A Blog About How We Are Put Together I will be pursuing two sets of questions in this blog. First , politics and the economy, issues I can be heard talking about regularly on The Old Mole Variety Hour . These are questions about how we, collectively, are put together in social relations. Second , questions about how the human soul is constructed and the sources of our inner demons. I have written about these matters in my book Demystifying Demons: Rethinking Who and What We Are . This blog could also have been called Consciousness and the Unconscious , which is the name of a course I taught several times some years ago. For I will be dealing with the limits and distortions of what we think we know (our consciousness) both about how our souls are put together and how we are all put together in society; and what we know -- and feel -- but do not know that we do, both about ourselves and our social relations with each other (the unconscious). ...
In Woody Allen’s film “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” a wise European existentialist, Professor Levy, appears on video reflecting on the difficulties of living well in a universe without God. Here is one clip: Professor Levy : We must always remember, that when we are born, we need a great deal of love, in order to persuade us to stay in life. Once we get that love, it usually lasts us. But, the universe is a pretty cold place. It's we who invest it with our feelings and, under certain conditions, we feel that the thing isn't worth it any more. What are these “certain conditions” in which we feel that life “isn’t worth it anymore”—conditions in which love dries up? How about a world in which there is no place for us, where we don’t matter, where there is nothing we can do that has value? Is this not the world in which so many people now find themselves, the world from which they flee from their lives into a stupor brought on by alcohol or opioids, or escape ...