As the rock is lifted on the Epstein files, we find beneath it the rot of our foundational institutions and the beyond-belief nihilism of those who control them.
Romans of the Decadence. (Thomas Couture, 1847, Wikimedia Commons)
By Patrick Lawrence
The Floutist
As we read revelations of the sordid, bottomlessly rank doings of Jeffrey Epstein and the vast circle of elites with whom he managed to surround himself—and god knows how immense the inventory of “redacted” material, how many the names and crimes that will never come to light—we read of the collapse of our world, nothing less. Our world: the Western world, the Atlantic world, the world wherein humanity began, in the eighteenth century, to bring modern democracies and republics into being.
Yes, much has been written over many years of the decline of the West. We have remarked upon this countless times in these pages. But we are confronted now with more, far more, than questions of national power, shifting geopolitics, the rise to prominence of the non–West, and the new world order these nations, their turn now come, are intent on bringing into being.
Questions of power and politics figure prominently in the Epstein affair, certainly. But even the partial release of the Epstein files takes us well beyond such matters, large as they are. As the rock is lifted, we find beneath it the rot of our foundational institutions and the beyond-belief nihilism of those who control them—altogether the worms that have eaten into any semblance of order, law, or justice to which the West’s democracies and republics may once have had a purchase.
Sign demanding release of Epstein files at No Kings Protest, Mass., Oct. 18, 2025. (Victor Grigas, CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0)
Toynbee warned of this in A Study of History, the 12 volumes of which he produced from 1934 to 1961. Civilizations decline and fall, he asserted in his most famous thesis, not primarily due to external forces but in consequence of internal decadence and lapses of spirit among societal elites.
What had served as “creative minorities” devolve into “dominant minorities” that no longer believe even in themselves. They then take to glorifying what elites once were but are no longer. Toynbee is out of fashion now, but I find in the books a mirror of our circumstance as we have them all these years later.
Meaning, truth, reason, language, purpose, social relations of all kinds: What is left of these in this, our post–Epstein era? Tomorrow will give the appearance of today and yesterday, but no, Toto, we are very far from Kansas now. And the point to be grasped as we manage the shock of the Epstein revelations is that there is no longer any going back to Kansas. Kansas is gone.
As others have remarked in recent days, for Americans, and by extension all those who have thought of themselves as citizens elsewhere in the West, there is nowhere else to turn now but to themselves.
“A Republic, If You Can Keep It.”
On Sept. 17, 1787, a prominent Philadelphia salonnière named Elizabeth Willing Powel put a blunt question to Benjamin Franklin. The Constitutional Convention drew to a close that day, its business complete; Franklin was 81 and infirm. “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Willing Powel asked.
“A republic, if you can keep it,” was Franklin’s famous reply.
We have failed to keep it: This is the truth of our moment. Now what? This is the question of our moment.
“There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings,” Christopher Lasch wrote as he began The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (Norton, 1995). It was the great social historian’s last book, published posthumously. I wonder if Lasch, prescient as he often was, could have imagined the dangers with which these elites have since come to confront us.
A refusal to accept limits of any kind, the abandonment of all notions of moral conduct, indifference to all others not of their status, the rejection of any of the responsibilities attaching to positions of influence and power: These manifest now as grave dangers across the Western post-democracies.
The Foundation of the American Government, signing of the Constitution. (Henry Hintermeister, 1925, Wikimedia)
As Lasch wrote in the just-noted book, the elites of the past understood that their places in society imposed upon them “civic obligations”—Lasch’s term. There were social contracts, in plain language. With privileges came duties, and a certain pride was taken in fulfilling these duties.
Hold Epstein and those around him up to this light and you instantly recognize a fundamental change of ethos among the elites of our time: Arrogance has replaced any such pride. This, too, we can count a danger.
How do we account for the depravity to which the West’s elites have sunk—their endless derelictions, their celebrations of a shared narcissism, the strange absence of any kind of order within the bubbles, the many-gated cities, inside of which they live and move?
“[I]ndifference to all others not of their status, the rejection of any of the responsibilities attaching to positions of influence and power: These manifest now as grave dangers across the Western post-democracies.”
Who are these people? Who? The question leads us into a history we might call psycho-social, and it is well we understand it.
We must go back to Emmanuel Kant to address our present properly. It was Kant who emerged among the great apostles of the Enlightenment, a.k.a. the Age of Reason, during the 1780s, when he wrote the books for which he is best known. In 1784 he published a brief essay—it prints out today at seven pages—called “What Is Enlightenment?”
