I think its more about admission to the “in” group. A loyalty test that keeps the person loyal to the gang. Do a horrible crime and be filmed for it, or we remove you from your job and find someone who we have blackmail material on.
The pedophile is a child mentally. Often they were abused themselves or abused other children when they were children. As adults they are ashamed and act to remove their shame through sex acts with children in an expectation that it will be acceptable or the shame will be shared or offloaded to another child.
Pedophilia is criminal in addition to being perverse. It’s criminal in general as criminals often perversely reason that it happened to them so it’s Ok to do it to others. Pedophiles thus reason it’s Ok to have sex with children because it happened to them and there were no consequences as long as it’s kept quiet.
The adapted secrecy of pedophilia causes them to go underground and find each other forming networks of pedophilia and learning to protect each other including enriching and empowering each other. They may be placed in positions of power because their horrible secret provides a means by which others can control them. For example, Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert was a pedophile.
It used to be that homosexuality was the taboo that could be used to control people in power. But current social permissiveness has allowed them to tout their perversion as somehow normalized.
Normalization of pedophilia is up next.
I don’t think they are attracted to sex with kids.
There’s a very strange quality to some people, which is not easily visualizable from a normal human perspective. When you see it, it really only makes sense in the context of someone who has taken on the job of being evil, and who approaches it like a day at work.
What makes it strange is I have seen people who seemingly would have preferred doing other stuff, and who could have gotten more of things they wanted like wealth and power, but they actually would sacrifice what they wanted, and screw themselves over, to do the evil thing and hurt somebody else.
I suspect that is why spirituality, and the the Bible, and all of that is still so strong. Once you see it, you realize it really is the only explanation.
In cases like this though, I think this is the unwritten rule of how you climb the ladder. All of the system is blackmail. It sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. By doing this, this guy was likely knowingly giving Epstein blackmail control, and as a result Epstein’s leadership would then promote him because he was a controllable asset.
It is like Disney-story that came out recently, where the executives all had to attend parties with the child stars. Throughout the party, executives would take a child star in the back room, and molest them. It sounds like regular pedo-debauchery but the truth is they all knew there were cameras in the back room, and the machine was using it as a way to demonstrate fealty to the machine.
People have no idea the degree to which very smart intel operators began forming the network decades back, how big it has gotten, how just how much it has penetrated everywhere that cultural and population-level opinions are disseminated.