Epstein: Elite Depravity in Imperial Decline (w/Richard Wolff)

The system and the sickness.

Prof. Wolff and I discuss the latest Jeffrey Epstein document releases and what they tell us about a political system that actively selects for predators, then rewards them with the power to destroy lives without consequence. We explore the uncomfortable connections between Epstein’s island and Bezos’s boardroom, between sexual pathology and economic pathology, and between personal dysfunction and political disintegration.

If you’ve been disturbed by these revelations but have struggled to articulate exactly what they tell us about society, we explore a framework for understanding how the personal and political integrate under capitalism—and why the victims’ courage in coming forward is exposing not only the perpetrators, but an entire system built on commodification and control. It’s a challenging discussion, but if you’re ready to glimpse the beating heart of a sick and dying power structure I encourage you to listen.

Key quotes and transcript below.

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Key Quotes

“The system self-selects for psychopathy... the most sociopathically obsessive competitor and accumulator of personal power and wealth wins.”
— Richard Eskow

“There oughtn’t to be people that are that rich. It produces weird behavior, behavior that shouldn’t be possible.”
— Richard Wolff

“This story to me is a powerful example of how interpersonal relationships and the personal sphere reflects the political and economic sphere and vice versa, and how each shapes and interacts with the other.”
— Richard Eskow

“These are not people who’ve been able to have an adequate sexual connection to an adult … a partner to share the complexities of life.”
— Richard Wolff

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Transcript (lightly edited):

Richard Eskow: Joining me once again is my good friend Professor Richard Wolff, whose insights on topics timely and timeless I always look forward to hearing and discussing with him. We’re going to talk about a timely and perhaps timeless topic right now. But first of all, Richard Wolff, welcome back to the program.

Richard Wolff: Thank you very much, R.J. I’m very pleased, as always, to be doing this with you.

Richard Eskow: Likewise. And of course, the story I was alluding to is the release of more Jeffrey Epstein documents and the ever-widening gyre of people—men, pretty much all, virtually all—getting drawn into his orbit and getting their reputations tarred along with him. A surprising collection of men, sometimes.

I know you and I talked about the Epstein files a couple of months ago, but there seems to be a shift in public consciousness, even more so than last time. It’s like watching a pointillist painting come together. More dots get filled in, the shape of what you’re looking at, the details of what you’re looking at become clearer. And it seems to me that what we’re looking at is something both very characteristic of our time—you could call it the zeitgeist—and also very characteristic of our economy and of our human relationships on any number of scales.

But I’m not really being very specific with that description. What are your thoughts?

Richard Wolff: Well, I start by being horrified. I suspected this, and there’s a bit of naiveté on my part as well. I’ve been a critic of capitalism all my life. I am horrified every day living in New York City, as I do, by the gap between rich and poor, which is screaming at me literally every time I leave my home.

In my home it’s not there because in a way I’ve excluded it from the interior of my house. But I go out and, whether it’s a beggar, whether it’s a poor person talking to themselves walking down the street, whether it’s the way I watch police dealing with others, it’s an endless display, if you’re open to it, of the inequalities of our system.

I talk to other people. In the apartment complex where I live, everybody’s afraid to go out at night. The fear is largely irrational in the sense that there’s not that much happening at night that you have to be afraid of. But on the other hand, it’s also rational because it isn’t crazy to think it might happen, because it happens often enough.

For me, what I’m watching is that rich people who have so much money can actually slither out of accountability for things they do that are immoral, illegal, unethical, outrageous—really beyond words. There’s something in the system that not only gives them the means, but breathes in them the appetite that somehow goes with the means.

There’s some sort of process here, and I’m thinking particularly of the advertising industry. The job of the advertising industry is to get you to spend money on whatever the client of the advertiser is paying the advertiser to advertise. The point is to get you to open your wallet and spend money on the car, on the drink, on the clothing item, whatever it is.

It begins to create, particularly in people who have a lot of money and can therefore indulge what the advertiser is doing—most of us can’t do much of that because we’re limited by the funds that we have. But now imagine the world of advertising imploding on a person like Jeffrey Epstein with hundreds of millions of dollars.

So there is no limit. Well, if there is no limit, then those things that might limit you become almost challenges. It becomes a kind of contest. And the one who goes the furthest—Jeffrey Epstein—goes beyond buying sex to literally buying an entire island where, away from any political authority other than himself, he can indulge.

He can find someone who goes and lures teenage girls to come to this island. It’s so ugly, you don’t really know where to start with the horror of it. And yet it seems rooted in the particular system that we have. There oughtn’t to be people that are that rich. It produces weird behavior, behavior that shouldn’t be possible.

One last point. I’m going to link it to something that isn’t about Jeffrey Epstein for a moment and isn’t about an island and isn’t about rape and all the rest. I read this morning about the firing of one third or one half of the reporting staff of the Washington Post. Jeffrey Bezos is in a bizarre position.