Kant’s answer turned on the liberation of the individual. It was the free-standing individual, capable of discerning, reasoning, and judging for himself or herself without reference to the coercive relations of the past, who would announce the enlightenment of humanity from the reigning state of “immaturity,” as Kant called it.
From the opening lines of this famous essay:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”
A few paragraphs in, Kant wrote aspirationally of “a few who, after having themselves thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will spread the spirit of a rational appreciation for both their own worth and for each person’s calling to think for himself.”
Stirring, of course. And how thoroughly has this accolade to individuality permeated Western culture from Kant’s day until ours.
Monsters of Boundless Subjectivity
But over time this idealization of the individual produced—and I am not first to use this term—a monster. Who could possibly have anticipated this as the outcome of so salutary a breakthrough in the human consciousness? Let us call it the monster of boundless subjectivity.
The thinking-for-himself individual—discerning, reasoning, judging—came subliminally to conclude that he or she was capable of discerning, reasoning through and judging any event, circumstance, course of action, or phenomenon and getting it right without reference to the learning, knowledge, or expertise of anyone else. An ethos of all-knowingness, made of sheer presumption, came to prevail.
What had long served as external sources of order and guides to conduct were in one or another way discredited. Morality—essential point here—was internalized. Even law, which is by definition an altogether public agreement among those in a given polity, was internalized.
The feast of reason, and the flow of soul,’ – ie – the wits of the age, setting the table in a roar. (James Gillray, 1797, National Portrait Gallery, Public Domain, Wikimedia)
There is no walking around anywhere in the Western world without encountering a person of these subconscious convictions. He is not well-read but thinks he is well- read, not well-informed but certain he is. He has an opinion about everything and it is a worthy opinion because it is his opinion. He is, borrowing and bending a phrase from John Ralston Saul, one of Kant’s bastards.
It is but a few short steps to the more diabolic presumption, and this, too, is essential to our grasp of power and how it is exercised in our time: If I think something is right for me it is altogether right because I think it is right. In this way the Age of Reason Kant celebrated has given way—a gradual process, Jeffrey Epstein merely a thoroughly unconscious exemplar—to an Age of Unreason, as I call our time. I dilated on this topic in a lecture delivered in Switzerland last summer. I subsequently published it in Consortium News, and it is here.
The elites described in the Epstein files, such as we have them, are best understood as people of this kind. They are among Kant’s bastards, extreme as their case may be. And we know by now that President Trump, via the thousands of mentions of his name in the documents, is through and through one of Kant’s bastards. This is not a matter of whether Trump dropped his drawers with one of Epstein’s underage victims: It is a question of his consciousness.
In early January four Washington correspondents from The New York Times conducted a lengthy interview with Donald Trump. During it they asked the president whether there were any limits on his exercise of power in the global context. The coup in Venezuela was but a few days previous.
“Yeah, there is one thing,” Trump replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” As if this were not enough he added, “I don’t need international law.”
“This is not a matter of whether Trump dropped his drawers with one of Epstein’s underage victims: It is a question of his consciousness.”
The Times’s report then continued:
“‘When pressed further about whether his administration needed to abide by international law, Mr. Trump said, ‘I do.’ But he made clear he would be the arbiter when such constraints applied to the United States. ‘It depends what your definition of international law is,'” he said.”
This is well beyond the narcissism commonly ascribed to Donald Trump. It tilts to sheer solipsism.
James Marriott, one of the only interesting voices in the Times of London’s otherwise dull opinion section, published “Jeffrey Epstein circle’s ‘big ideas’ were vacuous guff.” It goes straight to my earlier point: The monster of boundless subjectivity is ever to be found among Kant’s bastards, empty minds ever to be dressed up as high intellects.
Maison de L’Amitie mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, bought by Donald Trump in 2004 after winning a Trump-Epstein bidding war. (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
Marriott writes in part:
“Contemplating their ranches, private islands and jets, the Epstein set managed to convince themselves that all this wealth was not evidence of anything as prosaic as birth or luck or hard work—rather, these were the rewards of intellect, ‘superforecasting’ and “pattern reading.” …
The men in Epstein’s circle continually congratulate one another on their intelligence: ‘U r wall st tough guy w intellectual curiosity,’ Larry Summers told Epstein.
‘And you an intellectual with a Wall Street curiosity,’ Epstein replied…. Prince Andrew was still at this when he told Emily Maitlis that he didn’t regret his friendship with Epstein because of ‘the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him.’
