Social Contracts, Moral Order, Weaving A Better Social Fabric, and Epstein

Not just another post on Epstein. I promise it's a broader thing

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking and talking with friends nonstop about Jeffrey Epstein. (For readers unfamiliar with my previous posts on Epstein: I had a post last year called “‘It’s Just Politics:’ The Time I Met Jeffrey Epstein, Twice.” And, last Monday, I wrote a short piece after the latest drop of the Epstein Files.)

This situation is related to one of my favorite topics: Moral order and community norms. Also, there are aspects of how the files were released that, in my opinion, are worth considering as part of the larger picture. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to make my entire Substack about the Epstein Files, I just care a lot about moral order in general.)

The Jeffrey Epstein situation is not just about Epstein, and it isn’t just about “elites.” It reflects on all of human society. At the same time, those of us in the so-called “elite” who were socially connected to Epstein are the ones who should be thinking about it the most. I know the word “elite” can turn off some readers, so to clarify, I think this group includes Americans with certain high-status academic, tech, political, and/or media affiliations. Also, I think people can be members of this social class regardless of personal wealth; money matters, a lot, but membership in this group is more about social status than money.

As my regular readers know, I have also spent time in multiple political movements, both on left and right. I care more about creating high-integrity communities and interpersonal support, than I do about ideology. (I don’t think larger political questions are irrelevant to small-scale community building, but I think the relationship between those things is complicated and non-obvious.)

Basically my main concerns are:
(a) ways that decent people can do better at supporting each other at a small scale, and
(b) ways that “elites” can do better at moral leadership — which is an important job of elites, even though many try to distance themselves from that particular responsibility of being an elite.

1: Context About The Files

I have not yet gone through the Epstein Files in detail, but eventually I probably will. (From what I’ve heard, it takes a strong stomach to read them and consumes a lot of energy, at least for people with a conscience.) Much of what I know about the files is due to chats with friends who have read the files; social media commentary; and media coverage.

I’m glad I didn’t simply jump into the files, because there’s a lot of context. (And there’s lots of misinformation circulating! Did Jeffrey Epstein convince the cartoonist Matt Groening to stop hand-drawing the cartoon “The Simpsons” after Groening flew on Epstein’s plane in 2002? Who knows, but there’s at least one viral tweet saying he did!)

Anyway, here’s some more context, for anyone who wants to take this seriously.

• There is still a ton of information that’s not in the public Epstein Files. Despite the volume of the latest file drop, it’s obvious that many names and email histories were left out of the release entirely, or their material was redacted so heavily that it misrepresented them.

I’ve personally confirmed to my satisfaction that multiple people, who I know had contact with Epstein, aren’t in the files at all. (With that said, I have no reason to believe that any of the people I personally know got left out took Epstein’s money, so please don’t interpret this statement as an indictment of anyone.) I’ve also seen lots of coverage confirming that there were names redacted who were obviously guilty, perhaps because they cut some deal with the Department of Justice. One lawmaker who saw the unredacted files described the redactions as “puzzling, inexplicable.” Lawmakers are on social media talking about how not-actually-unredacted the files are that they get to see.

Meanwhile, people who allege that they were abused by Epstein have stated that their personal information is revealed in the files, even as personal information of their abusers was redacted. I’ve even heard rumors that the files were incomplete before they reached the Department of Justice in the first place. Some people mentioned in the files (including me) had zero information redacted, though we never took Epstein’s money and had very little contact with him; the net effect of this is that we absorb attention from the random people reading the files, who sometimes assume we’re guilty. Danielle Fong, an entrepreneur in the Bay Area, says that one of her windows was broken after someone who was angry about the Epstein situation found Danielle’s unredacted information in the files, even though Danielle was connected to him for fundraising and was not a big part of Epstein’s network. (I don’t know Danielle well, but I have chatted with her at parties and we follow each other on Twitter/X.) Danielle and I have both, often, refused to stay silent when we encounter things we think are wrong, and both of us have criticized both political tribes; a paranoid person might suspect that there is some intent to intimidate us, or to throw sand in the eyes of everyone who’s trying to figure out what’s going on, behind the apparent political decision not to redact our info; at the same time, we are relatively minor figures, and the lack of redaction could have been accidental.

