The Vapidity Of Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends

I have probably paid less attention than the average person to the Jeffrey Epstein saga, but in the wake of the latest, vast document dump I have been reading what some commentators are saying. So here, for what it is worth, are a few observations.

First, the dog that isn’t barking. I take it that in all of the millions of emails that have now been released, there is no evidence of anyone other than Jeffrey Epstein having sex with underage girls. I don’t think that is surprising: as I noted here, twelve young women gave evidence in the Florida prosecution of Epstein. Not a single one of them mentioned any man other than Epstein. Likewise, when the feds prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell for procuring underage women, they charged her with procuring girls for only one man: Jeffrey Epstein.

The idea that Epstein had a “client list” and ran some kind of international pedophile ring was always, I think, a myth. And this seems to be confirmed by the absence of any such evidence in the releases of Epstein documents to date. Although, to be fair, if Epstein supplied underage girls to anyone, Prince Andrew seems to be first on the suspect list.

So what do the Epstein documents show? The vapidity of the world’s supposed elite, I think. Epstein was a minor player in the world of finance, but he was regarded as an intellectual–a thinker!–with strong connections at both Harvard and MIT. Intellectuals like Larry Summers, former President of Harvard, were in his orbit, along with numerous members of the business elite.

James Marriott takes up this theme in the London Times: “Jeffrey Epstein circle’s ‘big ideas’ were vacuous guff.”

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.
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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”.

Like so many of his friends, Epstein was pretentious but, outside of the obscure financial niche where he apparently made money, ignorant:

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?”

The banality is suffocating. Harvard’s president weighs in:

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.

What is this, junior high school?

Prince Andrew…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?

Epstein was, in this respect, a sign of the times:

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.

I’ll bet he did.

This is the point:

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.

You have to be good at something to make money, or to become a university president. But the idea that this something, whatever it may be, makes you a member of a global elite who should tell the rest of us how to live, is a malignant fantasy. We saw this in, among many other instances, the covid fiasco.

So it is entirely fitting that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald Trump. Trump, more than anyone else in recent times, has been willing to expose the hollowness of the elite to which he once belonged. We are living in the age of the Emperor’s New Clothes, and Jeffrey Epstein, along with so many of his wealthy and powerful friends, was naked.