A lot has been said about Jacob Geller, and the nature and mystery of restorative justice, of what his victim is owed and of what we can and cannot know about the crime he committed, about the secret workings of his heart and whether his admission of guilt (such as it is) constitutes adequate self-recrimination for us to keep watching his videos.

A number of essays against these questions have entered the Discourse, and several of them have brought forward a point that I regard as absolutely essential to this conversation and then forgotten it as more or less irrelevant. I aim to take it up again. I will frame it as a question here, one that will cast a lot of is in a poor light, and then I will ask is to sit with it until it feels less stupid than it might at the first.

The question is this: are we among Jacob Geller’s victims?