“Men are more inclined to choose evil than good when they are free to choose.” Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, Book I.
“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant; and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” Jesus of Nazareth, Gospel according to Mark 10:43–44.
The court-ordered declassification of files linked to the Jeffrey Epstein case has shaken global public opinion not only because of the scale of the documented abuse, but because of the nature of the material released: complaints, testimonies, and private correspondence that remained under seal for years and that now allow us to observe, within a single corpus, the extremes of contemporary power. In these documents, the girls allege that Jeffrey Epstein organized sexual auctions of minors within closed circles of power. The testimonies describe practices of extreme objectification and recount direct intimate bodily “inspection” of the minors at the hands of Donald Trump, today the most powerful man in the world, before their assignment to one of the oligarchs present. This is not an ongoing trial or a verdict: these are files declassified by court order, containing allegations formally entered into the record, and whose publication has produced international shock because of the rawness of what is described and the names associated with it. There have been thousands of documents, and reading them is hard.
That same file—exposing the most brutal exercise of power over children’s bodies—contains another kind of material, less graphic but decisive for understanding how that power was sustained and normalized. It includes letters and emails from Noam Chomsky to Jeffrey Epstein, written after the allegations of sexual abuse of minors had become publicly known. In that correspondence, Chomsky expresses empathy for Epstein, offers support, and provides communications advice for navigating the crisis. The accusations are characterized as “hysteria” around the abuse of women; the legitimacy of public denunciation is questioned and the climate generated by the MeToo movement is delegitimized. The problem is treated as reputational and strategic, with no reference whatsoever to the victims or to the journalistic investigation that exposed the facts.
The coexistence of these materials within a single declassified judicial file forces an uncomfortable question. It is not a matter of establishing moral equivalences between those who perpetrate violence and those who do not, but of understanding a structural convergence: how unregulated power produces, at one extreme, direct predation, and at the other, enlightened banalization; how brutality and normalization can coexist and reinforce one another without the system stopping.
This essay positions itself at that point of contact. Not to pronounce sentences, but to think about what this convergence reveals about the nature of power when it emancipates itself from limits and checks; and why, in that context, even critical lucidity runs the risk of becoming an alibi. From here on, the question is no longer who the monsters are, but what architecture allows the harm to occur and, for so long, not be interrupted.
NOTE: The declassified documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case include complaints, testimonies, and materials incorporated into official case files. Their publication does not, for the moment, constitute judicial rulings or formalized charges, nor does it imply evidentiary validation of their contents, but rather the release of files that form part of the case and that reflect the totality of complaints received by the authorities.
The human fact before theory
In 1974, in a gallery in Naples, a woman remained motionless for six hours. She did not speak. She did not react. She did not defend herself. She did not move. In front of her, a table held seventy-two carefully arranged objects: a rose, a feather, perfume, bread; but also scissors, blades, a chain, a whip. Among them, a loaded pistol with a single bullet. A sign explained the rules: the public could do whatever it wanted with her body. She assumed all responsibility.
During the first hour, almost nothing happened. Someone offered her the rose. Another stroked her hair. There were nervous laughs, timid gestures, a floating discomfort that gave away that, despite the sign, she was still perceived as a person. The body was still a subject.
The turning point was silent. There was no announcement or visible rupture. Someone simply understood there would be no consequences. From there, the cuts began: first in the clothing, then in the skin. Marks appeared, small wounds, blood. Hands stopped trembling. Violence did not erupt all at once; it was learned. It became progressive, exploratory, creative.
As the hours passed, harm shifted from physical contact to humiliation. The body was no longer a motionless woman, but an available surface. A man pointed the pistol at her head. Another took her hand and placed her finger on the trigger. In that moment, some spectators intervened. Not before. Not when the violence was growing. Only when the possibility of death became explicit.
When the six hours ended, the woman moved. She walked toward the public. She recovered the condition of subject. Then something revealing happened: those who had participated, those who had watched, those who had remained silent, fled. No one wanted to look her in the eyes. No one wanted to acknowledge what they had done.
A year later, in the United States, a group of university students agreed to participate in a psychological experiment. They were assigned roles at random: guards and prisoners. The setting simulated a prison. There were no real punishments, no history of violence among the participants. Within a few days, the guards began to humiliate, degrade, and abuse. The prisoners internalized submission, shame, fear. The experiment had to be stopped earlier than planned because of the physical and psychological risk it had generated.
None of the participants arrived intending to harm. None thought of themselves as cruel. And yet, in both cases, ordinary people, under specific conditions, crossed boundaries they would likely have condemned in the abstract.
