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Nietzsche once wrote that “He who battles with monsters should take care lest he become a monster, for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.”
And seldom have those words rung more true than in the case of Noam Chomsky’s bizarre friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Over the course of the past year, I have listened to about 20 of Chomsky’s more serious books, because they are indispensable to dissecting the conspiracy of silence surrounding the worst crimes of the world’s most powerful state and its satellites.
And like many, I had developed a blindspot to American imperialism, which became glaringly obvious with the shocking levels of support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza among the leadership of both major parties.
So, one might expect me to be able to provide a meaningful explanation for his seemingly inexplicable friendship, but I am just as baffled as everyone else.
How can someone who has diligently dedicated his life to fighting injustices strike up a friendship with a billionaire trafficking in women and girls, who likes to party with the very people Chomsky spent his life eviscerating?
A greater familiarity with his writings can help eliminate some of the cruder explanations, as the next few paragraphs will illustrate. But there are greater psychosocial pitfalls to spending your waking hours researching crimes against humanity and fighting their perpetrators that we would all do well to consider.
In this way, this post is not just about a great intellectual who befriended a monster, and what his work for justice might have had to do with it. It is about how anyone standing alone against public opinion, while addressing such injustices, can develop monstrous personality traits, and how this might explain some of the failings of both this one thinker and the ability of the movements he has done so much to support to grow into stronger coalition.
In much the same way our spiritual development can be thwarted by the idolization of great men with even greater shadows, our ability to redress the great injustices of the world can be hindered by the failures of social justice movements to address their own outsized shadows.
An ancient Latin maxim holds that “The corruption of the best is the worst.” And while there have been no revelations that suggest Chomsky availed himself of Epstein’s trafficked women and girls, he did discuss with Epstein “fantasizing” about going to his island. And he did not demonstrate any concern with what were already well established accusations against him when he befriended Epstein in 2015.
This might be small potatoes in more spiritual circles, where great teachers often sexually exploit great numbers of their trusting students, but it is in many ways more disorienting, because we expect thinkers like Chomsky to be at the forefront of exposing the abuses of the high and mighty, not defending them against criticism.
Chomsky is currently incapacitated due to a devastating stroke, so he cannot speak for himself. Yet, his wife has stated, in what reads like a heartfelt apology, that they simply didn’t know of the accusations against Epstein. He simply presented himself as a philanthropist of science, and that is how he was known in their community, where Epstein frequented academic events.
She emphasizes that Chomsky would never have befriended him had he known of Epstein’s trafficking in women and girls, and that Chomsky has always been a strong supporter of the rights of women. And while the last part is certainly true, insofar as he routinely emphasizes major crimes against women and girls, the idea that he knew nothing of the serious accusations against Epstein is…hard to believe.
Now, there are many who have stated that Chomsky “didn’t give a damn about women’s rights,” and while it is true that he did not adopt a feminist analysis of power, and that he felt these analyses had harmed the worker’s rights movement, his writings are filled with gruesome revelations of the way woman’s rights have been abused, along with support for women’s movements in the developing world.
In some ways, he was at the forefront of revealing some of the worst crimes against women and girls to people in developed democracies simply by emphasizing the worst crimes against humanity in general, and the way they were being funded with our own tax dollars. Western feminists may not find this work as familiar as those in the developing world, where the plight of women can be so much worse.
A more credible explanation is that Chomsky may feel an almost instinctual affinity for people who are attacked by the American press, and this may have allowed Epstein to present himself to Chomsky as being attacked for some secretly held heretical positions. If this were the case, it should serve as a warning to us all, for many of us criticizing American crimes against humanity share this tendency. But Chomsky himself says he shared an intellectual affinity with Epstein, bizarre as that may sound, which transcended what he described as their substantial differences.
Chomsky is frequently accused of defending war criminals who oppose the United States, and I myself rarely read his books as a result of holding this view in the past. But in most cases, when he refers to dictators like Assad or Putin, he condemns their war crimes, and then he points out the hypocrisy of the American press in focusing on them when the United States is doing worse somewhere else. In rare cases like his early denial of the Cambodian Genocide, which was rooted in meticulous but flawed research, he quietly corrects his massive mistakes years later—though he never did this with the well established chemical attacks of Assad, who he nevertheless repeatedly describes as “monstrous.”
