Lydia Wilson writes:

When I read through many of the email threads between [John] Brockman [host of Edge], Epstein and various intellectuals, what was most jarring wasn’t the crude codes about women and sex that wouldn’t have been out of place in messages between teenage boys — the mass media coverage had to some extent prepared me for this boorish childishness of successful men. What unsettled me was, in fact, the familiarity of how these men were speaking to each other, from my interactions with certain older male academics in my time at elite universities in both America and the U.K. The emails lay bare what I had witnessed in fragments and suggestions, and in the manner in which they dealt with me and others.

In particular, they display the supreme conviction that they are right, whatever they are pronouncing on and whether it falls within their domain of expertise or not, combined with a curious fragility when questioned in any way. This combination of backslapping and peacocking, alongside sensitivity when contradicted, has always fascinated me: If they are the most brilliant men in the world, as Brockman’s invitations suggest, why are they so threatened by fields like critical theory and feminism? If they are so sure they are right, why do they react to challenges with either fury or whining?

The answer is the entitlement they feel about being at the top of society. Different types of elites and types of capital exhibit a camaraderie that is based on their social positions, positions they have no intention of giving up. They use their various attributes — money, reputation, ideas — to buttress each other as members of the same gang. In the language of the manosphere, Epstein’s circle of academics are the “chads” of their world, the 1% even of the white male elites they come from. This is just as bad for the majority of men in society as for the women being relegated to positions of servitude.

The closeness of those at the top is also seen in the way they draw together when one of their number is under attack. Noam Chomsky sympathized with Epstein over “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public.” He wrote, in February 2019, long after Epstein’s first conviction and soon before his second, about “the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.” This is a man more concerned about the treatment of a convicted pedophile than his victims. [Continue reading…]