Like many recent redactions happening lately in the public record, these redactions were not competently done, which means that everyday people can undo some of them. I recently heard that someone on Reddit made a crowdsourcing tool where people work together on unraveling the redactions; by the time I heard about the tool, it had already been taken down, but the creator published the source code.

A separate group of people made a tool called Jmail that enables you to search Epstein’s email using a Gmail-like interface (and they also made a suite of other Epstein-related digital tools). Jmail has a feature that allows you to load an email chain and then send a link to other people if you want to share it with them, which can be useful if you are discussing this stuff with friends. Remember, they’re working from the redacted public Epstein files, so the emails currently readable in Jmail are not the complete Epstein email account. Which brings me to:

• Naming names. Numerous people asked me why I am not naming names in my posts about Epstein. There are two main reasons. The first reason, and the most important one, is that I don’t know who knew what when, or who participated in actual corruption and abuse. I wrote my original post because I thought it would be useful to the public in understanding the process of how new people got pulled into Epstein’s network; but I have no evidence that any of the people I personally know are child abusers, or that they knew for sure that Epstein was one. I don’t even have evidence that Epstein himself was a child abuser; I only have the experience I described in the post, which proves nothing at all; if Epstein were still alive, he could sue me for defamation because I wrote that post.

Which brings me to the second reason. Defamation lawsuits are no joke, and neither is any other lawsuit. If you’ve never been the target of unreasonable lawfare, you have no idea what you are asking if you ask people to “name names.” Let me tell you: I have been targeted by lawfare (not over Epstein, but a separate thing). Please believe me when I tell you that lawfare can destroy your life. Major media companies have specialized insurance and legal departments that help them navigate the risks of naming names, and even so, large media companies with millions of dollars in the bank can still be destroyed by targeted lawfare.

It’s not just the money, either: Lawfare wrecks people in ways that aren’t just monetary but also affect the ability to live a normal life, operate a business, etc. And this is America, where freedom of speech is, at least in theory, enshrined as a core value and legal right; so things are comparatively good here; don’t get me started about how these laws work in other countries.

• It may sound obvious, but the Epstein world showcases a bunch of interconnected “elite” communities that are, in fact, human communities.

The rest of this post is about predator operation in general, partly as seen through the Epstein lens but also in general, and about what communities can do about it. Let’s dive in.

2: Predators and the Social License to Operate

Several types of predation are very difficult for society, as it’s currently constituted, to handle. One is sexual harassment, assault, and psychological abuse; this can happen to anyone, but obviously, its usual targets are women and children. Another is fraud and theft, especially theft of money, which can sometimes include theft of labor. Also, some types of spiritual harm are similar, like for example, problematic cults.

It took me a long time to see those types of predation as similar, but now I think they are far more similar than most people assume; and they often overlap, too. When I make this comparison, I do not intend to downplay the trauma of sexual harm. It is simply my observation that financial harm or cult harm can destroy people psychologically in a manner similar to sexual harm, and the aftermath and community responses are often miserably similar.

A man whose life is destroyed because he entrusted his life savings to false “friends” can end up in much the same social position as a woman who is severely abused by someone she knows: Alone when he most needs support, his messages to former friends unanswered or answered with blame because former friends think he “got himself into that situation.” I’m not speaking hypothetically here, by the way — I’ve seen all these things happen to people I know and the similarities are striking.

An important commonality among these situations is that the justice system is typically unable to help. As a result, these crimes almost never get justice through the justice system, and it is also very difficult to do anything resembling justice outside the justice system. As a concrete example: I’ve had men in my life indicate that they wanted to physically hurt a man who harmed me, and I have told them that I don’t want them to do that, because it will cause more trouble for everyone if the man they want to physically attack reports them to the law and they get punished by the justice system. So some types of harm are typically unpunishable, even if there are, technically, laws on the books about them, because the justice system won’t get justice for them and neither will anyone else.

