The Epstein Class

Commentator

For years with Epstein, everybody’s been grasping at different parts of the elephant and trying to imagine what the shape of the creature is that they’re dealing with. With the e-mails, we get, for the first time, a glimpse of the elephant as a whole.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago exploring different theories of Epstein, from his being essentially a film-flam man all the way to his being a kingpin of a dark global empire. And, actually, it turns out that the more lurid ideas towards the bottom of the post are closer to the reality. At the heart of it he was a ‘hyperconnector.’ His business was access, with everyone in the web getting closer to him through something they wanted and didn’t have, the business people to new ways to move their money around, the academics to the business people, the ambitious to the celebrities, the celebrities to a clubbable atmosphere where they could say what they really thought without fear of recrimination, and the lonely, priapic men to the trafficking empire.

There are a few things that should be said that, in the present climate, no one wants to say. One is that the story some time ago took on a witch hunt aspect, and is mostly being played out in public as a chain of associations — the notion is that Epstein is a toxic sludge, that anything involved with him is inherently tainted, and anybody who came across him therefore cancellable. The reality is a bit more complicated than that. He really was involved (with whatever degree of sincerity) in philanthropy, scientific research, financial planning, etc, and just to have known him or to have enjoyed his company is, for me, not incriminating. Then, we have to remember that there was never a trial and never a chance for Epstein’s side to present their case. What’s been missing in the emails so far is overt evidence of criminality. “On the question of whether there was a wide pedophile ring, we’re not seeing proof of that,” said Kirsten Danis of The New York Times. Then, there is a bit of a pivot in the accusation against him. This was supposed to have been about underage girls, but as more evidence comes out the emphasis shifts towards prostitution and trafficking, which is still bad but isn’t quite as satanic as the popular perception of what was going on. And, then, I am not entirely persuaded that association with Epstein after his 2008 conviction is by itself morally impermissible — the fact that somebody has been found guilty of a crime, even a sex crime, and had served their time for it, would not, in normal circumstances, mean that that person should then be considered beyond the pale.

But. What Epstein was doing was really heinous and has shocked even veteran watchers of the Epstein story. He was grooming girls and young women, on both sides of the age of consent, promising them various favors and then pushing them into trafficked sex work. It seems to have been genuinely a global enterprise, and was, as criminologist Thomas Volscho puts it, on an “industrial scale.” The women were frequently used as pawns in order to curry favor with men Epstein wanted to connect with for business or political reasons — and that produced a cone of silence around everything Epstein-related in which Epstein had implicit leverage over anyone who had partaken of what he was offering. The shoe that hasn’t dropped is proof of trafficking of underaged girls to others — Epstein paid for massages for himself that routinely involved sexual acts from underage girls, and there have been multiple accusations of rape against him — but what has come out, nonetheless, is entirely damning of a large number of people who were, essentially, johns for Epstein’s practice of grooming, coercing, and manipulating young women and then a larger number who knew and kept quiet about it.

And now that we can glimpse the body of the elephant, a few different pieces fall into place. Epstein’s original depiction of himself as being a money manager with his services exclusive to billionaires seems, in a sense, to be accurate. Here is how, in 2003, Epstein described his business, “I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit [for taking a client] a billion dollars or more.” With time he seems to have moved on from just advising, and serving as the right red hand, for Wexner and Black to doing it for a wide network, with (it now seems almost certain) Gates among his clients. What comes through most clearly from his interview with Steve Bannon is the sense of identifying himself ultimately with the global financial system — picturing the system itself as a living, breathing organism. In his pitch to Putin in 2013 that’s also the way he presented himself. “Russia can get out in front and leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21 st century,” he wrote. “A new form of money, on a world wide basis, It is much larger than any single project envisioned by any govt. and at its core not really that difficult to bring to fruition.” What’s obvious is that national boundaries do not matter at all — Epstein is aggressively offering his services to Russia to develop a new Russia-centric banking system.

And some of the moral sensibility comes clear as well. Long-time acquaintances of Epstein described him to Vicky Ward as having “no moral compass” — there’s of course an outstanding question of whether he was a psychopath — but there’s, to me, a very arresting moment in the Bannon interview where he gives some kind of a sense of a code. Bannon — who, by the way, must be the world’s very worst interviewer — is really pressing Epstein to show some kind of emotion or contrition for his 2008 jail sentence and Epstein, eventually, says, “[My being in jail] is as incredible as sitting here in this house. They are both just two sides of the coin.” The point is that there is a kind of threshold that you push through to engage in the sort of work Epstein was doing — just as rules of nationality don’t apply, ordinary notions of morality and criminality don’t apply either: if you’re caught you’re caught, while if you skate free, you skate free. Interminably in the interview, Bannon tries to press Epstein on who is responsible for the 2008 financial collapse, and Epstein seems sincere and convincing when he insists that that really is the wrong way to look at it: the system itself is what matters, more ordinary questions of culpability or morality don’t really come into it. And what extends from there is a view that the only people who matter are the ones who have the ability to move the system around. When Ghislaine Maxwell dismissed the Florida victims as “trash,” that may well have been what she had in mind — Epstein and Maxwell really were close to the nerve center of something, and the people who were far away from it, like the Palm Beach girls Epstein abused, were collateral, inconsequent. One of the more baffling aspects of the Epstein story — his interest in mass insemination and longevity — makes a certain perverse kind of sense when thought about in this way. There was a sort of Nietzschean morality at work: because he, and people in his world, had passed through the ordinary laws of good and evil, they were more worthy, in a moral category unto themselves. And that sensibility does feel of a piece with the entirety of Epstein’s career. He started out as, essentially, a butler to the powerful and he maintained that perspective even as he came into his own — he served power, and the vertical of power. The very clear sense is that nobody of lower status ever entered into his world unless they served some very clear exploitable purpose.

