One of the best pieces on Epstein I’ve read, Sam. Very eloquent and moving. These lines resonate a lot: “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”
Fantastic essay. I had a conversation with a spiritual advisor when I was young. It involved a very difficult decision I had to make. The choice was between doing the right thing and not getting a material benefit or doing the wrong thing and getting what I wanted.
He said, “The thing about having principles is that they usually cost you something.”
In our culture of easy, woo spirituality, you’re supposed to get rewarded for doing what’s right. But in fact, the choice most often is values or money. Not values and money.
We need to start talking about the price of decency and stop treating the accumulation of wealth as a virtue.
It's true. On the other hand, I find that if I get something I don't deserve my superego is strong enough to really diminish my pleasure that and I'll often find myself sabotaging that opportunity. If I feel like I'm gotten something I deserved, and obtained honorably, that's never a problem.
Great writing! Smart, knowing, and thoughtful. The only word you didn't mention was pimp, because that's also what he was. The higher-level version of those seventies guys with the tacky on purpose pimpmobiles. I used to live in a west side building where a few of them were residents. They would have gotten him in a NY minute.
That's right. A lot of it was that he was a kind of Heidi Fleiss for the jet set. The other word people aren't using is 'cult.' It's not exactly like he had a cult, but he was clearly using a lot of cult leader techniques to control his victims and to influence people.
Yes. Now why don't you write a novel about this? This has size, depth, importance, all the things we ask of big literature. It's what you've been looking for. And you already understand it, something that you have that Mann didn't have when he started the Magic Mountain.
Lol. Been reading about this primarily to use it in a novel! Will take a shot at it in April. Sort of glad I haven't yet because the disclosures are coming out so fast that they change everybody's picture of it. Thank you for the encouragement!
I guess what I struggle to put entirely to bed is my suspicion that it was ever thus, but we just didn't used to have as clear a view on it as we do now. Like weren't Bobby and Jack Kennedy pretty similarly amoral in a lot of ways, including very much when it came to their treatment of women.
Things do change, including the nature of the elite, so I'm not really sold on this perspective either. I just don't know how to adjudicate.
I'm wondering about this too. I think there are Epsteins all over the Russian elite, for instance. And, yes, JFK seems to have operated in a very Epstein-ish way, with recruiters, etc. Part of Epstein's spiel, as I understand it, was that this simply was the way power worked and always had been, and this kind of sexual excess flowed naturally from power.
Such an interesting piece, Sam, thank you. I absolutely agree with your thoughts about the uber wealthy not being like the rest of us, so it's refreshing to read your take on the way these people can be captured by being with someone who sees their desires to be beyond mere mortals and gives the them access to what they want. And the sex part of the story is just an extension of accommodation. Really interesting analysis here Sam, thank you again.
Very true that you can have integrity or wealth but not both.
Thanks Deb. It does feel like something really went wrong here, and in a way that goes well beyond Epstein. A little hard to put one's finger on what exactly it is.
Maybe the new "surplus wealth" class is really new. But I hear some powerful echoes of the Gilded Age here. Figures like George Hearst were plenty brutal. Many lives lost to railroads and mines, not to mention trafficking to those work places (as anyone living near an oil boomtown knows). Some of the robber baron behavior might have been excused by the roughness of pioneering, but wealth has always brought entitlement and a sense of playing by different rules (thinking even further back to the bad behavior of monarchs).
More and more, I think we need to reread the literature of the 1920s. "Babbitt" and "Main Street" and all the excesses in "This Side of Paradise" and "Gatsby."
Epstein feels new because we're too ignorant to have read anything that old, I guess. But this sounds quite a lot like Gatsby's parties: "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."
George F. Babbitt isn't quite this dissolute, but he sure aspires to the Epstein class.
Yes, I think that's right. Something that's really shocked me recently is discovering just how much of our arts culture emanates directly from Gilded Age wealth. (The Tyler Austin Harper article in The Atlantic is very good on this.) I think the real issue here are these pools of wealth that are disconnected from actual economic growth. The ancien regime had this. The Gilded Age had this. And now we have a version of it with the Reaganite deregulation of Wall Street and banking - it's worth remembering that Epstein's first brush with wealth came exactly as that deregulation was happening. Eventually, the state kind of got its handle on the Gilded Age but it's far from clear that that can happen now.
I agree that historical parallels are useful, Joshua, but I still think the aim should be to understand the specificity of this moment. Noting the resonances only gets us so far. The Varoufakis claims seems germane here. Like many millennial critics/scholars, I came of age when the Jamesonian model of conceiving of culture as the logic of late capitalism was dominant. Do we need a new model for characterizing that link? A new vocabulary? I see Sam's piece as contributing to that debate.
I agree -- and don't think there needs to be a binary between historical resonance and present reality. At least I didn't mean to suggest that we're living through an exact replica of the 1920s. Times differ, but they often rhyme. Getting at the truth requires attention to both parallels and novelties.
