You may think that Americans have heard more than enough by now about how the influence peddler and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein “networked” with accomplices, victims, and their apologists. But all the tawdry cravings for money, sex, power, and, later, conspiratorial dealings by this country’s plutocracy-serving elite have been merely symptoms of a deeper, more dangerous craving that we need to understand. No matter whether we characterize that craving as pathological or as sinful in the nature of our divided human hearts, it has been poisoning the country since long before Epstein and Trump began riding and accelerating it in an ever-widening gyre. I came to it nearly half a century ago, when I got to know a practitioner of sinuous methods and morals that anticipated Epstein’s and Trump’s decades later.