The Prophet, the Prof, and the Perp
On the dangers of hero worship in the Epstein era, and a lesson from the Occupy movement
“The danger which great men and great ages represent, is simply extraordinary; every kind of exhaustion and of sterility follows in their wake.” - Thomas Carlyle, 1841
A lot of people, particularly on the liberal left, have been getting some harsh lessons lately on the dangers of hero worship, courtesy The Epstein Files.
Deepak Chopra, for example. A little over a decade ago, I had a brief exchange with the hugely influential New Age author at a conference on consciousness studies. I appreciated his quiet-spoken and open vibe, consistent with his composure onstage after he was attacked by three haughty academics sharing the dais.
Closeup, I also took note of his designer haircut and pricey, jewel-encrusted specs. ‘There’s a guy who likes his comforts, and to project wealth, ‘ I thought.
I had no idea of how far his comforts went. Chopra’s name comes up thousands of times in the files. “I’m deeply grateful for our friendship,” he wrote to Epstein on July 11, 2017. The association between the consciousness-expander and the creep began in July of 2016, long after latter’s 2008 conviction. (Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to two misdemeanor counts of soliciting prostitution—specifically, arranging sexual encounters with a minor.)
Chopra would have known what the guy was about. He was a known quantity to millions.
The email exchanges between the two are beyond creepy. It’s obvious Chopra didn’t care where the young women came from who Epstein brought into his orbit, even as the hedge fund manager further seduced the New Age guru with financial opportunities and big-time connections.
This is no peripheral figure. “Deepak Chopra is one of the most influential personal development leaders on the planet. Ninety-five books. Tens of millions of copies sold. A global brand built on the word consciousness,” writes Mills, who confesses that he “believed so deeply” in all things Deepak before the recent revelations.
Mills points out that 21 other major figures in the New Age movement, with over 250 million followers combined, are named many times over in the Epstein Files. Some of these citations may be innocent, some not. But as he points out, none of these figures have come forward to condemn Epstein and/or explain their connection to him.
Although the New Age community focuses primarily on inner change, and the political left focuses primarily on outer change, there’s significant crossover between the two populations. And for the latter group, there’s no bigger culture hero than MIT linguist, author and media critic Noam Chomsky.
After falling into Epstein’s orbit in 2015, Chomsky and his wife were not just flying with the convicted felon, but dining with him at his Manhattan townhome. Here’s the key thing: as with ‘Deepfake Chopra’, the friendship between the prof and the perp began after Epstein’s conviction and first jail stint.
“Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute—and cannot unite—but they all worship money.” - Mark Twain, Notebooks, 1935
Chomsky’s association with Epstein now threatens to retrospectively cast a shadow over the MIT prof’s entire career. That would be unfortunate, considering what the thinker has added to our understanding of politics and the world.
Yet we also have to consider what Chomsky has subtracted from our understanding of politics and the world, particularly in his later years. His career arc arguably has the shape of a hyperbola, ending with a giant, ugly data point on the “Lolita Express.” And that’s no hyperbole.
Let’s examine Chomsky’s rise and fall a bit more, with the idea of the dangers of hero worship in mind.
Subtle as a hand grenade
Though I’ve never met the MIT prof, I once heard him speak at the Queen Elizabeth Theater in Vancouver, in 1996. During question period, an audience member rose to ask what America’s greatest dissident intellectual thought of the evidence that more than one gunman was involved in the assassination of President Jack Kennedy.
I well remember the appalled silence that fell over the crowd after his response: “I don’t care who shot him, an ex-husband or whoever.”
It was a complete non sequitur, inconsistent with the professorial, dry delivery that preceded it. It wasn’t so much that he summarily rejected a conspiratorial narrative, as how. In the words of Foghorn Leghorn, it was “about as subtle as a hand grenade in a barrel of oatmeal.”
