In for a Penny, in for a Pound
A short contribution to the Epstein Discourse
In late November last year, I made the following observation about “the Epstein Files”:
And lo, both my observations and those of the Irish economist I quote-tweeted have been vindicated. The vast tranche of material has indeed revealed Epstein to be a midwit and a pseud—complete with an aversion to correct spelling and capitalisation—while Epstein’s wealthy and famous “marks” emerge as the worst sort of sad-sacks. These are men who struggle to woo women in the normal way and so predate upon the very young and the occupationally compromised instead.
Epstein’s USP—to go with his wealth—was getting naïve young women (and quite a large number of girls) to shag ugly old men. Setting this system up involved two-way Machiavellianism. That said, working in the incel-ish male sad-sacks’ sexual favour was the basic reality that teenage girls are notoriously shallow and easily manipulated.
As everyone who hasn’t spent the last week under a rock knows, additional revelations contained in the latest DOJ releases are upending British politics, destroying Peter Mandelson’s place in public life and seriously undermining Keir Starmer—and all this in the run-up to a crucial Manchester by-election.
Britons can be forgiven for focussing on their own country’s travails, but there’s something in the Epstein files for many other people, too, not just Americans or Brits. Australian journalist Latika M Bourke has unearthed a useful backgrounder here on the extent to which—as in Britain—the Epstein files are burning Norwegian politics and even the country’s royal family to the ground.
If nothing else, Jeffrey Epstein knew who to target.
I’ve neither the time nor inclination to try to reproduce the efforts of those currently wearing out their CTRL-F or CMD-F keys. Times of London journalist Janice Turner searched for “young girls” and, well, regretted it immediately:
I didn’t type “Prince Andrew” or “Peter Mandelson” or other craven crawlers into the vast, unwieldy US Department of Justice archive. The people I’m interested in are mainly nameless — not so much individuals as an undifferentiated mass: somehow at once pitifully worthless and a tradable commodity, the fuel rods in Epstein’s power plant.
I searched for “young girls”. And up popped 120 or so pages of links to emails, documents and FBI depositions. After hours of reading, a picture emerges both of Epstein’s industrial-scale grooming operation and of those who indulged it as a rich man’s hobby, like modern art or fine wine.
Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife, just saw Epstein’s extended household as a market for her friend’s jewellery. “I know you have a lot of … young girls, women friends and potential women/girls that you will need to get gifts for,” she wrote. “All women, and girls in your case, like jewelry.”
A typical testimony is from a woman who had three jobs when a friend at a party told her about a rich guy who’d pay $300 for a massage. He was well connected, surrounded by models, and if he really liked you, he’d pay for your education too. She had never done anything like this before but called the number, was shown in, told to undress, instructed how to touch this naked stranger. He didn’t demand sex but masturbated while groping her.
As I read her piece, I wondered if anyone was going to make the—to me obvious—sad-sack man + manipulable girl point. Janan Ganesh of the FT did not disappoint:
Let’s start with the rich. Most people do not find money — or the main ways of making money, such as banking — intrinsically interesting. This might be less true in societies that are new to wealth. But it holds in the established western cities.
There, the self-made often discover too late that all their work and risk-taking has brought them less social status than expected. A minor magazine editor outranks them at a party. A hand-to-mouth actor is more welcome at Soho House. A bureaucrat can affect their business. Most rich people don’t mind. Even those who do tend to react maturely, perhaps sponsoring the arts for some reflected glory or buying a media outlet.
But some will cross the line in seeking to be near the beau monde. Which consists of whom? Artists, intellectuals, politicians, even the occasional journalist: the public rather than private 1 per cent. Their value in social settings is high. Their income might not be. It is hard to get rich doing something fun.
Again, most of them just shrug this off as the tax on having a cool job. Even those who really mind will often find a clean solution, such as the classic private-public intermarriage, where one spouse provides the wealth and the other the social clout. (George Washington’s marriage to a Virginia plantation-owner is a template from the annals of hypergamy.) A few, however, will do improper things for the rich to get some of their crumbs. It is just too jarring for them to be the star of a dinner party and then fly economy.
What the public sees as a monolith called “the elite” is really two different tribes, and so much corruption stems from the gap between them. Their desires are not just distinct but fatally interlocking. The private elite can scratch the public elite’s itch to live beyond their means. In return, the public elite can relieve some of the boredom and anonymity of business. Even without privileged information to offer, Mandelson was beguiling to the rich because he came from the world of ideas and events, not their world of facts and numbers. Their appeal to him scarcely needs spelling out.
Other people have observed that Epstein evinced plenty of sectarian bigotry, but that some of his most abject marks were fellow Jews. US attorney Ted Frank brings this out intelligently:
Like Bernie Madoff before him, Epstein targeted wealthy Jews in particular, creating an us-versus-them paradigm (“goyim”, making fun of JP Morgan WASPs) to make his marks trust him more and disregard his common and sketchy resume. He’s just a rogue getting one over on the high school jocks; stick with me because we Jews need to stick together. Again, a low batting average, but he did pull hundreds of millions from the wealthy Jews he did persuade that he was being particularly helpful.
(Seems unbelievable unless you’ve talked to enough wealthy people to know how much trouble it is to staff a trustworthy family “office.” Grifting or just plain principal-agent conflicts seem to happen much more often than is publicly reported, if on a considerably smaller scale than what Epstein pulled off with Wexner.)