These facts do not speak of exceptional sadism or singular monsters. They speak of something more disturbing: what happens when responsibility is suspended, when the other ceases to be a subject, when the structure authorizes.
Here there are still no culprits and no theories. Only an uncomfortable observation: violence does not always erupt from hatred. Sometimes it emerges from permission.
When evil does not need hatred
To understand what occurred in those spaces—the gallery, the simulated prison—it is insufficient to resort to the classic figure of the monster. In these scenes there is no explicit hatred, no unleashed destructive drive, no declared violent ideology. What appears is something more opaque and, precisely for that reason, more dangerous.
Hannah Arendt formulated it with a lucidity that still unsettles: modern evil does not always present itself as conscious transgression, but as administrative normality. It does not shout, it does not exalt itself, it does not experience itself as evil. It is carried out.
The so-called banality of evil does not refer to the insignificance of acts, but to the suspension of moral judgment. To the fact that ordinary individuals, inserted into a structure that distributes roles, responsibilities, and permissions, stop thinking ethically about what they do. Not because they ignore the difference between good and evil, but because that difference ceases to be relevant within the framework that contains them.
In this sense, the experiments described are not psychological anomalies, but Arendtian scenes in their purest state. The audience that cuts the clothes, wounds the skin, or points a weapon does not perceive itself as criminal. The guards who humiliate the prisoners do not experience themselves as sadists. They act within a system that authorizes them, that dissolves individual responsibility, and that turns the other into a function.
Arendt insisted that the radical evil of the twentieth century was not the work of demons, but of men incapable—or unwilling—to think from the other’s place. It is not a matter of ignorance, but of a form of moral blindness induced by the structure. When the institutional framework legitimizes action, personal judgment withdraws.
What is unsettling is that this logic does not require totalitarian states or explicitly criminal regimes. A device that suspends responsibility, that declares the other object, enemy, number, or experiment is enough. It is enough that harm be administrable.
In the gallery, the sign performed that function. In the simulated prison, the role did. In both cases, the result was the same: the progressive dehumanization of the other and the normalization of harm.
Arendt does not exculpate. But she shifts the question. It is not only who does evil, but how systems are built in which evil can be carried out without anyone feeling like its author.
This shift is decisive, because it prevents refuge in comforting explanations. If evil were always the work of identifiable monsters, it would be enough to isolate them. But if it emerges from obedience, permission, and the renunciation of judgment, then the question becomes more uncomfortable: what conditions make it possible for ordinary people to cross boundaries they condemn in the abstract? With this lens, the initial facts cease to be extreme episodes and begin to outline a pattern.
The questions that arise when permission exists
If we accept, with Arendt, that evil can take hold without hatred and without monsters, then the facts described cease to be extreme episodes and become symptoms. Not of an individual pathology, but of a structural human fragility. From there, questions can no longer be framed in simple moral terms. It is not enough to ask who caused harm. We must interrogate the framework that made it possible.
The first question is uncomfortable in its simplicity: what happens when responsibility disappears? In the gallery, the sign suspended all consequences. In the simulated prison, the role absorbed guilt. In both cases, action was detached from the moral self. It was not “I who did,” but “what could be done.” Responsibility was not denied: it dissolved.
The second question is even more disturbing: why does harm not only appear, but escalate? In neither experiment does violence arise immediately. It begins with smaller gestures, almost banal. A cut in the clothing. A humiliating order. A comment. The progression is key. Harm is normalized step by step, as if the system taught how far one could go. There is no abrupt ethical rupture; there is adaptation.
This leads to a third question: at what point does the other cease to be a subject? Not when they are named an enemy, not even when they are first wounded. The break comes earlier, when the other becomes functional to the device. When their pain stops being a limit and becomes data. A motionless body. A numbered prisoner. An available object. Dehumanization does not require hatred; it requires utility.
The fourth question touches a particularly disturbing zone: what role does pleasure play? Not necessarily explicit pleasure, sexual or sadistic, but something more diffuse: the sensation of power, of authorized transgression, of dominance at no cost. In the performance, violence became creative. In the prison, it became routine. In both cases, the exercise of power produced a form of gratification that was not planned, but that the system allowed.
And then comes the question that unsettles those who prefer to believe in a clear boundary between “them” and “us”: what real guarantees do we have that we would not act the same way? The temptation is to answer that it depends on personal values, education, character. But the facts erode that certainty. Ordinary people, without histories, without violent discourses, crossed serious boundaries when the structure allowed it.
