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.

Take Trump. Look at him 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 these groups. 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 their power - and nothing gives them greater pleasure - than when they, the very strongest, crush the very weakest.

Almost none of us, however, have reached the point where we are willing to accept that many of these unsavoury characteristics we see in far-right leaders may also be present in left-wing leaders, perhaps even in equal measure. After all, left-wing politics is supposed to based on concern for the little people, the oppressed, the vulnerable, the powerless. So, surely, left-wing leaders cannot be abusers!

Or can they?

History is replete with left-wing politicians, who have been more than capable of abuse on major scales. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong killed upwards of 20 million and 80 million people, respectively. Understandably, many people on the left cling on to the view that Stalin and Mao were exceptions rather than the rule.

It is therefore extremely disconcerting, incomprehensible even, that we now discover that Jeffrey Epstein's social circle included a great many prominent leaders on the political left as well as humanitarians and religious leaders.

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

I think it is important that left-wingers - myself included - do not look away from the facts. With every new release 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. The father of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's main recruiter of underage victims was Robert Maxwell, the proprietor of the left-wing Mirror Newspapers Group in the UK.

The entirety of the 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. So far, only little more than half of the files have been released, many of them heavily redacted. I have no doubt that more left-wingers will be implicated in future releases. I also have no doubt that many left-wing leaders participated actively in Epstein's abuses.

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 in general.

Leaders abuse the weak. It is a power thing.

In a sense, this is not a new insight. We know BBC personalities raped children. We know catholic priests raped children. We know political leaders 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, however, between these examples and what we are learning about those mentioned in the Epstein files is that the latter involve elites from all institutions of power and from across the entire political spectrum. As such, the Epstein files tells us 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.

A yet-to-be-determined (but undoubtedly large) number of leaders in Western democracies today are in positions of power not because they want to make the world a better place, but because they want power, for power's sake. Such people are dangerous. They are addicted to power. They will do anything to acquire it. They will cloak themselves any ideology to rise to the top to be able to wield power over others. And once they have power, they will exercise ruthlessly for kicks, including travelling to Epstein's island to sexually exploit vulnerable girls and boys.

To this class of people, it is irrelevant whether the institution they use to rise in the ranks is a church, a government, a large company, a political party, an international organisation, a charity, or a sports federation. Nor does not matter if their ideology is left or right, if the religion is Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. The draw is power itself and institutions, ideology, and religions are merely the means of getting it.  

Our leaders are able to commit abuses, because we allow them far too much leeway relative to the level of accountability. This is a legacy from feudal times. While all other aspects of Western societies have changed with the passage of time, the rules governing our democracies have barely changed since they were first introduced. Our democracies, in their current format, encourage morally bankrupt people into politics, which is why politics is so replete with corruption.

Once we recognise that there is a systemic problem of abuse of power at the heart of our democracies, we must also accept the need for reform. We must devise mechanisms that filter out abusers when we elect leaders. We must give voters and other stake holders the means to distinguish between politicians who genuinely want to improve society and those who seek power only to satisfy their own twisted urges to get one over other people.

Yet, at the same time a new and improved democratic system must never be prescriptive in terms of political opinions; it must allow for the expression of a full range of political views just like the current system does.

The key to positive change, 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). Unfortunately, the Welsh system is deeply flawed; since election promises are not legally binding, it is impossible to enforce the rules.  

Instead, I propose 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 elected politicians are legally bound to deliver. There should be no restrictions on what politicians can say, but they will be held to account for what they commit to the ballot paper. If the politician delivers on these promises, he or she will be rewarded generously (think banker-sized bonuses). Failure, on the other hand, triggers big fines or even jail time (for more details see here).

My proposed system does not take direct aim at paedophilia and other types of abuse of power, but by dramatically changing the incentive structure in Western democracies it will attract a completely different type of person into politics. Specifically, it will attract capable managers into politics and discourage charlatans, whose objectives are merely to satisfy their own lust for power. As the power-mad gradually disappear from politics their grip on power will also weaken and hence we should see far less Epsteinian institutionalised immorality.

The Epstein files are a horror, but also a wake-up call. This crisis can be turned into an opportunity. While the Epstein files are obviously deeply compromising for a rapist and paedophile like Donald Trump, their real significance is that they expose the systemic moral rot at the heart of our democracies. Our opportunity is to now finally address this problem.  

The End