Did it occur to nobody in this world that when Andrew is praising you as an intellectual something has gone horribly wrong?
Never in history has so much money surrounded itself with so much pseudo-intellectual guff. Gusts of it drift annually through Davos with its seminars on the power of dialogue and the meaning of tipping points.
The spirit is institutionalised in the large companies which, no longer content with merely making money, adopt ‘corporate philosophies.’ It is all-pervading in the tech industry, with its pseud0 meditations on consciousness. Sam Altman boasts that he ‘consulted, like, hundreds of moral philosophers’ when developing ChatGPT.”
Jeffrey Epstein, Sexual Offender Registry, 2018. (U.S. Virgin Islands, Justice Dept.)
I quote this passage at length because Marriott reminds us in it that the delusions and corruptions evident within Epstein’s circle are not confined to it. No, they are typical, if less sordid, of power elites across the Western post-democracies—in politics, judiciaries, finance, the universities, corporate media.
And I have to add: We will be reminded of this once again, bitterly, as it becomes evident that few of those implicated in the Epstein scene—if anyone, indeed—will be charged, tried, sentenced, or otherwise held to account for crimes that in some cases seem to verge on the unspeakable.
On the same day Marriott’s piece appeared, Alastair Crooke published another in Strategic Culture and, subsequently, Eurasiareview under the headline, “The Slow Epstein Earthquake: The Rupture Between the People and the Elites.” Crooke, going straight to this last point, begins just where we all must:
“After Epstein, nothing can continue as before: Neither the post war ‘never again’ values—reflecting sentiment at the end of bloody wars—and the widespread yearning for a ‘fairer’ society; nor the bipolar economics of extreme disparities in wealth; nor trust—after the exposed venality, rotted institutions and perversions that the Epstein files have shown to be endemic amongst certain of the western élites.
How to speak of ‘values’ against this background?”
Crooke addresses how the Epstein affair looks to young people—but not to the exclusion of the rest of us—as he concludes with his reflections on the world that has so spectacularly collapsed all around us:
“If protest has no effect in changing the status quo, and elections remain between the Tweedle Dee and Dum parties of the existing order, the young will conclude that ‘no one will come to save us’—and they may conclude in their despair that the future can only be decided on the streets.”
I don’t see why, Alastair, this judgment is the purview of the young alone. It is there for anyone paying attention to make. History, including America’s, is replete with examples of how the street figures when let-them-eat-cake elites prove as indifferent to the commonweal as those who now hold power.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
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Without any doubt, the complicated nature of Western societies—partly due to the powerful influence of the ruling class and its propaganda apparatus—makes it challenging for critics to convince Western public opinion of the rot within their “foundational institutions” and “the nihilism of the ruling class”.
As shockingly bad as the Epstein affair has been for the Western world, ironically it may have been a gift to the Global South. Unfortunately, countless ordinary middle-class people, intellectuals, elites, members of the managerial class, and numerous “Kant’s bastards”—as Mr. Lawrence puts it—in the Global South are deeply enamored with and obsessed by Kant’s idealization of the individual, the rule of law, and ultimately liberal democracy.
Epstein has helped amplify the voices of those in the South who, for years, have warned people against believing the false and fragile rhetoric of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law coming from the West. Undoubtedly, people in the Global South will become more receptive to critiques of Western democracy and human rights—values the West has relentlessly promoted through its propaganda—as they increasingly experience the consequences of capitalism, globalism, environmental destruction, war, and exploitation firsthand.
Dear Patrick Lawrence.
In consideration that I always like to read your articles I found it pretty strange that you’re occasionally writing on something you apparently don’t know nothing about. Some months ago you called the inhabitants of the East Prussian region up to 1945 “settlers” (I wrote a comment). My parents lived there and the only reason because they and millions others were thriven out of their homeland was the Nazi attitude adopted by the West that the Sowjets just as the Russians today have no right of security. But I’m much more surprised by your catastrophic misunderstanding of Kant’s philosophy you revealed when you was accusing “Kant’s bastards”, the “Monsters of Boundless Subjectivity”, you was looking for. For you they’re responsible for any abuse of power from Epstein to Trump and I don’t know what else. Honestly, I can’t imagine you’ve read anything of Kant’s books. Even out of the short letter Was ist Aufklärung? you seem to have read only the first sentence. Kant was not yielding at an empowerment of subjectivity in the sense of arrogance toward others. The goal is the defence again the mighty: Caesar non est supra grammaticos, Kant is stressing literally, the powerful is not superior of knowledge: “they” are not to decide what we have to think. To make it not to long: Kant’s philosophy is a philosophy of boundaries, to recognise them and to surmount them always coniderating his categorical imperative. There are different versions. The best one in our (and your) context probably is: Always take men as a purpose never as a mean. Maybe you should think about that general attack on capitalism, about what to read something in your articles of course would be a pleasure. With best regards Michael Ewert.