Of course, it goes without saying that major religious authorities won’t help with these sorts of problems, here in America in 2026. That this “goes without saying” is itself interesting.

I originally started thinking about rape and community norms twenty years ago, because I was active in the sex-positive feminist movement. I wanted to create a more healthy sexual culture, and to encourage people to explore their desires. I cared about rape as an issue, even though I had never been raped, and I knew that rape was part of sexual culture too; I was very idealistic and wanted to be sure I didn’t promote bad norms when I did sex education. I got trained as a rape crisis counselor, and I ultimately wrote both about sexuality and sex-positive culture, and also about abuse.

Back in the 2009-2012 blogosphere era, a sex-positive blogger who went by Thomas Macaulay Millar wrote some posts about rape that influenced my thinking. (During those years, I was writing under the name Clarisse Thorn, and he cited me as Clarisse occasionally, so if you see that name in his posts, he was probably talking about me.) One of Thomas’s posts was called “Meet The Predators,” wherein Thomas noted that there are two basic types of sexual predator: One type develops a method, and then uses the method over and over; the second type is less organized, and perhaps more confused. Many methods used by the first type are deliberately intended to look like the second type; this is a strategy for evading accountability. In other words, many predators work hard to make their actions look accidental or uncalculated.

In some posts, where Thomas was writing specifically about abuse that camouflages itself within the BDSM community, Thomas detailed specific predator strategies. I’ve been thinking about a phrase he used, the “Social License to Operate” (SL-Op for short). Here’s a quote of Thomas describing what he means by this:

I repurposed the term from extractive industries like mining and oil, where it expresses the concept that aside from whatever formal regulations govern their operations, they have to maintain enough goodwill that forces are not mobilized to shut them down. Which is not far from what I mean in the rape and abuse context. Law and regulation and social structures are all dynamic systems through which power is exercised, and how exactly it is exercised is a social phenomenon. If there is sufficient desire to make something stop, usually a society can manage to change the law of the interpretation of the law to at least make it much rarer and more difficult. Conversely if there is widespread support of acquiescence, legislators and law enforcement will find that they are swimming against the tide to deploy effective measures against it. In the mainstream of American society, and I can say the same at least for the UK, you can look at the infrequency with which acquaintance rape is successfully prosecuted and punished and simply say that it is not really illegal; not in the thoroughgoing sense where the society collaborates in deploying power against it. It’s nominally illegal, certain kinds of rape are illegal, in the sense that they are often successfully prosecuted, but the most common kinds of rapes, those committed using intoxicants and no overt force, by a man against a woman he knows, are punished at such low rates that a would-be rapist is safe in concluding that if he follows the usual protocol of repeat rapists he is likely to go unpunished.

Thomas then described specific accidental behaviors used as camouflage by predators, including but not limited to “miscommunications.” The posts are potentially worth reading in full if you want to develop a clear understanding of sexual assault; again, Thomas was mostly writing about non-consensual activities within the BDSM world, but these ideas can generalize to other contexts, especially contexts where people have stronger-than-usual reasons to not go to the authorities if they become a victim. This category includes, of course, Epstein’s victims.

In Thomas’s posts he sometimes talked about “The Pussywagon” and noted that we must “never underestimate the depth of human venality.” “The Pussywagon” is the phenomenon where some people manage other people’s access to hot young people, and thereby gain social status. This phenomenon, of course, was part of Epstein and Maxwell’s method, but it’s not limited to them, and has been used widely by power brokers across history.

Because I initially began understanding this problem from the vantage point of a social movement hyper-focused on rape, it took me a while to see that most if not all crimes, by all criminals, and a lot of other bad behavior too, can be described within an SL-Op framework. To be sure, rape is a stronger example than most because it is so hard to prove that it happened. Many crimes are hard to prosecute — even homicide only has a roughly 50% “clearance rate” right now in America — but I’ve seen estimates as low as 1% for acquaintance rape, partly because it is just so easy for rapists to claim that they had consent or that they miscommunicated. Acquaintance rape, therefore, particularly benefits from the SL-Op.

