizons, as Marco Polo, Prince Henry the Navigator, and Christopher Columbus did.

Give us tools to win others to our ideas, as the pamphlet-printers who empowered Christopher Columbus and Martin Luther did. 

Satisfy our needs for the harmless but undignified, as Benvenuto Cellini and William Shakespeare did.

Give us new rituals to make sense of our day, new ways of coming together and of exciting each other as the importers of the afternoon tea ceremony from China and the importers of Yemeni coffee at the first cafés did. 

Give us new frivolities and new openings to the formerly strange as the importers of tulips from Turkey did.

Give us new levels of reality, new virtual plateaus of possibility, as Daniel Defoe and novels did.

Give us new ways to share the phantasms drifting through our brains as Prince Ferdinando de' Medici and his instrument maker, Bartolomeo Cristofori, the inventors of the piano did. 

Give us your soul and bare your emotions, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau did.

Give us new tools of understanding, as Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations did.

Turn luxuries into everyday commodities, as the mass-producers of cotton did. 

Warn us of our failings, of our complacency, of our alternatives, and of our dangers, as Isaiah, Marx, and Ida Tarbell did.

Give us an ego-stake in your plans the way Linnaeus did and we will pull through for you.  Add us to your brain-trust--add us to your group IQ. Give us your visions, give us your obsessions, give us your heart and give us your caring.  Give us new tools, and we will give new visions, new obsessions, new fantasies, new realities, new powers, and new emotions back to you.

Help us serve a purpose higher than our selves.  Help us do what slime mold, bees, and ants achieve.  Help us serve the interests of our fellow human beings.  And help us serve the goals of biomass, the grand experiment of life.  Help us achieve our destiny as antennae of creation, as explorers in an evolutionary search engine, as participants in a god-like process, as agents of creation in a secular genesis machine.

These are the imperatives of the Western system. These are the implicit commandments of third-millennium capitalism, of messianic capitalism. They’ve cried out silently for two and a half million years, waiting to be said…waiting to gain utterance through you. 

This is a universe in search of her potential.  And you are her next-step creator.  May you do your job with   passion, reason, empathy, and astonishment.  May you do your job in ways magnificent and new."