The Many Faces of Jeffrey Epstein

Ezra Klein interviews Anand Giridharadas and covers all the things I’ve been thinking I want to put into a post (gift link). If I have time, I’ll work through some of the points in detail in future posts. (But I won’t have time, most likely.)

The breadth of Epstein’s influence is breathtaking. Scandals in the UK and Norway revolve around people giving him state secrets. That’s one of the most difficult things for me to get my head around, having been part of a culture marked by the need for nondisclosure. For me, anyway, sharing information in that way would have gone against loyalty to country and to the particular group I was associated with. But that wasn’t the case for the former Prince Andrew and others.

It was a whole social system and more. People asked Epstein for advice on jobs and their social lives. They reveled in connections to other people who they may have found even more privileged than themselves. It may be the culmination of these vulnerabilities that we now have a government of sociopaths in the US.

Some selections:

EK: But there’s also just an endless transactionalism. An endless trading of information, money, connections, favor, powers — ultimately, women and girls. And what feels oftentimes like it is attracting them to each other is not always what I would think of as solidarity or a fellowship but: What can you do for me?

If you can be the one who finds it for them, that’s real power.

AG: And it’s different needs, right? The money people may not need money, although they always want more of it. They often want to seem and feel smart. If you have met people in those kinds of worlds — finance people — even if you make a lot of money in it, they’re often very boring people.

I don’t say this as slander. They know it. I’ve had so many conversations with people in this world where there’s an insecurity about how boring they are. So they want something else.

Then there’s a bunch of academics. Academics, I think, really figure in this story in a way that feels surprising. It’s a tough era to be an independent thinker, so the academics want money and access.

AG: This is really worth understanding: As the cultural figure that Epstein was, he exploited certain gaps in our culture. He was not only grooming teenage girls, he was grooming all of these people. This was all grooming, and it was a continuum of grooming from light consensual grooming of bankers all the way to the most depraved and criminal grooming of teenage girls.

AG:These billionaires, these superelites, these superlawyers are working on a whole different kind of system. Their system has to do, as you say, with how loaded with connections you are in this network, how high your stock is on a given day in this network.

What Epstein figured out was how to game this. He figured out the vulnerability of this entire network, which is that these people are actually not that serious about character. In fact, character may be a liability for some of them, may be an unnecessary source of friction.

It’s a long read, with a lot in it.