These questions do not seek to absolve. They seek to shift the focus. If evil emerges when permission exists, then the problem does not reside only in individual intent, but in the architecture that suspends judgment, distributes roles, and protects the perpetrator. Harm does not appear despite the system, but through it.
At this point, the central question is no longer psychological in the strict sense, but political and structural: what kind of power produces these conditions? What forms of organization make it possible for violence to be exercised without anyone recognizing themselves as responsible?
Answering this requires taking another step. It requires abandoning the comfort of explaining evil as individual deviation and entering the relationship between power, personality, and structure. There a word appears that is often misused and must be approached carefully: psychopathy.
Psychopathy: intelligence in the service of character
The word psychopathy is often invoked as a moral insult or as a simplified clinical diagnosis. In both cases it impoverishes more than it clarifies. If one wants to think rigorously about the relationship between psychopathy and power, it is first necessary to clear up a central confusion: there is no single definition of psychopathy, nor an absolute consensus on its boundaries.
In the clinical field, psychopathy is not reduced to violence or crime. Nor is it automatically equivalent to madness, but rather to anomaly. And conversely, many psychopaths are fully functional, socially adapted, and cognitively competent. In fact, one of the most disconcerting traits is precisely that: the coexistence of high instrumental intelligence with profound emotional poverty.
A particularly fruitful definition for thinking about power understands psychopathy not as an isolated pathology, but as a configuration of personality in which intelligence is placed in the service of character, and character is dominated by certain traits taken to an extreme. It is not a cognitive deficit, but a structure and, for some types of socially extreme, conflictive psychopathy, a specific moral orientation.
Among these traits frequently appear low empathy, inability to feel guilt, the tendency to instrumentalize others, the ease of lying without distress, superficial charm, and a notable tolerance for moral risk. None of these, taken in isolation, is necessarily pathological. The problem arises when they combine, reinforce one another, and operate without counterweights.
From this perspective, psychopathy does not imply a rupture with rationality, but a particular form of rationality. The psychopath understands the rules, but does not ethically internalize them. Understands harm, but does not register it as a limit. Can anticipate consequences, but only in strategic terms, not moral ones. Intelligence does not moderate the impulse; it optimizes it.
This explains why many psychopaths do not fail socially, but prosper. In certain environments—competitive, hierarchical, deregulated—certain psychopathic traits not only are not penalized, but become functional. Coldness is confused with leadership. Lack of guilt with determination. Manipulation with charisma. Cruelty with efficiency.
However, it is important to introduce a crucial distinction here. Clinical psychopathy is statistically minor. It does not govern the world. If it did, systems would collapse quickly. Most people who wield power are not psychopaths in the strict sense. And yet, many systems produce functionally psychopathic behavior.
Prolonged power, exercised without effective controls, tends to erode empathy even in individuals who do not have baseline psychopathic traits. Impunity acts as an accelerator. Structural dehumanization does the rest. What in the psychopath is a trait, in the ordinary powerful can become a habit.
It is worth clarifying that we are referring to psychopathic personalities that cause more social harm than perhaps other forms of personalities with extreme traits that do not. In any case, we are speaking of abnormal personalities, in statistical terms, not necessarily pathologies.
At this point, the question stops being how many psychopaths reach power and shifts to something more disturbing: what type of power selects, rewards, or amplifies behaviors that, outside that context, would be considered unacceptable. The problem is no longer clinical, but political.
Psychopathy, understood as intelligence without moral brakes, offers a key to understanding certain individual trajectories. But it does not by itself explain the great ethical disasters of modernity. For that we must look higher: at the structures that turn lack of empathy into a competitive advantage and absence of guilt into a functional virtue.
With this distinction in mind, the link between psychopathy and power becomes less comforting. Not because all powerful people are psychopaths, but because too many systems allow—and sometimes require—acting as if they were.
Here the analysis definitively leaves the clinical terrain and enters another plane. It is no longer about personalities in the abstract nor about bounded experiments, but about a reality in which these mechanisms operate without simulation or metaphor. Where permission is not artistic or academic, but social, legal, and economic. Where the experiment does not last hours or days, but years.
There Epstein appears.
Psychopaths in power
The fact that certain personalities with psychopathic traits appear recurrently in the highest spheres of power is not due to a conspiracy nor to an inexplicable statistical anomaly. It is due to a phenomenon of structural selection. It is not that the system is invaded by psychopaths; it is that certain systems reward the traits that characterize this kind of personality.