An amazing ecosystem bootstrapped out of nothing more than Epstein’s charm and his amoral shamelessness.
If this was all there was to Epstein, we can only guess what a #MeToo scandal might’ve looked like eventually (though lots of rich men have womanized extensively without real consequence), but he might well have gotten away with all of this and died a billionaire from existing investments. Epstein’s former clients hated him, but he wasn’t losing any sleep over it.
But Epstein also had an entirely separate and justifiably illegal fetish for teenage girls, spending millions in a reckless scheme to constantly import more for a sick sexual hunger. It doesn’t matter that many of the teenagers were delinquents thrilled with the sex-for-cash trade, so thrilled that they’d happily collect bounties to recruit their underage friends to work the massage tables also; it’s still illegal and immoral; the age of consent is there for a reason. He’d use his money and exaggerate his connections and his past to intimidate women from complaining, though plenty spoke to police in Palm Beach without the Mossad killing them. That’s what eventually brought Epstein (and his right-hand woman Ghislaine) down.
From a British perspective, the intervention below from New Statesman Executive Editor Oli Dugmore captures the mood of the national electorate handily. Dugmore is a lefty, but people from Lotus Eaters Media’s Carl Benjamin on the right and Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani on the left—and all shades in between—have praised it.
I do think the combined insights from Janice Turner and Janan Ganesh are on point, however. I’ve encountered a little of the phenomenon the latter in particular describes, but only in the UK, US, and Europe. That is, people have been far more impressed by my novels, various literary prizes I’ve won, or my job at a fancy think-tank than if they met me when I was making a great deal more money as a lawyer. Even bestsellers—as two of my novels were—do not amount to anything like what a commercial solicitor earns.
Australia, however, is different. In Australia—and among Australians—people were almost universally more impressed by my lawyering than by any writing of novels or working at think-tanks. The only exceptions to this were a few politicians and staffers in Canberra (all on the left, either ALP left faction or Greens) or culture mavens at literary festivals and the like.
I have now formed the view that the common Australian inclination to denigrate intellectuals—particularly academics and writers—is fundamentally a healthy one. I suspect it’s part of why few Australians have turned up in the Epstein files. Only Kevin Rudd seems to appear reasonably regularly, but always in anodyne contexts.
As many of you know—along with Lorenzo Warby—I’ve taken what I hope is an informed and thoughtful approach to the reality of average differences between groups. This is something that must include IQ because it is substantially heritable. However, Lorenzo and I have also been careful to ensure that we focus on personality psychology and character at the same time. IQ is one thing. Conscientiousness, disagreeableness, emotional stability—those things matter as well.
I say this because I think there are reasons why no great ethical system of which we have record considers high intellect a per se good, something the Epstein Files exposes in its most tawdry form. People who are brainy but have nothing else going for them—no sporting ability, few social skills, emotional brittleness—are an absolute menace. High intellect in combination with low conscientiousness is a recipe for mental illness and personality disorders (particularly the Cluster Bs, as Josh Slocum argues). High IQ people with mental health problems generally fail at life just us hard as dummies do, too, while being far more bitter and destructive about it.
The photographs of Epstein schmoozing people—I’ve included one in this piece—reveal an ostentatiously trim, permatanned silver fox surrounded by fatties, shorties, uglies, and blokes with faces attached to their noses. Men like that are routinely rejected by the sort of women they find most desirable, especially if they’ve not put their intellect to work making money.
Epstein must have felt like a giant among pygmies—all very flattering to his ego, I’m sure.
I suspect this reality is why two major religious traditions—Buddhism and Christianity—went out of their way to build institutions where they could both hide and exploit intelligent but socially clueless freaks. They even went to the trouble of ensuring there were spots for both men and women who fitted the bill. And, as I wrote a couple of years ago for Law & Liberty, both those religious traditions were not above firing the monasteries out of the solar system if the people in them got too big for their boots:
Whether a given monastery was held in contempt or considered a worthy institution depended on the role it had played locally. If it gave out poor relief, educated local children, participated in regional markets, and provided spiritual services, it tended to be beloved. It was inwardness, unworldliness, and failure to engage with society—while taking people’s money in tithes—that did many of them in. If you don’t share, we won’t support was a real gripe of long standing.
Locking away both human and economic capital never goes down well, and resentment was not unique to England and Wales or Reformation Europe: it arose in other civilisations with their own monastic traditions. In 843, China’s Tang Dynasty Emperor Wuzong—like Henry VIII, short of cash—dissolved his country’s Buddhist monasteries. He began by ending their tax-exempt status. Also like Henry, he probably didn’t start the process intending to extirpate all monasticism, but that’s what it became.
Australians: not everything about your cultural cringe is bad. If it stops you putting people like Jeffrey Epstein and his sleazy friends on a pedestal, it’s probably a useful thing.
“IQ is one thing. Conscientiousness, disagreeableness, emotional stability—those things matter as well. “
Brings to mind the distinction between speed and velocity. IQ is not a virtue but it can be directed by the other three factors.
You might acknowledge someone’s intelligence but how they employ it is more important.
High IQ is pure potential but as such can go in any direction. After the Bomb, the Final Solution, and various 5 Year Plans and Cultural Revolutions, etc. you'd think all those geniuses would've gotten the memo.