Where It Ends

The so-called Justice Department issued another tranche of emails from the Jeffery Epstein trove known colloquially as "The Epstein Files." I imagine that, like previous emissions, Justice has redacted most of the references to the best friend of the infamous serial child-rapist and sex trafficker (who is our current and temporary president Don Trump, in case you didn't know). And I imagine that, like before, a bit of the tip of Trump's culpability iceberg will manage to break through to the surface, because when you're dealing with an iceberg of such magnitude there's only so much hiding you can do.

As metaphors go, an iceberg is perhaps overused, but serviceable, what with the submerged majority mass and all. And an iceberg is, after all, an island. The tip of an iceberg is a "hummock," Wikipedia tells me, while the submerged part is a "bummock," and while I don't have a point in sharing that detail, it's delightful, and I feel you ought to have at least one delightful thing to contemplate.

The Epstein revelations are exposing the fact that, yes, while anyone paying attention would have already strongly suspected it, the current and temporary president has, like his now deceased best friend, very likely raped a great many people, including many children. But more than that, what it exposes is that a truly astonishing and sickening number of wealthy and powerful people—mostly male, mostly white, mostly christian-presenting—curried favor with this guy, sometimes in order to access the influence of his network, but often in hopes of being invited to his child-rape parties on his child-rape island, and moreover they did this both before and after he was exposed, and the knowledge of his vile crimes doesn't seem to have tamped down the chummy cordiality in the least. Elon Musk, for example, was apparently begging Epstein to be included, though he now insists that he was not included and did not beg, and is even bragging that he could have started his own similar system up if he wanted to. Very likely he could! Has he? He's got the money, and he finds cruelty funny. He deliberately murdered thousands of people last year, most of them children. The final count of his murders might reach 14 million. He did it by making up a government entity with a dumb name that amused him, which was illegal. He still walks free, the wealthiest man in the world. What couldn't he do?

Around the time he was writing Epstein those hopeful emails, Musk was famously and baselessly accusing cave diver Vern Unsworth of being a "major pedo," for the crime of not taking Musk's terrible uninformed advice on how to rescue the people Unsworth was in the middle of successfully rescuing. This sort of deflection and reversal is standard abuser stuff. Many of these Epstein correspondents are, like Musk, the same people who like to float around vile antisemitic conspiracy theories of a cabal of global Jews, who the vile conspiracy myths claim do exactly the sort of thing we now know they themselves were doing or complicit in all along. This sort of vile conspiracy forms the basis of the vile racist antisemitic myth called "replacement theory," another favorite of Musk and Republicans, which serves as a rationale for the war of ethnic cleansing that the temporary president and the Republican Party are waging right now against the civilian population of the United States and elsewhere.

It's the sort of thing you have to pay attention to when you're writing about living in a culture of abuse.

Watching the Epstein story unfold, you’d almost think our entire society is based on knowing enablement of the violent abuse of marginalized people—mostly young, mostly of color, mostly women, mostly poor—by powerful and wealthy people—mostly older, mostly white, mostly men, mostly identifying as christian—and by those who so wish to be close to wealth and power that they partake in the depraved billionaire mindset without even enjoying access to any of its privileges. It might almost start to seem that wealth, maleness, whiteness, and advanced age, are instinctively seen as presumed moral value (that's what the christianity is for), presumed innocence, presumed ownership—and that poverty, femaleness, color, and youth are seen as presumed moral lack, presumed guilt, presumed property.

People whose minds aren't captured by supremacist domination wonder why it is that people who have more wealth and power than they can ever use themselves nevertheless pursue even more, no matter how much other people suffer as a result. The conclusion I have arrived at is that this formulation, while understandable, has matters reversed: Wealthy people don't seem to think of money as money. It's certainly not lack for material needs or luxury that drives them. At a certain point of wealth, what is being pursued seems not to be wealth, but the ability to make other people suffer. What's being pursued is immunity from human decency; the ability and even the right to be depraved with impunity.