In contexts of intense competition, high hierarchy, and scarce counterweights, the absence of empathy is not a deficit, but an adaptive advantage. The capacity to make decisions without experiencing guilt, to instrumentalize people without inner conflict, and to assume high moral risks allows advancement where others stop. Emotional coldness translates into efficiency. Lack of scruples, into audacity. Manipulation, into political skill.
To this is added a key element: psychopathic personalities tend to handle the language of charisma and simulation with ease. Not because they believe in the values they proclaim, but because they understand them as tools. They can embody ethical, philanthropic, or reformist discourses without experiencing them internally. That plasticity allows them to move successfully in environments where public image and persuasion are central.
Another decisive factor is tolerance for dissociation. While many people experience a psychological cost when sustaining deep contradictions between what they do and what they say, psychopathic personalities can operate without that friction. This makes them especially suited to navigating structures where harm is fragmented, diluted, or externalized. They can participate in destructive systems without experiencing themselves as responsible.
No less important is the way power protects those who best adapt to its internal logics. As these personalities rise, they tend to surround themselves with complementary profiles: efficient technicians, obedient executors, respectable figures who provide symbolic legitimacy. The result is a bubble of progressive impunity in which the most harmful behaviors are cushioned by distance, prestige, or the system’s complexity.
It bears emphasizing, once again, that this does not imply that most people who occupy positions of power are psychopaths. It implies something different and more disturbing: that poorly regulated power systems tend to filter upward those with fewer empathic brakes and a greater willingness to instrumentalize others. Ascension does not occur despite those traits, but because of them. This mechanism explains why, when power concentrates and becomes opaque, certain individual trajectories repeat with unsettling regularity. Not because humanity is populated by monsters, but because certain statistically abnormal traits prove functional to structures that have stopped rewarding limits.
Once this is defined, the picture becomes complete: Epstein does not appear as an inexplicable aberration, nor Chomsky as a simple personal disappointment, but as figures situated at different points in the same system that selects, tolerates, and protects certain behaviors. The first inflicts harm; the second does not stop it. Both are intelligible only if one understands what kind of power makes them possible.
Why, from East to West, does the perversity enabled by power converge on the same thing: boys and girls?
At this stage of events—which, I would dare say, have half of humanity nauseated—I think it is a brutally lucid question, and it has no comfortable answer, but it does have a structural explanation that cuts across cultures, religions, and political systems. The reason why, from East to West, the perversity enabled by power returns again and again to children, adolescents, and minors is not cultural or anecdotal. It is anthropological, political, and symbolic.
- Absolute power seeks the absolutely vulnerable
Children concentrate all the conditions perverse power needs: total dependence; absence of political, economic, and symbolic power; difficulty naming harm; fragile social credibility; bodies available without reciprocity. From the logic of distorted power, they are not just “easy” victims: they are perfect victims. They cannot negotiate. They cannot denounce effectively. They cannot take revenge. They cannot dispute the narrative. That cuts across all human cultures.
- It is not only sex: it is total domination
There is a frequent—and dangerous—mistake here: believing this is “sexual perversion.” It is not primarily that. At its core, it is absolute domination, and the child’s body represents the maximum point of that domination because: consent is impossible; no symmetry is imaginable; no comparable resistance exists; the act does not affirm desire: it affirms omnipotence. That is why it appears again and again wherever power loses all limit: in imperial courts, decadent aristocracies, closed clergy, financial oligarchies, political castes, criminal networks, failed states, and states that are too strong. Discourses change. The logic does not.
- The child as symbolic territory
There is something even deeper. The child is not only a vulnerable body. The child is a symbol of future, continuity, and humanity. When corrupted power invades that body, it does not only violate a person: it violates the very promise of the community. That is why these acts often coexist with: contempt for law, moral nihilism, extreme cynicism, the sense of being “above everything.” The implicit message is: there is no limit I cannot cross. That explains why these abuses appear both in ultra-religious and ultra-secularized contexts: the common point is not belief, it is impunity.
- Universality of the pattern, not of culture
It is not that all cultures “produce the same.” It is that any extreme concentration of power without control ends up producing zones of absolute abuse. And those zones tend to fixate on: bodies without voice, bodies without rights, bodies without return. Children are at the center of that intersection. Not because they are “desired” in the abstract, but because they represent ground zero of defense.
- Epstein as a modern example, not a historical exception
Epstein invented nothing. What he did was reproduce, in contemporary form, an ancient logic: closed elites, opaque spaces, structurally silenced victims, networks of mutual protection. The novelty is not in the crime, but in the scale, logistics, and sophistication. Private jets instead of palaces. Foundations instead of temples. Lawyers instead of priests. The object is the same.