As a corollary, many individuals who do certain crimes also do other crimes. This isn’t a perfect correlation: Not all male con artists are also psychologically abusive liars towards women, for instance, but the two are correlated; and part of why this is true, is that the skills to do both are shared.

If you think this problem of human society is limited to a shadowy elite, then you are badly mistaken. However, when the problem manifests within the elite, then it ends up getting interconnected with access to elite-level money and power, as the Epstein situation illustrates.

3: Why Cancel Culture Failed, And The Behaviors It Tried To Address

As I’ve noted before, cancel culture was one attempt to resolve this type of problem. Ultimately, I think there were a few reasons cancel culture failed.

A. I’ve long thought that the main reason cancel culture failed was that its proponents did not have a positive vision of success in advance. (In this way it’s an ironic mirror to the manner in which right wing aggression is currently embedding itself in American institutions, and that movement is starting to get massive pushback.) Back when I was in the social justice movement, I used to ask people about this, and they never had an answer for me; the closest thing I got to an answer was like, “The world where we win is impossible to picture and isn’t going to happen anyway because abuse is too entrenched.” This, then, became a weird justification for the extremes of cancel culture.

B. The punishment often didn’t fit the crimes. There were too many cases where cancellation-level punishment was clearly undeserved by the person who was canceled. This went a long ways towards discrediting cancellation as a method overall — inasmuch as there was a widely agreed-upon and shared method in the first place, which there wasn’t, which was also an issue.

C. The punishment often didn’t work to remove the canceled person from society, or even from the community where they were canceled. In cases where a canceled person did deserve it, they were frequently able to engineer a comeback. This was especially true in cases where the canceled person was rich and/or famous.

D. Finally and crucially, changing the SL-Op is way harder than it looks. Cancel culture was good at invoking moral outrage, but less good at changing the underlying culture and its opportunities for abuse. In some ways, cancel culture actually entrenched and solidified its opposition because there were so many blatantly unreasonable cancellations.

Some feminists talk about the SL-Op, which has been termed “rape culture.” But as I noted above, I think this is about more than rape. Victims of any sort of plausibly deniable abuse, especially abuse executed among their community ties, tend to go through a similar set of experiences afterwards. Many victims expect others to see their pain and sympathize with it, especially if those people are their friends; part of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the experience of not receiving empathy or support, of feeling alone at the time support is most needed.

All of this involves unpalatable realities about victims, predators, and communities. Often, victims really did make decisions that “got them into that situation.” Often, those decisions really are in line with previous problematic behaviors or blind spots that their friends and families were already frustrated about. Often, predators really didn’t intend the harm they caused, or simply cannot fathom the depth of harm they perpetrate, or are themselves traumatized. Often, victims’ communities really don’t have the extra capacity to help with the healing process because many people are overwhelmed managing their own lives. All these problems contribute to the SL-Op. There seems to be a general failure of empathy about certain types of problems that ruin lives, and that translates into a lack of support for victims, even though it usually isn’t intended that way.

If a victim is so hurt that they don’t feel confident going out to big events, for instance, then practically speaking, a predator who is going to a lot of parties will get social care that the victim isn’t getting, even if the other partygoers aren’t actively trying to support the predator at the expense of the victim; it’s rarely malice on their part, as opposed to incomprehension. Cancel culture tried to address this by basically raising the cost of inviting predators to parties, and for this reason I still appreciate what it was trying to do; because if you have any experience with these underlying issues, then you know how incredibly important it can be, for a victim, to have social environments where they feel confident they won’t encounter the person who harmed them.