He’s in the same position toward journalism that Jeffrey Epstein was toward sexuality. What is Mr. Bezos doing? For reasons of his own, he’s in a position to buy one of the most important media institutions in the country. Right off the bat, there’s something wrong here. It’s at least as horrible as buying someone else’s sexual services—we make that an illegal act.

Buying sexual services, that’s prostitution. That’s against the law. Mr. Bezos doesn’t have to worry about that. That law has been fixed. He can buy the Washington Post, he can fire one third of the staff. And the goal supposedly is to make the newspaper more efficient. The man has just spent publicly—he didn’t deny it—$55 million to promote the movie Melania, which everyone who’s not paid has said is a large waste of time.

But whatever you think, he had $55 million to promote that movie rather than to maintain the integrity of the Washington Post. And at a time when the events in Minneapolis screamingly say we need more independent journalism looking over the shoulder of the government than we have ever needed it, we’re going to cut staff.

How is it possible that there is a man like Bezos who’s in a position to do all of this horrific damage? Well, it’s the same to me. It’s Epstein ruining the lives of all these young people, corrupting the legal system so that he could slither out of it. Mr. Acosta, who was the first Secretary of Labor under the first presidency of Mr. Trump, we find out was the local legal authority who looked the other way so that Epstein could get out of being properly dealt with for what he was caught and convicted of doing.

It is a testimony, if you needed it, that allowing inequality like this becomes an invitation, a goad if you like, to these wealthy people to literally push the boundaries like an out-of-control child who has to test how far can I go in throwing food before mommy and daddy tell me, you’re not going to get your dinner if you keep throwing the food this way.

Nobody’s there to do that for these gentlemen. And so they have sex slavery on a hidden island for decades before anybody does anything about it.

Richard Eskow: That’s a very interesting take. Thank you for that, Richard Wolff. And it’s interesting to me because I think in terms of the chain of effect, the causal relationships, I look at it a little differently, and I think the two views are complementary. But to me, one of the things this illustrates starkly—because many other things illustrate it as well—is that the system we have now, the capitalist, so-called competitive, really anti-competitive as soon as people can arrange that system, it self-selects. Sociologists say self-selecting groups. It self-selects for psychopathy, for psychopaths.

It’s as if we created a system of economic governance and political governance where you don’t take a test like the Mandarin system in Imperial China. You don’t advance through elections or whatever. The most sociopathically obsessive competitor and accumulator of personal power and wealth, whatever the cost, wins. And when they win, they get to be Jeff Bezos, they get to be Bill Gates, they get to be all these other people who are implicated in it. They get to be Jeffrey Epstein.

And they do horrible things. You’ve been defending a system—not you, Rick, but society has been defending a system—that encourages that. Back in the 1980s, I’ve mentioned this before, the director Oliver Stone, when he made the character of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, saying “greed is good,” portrayed him as a villain.

Stone was amazed that people treated him—young Wall Street guys treated Gordon Gekko as their hero. He said, “It’s like he’s the devil. I mean, what?” But of course. But that’s what you’ve been celebrating. That’s what you’ve been encouraging. And then you’re right. There are studies about this too, that people as they move up a certain income ladder and live a more insulated life—not everyone, I mean, there are exceptions—but their empathy may wane, to say the least.

But we have a system—and the other thing that strikes me in my view of the Epstein horrible saga that we’re seeing now—is it almost feels to me like a hologram with these different dimensions and layers. When you move around it, you see different things. Because you see the really billionaire people like Bill Gates, who’s now implicated. I can’t say it’s proven, but the suggestion in the emails is that he had sex with Russian women, got a disease. Jeffrey Epstein claimed that, anyway. His ex-wife now was very upset about his association with Epstein. We hear that she’s not denying those stories.

So you have those guys, and they are guys, of course, which is a big part of this story. Then you have the Epsteins who are the sort of grand viziers to these people, right? Where Epstein made hundreds—if not billions, but hundreds of millions—by managing their money and making connections for them.

He’s almost a combination of—the sociologist Stanley Milgram talked about connectors, right? People who just put people together. Epstein seems to have been partly that and partially, I think in Yiddish the word was Handelman, a middleman who worked things out for you. You needed to get a private plane to the Caribbean? Yeah, Jeffrey will get you one. This kind of grand vizier slash concierge to the real billionaires, but rich as hell compared to the rest of us.

And then you have the mere multimillionaires like Deepak Chopra, the self-help alternative spirituality guru and physician, whose most memorable quote, perhaps, from this latest tranche of emails was—I believe I’ve got this correctly—he wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, “God is a construct, period. Pretty girls are real and obvious.” It seems obvious anyway that he was joking, quote unquote. But he was also toadying, obsequious to the point of repulsive.