Yes, agreed. Didn't mean it to be a criticism on my end either; only an observation. In a way, Sam's response suggests how the Gilded Age functions both as a parallel to the current situation and as part of the historical process that led us to where we're at (in providing the wealth that currently fuels foundations like the Mellon).
I once had a large hedge fund as a client, and one of the PMs once told me at a certain point, the utility of money maxes out. Once you hit a certain level, you can all go to the same cities, restaurants, hotels, luxury boxes, VIP areas. The competition, the desire for status, the desire for something others do not have, or are in a secret club - becomes the motivator. Every story I read about the Epstein files, it just feels like that conversation come to life.
Have you seen this guy? He's great! The court jester able to play the fool and tell the king what the vassals can't. The tragedian and comic all rolled into one.
I don't think it's capitalism. You made the analogy, Sam, with imperial Rome, which whatever it was, wasn't capitalist. Every society, I would say, has always had the key features at the top - wealth, illicit sex, favours, clients, utter corruption. One piquant difference about this particular instantiation, is that the very same people who were constantly announcing their support for 'women and girls' were, in fact, engaged either in exploiting same or turning a very blind eye to those who were: it's the degree of progressive hypocrisy which may be unique to our time.
Yes, I think you're right. That's a big piece of it that I didn't touch on. To clarify: I didn't mean that this is "capitalism." I mean that there's a post-capitalist structure that's hard to even put a name on. Modern banking is a big part of it, but it's about wealth that's not based on underlying value. I suspect that you have big social problems whenever you have that - probably there was a version of that in Rome as well. It's interesting to keep in mind that Epstein helped create (or at least took credit for helping to create) derivatives when he was working at Bear Stearns.
Very good. Reminds of my first lesson during a cocktail party in one of those high-ceilinged rooms, when I asked the man of the hour a question that had to do with moral choices in his industry. He said, "Oh, I stopped worrying about that shit long ago," and turned away.
One of the best pieces on Epstein I’ve read, Sam. Very eloquent and moving. These lines resonate a lot: “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”
Thanks Jeffrey!
I echo Jeffrey Lawrence here. A very good piece of writng.
Thanks Terrance!
“But, in a word, fuck that shit.”
💯
What a brilliant piece of writing!
Thanks!
Fantastic essay. I had a conversation with a spiritual advisor when I was young. It involved a very difficult decision I had to make. The choice was between doing the right thing and not getting a material benefit or doing the wrong thing and getting what I wanted.
He said, “The thing about having principles is that they usually cost you something.”
In our culture of easy, woo spirituality, you’re supposed to get rewarded for doing what’s right. But in fact, the choice most often is values or money. Not values and money.
We need to start talking about the price of decency and stop treating the accumulation of wealth as a virtue.
An excellent comment to an excellent article.
It's true. On the other hand, I find that if I get something I don't deserve my superego is strong enough to really diminish my pleasure that and I'll often find myself sabotaging that opportunity. If I feel like I'm gotten something I deserved, and obtained honorably, that's never a problem.
Great writing! Smart, knowing, and thoughtful. The only word you didn't mention was pimp, because that's also what he was. The higher-level version of those seventies guys with the tacky on purpose pimpmobiles. I used to live in a west side building where a few of them were residents. They would have gotten him in a NY minute.
That's right. A lot of it was that he was a kind of Heidi Fleiss for the jet set. The other word people aren't using is 'cult.' It's not exactly like he had a cult, but he was clearly using a lot of cult leader techniques to control his victims and to influence people.
Yes. Now why don't you write a novel about this? This has size, depth, importance, all the things we ask of big literature. It's what you've been looking for. And you already understand it, something that you have that Mann didn't have when he started the Magic Mountain.
Lol. Been reading about this primarily to use it in a novel! Will take a shot at it in April. Sort of glad I haven't yet because the disclosures are coming out so fast that they change everybody's picture of it. Thank you for the encouragement!
I guess what I struggle to put entirely to bed is my suspicion that it was ever thus, but we just didn't used to have as clear a view on it as we do now. Like weren't Bobby and Jack Kennedy pretty similarly amoral in a lot of ways, including very much when it came to their treatment of women.
Things do change, including the nature of the elite, so I'm not really sold on this perspective either. I just don't know how to adjudicate.
I'm wondering about this too. I think there are Epsteins all over the Russian elite, for instance. And, yes, JFK seems to have operated in a very Epstein-ish way, with recruiters, etc. Part of Epstein's spiel, as I understand it, was that this simply was the way power worked and always had been, and this kind of sexual excess flowed naturally from power.
Such an interesting piece, Sam, thank you. I absolutely agree with your thoughts about the uber wealthy not being like the rest of us, so it's refreshing to read your take on the way these people can be captured by being with someone who sees their desires to be beyond mere mortals and gives the them access to what they want. And the sex part of the story is just an extension of accommodation. Really interesting analysis here Sam, thank you again.