I often think about the small social behaviors that lead to victims losing support and “disappearing” while predators thrive, even if others in their social context aren’t trying to do that. Part of what’s happening is that there are many reasons to participate in social contexts, and those reasons all have subsidiary effects, which can be hard to predict. For instance: If I find out that someone in my scene is a serial rapist, then should I unfriend them and/or stop following them on social platforms? It might seem obvious that the answer is yes, but if I do that, then I’ll have less situational awareness about where they hang out and who they know, which can be important. This problem was really obvious with Epstein.

For a long time after I met Epstein, I wondered if there was something wrong with me because I took the second meeting at all (after I figured out that he was guilty), even though I didn’t accept any money from him. But after my first meeting with him, my subsequent contact was largely motivated by trying to figure out what was happening. I thought about whether there was some shadow side to what I was doing; and maybe there was something I was not conscious of; as I acknowledged in my original piece about him, there was some part of me that felt an attraction. Yet it was also true that I had no clear way of getting more information aside from contact with him.

A side effect of this problem is that people who are not guilty of anything, but who were trying to do something useful, are more likely to be “exposed” for their involvement with the predator. We’re seeing this in real time with the Epstein Files, where many of the guiltiest people got their information redacted and yet others in the broader network didn’t. Another good example was an article that ran in TIME Magazine a while back, which purported to examine sexual harassment in the EA community. The article then proceeded to name victims, and it named a mediator who tried to help, and it did not name the perpetrators. This is exactly backwards! If anyone in that article should have gotten the protection of anonymity, it should have been the victims first, and then the mediators, before the perpetrators were anonymized!

However, it’s worth noting that the magazine article I’m mentioning above was not the standard methodology for handling victims. There was a brief cultural moment, the MeToo era, where it felt like media institutions truly innovated on how to report about sexual abuse. This involved finding a lot of different victims, comparing stories to understand the predator’s basic methodology, and exposing the methodology alongside the predator; the Bill Cosby case was a good example of this. If cancel culture had been more functional, maybe these trends would eventually have gotten honed into a longer-standing set of tools. Maybe somewhere people are still developing stories like this, but I haven’t seen any in a while now.

Methodologies like transformative justice try to develop social contexts that can support trauma healing, but those methodologies are fighting an almost unfathomably challenging uphill battle, as anyone who’s explored them can tell you. As I said in my last Epstein post:

Some people try to operationalize community responses using transformative justice. When I published the first issue of my magazine, I was very proud that the longest article in Issue One was about transformative justice.

However, a problem with transformative justice is that it simply does not have an answer for the worst offenders. TJ depends on people trying to seriously engage with the process. It does not work with compulsive liars — it doesn’t work with people who either refuse to engage, or only pretend to engage. Indeed, even for people who are legitimately trying, TJ is still incredibly hard.

The difficulty here tends to be emotional more than anything else.

4. Event Attendance And Organizing In The SL-Op

In recent years I’ve been recalibrating how I think about my relationships and social presence. I’ve also been reconsidering what is implied by my attendance at different parties. I am not the only one. One woman in my social scene remarked to me, recently, that she’s become careful about who she is seen standing next to, because even the most minor position in a photograph could be perceived as an endorsement. I’m not there yet, but maybe I’ll get there eventually.

This is a tough problem. There are good reasons to go to parties even if I don’t like the organizers or feel mildly uncomfortable in the social scene. There’s lots of stuff that’s best learned at large social gatherings; and one of the roles I play, both professionally and in my community, is knowing a lot about what’s happening. Sometimes when I give people a chance, I learn that I disliked someone for the wrong reasons. I also take some enjoyment in challenging myself with unusual social situations, as some of my longtime readers and friends can attest. So choosing to not attend parties at all seems like a maladaptive response to problems with the social fabric, although I see the appeal and I’ve sometimes opted out for extended periods.

Some of my friends have expressed puzzlement about my concern around this. They say things like: We believe in you, and we know you wouldn’t do anything evil, so why not attend whatever events you feel like attending? I’ve also had friends ask me: Why not accept money from someone like Epstein? We want your works to be in the world and we wouldn’t have judged you even if you’d taken the money. Why be so paranoid about accepting the wrong kinds of money?