And of course the victims in all this, these women who were treated like things, like objects, because these men knew they could do it. And that is part of the same—I’m going to call it psychopathy—that leads people to cheat and lie and go behind people’s backs and break deals and do whatever they have to do to get ahead. But I could tell you stories from my own career, not from myself, but from people I worked with or for and observed, about that and the rush they get off of that.

Well, you can get that too off of breaking the spirit of a young girl for your own sexual satisfaction. It’s just so loathsome, so disgusting. But to me it’s all of a piece, and it’s this sort of capitalist, ultra-hyper-capitalist monkey house where the big apes are being served by the medium-sized apes and the little ones and then down to the frail ones that they just beat and batter and then throw away.

To me, it represents the lowest of human existence. My only prayer for this, if I may use that theological word, is that people come to understand that this is what our system does. This is what it is. This is the real thing, right? You’re getting to see the beating heart of it now. If you don’t like it and you’re sick—if you hate it, if you don’t like it—you might want to change the whole system rather than put these people in charge of everything.

Richard Wolff: I agree, I agree. I also think there’s something here that we have to face, and it’s sexism. These are men. The vast majority of the people being caught up here are men. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t bring adult women. He brought men and he brought children. And he put those two things together: the children and the adult men.

The adult men whose sexuality has to at the very least be deeply questioned. These are not people who’ve been able to have an adequate sexual connection to an adult female or male, for that matter, who could be a partner and could satisfy the complexities that life is about. No, these are people who live in another world.

It’s the world of pornography, of watching somebody else’s sexual activity. Only it’s one better than that. It’s one you can control. It’s one that, because you’re an adult surrounded by male adults on an island that the young girls cannot escape—they got there by an airplane, et cetera, et cetera.

This is a fantasy life of people who have the money to do such a thing, but who also have a twisted sexual repression. I understand our culture is sick about sex, right? My parents were Europeans, and Lord knows Europeans have a lot of problems. But when my mother was a teenager in Germany, she was sent at age 13 or 14 to the beach in the summer with other young teenagers.

And these were nude beaches. And it was explained to them, “Look, so you know what this is all about. So you’re not intimidated, you’re not frightened. No one’s going to tell you lies. Get your fill of what you need to see.” And the implication was you make some experiments. You do what young people do one way or another anyway.

But no one is pretending that it isn’t there, that it isn’t normal. We don’t do that in our culture. We have no way of doing that. So we have men who don’t have any idea of what a decent sexuality is. It’s all hidden, it’s furtive, it is guilt-ridden.

So if they then become very rich, they can buy their way out of their incapacity and have an indulgent moment with some child that another person has procured, which they can put out of their mind as soon as they’re done. I mean, it’s so perverse that you have to realize it is a mixture of things that are really wrong in this culture.

I like very much the way you use the word pathology here. You’re right. It is a social pathology that is expressed here. My daughter said to me the other day, “Young women are expected to manage their sexuality carefully and cautiously, whereas the boys are given weird other messages.” You know, “you sow your wild oats.” It’s kind of exciting for boys. The girls—don’t ever do anything like that.

It’s so different that when they then get a lot of money, the women don’t do this. We don’t have a female Jeffrey Epstein, and if we get one, it’ll be really rare, but we got Jeffrey Epsteins in every generation, one way or the other.

Pasolini in Italy made a film 20 years ago or more called 120 Days of Sodom, and it was a study of the Fascist elite in Italy. And large parts of it are Epstein’s Island. It wasn’t done on an island there. It was done in secret buildings. But you see, again, coming to the peak of this twisted society, people working off their pathologies in these awfully destructive ways.

Richard Eskow: I just want to add a couple things to that. One is that when we reach a certain level of maturity early in life, much earlier than these men we’re talking about, intimacy is supposed to come into play, right? And I’m not just talking about—although primarily I’m talking about intimacy in terms of male-female, or male-male, female-female, whatever sexual relationships, intimate relationships, love relationships, whatever you want to call them—which include love, right?

And love and intimacy seem to be alien in this equation here. And the very opposite of intimacy would be someone where the power imbalance is so stark—a child, right? A virtual child. So that’s a piece of it.

And I also wanted to tell you a story, if you don’t mind. It’ll seem irrelevant, but I think you’ll get the connection after a while.

Long time ago, I was talking to a guy, long dead now, who had been a senior CIA official during the Kennedy era. One of the top five or six guys, probably. And he told me that Jack Kennedy would make a point of having sex with everybody around him. And the women would say, “It lasts 20 minutes, was frustrating, whatever, but he’s the president.”

And there’s a reason why I say that too. Including the wives of these guys. And I said, “Boy, what most people would probably say is I’d be pissed. I’d be upset.” He said, “No, no. It was—we’d all be sitting around having a drink by the pool and they’d say, ‘So-and-so, where’s your wife?’ ‘Oh, she’s with Jack.’” It was a status thing.

