Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein (image released by the House oversight committee). Via Scheerpost.
Each time I read new revelations from the heavily-censored Epstein files, I am at once shocked and not at all surprised.
It’s a cliché that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The oft-resurrected causal debate that arises when someone says this is whether (a) the very possession of power leads to its abuse, or (b) those with a predilection for corrupt and abusive behaviour (ie “bad people”) strive for power to enable that behaviour.
I’m not going to get into that debate except to say that Lord Acton, to whom this quote is usually attributed, immediately went on to clarify unambiguously that he meant it in the former (a) sense.
I have had a few dozen brushes with members of what I call the patriciate*, this amorphous class of “fatherly nobility” (they’re almost all males), and all of them, without exception, exuded a sense of arrogant certainty, intolerance of and obliviousness to criticism (“it isn’t from one of our people so it is of no matter”), and an obnoxious sense of privilege (etym.: “that law doesn’t apply to me”) and of belief that they could basically do no wrong.
I knew some of these people before they became members of the patriciate, and so I do tend to agree with Lord Acton that it was their admission to the patriciate and its membership that corrupted and poisoned their character, thinking, and behaviours. But I also acknowledge that those who are already prone to corruption and abuse do disproportionally seem to strive for power and admission to the patriciate. It’s a vicious cycle of depravity.
At some point I’m going to write a longer article about the brief and limited period in my own life when, based on the rewards and recognition I was receiving, I too began to be poisoned by “believing my own press (clippings)”. I’m certainly not proud of my behaviour during that period, though it never included anything illegal.
But as a result I can completely understand the seduction and promises of power and their corrupting influence. We are, after all, conditioned by our biology and our culture, and it’s not hard to be slowly, subtly conditioned to find certain behaviour that we might once have found revolting and outrageous to be somewhat justifiable, and then, gradually, acceptable and even ordinary.
Looking at the extreme example of Trump, if you disentangle the behaviour that is due to his accelerating senility and his traumatizing past, you see a guy who is utterly unapologetic for saying, while laughing, on camera, that when women don’t do what you want, you have to “grab ’em by the pussy”. His comments on the Epstein Files have made it quite clear that now that his censors have released millions of emails that aren’t “about Me”, he no longer sees what the fuss is all about and why anyone still cares about their content. The problem for him, obviously, isn’t that the files reveal disgusting and illegal behaviour, it’s that the perpetrators (at least the ones revealed so far) got caught and now have to face public reaction — distracting public attention from the demented king.
Worse, it’s quite clear that he, just like Ghislaine Maxwell, doesn’t really think anything that Epstein and the thousands of people in the patriciate (including Trump, if/when his incriminating emails ever get out) did was morally wrong. Just a bunch of bros hanging together and doing bro stuff. The lion always eats the lamb. If the “alleged victims”, he is undoubtedly saying, didn’t scream and run away, then they were either stupid or complicit — and hence there was no crime, legal or moral. This is, of course, the typical rationalization of pimps and johns (and of drug pushers). If everyone around you is a pimp or a john, you come to see this as normal behaviour. If you exploit an addict’s behaviour, or that of someone weak or in desperate need, you rationalize that that’s no reflection on you.
Once you get infected with the patriciate mindset, everyone and everything outside the patriciate becomes disposable without a thought or care: Children, women, animals, ideological opponents, nations, the environment, ‘other’ ethnic groups, the poor, the sick, the weak, people who have what you want and believe you ‘deserve’ (Greenland perhaps, or Palestine’s land, or Iran’s oil, or the Washington Post, or Twitter). They are all tolerated while they are of use to you and available to you, and then cease to be important and can be discarded.
This is not an ‘elite’ predilection. It’s way too big for that. It is ubiquitous in our society. Political leaders and groups, government and institutional administrators and their groups, entertainment and sports stars and associations, business and ‘professional’ leaders and clubs, university leaders and clubs, religious leaders and associations, gurus of every stripe, leaders and cadres and ‘in’ groups in the military, in the media, in the sciences, in the arts, among cops and prison guards, street gangs and crime syndicates, and also wherever any kind of ‘hazing’ or other abusive rituals of membership rear their ugly head — everywhere that wealth, fame, authority and hence power is or can be concentrated, you will find layers of the patriciate. Power corrupts everywhere.
And just to stress, the patriciate is not ‘organized’ by anyone. This is not a tight cabal conspiring in secret to do nefarious things. It is insidious because it preys on our essential human nature, our malleability, our hunger for recognition and reassurance, our addictive tendencies in search of the next shot of dopamine, and our intense desire to belong and ‘fit in’. We get seduced into its outer layers easily, and then just as easily slide into ‘higher’ layers where the reinforcement of privilege, impunity, recognition, faithful ‘brotherhood’, belonging, and the easy spoils of power (“money for nothing and your chicks for free”) entrench us and blind us to the abuses and horrors we are inflicting on others and on the world. More than being ‘invited’, we quietly ask to belong. And soon we are conditioned to be part of it, with all the arrogance, self-certainty, intolerance, obliviousness to criticism, sense of impunity, and sense of privilege that goes with that. Everyone is vulnerable to being sucked into it.
What has been most remarkable about the behaviour of those ‘outed’ in the Epstein Files is their sense of disbelief and astonishment that anyone could dare insinuate that any of their behaviour was wrong. We see this in the annoyed denials, veiled threats, feeble self-apologies, and whitewashing (sometimes with the complicity of the alt media) of celebrities like Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Richard Branson, Lawrence Summers, Ehud Barak, Howard Lutnick, Sergei Brin, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, ‘Prince’ Andrew, and hundreds of others across the political spectrum, and in the sidestepping media coverage and absence of on-the-record comment from associates of all these rich and powerful men. You don’t want to get on the ‘wrong’ side of any of this arrogant, privileged, and vengeful bunch, and not just because it would block your admission to the patriciate.
To show that the patriciate isn’t exclusively men, Exhibit A is Epstein’s partner-in-crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, who shows no remorse for her cruelty in the manipulations that destroyed so many people’s lives (most of them women, and lots of them still children). She was quickly moved to more comfy prison quarters after people of influence talked with Trump about her, and has now publicly pledged to say nothing — ie to completely protect the patriciate — unless and until Trump gives her a full and unconditional pardon.
To repeat: This is not a small pocket of rich evil men secretly doing diabolical things among themselves. This is the inevitable product of human greed, thirst for fame, for security, happiness, reward, recognition, and reassurance, in the presence of a monstrous inequality of power. It’s been going on for thousands of years.
This will not end with the closure (probably without significant prosecutions) of the Epstein Files. This is a sickness in an entire bewildered and traumatized species that has lost its connection with community and with the rest of life on Earth, whose privileged patriciate has been freed to do anything they want and who, together, and with their procurers, will do anything that will make them feel better about themselves, even for just the duration of a rush of dopamine and other feel-good chemicals, each a little more powerful than the last.
*Why do I not use the more familiar term patriarchy, you might ask? It’s because I don’t think most members of the patriciate are terribly fussed with the -archy of running things and controlling other people. Running things is hard, annoying work. In fact I think the patriciate would be quite delighted if the 8 billion ‘other’ people on the planet, who are no longer of immediate use to them getting what they want and what they think they deserve, just vanished and got out of their way.
