Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Epstein Files aren’t an ‘island story’. They are about the nature of collective power

NB: An incisive commentary by Professor Mehta. “First, though there is partisan bickering, there is still a kind of attempt to exceptionalise the behaviour of this ruling class… a bounded zone in which elite actors could suspend norms without contaminating the moral order of the centre. Second, there is a pathology of modern political life, where power is not legitimised or justified through virtue, but through opacity, brazenness, legalese, propaganda and procedural shenanigans… Third, there is a shadow that haunts modernity. The only great historians who let us grasp this moment are the Romans: Tacitus, Sallust, and Livy. They located sexual decadence and violence at the visible centre of power, treating excess as a sign, and in some cases, a cause of political decline….‘

To this I can add only this: Nietzsche often looked forward to the ‘active nihilist’ future as an age of ‘great politics.’ Greatness was indeed the simultaneously edifying and hollow theme in his prognoses. Now we can see what these ‘great’ powers are in their essence: mass destruction, ecological catastrophe, distant satellites, genocide. At the root of it is the mature nihilism which adds up to nothing more than deception, money, fraud, the worship of war and power for its own sake. No grand purposes reveal themselves, as Mehta observes. And no country nor continent can absolve itself: all around us is nothing but the rotting carcass of what was once called civilisation. The young generation needs to extricate itself from this morass of normalised corruption and save itself while there is still time: DS

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The files provide a sobering X-ray of some of America’s elites: Immature, full of impunity, corrupt, venal, venial, and venereal all at once. They also provide a sobering view of global politics: There are no grand purposes, not even a political economy

It is perhaps not an accident that an island figures prominently in the horrifically appalling Epstein scandal. The scandal, which now implicates a wide section of America’s elites, brings together one fantasy of modernity and one of its most atrocious moral horrors.

Islands have often been the places where modernity has staged its worst delusions. In the Enlightenment, islands were spaces where one could safely escape all moral norms and sexual prohibitions; they promised unlimited indulgence, but one that did not imperil mainstream society, precisely because they were exceptional and offshore. But the image of exceptional relaxation of norms, “offshoring”, applies to financial crimes too: A form of evasion that does not imperil the system as a whole. Offshoring crime, sexual violence, indulgence and financial perfidy is threatening but also reassuring. After all, it is offshore.

This was, of course, always a delusion. Financial offshoring is not a peripheral matter; it magnifies the crimes of the financial centre. Similarly, elite actors thought they could carry out their worst desires without contaminating the centre. What those who came into Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit were enacting was not a fantasy of freedom, a revolt against prohibitions or norms. What they were enacting was an aspect of the horrific logic of modernity: An extraordinary pornification of the imagination, sexual exploitation and commodification of bodies, and total abjection in the pursuit of power. And it is an elite that seems to combine violent impunity with emotional immaturity.

There are too many angles to the Epstein files. Have all the files been released? Will the victims’ rights be protected? Given that both Democrats and Republicans are implicated, who stands to benefit? The files provide a sobering X-ray of some of America’s elites: Immature, full of impunity, corrupt, venal, venial, and venereal all at once. They also provide a sobering view of global politics: There are no grand purposes, not even a political economy. Instead, what we get is a world run by huckstering middlemen, vulnerable personalities, fragile egos, the perfect embodiment of Spengler’s figures of moral decline: Clever, sceptical, but licentious and morally exhausted.

What decisions are such immature and fragile men capable of? The puzzle is how Epstein managed to put himself at the centre of so much geopolitics; the fact that so many global powers felt they had to go through him is remarkable. He comes across as both a figure of great evil and an agony aunt for the powerful, including powerful countries.

The reaction will play out over time. Who knows what skeletons will tumble out? But, as always, the response is revealing. There was initial reluctance to confront the matter in both political parties, and it has taken years, and legislation introduced by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, to get the release of the files moving. Yet there is still, arguably, a shroud of silence. Yes, there is gossip and chatter, but it is almost a way of not confronting the central question: How could a society produce an elite of this kind? Imagine if this kind of story had broken about the ruling class of any other country. Every colonial trope of debauchery or orientalism would have shaped the coverage.

But the response is revealing in three deeper ways. First, though there is partisan bickering, there is still a kind of attempt to exceptionalise the behaviour of this ruling class. Like earlier colonial and island imaginaries, it functions as a bounded zone in which elite actors could suspend norms without contaminating the moral order of the centre. Second, there is a pathology of modern political life, where power is not legitimised or justified through virtue, but through opacity, brazenness, legalese, propaganda and procedural shenanigans. So much energy will go into legalese when the horrors are in plain sight.

Third, there is a shadow that haunts modernity. The only great historians who let us grasp this moment are the Romans: Tacitus, Sallust, and Livy. They located sexual decadence and violence at the visible centre of power, treating excess as a sign, and in some cases, a cause of political decline. We moderns, of course, are supposedly more sophisticated. We distinguish between public and private. For us, corruption is not about virtue; it is a matter of institutional containment. The historian and theorist of the politics of virtue, JGA Pocock, in The Machiavellian Moment, cautioned about a paradox at the heart of modernity: Unlike the Romans, we do not think decadence, especially sexual decadence, tells us much about the decay of societies. Usually, the causes are structural — economic or political. Yet the republican category of virtue survives. It may not have explanatory force, but we cannot entirely abandon the language of virtue, or the sneaking suspicion that, even if sexual decadence is not causal, it is revealing.

There are, of course, gradations in the Epstein files that need to be sorted out — people who committed crimes in legal terms, people who engaged in morally reprehensible behaviour, and people who themselves are not individually guilty but condoned the whole structure of power and knowledge that pushed shame aside. The Epstein files are not about individual guilt or innocence; they are about the nature of collective power. And when that collective power displays elites aligning sexual, financial, legal, political, and even intellectual power with shame and impunity, one has to wonder whether the Roman historians were onto something: They imagined empires collapsing when elites could no longer restrain themselves on any dimension. An elite so needy, greedy, and now so vulnerable can hardly be trusted to exercise good judgment.

The dilemma, as the Romans knew, is this: An elite of this kind has no authority left. Even in power, it is fearful; who knows what violence it enacts to cover its own tracks? On the other hand, if the elite gets away with it, the road is open to moral nihilism, a point we are dangerously close to reaching.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express

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The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb

Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know

A Lying World Order

Cynical Theories

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: The Industrialization of the Mind

The Supreme Contradictions of Simone Weil

Simone Weil The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940) (archive)

Evil: The Crime against Humanity. Hannah Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism

Alexandre Koyré: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943)

Lying and history: Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war (2009)