Depravity is, to the mind consumed by the billionaire mentality, a flex. It's the prize. It seems the whole reason for the money in the first place. The more you can make other people suffer, the more the rules don't apply to you. The worse a crime you can commit, and the more blatantly you can do it, the more you can demonstrate your impunity to the most foundational laws of human decency. I think this is why child rape is so popular; it's not so much a proclivity for younger people, it's a crime universally agreed upon as so terrible as to be unforgivable. To the mind consumed by the billionaire mentality, to rape children with impunity is how you show beyond doubt that you are a person of influence. The emails sure stayed chummy, didn't they?

Child rape is the sort of thing they hint at or even talk about openly in emails and birthday cards. One wonders what other taboos they commit that they don't put in writing.

And whenever the hummock of the depravity iceberg pokes out of humanity's waters, there are those, even who do not have the ability to pursue depravity with impunity, who nevertheless instinctively rush to defend the precious reputations of our depraved decency-exempt overclass. This sort of thing came out during the Me Too movement. It usually started with an quick admission that, yes, the alleged crimes were terrible and should be taken seriously. This brief sop to decency expunged, the defender moved quickly to worry about scope: How far is this sort of thing supposed to go? we were asked. How many careers will be ruined? Where does it all end?

Here, in the reaction to the hummock, we detect the shape of the submerged bummock. Where does it all end? This reaction ... it’s an instinct. It’s a statement of alignment. An abuser culture will always double as an enabler culture. In an enabler culture, revelation of the offense is the offense. You can hear the dark echoes of their clear expressions of this worldview in more mainstream statements. This—yet another moment when it becomes obvious that powerful men consume women and children for pleasure—is going to be framed, once again, as a scary time for men. Does it occur to those who do so that they are perfectly demonstrating the point that's being interrogated? It does not.

These foundational lies are embedded in our culture. They seep up in ways we can't even control, inevitable as oil up from tar pits. Once you see it, it's everywhere. It might begin to seem inevitable, then, that such a society would elect as its leaders profoundly incompetent men, or choose as their avatar one whose only value was a grotesquely flagrant display of the full extent to which a powerful person—older, white, wealthy, male—can abusively consume other people.

It might seem as if acceptance of these assumptions are so instinctive, the existence of a Jeffery Epstein, who procured weaker human beings for consumption by stronger ones, would seem not an aberration but rather an inevitability.

As might the existence of many Jeffery Epsteins, still operating, providing our overclass with access to the privilege of grotesque depravity.

Where does it all end? is the big question. The assumption being that what has happened thus far will be permitted, but the instinct for exposure of abuse moves us in a dangerous direction that could easily go to far. The implication is that it may have already gone too far and probably has. The clear call to action is to stop. Where does it all end? is the sort of question that somebody asks when they don't want it to end, and they don't even want the process of ending it to begin.

So often the question is “have we gone to far?" So rarely is it the statement: "They have gone too far." So often the question posed is "where does it all end?" So rarely is the question “how will we make this end?”

But I'll answer the question, now.

It ends with a society that doesn't permit abuse, and doesn't extend abuse as a perk of power. It ends with a society where wealth cannot buy abuse because human prosperity springs only from universal human plenty, and does not permit the sort of wealth that does. It ends with a world where power does not offer immunity, because power comes with an understanding that law enforcement mechanisms are for the powerful, not the powerless; that power is a sacred public trust and a grave responsibility, and will not bestow privileges of impunity and enablement, but rather will carry far greater regulation, far greater scrutiny, far greater expectation of transparency, and far greater penalty for abusing that trust, than the standard held by everyone else.

It ends when we have a society not of supremacist abuse but of universal human thriving, where the cost of abuse is high and paid only by the abuser; where the natural costs of human society are shared equitably, whereby any who benefit more will also be naturally expected to pay more, and will not be permitted to pay less.

It ends with justice and liberation from the abuses of supremacy and the tyranny of the supremacist billionaire mindset.

This destination is where our compass must point, and we should accept none other, even as we acknowledge the challenges and gird ourselves for the journey.

Where does it end? Wrong question. Let me ask a new and better question.

Where do we begin?

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. And you have five seconds to spare, he'll tell you the story of his life.