Colin Sheridan: Chomsky’s downfall highlights conditions that allow a wider cancer like Epstein to spread

This undated photo released by Democrats at the end of last year shows Jeffrey Epstein talking with Noam Chomsky.

It's with a heavy heart, no doubt, that dozens and dozens of now middle-aged men are removing their Noam Chomsky books from their shelves.

They do it slowly, like someone taking down a framed photograph after a messy divorce: deflated, defeated, and faintly embarrassed at the notion that a small, bespectacled man — whose work they bought but never read — has somehow ended up adjacent to the most grotesque tale of human avarice in modern memory.

I say “they”, but I must absolutely count myself among them.

Chomsky was to the postgraduate student in the mid-noughties what the Pulp Fiction poster was to teenagers in the ‘90s. He was a badge of honour. A totem of pseudo-intellectualism. Something you didn’t so much study as display — aspirational projection masquerading as political seriousness.

His books were procured not to be read, critiqued, or even understood, but to be left on bedside lockers and disorganised workstations. Needy, aesthetic props designed to project depth. Who is to blame? Narrow minds. Good Will Hunting. The fact Chomsky had a cool-sounding name.

Whether it was to impress a girl or just impress ourselves, a copy of Rethinking Camelot was the bootcut jeans of a confused generation: bought not because we understood, but because we thought it was the right thing to do.

Had we actually taken the time to open and read anything he wrote, we might have concluded you could learn more from a taxi driver in Damascus about life in the Middle East than you could from a Western academic who, however sharp, would always be looking in from the outside.

But the point was never to understand. The point was to be seen as the kind of person who understood.

And that is why Chomsky’s name popping up in the Epstein files hits a nerve in a way that’s hard to articulate without sounding ridiculous.

The more you read about Epstein, the more you realise you’re not dealing with one monster, but with an ecosystem of monsters, enablers, and cowards.

Chomsky, by comparison, was stricken by catastrophic judgement in his friendship with Epstein, along with the kind of self-important detachment that only becomes possible when you’ve spent decades being told you are one of the great moral minds of your era.

That’s the point. Not to engage in revisionist history about the veracity of his work, but to expose the folly of veneration itself.

Because it always goes wrong.

From the Kennedys to the Clintons, from Cosby to the House of bloody Windsor, bestowing an unnatural amount of adoration upon anybody in a position of privilege and power has historically gone badly. 

The surprise is that we keep acting surprised.

A national curriculum in disappointment

In Ireland, we should be better at this than anyone. 

We have a national curriculum in disappointment. We have decades of recent history that can be summarised as “powerful people did horrible things, and ordinary people looked away”.

Parents believed parish priests over their own children. People knew what was happening in the Magdalene laundries and did nothing.

Entire communities could sense the rot in the walls and still chose silence — because it was easier, and because the people in charge wore collars and patted our heads.

All the while we named stadiums after bishops. We built statues. We flocked to Sunday Mass. We kissed rings, bowed heads, and mistook obedience for morality.

We are drawn to power like moths to a flame. And we get burned, time and time again.

What makes the Chomsky-Epstein story feel so grimly familiar is that it’s not about one philosopher’s downfall. It’s about the conditions that allow a wider cancer like Epstein to spread: ego, hubris, narcissism, and the social machinery that protects the powerful while feeding on the admiration of the powerless.

And if you want the clearest possible example, you don’t need a thousand pages of court documents. You just need one line.

“I’ve watched the horrible way you’ve been treated in the press and public,” Chomsky wrote to Epstein in 2019.

Poor Jeffrey. Poor Noam. A pair of misunderstood warrior poets — one a billionaire child abuser with a private plane, the other a world-famous academic writing sympathy notes like a man comforting a buddy who’d been breathalised after two pints.

There is something almost funny about it, in the way tragedy often becomes funny when you stand far enough back.

But it’s not really funny. It’s bleak. It’s the sound of a moral compass snapping under the weight of someone’s need to feel important.

Because that’s the real disease here: The desire to be taken seriously.

It is in all of us, thankfully to varying degrees. We want to be the kind of person who reads the right books, admires the right thinkers, stands on the right side of history.

We want proximity to greatness. And when we find someone who seems to represent the version of ourselves we’d like to be-brave, intelligent, principled — we put them on a pedestal without even noticing we’re doing it.

Then, when they show bad judgement, or moral cowardice, or plain old human ugliness, we feel betrayed. 

As though they owed us something. But the contract we imagined was never real. It was always projection.

We need to stop naming things after people

This is why we need to stop naming things after people. Not because everyone is secretly a monster, but because everyone is human — and humans, given enough worship, eventually start to believe they’re not. 

They start to think the normal rules don’t apply. They start to confuse access with virtue. They start to treat criticism as persecution.

We do it constantly. We name parks, build statues, award the freedom of cities to people who are often one leaked email away from being exposed as-at best-flawed, ordinary people, and at worst something much darker.

And then we stand around afterwards, shocked, as though we didn’t build the pedestal ourselves with our own hands.

None of us — privileged in the way Irish people are — needed Chomsky on the shelf as a sacred object. 

Most of us figured the world out by travelling, working, reading widely, and listening to people who didn’t have book deals. 

And we’re all still figuring it out. But the solution isn’t to find a new saint.

Forget “beware false gods”. It’s well past time we beware anything and anyone who holds power, especially those who seem to enjoy it.

Because the act of worshipping it is the oldest mistake we keep making.

We are moths. And we have been burned so many times we seem numb to the pain.