In short: What would have been the harm in accepting Epstein’s money, if it had allowed me to do the work I think is best? Many prominent intellectuals took this deal and did important stuff with the money. I know fundraising is hard, and I don’t judge the people who took the money (unless there was some separate involvement aside from the dollars themselves). So it’s interesting that I seem to hold myself to a higher standard than I hold others.

I think the problem becomes more visible if you zoom out a bit. Social scenes are where money changes hands, yes, but also where people find partners, develop norms, and learn patterns of behavior. And social proof is a massive driver of human behavior, sometimes in ways I have totally failed to predict in advance. For instance, I’ve had the experience of introducing someone to someone else, intending the introduction purely in a logistical sense (like “hey, I heard you need a ride to Burning Man, and this person is driving to Burning Man!”), only to learn later that my introduction was taken as an endorsement that I didn’t intend.

If I attend a party hosted by someone else where there’s someone I know to be a vindictive predator, and I chat with the predator at the party, and an observer infers from seeing me talk to them that the predator is a safe person, then is that my fault? I think most people would say no, but this is the sort of question I worry about. This problem is complicated by the facts that there are many predators whose predations I don’t know about, and also I haven’t found warnings to be very effective. So if I introduce someone to someone else, even by accident, and they like each other, then it probably won’t fix things if I try to warn them later.

This is also about my own safety, by the way. Part of my increased concern about this has been the costly realization that in fact, I can get caught by predators, too.

Epstein was a master of this type of social proof. Over and over, one hears the refrain that Intellectual X trusted and respected Jeffrey Epstein because they met him in the company of Intellectuals Y and Z. He also deliberately crafted social situations that “felt weird” but where nothing could be “proven.” When I met Epstein, I had over a decade of experience navigating a wide range of weird social contexts, plus what seems to be some natural talent for doing so; even then, I felt confused afterwards about what I’d seen and I spent years being like: wtf?

It’s clear from reports that Epstein pushed social norms with his grantees, including by bringing young women along with him in inappropriate circumstances. In 2019, Ronan Farrow wrote an article about how Epstein did this with Joi Ito, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, whom Epstein funded; here is an excerpt:

In the summer of 2015, as the Media Lab determined how to spend the funds it had received with Epstein’s help, Cohen informed lab staff that Epstein would be coming for a visit. The financier would meet with faculty members, apparently to allow him to give input on projects and to entice him to contribute further. Swenson, the former development associate and alumni coördinator, recalled saying, referring to Epstein, “I don’t think he should be on campus.” She told me, “At that point it hit me: this pedophile is going to be in our office.” According to Swenson, Cohen agreed that Epstein was “unsavory” but said “we’re planning to do it anyway — this was Joi’s project.” Staffers entered the meeting into Ito’s calendar without including Epstein’s name. They also tried to keep his name out of e-mail communication. “There was definitely an explicit conversation about keeping it off the books, because Joi’s calendar is visible to everyone,” Swenson said. “It was just marked as a V.I.P. visit.”

By then, several faculty and staff members had objected to the university’s relationship with Epstein. Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor, had voiced concerns about the relationship with Epstein for years. In 2013, Zuckerman said, he pulled Ito aside after a faculty meeting to express concern about meetings on Ito’s calendar marked “J.E.” Zuckerman recalled saying, “I heard you’re meeting with Epstein. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” and Ito responding, “You know, he’s really fascinating. Would you like to meet him?” Zuckerman declined and said that he believed the relationship could have negative consequences for the lab.

In 2015, as Epstein’s visit drew near, Cohen instructed his staff to insure that Zuckerman, if he unexpectedly arrived while Epstein was present, be kept away from the glass-walled office in which Epstein would be conducting meetings. According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room.

