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Essay

Ill-doing is not the province of monsters. It’s the province of you and me

These days it feels like practically every social interaction, phone call or email with someone I haven’t spoken with in a while has to begin with some form of grim recognition — What terrible times we’re in…the daily horror…atrocity upon atrocity — before moving onto whatever the main item of business may be. Such is the moment that it would feel crude, like a form of bad manners, not to acknowledge the heaviness many of us are feeling, the lethal danger facing so many of our neighbors, here and around the globe.

Now, the Epstein files: one more poisonous cloud billowing into the already choked atmosphere. To some, the attention being lavished on the files may seem a distraction from more immediate violence playing out in real time*, *as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. To others, the revelations they contain serve as confirmation not only that power and immorality are inevitable bedfellows, but that depravity inheres in the very condition of being a member of the elite.

To me, the first position seems at once true and also to miss a crucial connection between the history the Epstein files document and the ongoing, ever-growing viciousness being meted out by the Trump administration in so many arenas right now, in the form of pepper spray and drone strikes and caged children and hunger. But I worry that the second position misses something even more crucial. I worry that by deciding the most egregious wrongs are the special province of what the New York Times calls “a cabal of elites,” by demonizing this particular group — a group to which, by definition, the vast majority of us will never belong — we risk letting ourselves off the hook.

Of course we have an obligation to investigate the wrongdoing, both criminal and ethical, both directly inflicted and implicitly endorsed, committed by Epstein and the stomach-churning list of his cronies and enablers.

Of course we have an obligation to the survivors, who suffered at their hands and continue to suffer, in no small part because of the unconscionable outing of their identities by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice.

But I believe we also have an obligation to do something very hard, and that is to hold the perpetrators in our consciousness not as demons, but as beings like ourselves. We should resist the temptation to conclude that because they were unlike us in many respects — wealth, status, access — they have nothing to do with us. We should resist the temptation to assign flat fairy tale roles — hero, villain, monster, victim — to anyone. We should resist the temptation to cast the bad guys out, categorize them as inhuman, and assume we are, thank heavens, incapable of fathoming what could make anyone that way.

We should resist this temptation not out of charity, but out of self-interest. For working to fathom the roots of ill-doing is a necessary step toward disentangling ourselves from these roots’ noxious clutches. And make no mistake, we are all in their clutches.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said, “we must ask ourselves how we have produced an elite that is so immature, reckless and arrogant.” He’s right. We produced them. We, as a society, produce them.

Regardless of how we cast our votes, the fact remains we are all in this together. It’s the bad news and the good news. It’s bad because we’re all breathing the same toxic — racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, ableist, ageist, Islamophobic, antisemetic, etc. — air, drinking the same toxic water. It’s good because we really are all people: messy, complex, capable of goodness, capable of badness, capable above all of change. But we cannot heal anything alone, neither ourselves as individuals, nor our society. We need one another. We need one another badly. This is why now, even now, especially now, in this time of heightened cruelty and earthly peril, we must resist the temptation to suck our teeth in disgust and write one another off.

We must ask ourselves how we have produced an elite that is so immature, reckless and arrogant.

Rep. Ro Khanna

We’ve been here before, folks. And we’ll be here again if we don’t embrace our capacity to change the way we see the problem. Ill-doing is not the province of monsters. It’s the province of you and me. Fear, insecurity, unkindness, mistreatment of others, neglect of others, participating in abuse or failing to speak up against it — this is the stuff of the Epstein files, but it’s also the stuff of the playground. Hannah Arendt warned us more than a half century ago not to blind ourselves to “the banality of evil.” It may be comforting to absolutize, but doing so leads us right back to the root of the problem. It delivers us full circle to the sick delusion at the heart of so much of the world’s current suffering, the delusion of us vs. them.

To reject the formulation of “us” and “them” is neither to normalize or excuse the actions of powerful men who plot and rape, or of their masked henchmen who terrorize whole communities, shooting mothers and nurses dead. On the contrary, it’s a refusal to participate in the cynical mindset that enables such horrific acts in the first place. I believe when we dehumanize anyone we inflict moral injury upon ourselves, and that to insist upon seeing our enemies as fully human is itself a form of resistance.

These may be abysmal times, but they offer us an opportunity — or two.

First, a chance to connect the dots between the conditions that allowed Epstein and his cohort to inflict suffering unchecked, and the continuing conditions that allow other purveyors of brutality the same latitude. The clearer-eyed we become about how systems of oppression are interwoven, the stronger position we’ll be in to dismantle them. Second, an invitation to be curious about where we fit along the spectrum of damage and harm — that done to us and that we have participated in doing to others. The more open we are to understanding how such experiences have shaped us, and how we’ve been able to liberate ourselves from reproducing them, the wiser and warmer we’ll be in our efforts to make a safer, healthier, more just world for all.