Introduction form the authorThe essays in Inner Demons, and other essays, comprise what I believe to be the best of the essays from on my blog, Riding on the Storm, written between August 2014, and October 2017. They also represent some of my more pertinent contributions to the Occupy Wall Street web site, under the user name GypsyKing, written between 11 October 2011, and December 2013 - most of which has now, unfortunately, been redacted from that site. This book is relatively short, considering the volume of work within the sources I've drawn from, including roughly a-quarter-million words written for the Occupy Wall Street site (in the form of debate, as well as of articles), and the roughly 50 essays written in my current blog in the above time frame. Also, many of the thoughts expressed here first appeared, at least in their nascent form, on my former blog, which has now been discontinued.One might conclude from what I've written above that these essays are related to the problem of inequitable distribution of wealth in modern America, but if so, they are so for the most part tangentially. At this time, a hundred years exactly since the Russian Revolution, every thinking individual should see that whatever solutions we may find to humanities problems - if solutions are to be found - can be found only through penetrating much deeper into the questions of human existence then those posed merely by financial inequality. Our fundamental problems are clearly built much deeper into us, and in the nature of the world we are born into, that any such pat explanation could begin to address.Yet nevertheless this book is brief, and in that it addresses such a complex subject, its brevity would tend to contradict the above assertion of the complexity of its subject. The simple reason is that I have no intention of boring the reader. The ideas one encounters over a lifetime, and the ways in which those ideas are infused with the spirit of particular individuality, are also both complex and intensely personal. Yet such insights, if they are valid, and are to stand the test of time, must also stand the test of brevity. Brent Hightower 29 September 2017My blog, Riding on the Storm, is at 21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com