What Epstein tells us about power - and our democracy

Jeffrey Epstein towards the end of his career (Source: here)

By now, we are all accustomed to the ruthlessness of Far-Right leaders. Reluctantly, we have come to accept that people like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu are driven by a desire to accumulate and exercise power. To the exclusion of all other considerations; they have zero empathy for the victims of their ambitions.

Not quite all of us have yet accepted that our Far-Right leaders actually enjoy hurting other people. We cannot quite bring ourselves to believe that there are people out there who actually take pleasure in inflicting pain on others, just like serial killers, who record the suffering of their victims to be able to relive the experience later. Yet, Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu are precisely such people.

Look at Trump, when he picks on female journalists in press conferences, or castigates immigrants as murders and rapists, or when he makes fun of disabled people. He clearly gets a kick out of demeaning others. He and leaders like him are addicted to power and they get pleasure from crushing others, because that is how they manifest their power. To them, there is no greater expression of power than when the very strongest crushes the very weakest.

Almost none of us, however, have yet accepted that these unsavoury traits in Far-Right leaders may also be present, perhaps in equal measure, in leaders on the Left in Western politics.

After all, the entire foundation for left-wing politics is concern for the little people, the oppressed, the vulnerable, the powerless. Surely, left-wing leaders cannot be abusers.

Or can they? We know that left-wing politicians are more than capable of abuse on a major scale. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong are thought to have killed upwards of 20 million and 80 million people, respectively, but many people on the Left cling on to the idea that Stalin and Mao were exceptions rather than the rule.

To them, it must therefore be extremely disconcerting, incomprehensible even, that we now know that Jeffrey Epstein's social circle included a great many very prominent leaders on the political Left as well as humanitarian and religious leaders.

How could people who supposedly devoted their entire careers to standing up for the downtrodden have hung out with Jeffrey Epstein, who procured at least a thousand underage girls and boys, teens, and young women, whom he subjected to repeated rape and sexual violence?

Do not look away from the facts. With every release of documents from the Epstein files more and more prominent left-wingers, religious leaders, and people's favourites are revealed as having been part of Epstein's social circle. So far, they include Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Noam Chomskey, Larry Summers, Peter Mandelson, Richard Branson, Stacey Plaskett, Kathryn Ruemmler, the Dalai Lama, and others.

Worryingly, only little more than half of the Epstein files have so far been released. The entire cache of Epstein files comprises more than 6 million pages of documents, images, and videos detailing the criminal activities of the American financier and convicted child sex offender.

I have no doubt that more left-wingers will get implicated in future releases. I also have no doubt that many left-wing leaders participated actively in Epstein's abuses. The father of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's recruiter, was Robert Maxwell, the proprietor of the left-wing Mirror Newspapers Group.

The Epstein files therefore force us to rethink what type of person abuses weak people. It is not just Far-Right leaders. It is also Left-wing leaders. Democratic leaders. Business leaders. Religious leaders. Humanitarian leaders. In other words, leaders.

Leaders abuse the weak.

In a sense, this is not a new insight. We know BBC personalities have raped children. We know catholic priests have raped children. We know political leaders have raped children. Soldiers rape children. UN workers rape children. Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi supported the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. In other words, power is intricately linked to abuse.

The big difference between these examples and the Epstein files, however, is that the latter involve elites from across all corridors of power, all across the entire political spectrum. As such, the Epstein files force us to recognise that abuse of power is not just a problem that afflicts a few 'bad' individuals. Rather, it is a systemic problem across Western democratic institutions.

An unknown, but seemingly large proportion of people who inhabit positions of power in Western democratic institutions today are there not because they want to make the world a better place, but because they want power, for power's sake. And such people are dangerous.

Their types will do anything, cloak themselves any ideology, in order to rise to the top within institutions from which they can wield power over others. They are addicted to power. They will do anything to acquire. And once they have it, they will exercise it for kicks, including travelling to Epstein's island to sexually exploit vulnerable girls and boys.

To these types of people, it is irrelevant whether the institution is a church, a government, a large company, a political party, an international organisation, a sports federation. It does not matter if the ideology is Left or Right, if the religion is Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. The draw is power itself and ideology and religions are merely the means of getting it.  

Once we recognise the existence of this systematic problem at the heart of our democracies, we must accept the need for reform. We must devise new mechanisms to filter out abusers when we elect leaders. We must give voters and other stake holders the means to distinguish politicians who genuine want to improve society from those who seek power only to satisfy their own urges to get one over other people. At the same time, a new and improved system must not be prescriptive in terms of political opinions; it must allow for the expresion of a full range of political views.

The best way forward, in my view, is to force politicians to actually do what they promise. The Welsh Assembly recently introduced new rules that make it illegal for parliamentarians to lie (see here). However, the Welsh system is deeply flawed. Election promises are not legally binding and the rules are therefore impossible to enforce.  

The better way forward is to turn election ballots into legally binding contracts. Politicians must be free to make whatever promises they want, but once their commitments have been added to the ballot paper, the politician is legally bound to deliver. If the politician delivers, he or she will be rewarded generously. Failure, on the other hand, triggers big fines or jail (for more details see here).

This system would not eliminate paedophilia, but, by dramatically changing the incentive structure in Western democracies, it would attract capable managers to politics instead of charlatans, whose objective are merely to satisfy their own lust for power. As power-mad types gradually disappear from the political arena, their grip on power also loosens and therefore their means to engage with impunity in institutionalised immorality of the type Epstein ran.

The Epstein files are a wake-up call. They are obviously deeply compromising for a rapist and paedophile like Donald Trump, but their real significance is that they expose systematic moral rot at the heart of Western democracies. A general problem afflicts our political elites regardless of their party-political affiliation as well as elites in other types of institutions.

This systematic problem is legacy from feudal times. While all aspects of Western societies have changed with the passage of time, our democratic systems have barely changed since they were first introduced. We still allow our leader far too much leeway and do not hold them sufficiently to account. Until we reform our democracies to root out abusers, we will continue to encourage too many morally bankrupt people into politics and it will only be a question of time before the next Epstein scandal erupts.

The End