On the day of the visit, Swenson’s distress deepened at the sight of the young women. “They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”

This is a slightly different permutation of the behavior I described in my own post about meeting Epstein: Bringing obviously young women into meetings where it made little sense for them to be there. Epstein wasn’t just working within the SL-Op, he was actively creating new SL-Op, deliberately making others uncomfortable by pushing the Overton window. I don’t doubt that an important effect of this behavior, from Epstein’s perspective, was that it both caused gossip and drama, and started shifting the line in onlookers’ minds about what was acceptable behavior among grantmakers and grantees.

But what’s the responsibility of any individual observer in this situation? After the visit described above, Zuckerman resigned and Swenson became a whistleblower — but she had help from an organization called Whistleblower Aid, which assists whistleblowers who are “public and private sector workers.” Someone like me does not have access to this sort of resource, and that’s probably true of most people reading this. Also, most of the cases one encounters in everyday life are not as dramatic and obvious as Jeffrey Epstein was.

5: What To Do

This stuff is absolutely horrible and there is a very real sense that I have no idea what to do.

As I’ve been arguing, it can be hard to gauge the line about where being present in a scene turns into participation, or even endorsement. The same is true of accepting money from an evil person.

And yet a terrible reality of human society is that every single human, no matter how virtuous, relies on taking what is not given in order to live. Where is the line? I don’t ask this to encourage nihilism but rather because it’s something that must be considered in order to do better. One of my ongoing mental puzzles is whether I ought to be vegan or not. I was vegan for a long time, and now I’m not. A question I ponder on a regular basis: Is buying organic, free-range animal products better than veganism because it supports a market for more ethical products, or is it worse because you’re still supporting an evil empire of trapped, traumatized animals? And if the question is literal survival — like you’ll have nothing to eat unless you eat meat that was tortured to death, or perhaps you’ll have medical problems if you don’t eat animal products — then at what point should the compromise start?

An imagined world where a lion lays down with a lamb points to a miraculous paradise precisely because it is so impossible to imagine, for someone who knows how both lions and lambs behave in the real world. No single one of us can reasonably take responsibility for the fact that we live in a world with lions and lambs; and if you try to get between a lion and a lamb, it may not go well for you. This, to me, is what is profound about the image of Paradise as a place where the powerful predator lays down with the vulnerable child.

It is important to have an image of what Paradise might be. At the same time, we live here, now.

A friend who works on transformative justice once remarked to me that the purpose of the practice is not so much to fix the problems, as to “let the story in.” Sometimes one of the most profound things you can do for a badly hurt person is listen, even when it hurts you to listen, as it generally will if they have been deeply hurt and haven’t been able to process it. I fail at this all the time. But when I succeed, I see the transformation.

If there’s no capacity for listening, then sometimes showing up for a person who needs it can just mean being there logistically, showing care even if one can’t bring oneself to hear the full story or can’t agree on their interpretation. These things may seem tiny, but I’ve come to believe that these small attempts at relating are one of the surest personal crucibles we have.

—

—

Update, 2/16/26: I made some slight corrective edits (for instance, I removed a reference to industrial farming from the paragraph where I mentioned veganism because it didn’t make sense). I’m noting these edits because I habitually note post edits when I make them, even if they are minor.

—

Update, 3/16/26: As more people have sifted through the Epstein files, new information has come to light.

Typically in situations where women assist with abusive men, they are involved in the abuse; therefore, I now suspect that Epstein was essentially trying to get me sexually involved with both him and the girls during our meeting. I suspect that he hoped this would ultimately lead to a procuress-type role, similar to the one Maxwell allegedly played. It is now well-documented that Epstein recruited multiple women for roles like this, e.g.: here is a thread on Twitter/X that has screenshots showing how he “formalized sexual services and the recruitment of other women through a written ‘apprenticeship’ contract:”

grizzy@Furbeti

Epstein formalized sexual services and the recruitment of other women through a written “apprenticeship” contract, framing the arrangement as independent contracting under French law.

2:52 PM · Feb 22, 2026 · 66.2K Views

---

34 Replies · 558 Reposts · 1.33K Likes

Just in case the Twitter/X thread disappears, here is a direct link to the contract that it cited in the Epstein Files.

•