Michael.
Thank you for reading the piece (and other work) so closely and for taking the time to write.
On the question of what I termed “settlers” in lands known historically as East Prussia—this in the four-part series,“ Germany in Crisis,” published here and elsewhere last year—it may be that “expatriates” could’ve been my better word.
As to Kant, while I lay no claim to scholarly study of the books, which I confess to finding difficult if rewarding after rigorous toil, I think you may’ve taken the case I made incorrectly. I coined the term “Kant’s bastards” for a reason: Our “monsters of limitless subjectivity” are illegitimate offspring, so to say, as they have utterly perverted Kant’s case for the autonomous individual as harbinger of the modern age. They are wholly decadent reflections of Kant’s thought on reason, “pure reason,” or reason’s relationship with morality. They are deformities, in short. I hope I make this point clearly here.
Thanks again for reading and writing.
P.L.
The dog that did not bark. What is unusual about any set of occurrences? A guard dog that does not bark, or anything else out of the ordinary. What is unusual about The Epstein Affair?
The people who were being blackmailed by the blackmailing gang are not the people who are considered to be “the victims.”
In this modern age, everything gets redefined. I agree with Orwell that this deserves to be at least noticed. Traditionally, the “victims” of a Master Blackmailer like the Epstein Gang are the people whom the blackmailer is extorting. It is interesting to watch how societies morals change, and the language with it. To be brutally honest about it, we are now told that the victims of the Master Blackmailer are the people who conspired with the Master Blackmailer in the blackmail. Very interesting.
And thus I’ll let everyone return to the tabloid coverage which they so want to consume. And I can go back to watching every writer in the world use the Epstein Affair to attack the same targets they were attacking anyways before the corporate media and American corporate politicians released the latest scandalous information to titillate everyone into ignoring that everything keeps getting worse.
What, did you think that these rich and powerful people were all Saints? One look at the world they rule would clearly tell you the evil nature of the powerful people at the top of that world. As the old saying used to go, if you were not already outraged, then you were not paying attention. The recent corporate scandal, with Trump’s fingerprints on how its been manipulated, does not add any knew knowledge beyond what was already self-evident.
Primate Dominance HIERARCHY, civilization after civilization after civilization after… POWER guarantees Human corruption. If our species continues to organize as a troupe of baboons we’ll continue to get what we continue to get. Watching the slow evolution of Human consciousness is painful.
We are now seeing the ultimate result of devotion to the supreme ego, the secular self who sees nothing higher than itself. It is not humble; in itself it sees no weaknesses. It believes it can rule life on its own without relationship to divine and sacred powers. It cannot.
For the Struggle of Wings
In nature
sacrifice is manifold
a folding in on an end
as well a means to an end
a metamorphosis
Yesterday morning
near a chrysalis on a jade leaf
caterpillar tracks kissed iridescent
in droplets of dew leading
from sunlit molt to
dire enclosure
its slithery
earthborn slog at end
to end again in sluffing swirl
of silken self-annihilating
strands
for the struggle of wings
?
“It believes it can rule life on its own”
Only someone who believes that they are already a God could possibly believe that they “rule life”. The bizarre bit is that human society would gladly cede power to people who are obviously insane.
Of course, the real joke of the Gods is that humans believe that they are an intelligent species.
The article is illuminating ! Donald and Epstein refuse light and maturity . “The World is my oyster”, Peter Pan. Being immature and being psychopath them from responsibility of growing up . Growing up demands eyes opening to the pains of ones’ childhood; pains of adaptation to responsibility . Growing up demands compassion for the seeing suffering in others . Growing up requires recognizing the pain we cause to others . The tragedy is that society is adapting themselves to their norms, increasingly.
Thank you dear Mr. Lawrence. Thank you for pointing out Kant’s enlightenment definition. My disclaimer is that I am not an intellectual. I was a 16 year old school drop out and I learned some thanks to writers like you.
The United States itself is the handiwork a of shallow, self-preening elite. Now we’re seeing yet another failure — or is it a success? — of the malign contraption it assembled at Philadelphia in 1787.