Throughout his career, Chomsky has behaved like JFK was excrement he was trying his damndest to scrape off his shoe. “Kennedy is not even worth discussing,” he said in a 2013 interview. “The invasion in South Vietnam – Kennedy attacked South Vietnam, outright. In 1961‑1962 he sent the Air Force to start bombing villages, authorized napalm.”
The prof held that contrary to a lot of mythology, Kennedy was one of the hawks in his administration to the very last moment.
Now this could be seen as a necessary corrective to the excessive hero worship that surrounded JFK himself, yet Chomsky’s reading on the president’s plans about Vietnam remains highly questionable.
While it’s true Kennedy entered the Oval office very much a hawk, the evidence of his transformation into a dove across his presidency is well documented. The document NSAM‑263, signed by President Kennedy in October 1963 and declassified in 1978, is a concrete government memo indicating that the Kennedy administration intended to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, and likely would have done so—were in not for that fateful open-air car ride in Dealy Plaza in 1963.
There’s also JFK’s rapprochement with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev over Cuba and nuclear weapons buildup, his stated desire for African autonomy, and his initiation of civil rights legislation for black Americans, signed off on by his successor Lyndon B. Johnson.
(Chomsky’s distaste for all things JFK had a long pedigree. I refer interested readers to this lengthy and damning indictment, My Beef with Noam Chomsky, for further details on the great linguist’s rhetorical gymnastics around Vietnam, Kennedy, and the assassination.)
The prof would go on to both ignore and reject the many anomalies surrounding the 9/11 attack on New York, including the footprint collapse of Building No. 7, dismiss the Federal Reserve having any relevance in understanding power politics, and state in 2022 that the “right response” to the unvaccinated was “to insist that they be isolated” from society. When pressed about how such isolated individuals would obtain basic necessities, the great intellectual replied that getting food after they have “the decency to remove themselves from the community” would be “their problem.”
(On this last point we can give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt, since at the time it was not widely known that the unvaccinated presented no health risks to the vaccinated. It was still a savagely discriminatory comment.)
At the time I heard Chomsky in Vancouver in 1996, he was still widely dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by many legacy media outlets. That no longer applied within two decades later. Even as he fashioned himself into a member in good standing with the establishment, his opinion on political trends and world news remained the gold standard for the liberal left.
I’m not arguing that Chomsky’s conservative stance on ‘conspiratorial’ matters in itself made him an increasingly unreliable narrator. I’m arguing that, unlike his bête noire JFK, the dissident prof made himself increasingly acceptable to the establishment over time, until his opinion fused with elite consensus on many issues.
As the elder statesman of political commentary par excellence, he remains hugely influential. But ironically, the man who once said this…
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
…became a gatekeeper himself, helping ensure millions of followers in the liberal-left would colour inside the lines with just a few well-worn crayons.
From this perspective, Chomsky’s falling for Epstein’s charm offensive was not as weird as it seems; it can be seen as the capper on a downward career arc embracing establishment values.
The prof and the perp
Author and activist Chris Hedges considered himself a personal friend of the MIT prof, who is now in his late nineties and in poor health. Yet he found no good explanation for the Epstein-Chomsky friendship in the mea culpa offered by Chomsky’s wife Valéria:
“[Valéria Chomsky] writes that she and Noam were ensnared by dinners with luminaries at Epstein’s mansion, flights on his private jet nicknamed the Lolita Express, a literary reference to the sexual exploitation of girls Noam would have recognized, financial assistance, trips to Epstein’s ranch and the use of one of Epstein’s apartments in New York…
I know and have long admired Noam. He is, arguably, our greatest and most principled intellectual. I can assure you he is not as passive or gullible as his wife claims. He knew about Epstein’s abuse of children. They all knew.
Here is the most damning document in the files, a sympathetic email to Epstein from February 23, 2019, in which Chomsky offers public relations advice to a convicted child trafficker. It deserves to be quoted in full.