The sophisticated analysis of Epstein has, by this time, moved on from him to the question of whether there an ‘Epstein class,’ in Ro Khanna’s phrase. Based on the evidence of the emails, there really is. That doesn’t mean pedophile rings or satanic rites — or at least that tranche of emails hasn’t dropped — but it means a class of people, many of them household names, who aren’t beholden to democratic values or national interests or to the greater well-being of the public sector, who are beholden endlessly to their own narrow self-interests, which tends to include a heavy dose of pure hedonism, and are invested in the preservation of their own class. In his most butlerish mode, here was how Epstein put it to Vicki Ward. “The problems of the mega-rich, he tells people, are different from yours and mine,” Ward reported. “Very few people need any more money when they have a billion dollars,” Epstein said. “The key is not to have it do harm more than anything else.” It’s an interesting echo of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line “The very rich are different from you and me” and speaks, again, to the underlying worldview — that money, or a certain place in the power hierarchy, moves you out of normal moral concerns and makes you, to take Epstein’s words literally, almost a different species: not in the accumulation business, like everybody else, but in something very different, the management business or the transaction business, where everything takes on a somehow juvenile, gamified character. As Ezra Klein puts it, “There’s also just an endless transactionalism. An endless trading of information, money, connections, favor, powers.”

What comes through, as well, is the almost total absence of any kind of integrity. Many of these people are public servants or, in some way, custodians of the public trust, and, on the evidence of the emails, their attention was entirely on their own mercantile self-interest, which often meant very petty symbols of conspicuous consumption (the baroque effort of Brad Karp to get himself into Augusta National Golf Club, for instance, with Steve Bannon and Epstein organizing the campaign on his behalf). As Anand Giriharadas, who has been one of the sharpest observers of the Epstein story, puts it, “Everybody is so interested in longevity. What about living well and honorably in the existing time, whatever that is?” If we were to use a Rome analogy, what it feels like is the elite swanning around Capri in the age of Tiberius, the parties getting progressively out of hand, and what you want is for everybody to read their Cicero. In this context the mis-education of Ehud Barak is particularly bracing, with Barak — career soldier and public servant — being, under Epstein’s tutelage, put through the paces of the strange new international order, selling surveillance equipment far and wide and with Barak’s reputation helping to bolster the deals.

The sensibility, within this world, is that this simply is the way it is, and Epstein is ahead of the curve by being less morally encumbered than most. Michael Wolff clearly put his finger on something when he reported that a number of Epstein’s acquaintances would spend the whole day at his house — not necessarily doing anything untoward — but just kind of basking in the atmosphere of being beyond the pieties of the rest of society. “It was like at a men’s club,” Wolff said. And one can’t help but imagine some of the topics covered — lowering the age of consent to 15, as Alan Dershowitz would argue in an LA Times op-ed, building a Russia-centric financial system, and so on.

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If I think about what the ‘Epstein class’ means for me, what I find myself picturing is a fork in the road for most people I knew growing up — which is like a scar across every educational institution I’ve ever been part of. On the one hand, there are the alleged values of that institution — the liberal arts, a humanistic sensibility, a general reverence for democracy. And then there’s the path that most people follow — which is to run pell-mell into finance at the earliest possible opportunity. The general view on this was that that was just the way it is — we live in an era where finance is predominant, but that it all works out, that the bankers themselves are more or less beholden to the norms of the democratic system, that the wealth they generate irrigates the broader economy.

But, in a word, fuck that shit. What comes through with the Epstein e-mails is something really rotten at the heart of it — the best real estate, the best connections, the best of everything, and all of it, in Epstein’s case, supporting something really evil. What this has to do with ultimately, I suspect, is something I talked about in a different post — the turn from capitalism to some different system, what I’m calling ‘surplus wealth.’ The argument is that there really is a new beast in the world, that, as Yanis Varoufakis — who has thought very deeply about all this — argues, the new system is ‘parasitic’ on capitalism much in the way that capitalism was ‘parasitic’ on the feudal system that preceded it. We can see that very vividly with Epstein. It’s unlikely, in his long career, that he ever produced anything of ‘value’ — everything was essentially parasitic on the work that other capitalists (Wexner, Gates, etc) were doing, and he was able to prove his value to them through tax evasion, through different forms of money laundering, through the skills of hyper-connection.

These are real moral questions. Over the course of people’s lives, they are given choices — ultimately, whether they want to be part of the system or not. The system means money, and wherever the money is congregated, but there’s also a certain creed that the money seems to articulate — that it’s the ‘invisible hand,’ that the right thing to do in your own life is just to get downhill of the money and follow wherever it leads. That’s what Peter Attia was trying to articulate in his mea culpa that “At that point in my career, I had little exposure to prominent people, and that level of access was novel to me,” and I can certainly understand him. I’ve been in enough rooms with high ceilings to know how rapidly the presence of wealth can corrode ordinary moral sensibility. But follow that logic and it really can lead somewhere very dark — as the interior of the Epstein e-mails has more than shown to us. There has to be a better way.