How We're Put Together

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 ...

An important task for a socialist writer is to make capitalism look as bad as it really is. This is essential to the socialist project because capitalism has so many ways of making itself look good in the   propaganda it distributes through the corporate media and the education system which it dominates. Daily we are shown the glossy and benign face of capital as providing all good things, from jobs to all our enticing consumer goods. So it takes a lot of effort to show the system in its true colors. Yet the underlying and terrible truth about capitalism is not hard to see if one just burrows a little way below the surface. Among the many charges we can bring against capitalism is that it is a system of organized crime: it organizes the predatory activity of wealthy families and corporations and protects them from real and potential uprisings of the people they exploit. It is also, like much crime, psychopathic; in particular, it is organized narcissism. It seem...