Memes lead the story
Le Principe de Lucifer (The Lucifer Principle), book with an unusual title, earned him to find himself in the "esoteric" department of the Virgin store, enthroned in the middle of treatises on transcendental meditation, the umpteenth "secret of the pyramids" or other "Mysteries" of Rennes-le-Château "…!
In these conditions, one wonders who will be able to read it: the esotericists will certainly not want it, the political scientists or political analysts will never have the idea to go to seek it in this type of ray. Decidedly, this Lucifer has the genius of dissimulation.
It is, however, a fundamental, even founding book. It is indeed to memetics (1) what was in its time to mimetic the book of René Girard "Things hidden since the foundation of the world", Grasset editions, 1978).
The Principle of Lucifer is a confusing book, both very scientific in its approach (many references) but also full of humor, even mischief ... The short cuts are striking, the extreme density, insights lightning, relentless reasoning , the field of immense knowledge.
The strange personality of the author, his style and his behavior, sometimes offbeat but always very rigorous, earned him the praise of a large part of the American university community from Stanford to Harvard, including UCLA and Johns Hopkins University. The very unofficial review, Foreign Affairs, also pays him a strong tribute. But that's not all: The Lucifer Principle has become the cult book for Broocklyn rock groups who "sample" entire passages from his book to integrate it into their music…!
If the author is an academic, note that this book was rejected by thirty-two New York publishers before being finally published.
"We need the story in its entirety, but not to fall back in but to escape ": this quote from Ortega Y Gasset placed at the beginning of the book comes as a warning from the author, aware of the devastating hypotheses he develops, even of their despairing aspect. And Bloom adds:" The systems I am going to describe are not my idea of what the world should be like, they are the conclusions I have come to regret about what it really is. "." It deals with how, through our interest in sex, our submission to gods and rulers, our sometimes suicidal attachment to ideas, religions and vulgar cultural-type details, we become the unconscious instigators of the exploits of the social organism. "
http://www.automatesintelligents.com/biblionet/2002/fev/principe.html