They are giddy in the belief they will become genetic masters of the universe unto themselves alone in technological super-powers..
Very interesting article, as usual! May I suggest another author from Kant’s time, from the dark side of enlightenment, who has probably better anticipated what we see today than him? Who anticipated the effect of adopting a creed of self-love, egoism and self-interest to its utter limits? If Adam Smith kept if self-interest man inside puritan norms, deflecting a bit the Mandeville ‘private vice, public good’, it is the Marquis de Sade who developed to its unbound limit. After all, who are the main characters of his Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) who unleash their unbounded sexual fantasies depravity scenarios upon lower-class girls in a castle? Were they not the aristocrat owner of the castle with a banker? Ain’t it rung a bell?
Took that from French philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour in its La cité perverse – Libéralisme et pornographie (2012) (unfortunately not translated in English, but it would be The perverse City – Liberalism and Pornography). Here is what it said on the back cover:
“This principle, destructive of both community and individuality, now governs all behavior, from that of the “hyper-bourgeoisie” and gangs of young delinquents to that of the middle classes. Pornography, egotism, defiance of all laws, acceptance of social Darwinism, and the instrumentalizing of others: the City has become perverse.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film was called “Salo”, named after the rump fascist statelet formed in northern Italy in 1944, and was derived from the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom”. In the latter work a representative corps of libertines- an aristocrat, a judge, a financier and a bishop- indulge in the most systematically depraved acts on the bodies of adolescents of both sexes. The film is quite faithful to its original, rendering it all but unwatchable. I won’t try to encapsulate Pasolini’s stated purposes in bringing such a production before the camera, but the film could be taken for the harshest attack on capitalism’s inhuman appetites. Everything found there will be found in the dark circle of Epstein and his friends.
Pasolini was murdered upon completing the film, under circumstances some have interpreted as indicating police involvement.
To Patrick Lawrence’s beautifully elaborated picture of a person who is “not well-read but thinks he is well- read, not well-informed but certain he is,” a little-noticed assertion Mark “Goldman Sachs” Carney made in his Jan. 20, 2026, speech at Davos has been sticking in my craw ever since he uttered it, with reference to Canada:
“We have the best-educated population in the world.”
If this assertion was aimed at foreign investors, it was not to assure them that Canadians think critically but that they will proudly regurgitate whatever narratives intelligence agencies and big money plant in Canadian mass media for them to believe and go to the mat to defend.
I suspect, however, it was meant as pat on the head to the Canadian who is “not well-informed but certain he is,” to reassure him that, yes, Maduro is a dictator, as is “Putin!”, housing prices are in the stratosphere because “Immigrants!” have so inflated “Demand!” that “Supply!” simply cannot keep up, and you are very knowledgeable, very smart, and the “best-educated population in the world.”
Kudos!
It does occur to me that no educated citizen of a well-educated country would ever say “We have the best-educated population in the world.”
Also, your last paragraph is a good summary of the absurdities to which “not well-informed but certain he is” people subscribe in Canada, where I live.
Another splendid piece by Patrick Lawrence; and by the way, “Barbara Ehrenreich: Fear of Falling” might be of interest to some readers.
More and more volunteers every single week at my local Food Not Bombs serve. The street will have the final say.
“Elites” is a misnomer. They are the dregs of society. They just happen to rule over us.
Hear! Hear!
Outstanding, as usual. Dr. E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars, has come to essentially the same conclusion. He argues that the root of this American narcissism or extreme subjectivity is actually expressed in Satan’s speech in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is this notion that “the mind is its own place”— also echoed in Emerson’s Transcendentalism. His article will appear next month in the March issue of Culture Wars. And this morning I was going to let Mike Jones know of Patrick’s Lawrence’s book, Time No Longer! Both Dr. Jones and Dr. Lawrence have arrived at what, to me, is compellingly true: that history only becomes real when we become –at least to some extent–humble. It is indeed the arrogance of our elites that has made our history unreal. But in an age of devastating nuclear weapons, are we courting that “unreality”–to make it real? In other words, destroy ourselves?
“Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not”–attributed by Plato to Protagoras. For a more detailed account of the dangers of radical subjectivism (called solipsism in the essay above), see Plato’s dialogues Protagoras, Theatetus & Sophist.
