The entire ruling class and the capitalist system are
guilty
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It’s an odd place to be,
not being surprised that the President of the United States is all over the
emails of the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker. There are surprising
details in this latest Epstein email drop, and by now you’ve probably seen at
least a few (and maybe many more) references to a possible Trump-Clinton
liaison. But, by and large, little of it’s surprising. We’ve known that Trump
is a sexual assaulter, that he was deeply tied to Epstein, and that he
participated in the very worst activities on that private island.
I haven’t fully scoured these latest emails, and there are thousands of
them, but what jumps out to me from reading about them is the breadth of people implicated.
We’ve known for some time that Epstein was a broker, and that, as Edward Helmore writes, Epstein acted “as a channel
between political figures and business titans, greasing up the former with
lifestyles they could not afford and the latter with avenues of political
influence.” The most nefarious and revolting details understandably get the
most attention, but the countless shady dealings, the introductions, the role
he played at the nexus of business and politics is equally significant, and
might point us toward the most important implications of this scandal that
won’t die.
The way Epstein’s ghost
refuses to stop haunting Trump, and countless other elites, is a gift. There is
almost no event, no disaster, no development that persists in the public
consciousness quite like this unending saga. People are, understandably, horrified
and captivated by the idea that the rich and powerful are a no-longer-secret
pedophile cabal. For once, a conspiracy turned out to be startlingly true.
But, the thing is, that
way of understanding this scandal is ultimately limited. If we think this was
just a weird one-off, if we think Epstein and Maxwell were uniquely nefarious
and uniquely good at entrapping the ruling class, we fail to understand what
really happened here. Because, while these emails are unusually candid and
disturbing, they point to much bigger forces that we need to take on if we
don’t want to be ruled by the sort of people who traffic and rape minors and
send each other weird messages joking about it all.
The vast number of
people in this latest batch of Epstein emails helps point us toward the fact
that Epstein isn’t some anomalous fiend. Billionaire Palantir co-founded Peter
Thiel, billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, billionaire Victoria’s Secret
founder Les Wexner, Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black — the
super-rich have countless Epstein ties. Neoliberal economic policy shaper Larry
Summers, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Obama White House counsel Kathryn
Ruemmler — political elites are all over these emails too. And, of course,
these names are just a fraction of a long list.
Seeing the scope of the people implicated, and knowing that Epstein
worked to bridge the gap between the wealthy and those in politics, we start to
see that this thing is much bigger than a pedophile ring. When you zoom out far
enough, the full implications of the Epstein scandal wind up being, in some
ways, mundane. The richest people on Earth want corrupt people in politics that
they can use, and those corrupt politicians want wealth and luxury. As one
Epstein acquaintance told the Guardian: “Anyone he thought had
influence he would try to add to his collection. Mandelson [UK ambassador to
the US] is slippery, and impressed by money, so Jeffrey liked that.” Repeat
this again and again, and you have Jeffrey Epstein’s role in our corrupt world.
Of course, there’s no
full escape from the sordid details. They’re what makes this case stick, unlike
thousands of other instances of obvious and gross corruption. When you hear
about the nightmare scenarios on Epstein’s Island, it’s natural to ask why the
hell so many of the rich and powerful were interested in raping underage women,
and in the other depravities that took place there. I won’t pretend to know the
answer definitively, but there is one trend we see across time and space that
might point us in the right direction.
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Photo by Donald Teel on Unsplash
It’s hard to know
whether power corrupts, or whether the corrupt are drawn to power. The answer,
as with so many things, is probably both. Depraved people seek out positions
where they can dominate and profit, and the temptations of debauchery and
exploitation are likely to be too much for people who find themselves in those
imbalanced positions. These tendencies are exact ones that society should be
organized to counter-balance.
But that’s not how things work around here. As Morris Katz recently said, we need
“reluctant candidates” for office, because “if you’re someone who wants to be in the U.S. Senate, you have something wrong with you.” And
he’s absolutely right. But, at the moment, instead of reluctant public servants
we have eager self-servers, people who want to get powerful positions so that
they trade that power for gifts and cash and access to even more elite circles.
As Katz says, the Senate is currently a
club of millionaires who do what billionaires tell them to. The real lesson of
the Epstein saga is that this isn’t an anomaly, it’s that this is how our world
works.
The other lesson we need to take from this mess is that society is
structured so that these people, those without a shred of morality who trade
their souls for wealth and power and access, are abundantly rewarded. The
people listed in these emails have, by and large, faced zero consequences for their
reprehensible lives. Instead, as we see from the long list of billionaires and
successful politicians in Epstein’s correspondences, they’ve been handsomely
rewarded.
This is what capitalism
incentivizes. Those who are willing to sell out, those born with sociopathic
tendencies, those willing and eager to trample everyone around them and purge
their own humanity, are rewarded. Endless greed, endless thirst for power, the
total absence of values — the dominant world system rewards these traits and
behaviors. So the people who rule us, from Wall Street to Washington, are
people with no concept of enough. When they have everything anyone could ever
want and more they seek out new ways to get drunk on power, relishing the fact
that they’re above the law and using it to engage in depraved exploration of
the darkest corners of human behavior.
It’s not enough to go
after the individuals in Epstein’s circle. We should do that, but we shouldn’t
stop there. We should, and if we want a decent future we must, go after this
warped system that rewards sociopathy and depravity. Capitalism creates an incentive
structure where the worst among us are rewarded for their ruthlessness, their
lack of empathy, their willingness to ruin lives. When guardrails get in the
way of the ruling class exploiting and harming us, they organize and pour money
into bulldozing those obstacles to their endless accumulation of wealth. It’s
not enough to gently check their greed, we have to take away the system that
enables and rewards them and gives them vast power.
It’s easy to say “no one
is above the law,” but it’s a lot harder to reckon with the fact that a select
group of people is in fact far above the law, so far above it that even when we
know they commit the worst sorts of crimes they still go on to become President
and accumulate billions. And that’s because the ruling class wrote the laws,
and shaped our government to primarily to serve this small slice of the
population. As we see more clearly every day, our government facilitates vast
transfers of wealth from the working class to the .1%, and it’ll take a massive
societal overhaul to change that fact.
Epstein refuses to die,
his correspondence is endlessly horrifying, and Donald Trump is all over these
files. But he’s just the tip of the iceberg. Below the water lies the systems
that dominate our lives and our world. We should certainly ensure that Epstein’s
ghost haunts Trump and others for the rest of their lives, but we should also
make the legacy of these horrible men the transformation of society such that
there can never be another Epstein’s island. Society must be restructured such
that this greed, power, depravity, and the systems that enabled all of are
pulled up at the roots and replaced with something vastly different. - JP