- The sentence no one wants to accept
The reason this repeats is not that humanity “is bad.” It is something worse: when power stops recognizing limits, the child’s body becomes the last territory in which to prove that they no longer exist. That is why it always appears there. That is why it hurts so much. That is why it is so hard to confront. And that is why, as long as the architectures of power are not touched, Epstein—under another name, in another language, under another god—will keep happening.
Anthropology of Power: When asymmetry becomes principle
From an anthropological perspective, power is not, first and foremost, an institution or an office. It is an asymmetrical relationship. It appears where one can decide over another’s life, body, time, or destiny without effective reciprocity. All human societies have developed ways of managing that asymmetry: rituals, laws, taboos, prohibitions, sacred narratives. The problem is not the existence of power, but its deregulation.
In traditional societies, even the most hierarchical, power was usually surrounded by symbolic limits. The king was subject to the gods. The chief had to protect the clan. The priest answered to a transcendent order. Violence did not disappear, but it was contained by frameworks that reminded everyone that power was not absolute. When those limits broke, abuse was not interpreted as mere excess, but as profanation.
Modernity introduces a decisive mutation. Power becomes rationalized, administered, technified. It no longer needs to legitimate itself symbolically in each act; it is enough that it works. Authority becomes procedural. Harm can be carried out without drama, without ritual, without epic narrative. It is enough that it is efficient. From an anthropological standpoint, this has a profound consequence: the limit ceases to be sacred and becomes contingent.
When power emancipates itself from any external reference—divine, communal, moral—and answers only to itself, a specific form of perversion appears. Not necessarily violent in the immediate sense, but radical in its logic. The other ceases to be a fellow human and becomes a resource. Life becomes administrable. The body, available.
Here the anthropology of power converges with what the experiments and Arendt had already shown: hatred and extreme ideology are not required. Total asymmetry without brakes is enough. In that context, abuse is not a deviation, but a latent possibility.
Because, from an anthropological point of view, children represent the maximum degree of asymmetry possible. They not only lack material or political power; they also lack full symbolic status. They are humans in formation, subject to guardianship, defined by others. In all cultures, the child occupies an ambiguous zone: protected in discourse, but vulnerable in practice.
When power becomes perverted, it seeks the point where asymmetry is absolute. Not by chance, but by internal coherence. Abuse against children’s bodies is not a cultural anomaly, but an extreme consequence of a power relationship without limits. It is there that domination becomes total, because it meets no resistance and no possible equivalence.
From this angle, the historical recurrence of child abuse in contexts of power does not reveal a universal sexual drive, but something more unsettling: the anthropological need of overflowing power to prove itself limitless. It is not enough to command, decide, or possess. There comes a point where power wants to prove that there is no boundary it cannot cross. The child’s body then becomes the last threshold.
This pattern cuts across ancient empires, decadent aristocracies, religious hierarchies, modern states, and financial oligarchies. Languages, gods, and justifications change. The structure does not. Wherever asymmetry is absolutized and control disappears, abuse tends to shift toward the most unprotected bodies.
The anthropology of power thus forces us to abandon comforting explanations. It is not about cultures “more perverse” than others, nor about particularly degenerate eras. It is a human constant activated under specific conditions. The problem is not desire, but asymmetry without limit. It is not sexuality, but domination.
From here, Epstein definitively ceases to be an aberrant individual and becomes an intelligible phenomenon. Not as exception, but as a contemporary expression of an ancient logic, updated with the resources of global capitalism, financial opacity, and the sacralization of prestige.
Power, when it does not recognize an outside that limits it, tends to return to what humanity declares most untouchable. Not because it ignores it, but precisely because it knows it. Maximum transgression is not an accident. It is an assertion.
And that is the hardest point to accept: we are not facing an isolated moral failure, but an uncomfortable anthropological truth about human power when it ceases to be contained.
But not everyone would have attacked the artist and would violate a child or adolescent. And that nuance is fundamental. If we do not say it clearly, the analysis becomes unjust… and false. For the fact that not everyone would have attacked the artist nor would violate a child or adolescent contradicts none of the above. On the contrary: it sharpens it.
What the experiments, Arendt, and the anthropology of power show is not that “we are all the same,” but something more precise and more demanding: not everyone reacts the same way to permission, but permission shifts the moral thresholds of many. There are at least four key points here:
First: there is real diversity in internal brakes. People do not arrive at a situation of power with the same psychic structure, the same history, the same empathic capacity, nor the same relationship to limits. There are those who, even under explicit authorization, do not cross certain thresholds. Some withdraw. Others intervene. Others freeze. That matters, a great deal. If everyone were equally susceptible to violence under power, we would not be speaking of human fragility, but of determinism. And it is not that.