Very true that you can have integrity or wealth but not both.
Thanks Deb. It does feel like something really went wrong here, and in a way that goes well beyond Epstein. A little hard to put one's finger on what exactly it is.
Maybe the new "surplus wealth" class is really new. But I hear some powerful echoes of the Gilded Age here. Figures like George Hearst were plenty brutal. Many lives lost to railroads and mines, not to mention trafficking to those work places (as anyone living near an oil boomtown knows). Some of the robber baron behavior might have been excused by the roughness of pioneering, but wealth has always brought entitlement and a sense of playing by different rules (thinking even further back to the bad behavior of monarchs).
More and more, I think we need to reread the literature of the 1920s. "Babbitt" and "Main Street" and all the excesses in "This Side of Paradise" and "Gatsby."
Epstein feels new because we're too ignorant to have read anything that old, I guess. But this sounds quite a lot like Gatsby's parties: "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."
George F. Babbitt isn't quite this dissolute, but he sure aspires to the Epstein class.
Self-serving, but I think this piece is germane:
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/we-are-all-babbitts-or-bartlebys-now
Not only the literature of the 1920's, Dostoevsky's characters like Svidrigailov (Crime and Punishment) and Stavrogin (The Devils) come to mind.
On the individual level, yes. On the cultural level, the echoes of the 1920s in our time are profound.
Yes, I think that's right. Something that's really shocked me recently is discovering just how much of our arts culture emanates directly from Gilded Age wealth. (The Tyler Austin Harper article in The Atlantic is very good on this.) I think the real issue here are these pools of wealth that are disconnected from actual economic growth. The ancien regime had this. The Gilded Age had this. And now we have a version of it with the Reaganite deregulation of Wall Street and banking - it's worth remembering that Epstein's first brush with wealth came exactly as that deregulation was happening. Eventually, the state kind of got its handle on the Gilded Age but it's far from clear that that can happen now.
I agree that historical parallels are useful, Joshua, but I still think the aim should be to understand the specificity of this moment. Noting the resonances only gets us so far. The Varoufakis claims seems germane here. Like many millennial critics/scholars, I came of age when the Jamesonian model of conceiving of culture as the logic of late capitalism was dominant. Do we need a new model for characterizing that link? A new vocabulary? I see Sam's piece as contributing to that debate.
I agree -- and don't think there needs to be a binary between historical resonance and present reality. At least I didn't mean to suggest that we're living through an exact replica of the 1920s. Times differ, but they often rhyme. Getting at the truth requires attention to both parallels and novelties.
Yes, agreed. Didn't mean it to be a criticism on my end either; only an observation. In a way, Sam's response suggests how the Gilded Age functions both as a parallel to the current situation and as part of the historical process that led us to where we're at (in providing the wealth that currently fuels foundations like the Mellon).
I once had a large hedge fund as a client, and one of the PMs once told me at a certain point, the utility of money maxes out. Once you hit a certain level, you can all go to the same cities, restaurants, hotels, luxury boxes, VIP areas. The competition, the desire for status, the desire for something others do not have, or are in a secret club - becomes the motivator. Every story I read about the Epstein files, it just feels like that conversation come to life.
Very interesting.
People!
Lol!
We all know them. The cool insiders…photoshop them onto a bus of high schoolers circa 1960-1970, and it’s a perfect fit.
Have you seen this guy? He's great! The court jester able to play the fool and tell the king what the vassals can't. The tragedian and comic all rolled into one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j25xcIA7OXI
I think I've seen him on Rogan?
Maybe. I just saw him for the first time myself over at Age of Muses.
https://ageofmuses.substack.com/p/when-baal-and-moloch-saved-the-world?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=440277&post_id=188183970&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=ho8ar&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I don't think it's capitalism. You made the analogy, Sam, with imperial Rome, which whatever it was, wasn't capitalist. Every society, I would say, has always had the key features at the top - wealth, illicit sex, favours, clients, utter corruption. One piquant difference about this particular instantiation, is that the very same people who were constantly announcing their support for 'women and girls' were, in fact, engaged either in exploiting same or turning a very blind eye to those who were: it's the degree of progressive hypocrisy which may be unique to our time.
Yes, I think you're right. That's a big piece of it that I didn't touch on. To clarify: I didn't mean that this is "capitalism." I mean that there's a post-capitalist structure that's hard to even put a name on. Modern banking is a big part of it, but it's about wealth that's not based on underlying value. I suspect that you have big social problems whenever you have that - probably there was a version of that in Rome as well. It's interesting to keep in mind that Epstein helped create (or at least took credit for helping to create) derivatives when he was working at Bear Stearns.
Very good. Reminds of my first lesson during a cocktail party in one of those high-ceilinged rooms, when I asked the man of the hour a question that had to do with moral choices in his industry. He said, "Oh, I stopped worrying about that shit long ago," and turned away.
Good on you!