And my point about it, both in terms of Jack Kennedy being Mr. Hit-It-and-Quit-It, as they say, and about the way these men—who remember were also manipulators by profession, master manipulators—was that women, the commodification of women. They’re just like you get a pretty one because she has—conventionally pretty—she has value. And then you trade her for favors. Now the President owes you a favor, whatever it is.

That’s life to them. It’s not a new thing with Epstein. I mean, the perversity of Epstein may have happened dozens of times before in our history. We just didn’t hear about it. But this is the world we’re living in.

What are your thoughts about what I just said?

Richard Wolff: I agree. What it made me think of—I haven’t done a thorough study, but I’ve been reading and looking at the coverage of these new documents that were just released a couple days ago—and here’s what struck me, along your lines. In a number of the communications between Epstein and, say, Prince Andrew in England or even Noam Chomsky or Woody Allen or any of them, there’s a certain boyish asking for favors: “How am I going to get girls?” Remember Larry Summers? Unspeakable.

What teenage boys might say to one another, or comforting each other. They dealt with the other men, Jeffrey Epstein particularly, as quasi-intimate friends. Meanwhile, they’re engaged in treating these girls in an unspeakable, insensitive way. Wow. This is like the worst example of bifurcating your life so that some people are genuine human beings and other people are not.

And there’s a word for that, and that’s called racism. It’s not a matter of skin color, never was. It’s a matter of othering. This is a collection of immature men who are othering women. If they’re adult women, it’s your story of the Kennedys. And if they’re children, it’s Epstein.

It is a screaming testimony to the messed-up sex and intimate lives of our people on the one hand, and the inequality which allows these bad examples to do unspeakable damage on the other hand. Just like there shouldn’t be a Jeffrey Bezos able to hamstring a major newspaper at a time when we need more journalism than we have ever had before.

It’s so dysfunctional that it’s hard for me not to get excited about what it is telling us about a society in a pretty advanced state of disintegration.

Richard Eskow: Well, no question about it in my mind. And to me—Bezos, I want to say, and I want to be careful because I don’t want to stigmatize based on appearance and everything—but Bezos is an extreme example of what we’ve seen among a number of these guys, including Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, of taking steroids apparently, and doing other things to try to bulk themselves up.

Guys who would have been normally thought of as nerds, and there’s a lot of plastic surgery in their proximity and that kind of thing. And I’ve always thought, for eugenicists, Elon Musk seems very dissatisfied with his own DNA because he has hair plugs and all that. Do what you want with your appearance.

I’m not judging that, except to say that there is also this sort of lack of a core self. And as within, as without, as they say. Human nature is mysterious and ineffable on one level. It can’t be controlled. You shouldn’t try to control it. You should experience it, you should flow with it.

But these guys want total control. And when I say as within, as without, what I mean is—and your comments helped crystallize this for me—this story to me is a great example of how interpersonal relationships and the personal in general, the personal sphere, reflects the political and economic sphere and vice versa, and how each shapes and interacts with the other.

If you are not cooperative in your family, in your neighborhood, in your relationship with your primary partner, with your children, you’re not going to integrate and reinforce a cooperative society. If you are—and conversely, if you have a society that’s built on cooperative principles, you will be more comfortable doing these things.

And to me, when I think about the kind of strains of thought that you and I derive from, or are thinking from anyway, I think for me anyway, that’s a big part of it—that integration of the self, the immediate circle, and the society as a whole. Does that make sense to you?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Richard Eskow: So any final thoughts on this before we call it a day?

Richard Wolff: Well, if I understand correctly, there are millions more documents. The Trump administration is trying desperately not to release them. It lost that battle initially. Then it released them too late, but not all of them. Then it lost that battle. Now it’s released a few more. It claims that’s all there is.

It’s crystal clear that there’s more. I would like us to keep an open mind about revisiting this if, as I suspect, we’re getting closer and closer to the people they did not want to see publicly identified here. And as a number of the women who were victimized have now made clear, they were revealed in what was released.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: Men who patronized them have still been protected, which is again, the teenage, underdeveloped, perverse male protecting themselves at the expense of the people they already victimized. I mean, it gets—I want to be able to come back and talk about it some more if the material warrants it, which I’m virtually certain it will.

Richard Eskow: Good. Let’s plan on that. And let’s also say we’ll focus on the perpetrators as perpetrators of many things, of which these obscenities are one, and respect the victims as victims who as individuals are far more important to me and worthy of care and respect than their predators. So with that, Richard Wolff, it’s always—well, I would say a great pleasure talking with you, but it’s not a pleasurable topic.

Very insightful as always, speaking with you. And as always, thanks for coming on the program.

Richard Wolff: My pleasure, Richard. I look forward to our next one.

Richard Eskow: As do I.