On July 7, 2017, famed German cognitive scientist and MIT media lab researcher Joscha Bach sent his new buddy Jeff Epstein a 1,000-word email attempting to explain why he creeped people out. A single word would have sufficed, but instead Bach danced an awkward schuhplattler across his keyboard.
“People reflect in the categories they know, so when they discuss you, they will end up putting you in categories that fit into their worldview,” wrote Bach. “The first sentence of your Wikipedia entry introduces you as a sex offender, which due to contemporary America’s fascinating difficulty of dealing with all things sex related establishes a strong prior on you being a pariah.”
Epstein was not a pariah2. He was never short of unaccountable elites willing to accommodate him. The Bach email is a fascinating artifact because it shows a non-plutocrat struggling to do just that. It shows how unnatural the “yes, and…” game of elite improv is to those unused to its very specific rules.
In modern democracies, elites adopt egalitarian language and signal adherence to public norms. But this doesn’t make them normal. Their material and social conditions are specific—they act under conditions of abundance. They say yes to each other because there is no practical reason to say no. Vultures don't fight over their patch of a beached whale. Under conditions of plenty, status is maintained through agreeableness and accommodation. Elite improv means saying yes and expecting yes.
Most of the time, elite improv can be plausibly mischaracterized as collegiality, professionalism, or even enlightened tolerance. What makes the Epstein case singular is that there are no words – as Bach discovered – that can plausibly mischaracterize the accommodation of rape. The release of (some of) the Epstein files is a mask-off moment for what the journalist Anand Giridharadas has dubbed the “Epstein Class” because all that open-mindedness, discretion, and non-public information sharing is being exposed for what it actually is. Not understanding. Not ambiguity. Conspiracy.
Epstein was to elite improv what Jason Mantzoukas (not in the files!) is to actual improv. He was the master of the preemptive yes. He understood that many rich men have the same question about sex, that most knew better than to ask it, and that in a culture where everyone says yes, the most useful friend is the friend who says yes without being asked.
For most of history, elite status translated into sexual access. Kings had harems. Noblemen kept mistresses. Powerful men accumulated women (and men, tbh) along with land, titles, horses, and leather-bound books. Sex accrued to power. The question lodged in the back of many rich men’s throats – the question Bach tiptoes around in his email, which includes the memorable phrase "rich nerds continue to have concubines" – is simple: given the massive disparities in society, why shouldn’t that still be the case? Putting basic morality aside, there are practical reasons. .
As Roy Baumeister has argued, sex is a resource governed by laws of supply and demand. For most of history, men bartered access to resources and women abstained, ignoring their own horniness in service of driving up their bargaining power. Culture changed. Sex became cheaper in the sense that it was possible to get it without signing a lifelong contract. That sounds cynical, but the result, as historian Anthony Giddens put it, is that “Modern intimacy depends on the continual negotiation of consent, rather than its assumption.” Put differently, men and women now both trade principally in erotic capital.
Erotic capital is probably correlated with economic, social, and political capital – but not very. As sociologist Catherine Hakim describes it, it’s a bundle of traits that generate desire: charm, social ease, embodied confidence. Many of the men around Epstein – Prince Andrew being the most obvious example – had a lot going for them on paper but lacked erotic capital. Because sex is not had on paper, this left them pining for the coercive joys of yesteryear.
For them, Jeff Epstein basically became a time machine. He transported them back to a period (pre-industrial? pre-modern?) when teenage girls would have had little choice but to say yes.
The reason the Epstein scandal will never go away is that those outside the Epstein Class understand what it is to say “yes” or “no” to sex. We understand coercion. Unlike private-market investments, yacht contracts, or tax loopholes, rape cannot be mystified because anyone can do it. Simply put: No means no.
Unless.
Unless – and here’s the ugly thought – a person has become so habituated to elite improv that “no” stops registering at all. Epstein’s friends expected yes, so they heard yes. They offered yes. Everything became yes. Even no became yes. And that wasn’t just because Epstein was a monster. It’s because he was part of a monstrous culture.
On July 7, 2017, famed German cognitive scientist Joscha Bach wrote 1,000 words because he didn’t have the integrity to write two letters. He wasn’t confused. He wasn’t intrigued. He wasn’t okay with it. He was trying to fit in.