Second: most do not initiate violence, but many tolerate it. This is an uncomfortable but central point. In Rhythm 0, not everyone wounded. In Stanford, not everyone abused. In Epstein, not everyone touched. But: many watched, many stayed silent, many justified, many minimized, many benefited indirectly. Systemic harm does not require everyone to be aggressors. It requires enough people not to act as a limit. That is the difference between “not everyone would violate” and “not everyone would prevent it.”
Third: there is a radical difference between not doing and not being able to do. Most people would not violate a child not only for moral reasons, but because: they do not have access, they do not have impunity, they do not have networks of protection, they do not have control of the narrative. Power does not only authorize the act: it creates the material and symbolic possibility for it to occur. That explains why abuse concentrates at the top, not at the bottom. Not because the bottom has more virtue, but because the bottom has more limits.
Fourth: the perversity of power does not imply universality; it implies selection. Power systems do not turn everyone into executioners. They select, elevate, and protect those who: have fewer empathic brakes, better tolerate objectification, manage dissociation without collapsing, can harm without subjectively falling apart. This connects directly with what we already said about subclinical psychopathy and extreme traits: they are not the majority, but they are functional to the system. That is why they appear again and again at the top.
So, said precisely: No, not everyone would have attacked the artist. No, not everyone would violate a child. But power without limits does not need everyone. It is enough that some act and many do not stop it. And that is what is truly unsettling. Because the problem is not only who crosses the line, but what structures stop protecting it. That is the point where the analysis ceases to be psychological or moral and becomes, inevitably, political.
Epstein and Chomsky as differentiated examples of the same system
In light of the above, the Epstein case cannot be read only as that of an individual aggressor, nor Chomsky’s as a simple isolated “moral fall.” Both occupy different places within the same architecture of power. Precisely for that reason, they are so illuminating when placed in relation.
Jeffrey Epstein embodies the active agent of harm. He not only crossed the boundary, but organized it, systematized it, and made it sustainable over time. His conduct was not episodic or impulsive. It was repeated, logistical, protected, and profitable. For this he needed more than individual perversity: he needed access to vulnerable bodies, networks of silence, economic capital, social prestige, and a structural impunity that is not improvised.
Epstein did not act alone nor at the margins. He operated in the very heart of political, financial, and cultural elites. His power did not derive only from money, but from his ability to connect worlds: academia, philanthropy, international politics, intelligence, high society. In that sense, he was less a solitary predator than a node. A point of convergence where the asymmetry of power became absolute for the victims and invisible for the protectors.
Here what we have already said fits precisely: the system does not need everyone to violate. It needs some to do it and many not to stop it. Epstein belongs to the first group: those who, by personality traits, position, and opportunity, exercise direct violence. But his prolonged existence is only explicable through the conduct of the second group.
It is in that second group that the case of Noam Chomsky appears, and it is here where the analysis demands special rigor so as not to fall either into cover-up or into lynching.
Chomsky is not Epstein. There is no evidence that he exercised sexual violence or that he participated in abuse. Confusing these planes would be intellectually dishonest. However, his relationship with Epstein clearly illustrates another aspect of the pattern: the suspension of ethical judgment through prestige, symbolic capital, and environmental normalization.
Chomsky represents the subject who does not cross the boundary of direct harm, but who also does not act as a limit in the face of an evidently corrupt system. His error is not criminal, but structural and moral. It consists in having accepted closeness, interlocution, and the banalization of a figure whose power was only possible thanks to the systematic exploitation of vulnerable bodies.
Here exactly what we described earlier operates: not everyone would violate a child, but many can look without seeing, hear without listening, know without acting when the environment legitimizes silence. Prestige functions as moral anesthesia. Intellectual brilliance does not immunize against ethical blindness; sometimes it reinforces it, because it provides arguments to justify omission.
In this sense, Chomsky is not a shameful exception within the critical world, but a painfully human example of what happens when even those who have dedicated their lives to denouncing power underestimate its everyday proximity. It is not about perversity, but about a form of banality: excessive confidence in one’s own righteousness, the idea that “I am not that kind of person,” the implicit delegation of the problem to others.
Epstein shows what happens when power is exercised without brake through direct action. Chomsky shows what happens when power is tolerated without sufficient brake through inaction. Both cases confirm the same thesis: systems of abuse are sustained not only by those who harm, but by those who do not interrupt.
