child labourers, Pennsylvania, 1910, photo by Lewis Hine in the National Archives
A couple of people have asked me, after I’d written several times about what I call the “Patriciate” and what many call the “Epstein Class” or simply the “Elite” (among other conspiratorial-sounding names): Do you think this is a new phenomenon, or has this Class always existed and been this awful, vindictive, destructive, oblivious, unrestrained, unpunished, and paranoid? Or, thanks to the proclivities of the mass media, were we just never told this was going on?
I guess I should start by defining what I mean by The Epstein Class (aka the Patriciate). Here’s a modified version of AI’s current consensus definition:
A stratum of extremely wealthy, powerful, and well-connected people who substantially operate above the law, protected by their status, money, institutions, and networks, and whose insulation from those outside their stratum makes them incapable of relating to most people and hence corrupt and psychopathic in their behaviour. And oblivious to what others thought of their behaviour and beliefs.
Unlike most social groups, associated by vocation or interests or ethnicity or beliefs or demographics, the Epstein Class has no clear ‘markers’ of membership. So it is not a ‘caste’, at least in the classical sense of that term, though it exhibits a lot of the same characteristics.
What’s fascinating, at least to someone like me who was once almost seduced by the promises and privileges of Epstein Class ‘membership’ and has known a lot of ‘members’ of the Class, is that members have quick, subconscious means of recognizing who is and who isn’t a member. Asked about what ‘schools’ they attended, who they ‘know’, what they wear (nothing with logos on it, sorry pretenders) and what their political leanings are, it’s usually not hard to discern whether someone is in the Class, or not.
And there are many ‘signals’ of Class membership, also mostly subconscious. If you see a male with expensive luggage with extravagant personalized luggage tags pushing his way through the ‘tourist’ class hordes to make his way to the first class entrance at the airport gate, that’s probably a sign. Of course, you won’t see the many members who wouldn’t even consider flying on ‘commercial’ aircraft, preferring their private corporate jets.
That’s the other interesting fact about discerning their presence: Because they are driven from their estates and gated communities everywhere in limos, and take private jets, and have extravagant private health care, and their kids are likewise limo’ed to their private schools, you rarely see them in public places at all. And they certainly don’t ‘see’ you.
So it’s actually not surprising that they can’t relate to the challenges of precarity, of poverty, of chronic, untreatable and unaffordable physical and mental illness, of overwork and exhaustion, of feeling insecure in their neighbourhoods, of the shame of not being able to provide their families with what they want and need, of the endless fear and angry resentment of ‘not having enough’, and the million other symptoms of hardship that most of us recognize and empathize with in our fellow citizens.
As outrageous as it might sound to say, they are really not to blame for being who and how they are — acknowledged members of the Epstein Class, insulated from the need to conform to regular norms of behaviour, disconnected from human suffering, and hence inherently corrupt and pathological. Power corrupts. Isolation weakens and debilitates. And it’s a vicious cycle, as Epstein Class parents, trying to do their best for their kids, afflict them from an early age with the same pathologies.
A quick review of history suggests many examples of what we might now call Epstein Class dominance, arrogation of power, and commensurate abuses. A recent example is the Gilded Age of the 1870-1890s, with its ruthless and infamous “robber barons” stealing the land, livelihood and hope from the millions of farmers struggling from the Long Depression (my ancestors were among those long-term farmers dispossessed and forced into horrific mining and factory jobs in the cities).
Going back further, we might include the French and Russian royals and the British “Old Boys” network, the court aristocracies of medieval times (when “court” had an older meaning, one that we seem to be reverting to these days), the Venetian Patriciate that ruled during the Renaissance (that’s how old the term ‘Patriciate’ is), and even the Senatorial Elites of ancient Rome, when Juvenal wrote complaining about how the rich lived by a different set of rules than ordinary citizens.
And everywhere that White Empire has used military and economic power to smash its perceived enemies and left a power vacuum in its wake, that vacuum has been filled by Epstein Class oligarchs who pillaged the remains of the state apparatus and created their own private fiefdoms that they have ‘governed’ with impunity like gangsters ever since (Ukraine being a particularly notorious example).
Our staggeringly-unequal political and economic landscapes, built by today’s Epstein Class since the Reagan-Thatcher years ‘legalized’ their behaviour with massive deregulation and encouragement of untrammelled capitalism, are just the latest and most widespread examples of an ancient phenomenon.
Barry Ferns has written a whole series of videos psychoanalyzing the Epstein Class. Particularly notable is his recent review of the astonishing transformation of Elon Musk from a coddled but insecure, traumatized little boy into a psychotic adult. That’s what ‘membership’ in this Class does to you.
Have the previous iterations of the Epstein Class always been this ‘bad’? I would argue that the current extent of their power and hence capacity to inflict pathological abuse on the rest of us is unprecedented. But there’s no evidence that they were any more or less cruel, despotic, and psychologically unbalanced than the current crop.
Our species doesn’t seem to be very competent at reining in the excesses of the Epstein Class. Since the start of history, growing inequality and the growth of the Epstein Class seem to operate as a vicious cycle (to the point we now have Musk, one trillionaire, an utterly psychotic madman, with more wealth, and hence power, than the poorest half of the world’s population combined).
What has punctuated these cycles of insanity? Two things: Collapse (the great equalizer), and revolution. I know which of those two I foresee ending the current cycle.
I think we can look at the growth and disconnected derangement of the Epstein Class as a form of mental retardation. Most people have at least a sense of what the rest of the world is coping with, a knowledge from personal experience that inevitably makes us compassionate. This forces us to ‘grow up’ and treat other people with the same understanding, respect, and empathy that we have learned to expect from them when we’ve needed and wanted it.
Take that experience away, and what you have left is undeveloped, disconnected children. Like Musk and Trump and Hegseth and Starmer. And give those children massive amounts of power and wealth, and remove all constraints on their abuse of it, and you end up with what we have today.
Not a good situation to be in as our civilization enters a long era of accelerating chaos and collapse.
I guess we will learn what we humans are really made of, as it all falls apart.
