At Lawyers Guns & Money, Paul Campos writes about economist and former Harvard University president Larry Summers, who has just been banned for life from all activities of the American Economic Association due to his long friendship and correspondence with the late Jeffrey Epstein.
This happened soon after a large number of chummy, racist, and sexist emails between the two was made public. In some of those exchanges, Summers — who is married — sought, received, and followed Epstein’s advice for seducing a much-younger economic student. The emails would be really gross and creepy and disgusting even if Summers’s correspondent had been some unknown friend and not also the world’s most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker.
The same release of Epstein emails that seems to have ended Summers’s career also consistently reveals something else about Jeffrey Epstein: He wasn’t that bright. Or insightful, or interesting. So why did so many otherwise apparently bright and insightful people make time and take time to hang out with this man?
Campos turns to Andrew Gelman’s theories on this perplexing question, quoting this from Gelman:
I can’t speak for Larry Summers, a man I’ve never met and whose writings have never impressed me, but other members of what we might call the “Epstein community” are legitimately brilliant, and their receptiveness to Epstein puzzled me. Some hypotheses:
(a) They thought Epstein might send some money their way.
(b) They were in the habit of sucking up to rich people for money so they were just sucking up to Epstein out of habit.
(c) They thought they might get some sex with underage women out of the deal.
(d) They liked to hang out with Epstein because he thought Epstein was cool.
(e) They genuinely enjoyed hanging out with Epstein.I have a horrible feeling that for a lot of these people it was a mixture of all 5 of these things! I guess another option is that they enjoyed free Caribbean vacations and didn’t look too carefully at the other people at the resort.
My only point here is that if we’re talking about Summers, we can say, yeah, Summers is a stuffed shirt, he’s an idiot, the years as university president warped his brain (“flattering rich assholes and rich evil people” is pretty much the #1 requirement for the job of university president), etc. But not everyone was involved was an idiot, and a lot of them needed the money even less than Summers did. And yet they still seemed to have enjoyed hanging out with the guy.
Campos assesses these theories and says this:
Besides the most obvious explanations here — money, sex — I’m most intrigued by (d), which I think has a lot of explanatory power. Many many people love the feeling that they’re part of the in crowd, and I suspect that this especially true among academics, given that 93.71% were high school losers who never made it with a lady etc.
Very tangentially, I noticed a theme linking several key figures in John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke was that they were high school misfits who were desperate to find a niche in which they could be admired/cool kids. This is particularly evident in the cases of David Duke and Rush Limbaugh, who are both profiled in the book, but it applies to a bunch of other characters in it as well.
Wanting to be part of the Inner Circle is often an extremely powerful force in not just high school, but politics, academia, and institutional and social life in general.
What Paul Campos there calls “the Inner Circle” is what C.S. Lewis called the “Inner Ring.” That is also the title of his essay, first written for the 1944 Memorial Lecture at King’s College.
The entire essay is worth reading. It’s often quite funny, and — like much of Lewis — often most incisive where it is most confessional. But here is the part I was reminded of when reading Campos and Gelman:
It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.
And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”
And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.
Lewis’s description of the “genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated” Mephistopeles aligns very much with Gelman’s description of a college president’s fundraising duties — the exchange of flattery with “rich evil people.” Although, as both Lewis and Gelman insist, money isn’t necessarily the main factor.
While Lewis doesn’t use the word, I think he describes the transgressive appeal of a person like Jeffrey Epstein, even to those who did not share his specific transgressive appetite. His shameless transgression gave others permission to pursue whatever form of shameless transgression they preferred. The disgraced former Prince Andrew (still free, still unimaginably wealthy) wanted permission to do exactly what Epstein was doing. The disgraced former British ambassador Peter Mandelson (still free, still quite wealthy) apparently sought permission to become some slightly other kind of scoundrel.
Those invited and accepted into Epstein’s Inner Circle were not all active participants in his rape and trafficking. But they were all, in one way or another, “unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists.”
Lewis goes on to explain both why you should and how you can avoid this fate. Striving for the Inner Ring, he argues, will only make you miserable, drawing you away from the possibilities of craft and friendship, which is to say the possibilities of anything that might actually make you happy.
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