And here it is worth returning to the central point we formulated so clearly: not everyone would have attacked the artist, not everyone would violate a child or adolescent. That is true. But neither would everyone have stopped the experiment, reported Epstein in time, or publicly broken with his environment. Structural harm does not require unanimity. It requires a critical mass of silence. That is why Epstein is not only a proper name. It is a pattern. It is worth remembering that this pattern needs both psychopathic personalities who inflict harm and normal personalities, even brilliant ones, who do not stop it. Not out of malice, but out of adaptation, comfort, blindness, or undue confidence that the system will correct itself.
This is the point where the analysis ceases to be biographical and becomes political. Because as long as elites—economic, intellectual, or moral—do not conceive of themselves as responsible for setting limits, the system will keep producing Epsteins. With other names. In other places. Under other discourses. And that is, perhaps, the hardest conclusion to accept: it is not enough not to be the executioner. In contexts of power, not being the limit also has consequences.
How many brilliant scientists and academics operated within Nazism and in spheres of power without being soulless psychopaths or fanatics? What would Arendt say about this?
Exceptionality does not equal perversity
Psychopathic personalities—or personalities with psychopathic traits—do not exhaust the universe of exceptional personalities that converge in high spheres of power. There is another distinct category, one that is neither pathological nor morally classifiable in advance: statistical abnormality associated with extreme excellence. Chomsky, like a great religious leader, an exceptional scientist, or a radical creator, is not within the norm. He is not, in cognitive, productive, or symbolic terms. His capacity for abstraction, his intellectual persistence, his theoretical density, and his influence place him outside the average. That is not a value judgment: it is a fact.
Elites of power—in all eras—are composed to a large extent of subjects who are not average. Power tends to attract both those who lack brakes and those who possess extraordinary capacities. The frequent mistake is to confuse these two types of exceptionality. An exceptional personality may: lack empathy and produce harm, or possess deep ethics and still become trapped in harmful structures, or be morally correct in the abstract and fail in the concrete exercise of limits. Exceptionality does not guarantee permanent moral lucidity. Nor does it invalidate it.
Scientists and academics under Nazism
This is the question Arendt posed, and that separates her both from easy moralism and from naive absolution. Many brilliant scientists, jurists, engineers, physicians, and academics were not fanatics, not sadists, not necessarily militant antisemites, did not experience themselves as criminals. They operated within the Nazi regime because: their work was technically complex, their function was fragmented, harm was mediated by procedures, and their primary identity was professional, not political. Here there is no psychopathy. There is displacement of judgment. The scientist who optimizes a process, the jurist who refines a norm, the academic who legitimizes a discourse does not feel that he is killing. He feels he is fulfilling a function. That is the core of the problem.
What Arendt would say (and here it is important to be faithful to her)
Hannah Arendt would not say that these subjects were monsters, or perverse, or psychopaths. Nor would she say they were innocent. She would say something more uncomfortable. She would say they thought badly.
For Arendt, modern evil does not arise from a demonic will, but from the inability or renunciation to think from the other’s point of view. Thinking, for her, is not calculating nor reasoning technically. It is exercising judgment. Stopping. Asking oneself whether one can live with oneself after what one does.
The brilliant scientist who operates in a criminal regime without being a fanatic fails not out of ignorance nor malice, but by suspending moral judgment in the name of function. He takes refuge in his role. He tells himself it is not his matter. That others decide. That he only contributes knowledge.
Arendt was very clear about this: intelligence, even genius, does not immunize against evil. Sometimes it makes it more effective. And this connects directly with Chomsky.
Chomsky through Arendt
Arendt would not see in Chomsky a psychopath nor a pervert. She would see an exceptional intellectual who, at a concrete point, underestimated the demand of judgment in the face of a corrupt environment. Not out of desire to harm. Not out of cynicism. But out of something more human and more dangerous: the conviction that his intellectual integrity was sufficient as a moral guarantee. For Arendt, that is a grave error, but not an infamous one. It is a typical error of intellectual elites, who confuse critical lucidity with ethical immunity. She would say the problem is not having been exceptional, nor having been close to power, but not having interrupted the automatic thinking that normalizes the intolerable.
The final distinction (very important)
So, to say it precisely and without moralizing: Psychopathic personalities rise because certain systems reward the absence of brakes. Exceptional personalities rise because certain systems need intelligence, legitimacy, and prestige. Systemic harm occurs when neither of the two exercises the limit. Epstein represents exceptionality without moral brake.
