President Trump last week called Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, “a sick man, a demented man,” adding that “we are dealing with a very, very sick individual.” ( NYT ) Doubtless there was something drastically wrong in Stephen Paddock’s life that led him to act as he did. But can we separate that individual life from the way our common life is organized? Rather as changes in the global climate have to be factored into what gives rise to the recent hurricanes, so our evolving economic and political climate has to be seen as background conditions for what people do. But just as climate change does not give us a complete explanation of, for example, Hurricane María, neither does our social system completely explain what an individual like Stephen Paddock did. In fact, we do not have enough information about his life to even begin to speculate about his motives. But whatever they were, they were planted and cultivated in the soil of capitalist society and culture. A recent artic...