I had another encounter with Mr. Green recently.
“Epstein, Epstein, Epstein,” he said in the office one day. “Why does anybody care about Epstein?”
The office dwellers nodded in agreement. It has always been a curiosity of mine about Green, how, on the one hand, as a former business partner of my dad’s, he could be so useful as an advisor, yet at times so lacking in common sense.
He leaned back and folded his arms in a self-satisfied way. “It simply doesn’t make any sense,” he said finally.
I couldn’t resist. Setting down my pen, I looked up and said, “I can tell you why people care about it.”
Green rolled his eyes. “That figures,” he said.
“I’m serious,” I told him. “There’s a very philosophical reason for why people would care about Epstein.”
“And what is that?” said Green.
I pushed my chair back and folded my own arms. “His name is Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” I said.
I told him how, in “The Social Contract,” Rousseau talked about the relationship between the people and its sovereign, a kind of invisible bond that he called a “social contract,” which is vital to the realization of proper government. Further, the writer claims that the “contract” is only binding if both sides stay true to the nature of the agreement. According to Rousseau:
The clauses of this contract are determined by the nature of the act in such a way that the least modification would render them empty and ineffectual. As a result, even though they perhaps have never been formally stated, they are the same everywhere and are tacitly admitted and recognized everywhere, until the moment when, once the social pact has been violated, every person then returns to his original rights….
I explained to Green how, in my opinion, the U.S. government is at risk of violating the “social pact” Rousseau mentioned, and that it is for this reason that the country is so up in arms over Epstein.
“How do you figure that?” said Green.
“Because, like it or not, the Epstein case is what drove a large swath of people to vote for Trump. I myself know several individuals who crossed party lines to vote for the president, due simply to their concerns over pedophilia and the sex trade.”
Green was puzzled.
“Did you know,” I added, “that over 300,000 children are unaccounted for at the U.S. border from the illegal crossings under the Biden administration?”
“I didn’t know that,” said Green.
“The sex trade is one of the great crises of our time,” I went on. “Just last night, Rose and I watched a show on Netflix called “Amy Bradley is Missing,” about a girl who disappeared on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, and is thought to have been sold as a sex slave. By closing the investigation into Epstein, the current administration is at the very least saying that all this doesn’t matter, while, leaving open the very real possibility that it is the government itself that is complicit in it….”
I tried explaining all this to Green, but he mumbled something about podcasters and conspiracy theorists, claiming that in the end nobody really knew anything about anything, politely requesting that we move on.
I couldn’t explain myself to Green, so maybe I can to my readers. By suppressing information about the Epstein investigation, our government risks violating the social contract that Rousseau described. If it were a different time, maybe such a thing would pass unnoticed. But it isn’t. Our time is characterized by phony claims of Russian infiltration into the White House, promises that Hunter Biden’s laptop was itself Russian disinformation, assurances that Covid-19 came from a seafood market, and that President Biden was mentally fit to govern. In short, the trust of those on the populace side of the social contract are in many cases simply fed up with their sovereign.
Green disappeared into the kitchen and came back with an ice-cream sandwich.
“Oui, oui, mon petite philosophe,” he said. “Does Monsieur want an ice cream?”
“No, thank you,” I told him.
I had some lumber market reports to go over, and I asked him his advice on it. He was always good at that.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
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