The Slow Epstein Earthquake — The Rupture between the People and the Élites

Alastair Crooke, 5 Feb 2025

After ‘Epstein’, nothing can continue as before: Neither the post war ‘never again’ values -- reflecting sentiment at the end of bloody wars -- and the widespread yearning for a ‘fairer’ society; nor the bipolar economics of extreme disparities in wealth; nor trust -- after the exposed venality, rotted institutions and perversions that the Epstein files have shown to be endemic amongst certain of the western élites.

How to speak of ‘values’ against this background?

At Davos, Mark Carney made clear that the ‘rules order’ was but a tawdry Potemkin façade that was thoroughly known as false, yet the façade was maintained. Why? Simply because the deceit was useful. The ‘exigency’ was the need to hide the system’s collapse into radical, anti-values nihilism. To hide the reality that the élite circles -- around Epstein -- operated beyond moral, legal or human limitations, to decide between peace and war, on the basis of their base appetites.

The élites understood that once the complete amorality of the rulers was known by the hoi polloi, the West would lose the architecture of moral stories that precisely anchor an ordered life. If the Establishment is known to eschew morality, why should anyone else behave differently? The cynicism would cascade down. What then would hold a nation together?

Well, only totalitarianism, most likely.

The post-modern ‘fall’ into nihilism has crashed finally into its inevitable ‘dead end’ (as predicted by Nietzsche in 1888). The ‘Enlightenment’ paradigm has finally metamorphosed into its opposite: A world without values, meaning or purpose (beyond avaricious self-enrichment). This implies the end too, of the very concept of Truth that used to be at the heart of western civilisation, since Plato.

The collapse underlines, too, the failings of western mechanical Reason: “This kind of a priori, closed-circle reasoning has had a much greater effect on western culture than we might imagine … It led to the imposition of rules that are believed to be irrefutable, not because they are revealed, but because they have been scientifically proved, and there is thus no appeal against them”, Aurelien notes.