Howard Bloom

Global Brain, August 2000

"Today’s cyber-era Spartans are bone crushers of conformity. They are the fundamentalists of both the left and right. Some are godly; some are secular. Religious extremists, ultranationalists, ethnic liberationists, and fascists fall on the fundamentalist side of the line. Brooking no tolerance of those who disagree, they invoke a golden past and a higher power, both of which demand submission to authority. The worst shoot, burn, and bomb to get their way. Their opposites are Athenian, Socratic, Aristotelian, diversity-generating, pluralistic, and democratic." - Chapter 19, THE KIDNAP OF MASS MIND: Fundamentalism, Spartanism, and the Games Subcultures Play

"Thirty-five years before Schanck showed up with his sharpened pencils, an influential Baptist minister had died. To all intents and purposes, this worthy’s memory no longer should have thrived. As Schanck puts it, “The church has been remodeled, every one of his parishioners, save one, is gone, and in fact, in the realistic sense, nothing except the property upon which the building rests remains the same.” But the minister had left more than just a minor legacy—he had provided the platform for what the researchers called a “personality tyranny.” The heritor of the deceased minister’s stored influence was his daughter, Mrs. Salt, a woman who puzzled the researchers enormously. Forty-two percent of Elm Hollow’s Baptist parishioners declared publicly that her word demanded “extraordinary respect.” She “was not liked,” writes Schanck, yet “she dominated” the attention structure of the community. How, Schanck wondered, did Mrs. Salt manage to hold her sway? The answer was in imitative behavior and the fear which keeps us sheep from going astray. Mrs. Salt controlled what you did and did not say. Hence Elm Hollow chorused with almost unanimous piety. In private, Schanck heard the choked-off sound of heresy. Numerous Baptists secretly hankered for their nip of alcohol. Even the most vehement behind-the-scenes believers in the good of sipping bourbon from time to time, when caught in the spotlight of neighborly attention, echoed the religious party line. Even the new minister, who’d only been on the scene a year, admitted privately to liberal views. Yet on the pulpit he preached fire-and-brimstone services. How completely the anointed had commandeered collective perception became apparent when Schanck asked the closet dissenters how other people in the community felt about face cards, liquor, a smoke, and levity. Hoodwinked by suppression, each knew without a doubt that he was the sole transgressor in a saintly sea. He and he alone could not control his demons of depravity. None had the faintest inkling that he was part of a silenced near-majority. Here was an arch lesson in the games subcultures play. Reality is a mass hallucination. We gauge what’s real according to what others say. And others, like us, rein in their words, caving in to timidity. Thanks to conformity enforcement and to cowardice, a little power goes a long, long way."

"In China between 70 million and 100 million citizens—more than the entire British population and, more important, more than the members of China’s Communist Party—adhere to the teachings of a New York—based martial arts master named Li Hongzhi. Like some other fundamentalists, Hongzhi promotes his own books as the path to truth, claims the ability to heal miraculously, and preaches the hatred of outsiders, denouncing homosexuals, rock music, and television. The world is about to end, polluted by these sins, says he. According to Reuters, “rapid change and upheaval” have driven vast hordes of Chinese into cults which, in the words of high-ranking Chinese nuclear physicist He Zexiu, constitute “a real danger to society.” "