JAMES MARRIOTT
Whoever runs Private Eye’s fortnightly compendium of pretentious quotations, Pseuds Corner, could take the next few years off and delegate the task to an algorithm with access to the Epstein files.
Obviously, pomposity ranks low among Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. But a noteworthy feature of his inbox is the quantity of self-important philosophising it contains. In email after email, Epstein and his rich acquaintances — whom one might have naively credited with a kind of malign genius — trade specious sub-TED talk musings on polling, quantum physics, life after death, global warming and international relations.
Epstein retails banal opinions as if they are sage reflections (“I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives”) and tarot-and-crystals-adjacent woo (“The soul I describe as the dark matter of the brain”), as if he is reporting from the front line of science. The temptation is to chalk this up to “the banality of evil”. But it illustrates something else worth paying attention to: the vacuousness of the international business elite.
For all their self-importance, these powerful and wealthy men — always at a conference or on the way to Davos (“giving a talk tmrw about data visualization”) — display no remarkable insight into life or the world. “I’m wowed by people of great ideas,” said Epstein, meaning something like “I am wowed by the same buzzwords as everyone else in my circle”.
Profiles of Epstein written in his pomp hinted at this. He liked to brood on “the future of humanity”. Friends boasted about bafflingly vague accomplishments, such as their “skill of seeing patterns”. “We frequently discuss world trends,” bragged one acquaintance. Another recalled “three-hour conversations about theoretical physics”. You wonder how anyone got three hours on theoretical physics out of Epstein who, according to another report, interrupted dinner parties by asking “provocatively elementary questions” like, “What is gravity?”
When Thorstein Veblen applied his scalpel to the idle rich of the late 19th century in his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class he anatomised an elite that flaunted its wealth via the fruits of idleness: porcelain collections, stables of thoroughbreds and Canalettos. For some, intellectual inertia was a sign of prestige. A philistine fixation on dogs and horses was an aristocratic flex, a signal you were too privileged to have needed to exercise even a single brain cell in pursuit of wealth. If only the principle still applied.
Epstein belonged to an international set that displayed its status through “big ideas” and “thought leadership”. In ideology (if not in practice) our society is a meritocracy and to feel comfortable at the top, the wealthy need to believe they’ve earned their position through creativity and brilliance.
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”. Meaningless life lessons abound: “Epstein’s First Law: Know when you are winning”.
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 interllectual 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?
A version of the idea that wealth must correspond to talent is why even poor Brooklyn Beckham — the kind of witless scion who would once have been permitted to fritter away a life of contented dissipation at the card table — now feels obliged to “discover” dubious “passions” for photography or cookery. They will never believe it about themselves but sometimes the super-rich are as undeserving and talentless as the rest of us.
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 pseudy meditations on consciousness. Sam Altman boasts that he “consulted, like, hundreds of moral philosophers” when developing ChatGPT.
The claim to deep thought can be a way of cowing the public. Who are we to object to a technology that bears the imprimatur of a hundred moral philosophers? Worse, cod philosophy is used to launder dangerous ideas, to lend the ordinary corruptions of power an intellectual sheen. When Epstein planned to genetically engineer a race of superhumans, he could tell himself he did so not as a deluded creep but as a transhumanist visionary. When Peter Thiel muses on the passing of the human race, he passes himself off as a futurist prophet rather than a common or garden megalomaniac.
Our mistake is to take any of this seriously. An age in which millions of people voluntarily sit through the podcasts of venture capitalists is one which has grown altogether too credulous of the idea that wealth is evidence of special insight into the human condition. I can believe you have to be smart to make money. I don’t think it follows that making money turns you into a modern Socrates. The Epstein files remind us not only of the corruption but also the hollowness of our elite. To our horror, we might add a derisive laugh.