So, while the shadow we are examining in Chomsky might be related to those of socialist movement leaders who became dictators upon attaining power. Perhaps he developed a habit of treating people who were being portrayed as monsters as innocent until proven guilty. But while he may have done this with peasant movements in, say, Nicaragua or the Castro government in Cuba, he has no history of doing any such thing with billionaires accused of abusing their powers.
What nobody seems to be asking is how Chomsky coped with spending his waking hours reviewing atrocities and often being one of a tiny handful of recognized intellectuals exposing them, as was the case with the East Timor and Guatemalan Genocides, for instance. To this day, if you want to understand the horrors that were inflicted on El Salvador in the eighties, including the often grotesque dismemberment of sexually abused women, Noam Chomsky and his daughter Aviva, who is even more illuminating, are arguably the most important people to read. Similarly, Chomsky and Robert Fisk are the people to read on how Israel tore apart Lebanon in the eighties, and for quite some time Chomsky and Edward Said were the people to read on Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.
But what does playing such a prophetic intellectual role over six decades time do to a person?
It certainly requires that one develop a thick skin and unusual courage. Any number of the most brutal regimes in the world might have assassinated Chomsky to their benefit. And you would have to develop an extraordinary capacity for suspending judgment when you are being bombarded with propaganda that no one else is putting under a microscope.
Many of us who are accustomed to exposing uncomfortable truths about the greatest evils known to humanity have developed similar traits, and those of us who are more self-reflective could teach the rest a lot about keeping the personality traits associated with fighting injustices in check at dinner parties—though it will have to be do as I say, not as I do, in my lessons.
Yet, there is a more perplexing problem that comes with exposing crimes against humanity that so many ordinary people enable: almost everyone starts to appear capable of supporting a genocide. And since genocide is the greatest evil known to humanity, because it entails the commission of almost every evil imaginable, suddenly the perpetrators of what might otherwise appear horrific crimes start to look a whole lot more normal.
Should we condemn everybody or go easier on everybody? The answer is not entirely clear.
Still, there is an even deeper and more insidious way in which people who spend their lives working to expose crimes against humanity can be affected. Many journalists have been known to become atrocity junkies, forever seeking out the latest worst atrocities, as if in search of another adrenaline fix. This has led many to addictive behaviors, which have blown up their lives. Was this sort of death drive at work in his befriending of Epstein? Possibly, but it would be an unusual manifestation of them.
Then there are the perils of being a purist. Noam Chomsky was reputed to always take the bus home from speaking events in strange cities, even when offered a ride, for instance.
But moral purists befriending the worst sinners, as if seeking a vicarious thrill from what they would never engage in themselves, is a common theme in literature. Did Chomsky finally succumb to this desire to get close to evil, after a lifetime of condemning people in high places, when an unusually persuasive intelligence agent figured out just the right buttons to press? Or was his interest in Epstein more mundane, with Epstein being the only exploitative billionaire who would befriend Chomsky precisely because he was an intelligence agent?
Perhaps Ken Wilber got it right in suggesting that people with more developed mental and emotional capacities are more likely to get things right, but when they are wrong, they tend to get everything wrong. Or perhaps Chomsky is just a stubborn old man who learned to throw off all conventions in pursuit of justice and then found himself lacking in any social conventions when being drawn to this Pied Piper? We will probably never know.
But what those of us who spend our days working to expose crimes against humanity can do with this object lesson is reflect on the moral hazards of our work. We can pay attention to how it can sometimes contort our personalities. We can be careful to let in the right kind of feedback that might keep our worst tendencies in check. And we can be wary of striking up friendships with billionaire sex traffickers working for the Mossad.
And what of this stain on such a great man’s legacy? If I have gleaned anything about Chomsky from reading so many of his books, in which he almost never talks about himself, it is that there are people across the world risking their lives in the struggle for justice, and the risks people like myself face in exposing their plight are minimal in comparison to the risks they face. Perhaps we would do best carefully sorting through the insights of Chomsky’s substantial body of writings but look to these freedom fighters as the moral exemplars we might seek to emulate instead.
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