It is, almost, funny in how the Epstein Files have been weaponized against idiot Donald Trump and his Israel-centric administration, not so dissimilar except in being more blatant than Presidential administrations at least this century. Most of the damage of the Palestinian “Holocaust” was done in the last 15 months of the Biden administration, not in the 13 months of Trump’s second term. No one it seems has looked closely at the timeline of Epstein’s “Elite Behavior” which the FBI has been following (and covering up) since at least 1996 when Maria Farmer reported sexual abuse of her and her underage sisters at the hands of Epstein. Like the Big Banks he was too big to fail or jail. His crimes continued unabated through Clinton, Bush (where he received his Florida sweetheart deal in June, 2008 when Acosta in an unguarded moment admitted Epstein belonged to Intelligence), Obama (who did nothing when lawyers complained of violations of federal law including non-disclosure to Epstein’s victims, nor anything about following Epstein’s continuing deviancy), until Trump was elected 20 years after Epstein’s investigation first started under the FBI. Under Trump, Epstein was finally arrested in 2018 (when Julie K Brown’s expose finally broke free of censorship/ threats) and was suicided in 2019.
How can anyone really believe Epstein would have fallen had Hillary won in 2016? Epstein IS the ESTABLISHMENT.
And now Orange Man Bad is responsible for the decay of the American Empire? Trump is responsible for the overthrow of Assad and installation of the Israel toady and ISIS Headchopper in Syria, the Ukraine War and expansion of the anachronism of NATO, the destruction of Libya, the countless Color Revolutions, sanctions, and un-necessary military adventures (including the 2000 deaths during the arrest of Noriega), the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the Vietnam War, and the Kennedy assassinations?
Yes, Trump is a hideous person, quite open in his hideousness (unlike our usual ESTABLISHMENT guarded, secretive hideous politicians). A convenient scapegoat. Yes, Trump was best buddies with Epstein (and the Clintons and much of America’s Elites) until his falling out with Epstein in the mid 2000s (supposedly over Epstein recruiting the young girl servers at Mar a Lago parties, although money and competition for properties was also likely involved.) They hated each other. If Trump had not been ostracized by the ESTABLISHMENT (Russiagate and State Media) would Epstein have ever been arrested? Of course, Trump has now moved, social circle- and policy-wise to Tel Aviv, deserting his MAGA supporters much to the joy of the ESTABLISHMENT and DC.
I voted for Trump, under the logic that he can’t be any worse than Biden on Palestine, but if he is, Trump’s ego will expose everything. A Kamala victory would have silenced any liberal opposition, and the Right would have continued the genocide because of their Evangelical beliefs. I have been chastising myself for the past year, but when I saw Bondi inadvertently exposing the corruption to a depth we have never seen before, I realized my instincts were right. As Massie stated last week, this has been going on for forty years.
The Epstein saga sounds so much like chapters out of the “Bonfire of the Vanities” by Thomas Wolf or “American Psycho” starring Christian Bale. Truth masquerading as fiction, perhaps.
It has seemed obvious to me over the past several decades that the sheer and growing incompetence of political leadership was the product of a culture that was becoming ever more unhinged by the accelerating (and still accelerating) concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Wealth concentration is the fuel for conflict everywhere and environmental destruction, and together these three represent the fruit of neoliberal capitalism which champions profit above humanity and profit above all (thank you very much, Milton fucking Friedman, and friends). I kept wondering how long this facade with its two party political kabuki theater could continue. 2016 was certainly a turning point. COP24 was another in which the mask finally began to slip (eight years later, now, fossil fuel usage is only increasing). Nonetheless, the beast muddled on, only increasing the damage.
Change was always and ever going to come from the bottom up. I suggest that there is either the beginning of a shift in people’s consciousness now or collapse. And that change begins with a change in philosophy. The only philosophy that works, I believe, is Emmanuel Kant’s (to paraphrase) “Don’t treat people as the means to an end but always as the end itself.” Rejecting this is where everything goes wrong and stays wrong until collapse.
It’s a pyramid, with the 1% at the top and the ordinary people who hold the foundations on their shoulders. Those at the bottom just need to dance a little rhumba – but everyone and in the same rhytm – to topple the monsters. After things like this there are less and less of those who still believe that either of the two parties will actually do anything to help them. What they need is to organize themselves and get going – and never stop being vigilant because letting the governments free reign leads to them getting filled with people incapable or unwilling to do honest jobs.
Mozart wrote an opera entitled “Cosi fan Tutti” (sp?), which means “And so do they all.”
Epstein, and an incredible number of other filthy rich scum balls live are at the bottom of humanity.
Thanks, Patrick, for this article.
Mozart’s opera was titled “Cosi fan TuttE” which means “Thus do all women.”