“I’ve watched the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public. It’s painful to say, but I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it. I’ve had plenty of experience, though of course not on this scale. A google search will bring up tons of hysterical accusations of all sorts, even groups devoted to vilifying me. I pay no attention, unless I’m approached for a comment on a specific matter. It’s a nuisance, but it’s the best way. The same conclusions from experiences of others, in some cases close friends.
What the vultures dearly want is a public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts - which are impossible to answer (how do you prove that you are not a neo-Nazi who wants to kill the Jews, or a rapist, or whatever charge comes along?). That’s particularly true now with 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. For virtually everyone who sees any of this, the reaction will be “where there’s smoke there’s fire, maybe raging fire” (whatever the facts, which few will even think of investigating).
Where do you even begin with this?
The prof also accepted the perp’s help in cleaning up his finances (in cases where Epstein could not offer sex he dangled financial connections or advice; but it was usually both). Although the elderly intellectual is not implicated in any sexual abuse, he and his wife willingly crawled into Epstein’s lair, which turned out to be a reputational woodchipper. A kompromat machine, perhaps.
If the long-term intent was to build a file on Chomsky, the revelations have certainly proven effective in severely damaging his image, along with that of ‘Deepfake Chopra’ and dozens if not hundreds of other major figures who fell, crept or danced into Jeffrey and Ghislaine’s Fargo-like woodchipper.
I take no more delight in these revelations than Hedges, who writes (like Mills on Chopra) from a position of lapsed faith. As with so many others across the world, I owe my early political education to the MIT prof. His books on empire’s lethal adventurism in Latin America and Southeast Asia introduced me to the dark side of geopolitics. His 1988 masterpiece, Manufacturing Consent, co-authored with Edward S. Herman, awakened me to corporate media as a compliant tool of state propaganda.
In light of this disgusting business, to reject everything Chomsky ever said or wrote would make this operation a success. (One important thing to remember: from the seventies onward, Chomsky was writing against the grain on the Palestine occupation and continued to defend the rights of the Palestinian people, supporting a two-state solution right into his nineties, even as he was attacked as a ‘self-hating Jew’ by the usual suspects in Zionist circles. That’s not something any American public intellectual does with career advancement in mind.)
Alas, I’m afraid the revelations from the Epstein Files will prove lethal to Chomsky’s legacy.
A lesson from the Occupy movement
Here’s what works for me, for whatever it’s worth.
I never bought everything Chomsky had for sale. I don’t agree with everything Chris Hedges has written, either. That goes for pretty much every influencer and thinker I follow on Substack, and every nonfiction author on my shelves. I take what I find useful and discard the rest. (As the 19th century poet William Blake put it, “I must build my own system, or be ruled by another man’s.”)
That goes double for our culture heroes in the political sphere. After lifelong disappointment with elected officials on the left, right and middle, I’ve learned to set my support on ‘provisional.’ I know of many people still projecting the hero archetype onto Trump and/or RFK Jr., just as I know of many people in Canada projecting it onto either Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney or Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, sometimes abandoning their critical faculties in the process.
(That said, I also don’t default to believing that everyone in the upper circles of entertainment, industry, academia and politics are corrupted and in on the take. )
A lesson here from the past. Remember the Occupy movement, which spread from the US to Canada and across the world?
In September of 2011 I stood gobsmacked in Zuccotti Park, New York, witnessing crowds gather at the epicenter of demonstrations against the too-big-to-jail banksters. That is, the “masters of the universe” who presided over the credit crisis that wiped out a large swath of American middle-class homeowners through gamed mortgages.
Unlike previous demonstrations, this one involved the occupation of public places for weeks on end. If and when anyone went into the Occupy crowd to inquire who and where the leaders were, the response was always something along the lines of ‘I am, and so are they over there.’ Whatever variation came to mind of all of us and no one.