Chomsky represents exceptionality that does not recognize itself as a necessary limit. Both belong in the analysis, but not in the same category. And Arendt would insist on this: the problem is not being exceptional, nor brilliant, nor powerful. The problem is to stop thinking when it is most necessary to do so. That is what makes this reflection so uncomfortable… and so current.
The convergence as wound and as warning
This essay could not have been written without a persistent discomfort. Not only because of the subject matter, but because of the very gesture of bringing together two names that, for decades, seemed to belong to irreconcilable moral universes. Putting Chomsky and Epstein together is not a provocative rhetorical exercise; it is a painful operation. And that pain is not incidental: it is part of the argument.
The discomfort arises because critical thought tends to organize the world into comforting categories. Perpetrators and denouncers. Predators and defenders. Violence and critique. The convergence of these two names dismantles that simple moral geometry and forces us to think on harsher ground: that of the structures that allow harm to occur not only by direct action, but also by omission, tolerance, and banalization.
This text does not establish an equivalence. Epstein and Chomsky are not the same, do not occupy the same place, and do not bear the same responsibility. Confusing them would be intellectually dishonest. But neither can they be thought of as completely unrelated. The convergence analyzed here is not biographical or moral, but structural: both exist within the same ecosystem of power that selects, protects, and normalizes very different behaviors, yet behaviors that are functional to its continuity.
Epstein embodies the direct exercise of the perversity of power. The raw demonstration of what happens when asymmetry becomes absolute and the other’s body is reduced to territory. Chomsky, by contrast, embodies a different risk and, in a sense, a more unsettling one: the danger of lucidity that trusts itself, of critical intelligence that assumes its trajectory, its ethics, and its history suffice as a moral guarantee.
Here a central warning of this essay emerges. Being Chomsky—or being like Chomsky in structural terms—is not a place of immunity. It is a place of risk. The risk of underestimating the concrete responsibility that accompanies prestige, intellectual exceptionality, and proximity to spheres where power concentrates. The risk of believing that denouncing the system in the abstract exempts one from interrupting it in the immediate. The risk of delegating the limit to others, precisely when one’s own voice could have embodied it.
In a world in which power claims, with renewed aggressiveness, increasingly “libertarian,” deregulated systems stripped of counterweights, this reflection becomes urgent. The promise of freedom without regulation is often presented as emancipation, but it frequently operates as the deliberate dismantling of the few limits that still contained abuse. Where responsible structures disappear, power is not distributed: it concentrates. And when it concentrates, it produces again the same zones of impunity that this essay has tried to make visible.
The lesson is not cynical, but it is severe. It is not enough not to be the executioner. It is not enough to be right. It is not enough to have an impeccable critical biography. In contexts of deregulated power, intellectual lucidity ceases to be only a virtue and becomes a political obligation. Thinking is no longer only understanding, but assuming responsibility for contributing to the construction—and defense—of structures with limits, counterweights, and accountability. From this perspective, the convergence of Chomsky and Epstein functions as a historical warning. Not about the inevitable wickedness of the human being, but about the fragility of ethics when it trusts too much in individual goodwill and too little in institutional architecture. Where power emancipates itself from all restraint, neither genius nor radical critique is enough to prevent harm.
Perhaps the most honest gesture is not to soften that discomfort. To keep it open. Because what this essay ultimately argues is not that everything is lost, but something more demanding: that the responsibility to set limits is not abstract, nor delegable, nor automatic. And that, in times of deregulation celebrated as freedom, renouncing thinking about power in terms of responsible structures is also a way of allowing Epstein to happen again.
That is the point at which this text closes. Not with an absolution nor a condemnation, but with a warning addressed, above all, to those who believe they are safe from it.
REFERENCES
– U.S. Department of Justice. Epstein Files – DOJ Disclosures.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures
– U.S. Department of Justice. Epstein Files – Data Set 10, Document EFTA01660679.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01660679.pdf
– The Guardian. Epstein files: Noam Chomsky advised Jeffrey Epstein to ‘ignore’ abuse allegations.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/03/epstein-files-noam-chomsky
– The Nation. What the Noam Chomsky–Jeffrey Epstein Emails Tell Us.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/noam-chomsky-jeffrey-epstein-emails/
– Miami Herald, Julie K. Brown. Jeffrey Epstein Investigation.
https://www.miamiherald.com/topics/jeffrey-epstein
– Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. Lumen / Penguin Random House.
– Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment. Paidós.
– Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House, 2007.
– Abramović, Marina. Rhythm 0 (1974).
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/163883
– Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, Book I.
– Bible. Gospel according to Mark, 10:43–44.
