Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.

Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.

I think most generations tend to learn the lesson of war the hard way. There is a deep attraction to the empowerment. Freud is right: societies either become locked in a collective embrace of Eros, as individuals do, or a collective embrace of Thanatos, the death instinct. They swing between the two. The notion that societies are naturally prone toward self-preservation is wrong. Self-annihilation can be deeply addictive, intoxicating, enticing. So I take a darker view of human nature, that war is probably always going to be with us. I think history bears me out.

When you have a liberal class that no longer functions, when those people who traditionally defend and care about a civil society no longer do so, then you cede power to very frightening, deformed figures, all of which we are watching leap up around the fringes of our political establishment - this lunatic fringe, which has largely taken over the Republican Party.

There are no impediments now to corporations. None. And what they want is for us to give up. They want us to become passive. They want us to become tacitly complicit in our own destruction.

As the economy unravels, as hundreds of millions of Americans confront the fact that things will not get better, life for those targeted by this culture of hate will become increasingly difficult. Rational debate will prove useless.