It wasn’t just demonstrators acting cute. The laterally organized movement, with everything run by consensus, was free of top-down structures in which leadership could be decapitated by the authorities. Though Occupy was eventually crushed, it had legs. It drew greater public attention to the apex predators at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and other institutions now named over and over in the Epstein Files.
The movement’s disavowal of leadership within its own ranks likely gave it a longer lifespan than otherwise, and allowed it to bring the issues of high-level corruption and government complicity to a wider audience. In other words, the skew away from leadership left little in the way of celebrity for big media, just the thin gruel of the issues involved.
Does that mean I believe in the anarchist trope of a world built on lateral organization? No. I don’t see how its scalable. Even the Occupy movement had its acknowledged and unacknowledged prime movers. You cannot build and maintain a civilization without hierarchical structure; we have always needed, and will always need, leaders.
Yet we must resist the all-to-human impulse to unconsciously project the hero archetype on them. This only inflates leaders into mythological beings and shrinks us into primitives looking upward for salvation. When our godlings inevitably fly to close to the sun and plummet to Earth, we believers fall into despair while the disbelievers celebrate with that deathless cheer, “I told you so!”
Most of us feel the need to project the hero archetype onto others because so few of us feel heroic in our humdrum daily lives. When the mythological projections onto others fail, as it has for many with Chopra and Chomsky, it’s a recipe for learned helplessness.
Only when enough of us sense the heroic within ourselves, and then find it resonating with others—everyday people who aren’t recognized names, who aren’t powerful figures, who aren’t celebrities alternatively beloved or demonized by mass media—do we have a collective chance, slim as it may sometimes seem, of wrestling the world from fools.
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Lots of folks in the Human Potential Movement ( to use a more dated mainstream term- I find New Age far too tainted) have a poor filter for dodgy people and lack boundaries. Goes with the territory suppose.
I got a free ticket to hear DC speak at the Orpheum about 20 years ago. He went on in a self-congratulatory way for a few hours about Synchronicity as a mostly female audience drank it up. He definitely had the gift of the gab- which is a karmic astrological thing, perhaps even a learned thing, but doesn’t confer sainthood, -like the Donald has that gift too, notwithstanding his talking stick being a very blunt tool.
With Chomsky, his punitive PoV on COVID dissidents was way off base, even if he was loyally “following the science” like a good academician -or like most leftists. Another crude reactive and fear-based response. We can cut an old man some slack but that position bordered on murderous. I don’t think he lost a lot of followers though which left progressives in the conspiratorium looking both ways. When the heroes of the critical Left fall for a psyop it’s indeed a grand success. I recall Deepak being more sensible on that issue. But even the best humans are weak. Even the most “principled” can be fooled by the allure of money. Mark Twain nailed it. The ego is a fabulous construct , capable of multiple simultaneous delusions -a hall of mirrors within a house of cards . Oscar Wilde: “most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”
But still here we are, naked again. Rebuilding our worldviews. The cats are out of the bags, running wild in the streets.Everything is a psyop now. Including the Self. And with Adbusters (who kicked off Occupy) now also impotently irrelevant we are in a new world of possibility where the progressive tent can actually get bigger, realizing we are not the smug superior know-it-alls on every topic under an atheist’s Sun. No kings. No Leaders. Only fools with our choice of hats. Just a lot of pissed off ordinary people in an extraordinary time, with an even clearer sense of US vs THEM (those Higherups exploiting me) . Every thing and everyone for their time. That time is always NOW. Thanks for your insights
In our culture, ideas and beliefs regarding gender relations in general, and sexuality in particular, are distorted and often perverse. Yet these ideas and beliefs are commonplace and therefore considered normal. As individuals, we establish our orientation toward these normalcies at an impressionable age, and so can easily – and permanently – fall prey to the aberrations embedded in them. So from this angle, it makes more sense to see luminaries such as Chomsky, Prince Andrew, Chopra, Trump (and the under-aged women involved) as casualties.