The Craving for a Concierge of Depravity

What Epstein Reveals About the State of the Modern Soul

There are, as of this writing, two kinds of people in the world. There are those hunched over their screens at ungodly hours, cross-referencing flight logs with redacted email addresses, building sprawling digital corkboards connected by red string they can almost feel between their fingers — and then there are the rest, who scrolled past the latest Epstein disclosure somewhere between a reel of someone’s golden retriever and a fifteen-second pasta recipe. Both camps, as it turns out, are symptomatic of the same disease. But we will get to that.

The documents keep coming. Names keep surfacing. The constellation of figures implicated in the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein reads less like a scandal and more like the guest list for the annual meeting of whichever invisible committee actually runs the world: tech billionaires like Bill Gates, political mega-donors like Les Wexner, revered public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, intelligence operatives, law enforcement officials, members of the British Royal Family, and heads of state of the most powerful nations on Earth. It’s almost like a Caribbean version of Davos — an even more depraved one.

The sheer density of power and influence concentrated around one man’s operation should, by any reasonable standard, provoke a civilizational reckoning. Instead, it has provoked memes, a few trending hashtags, and a collective shrug from roughly half the population.

And you can almost understand why. If even a fraction of what the documents imply is true — that the people who build our technologies, shape our foreign policy, educate our children at the most elite institutions, and sit on the thrones of democratic nations were complicit in the systematic abuse of minors — then we are confronted with a conclusion so destabilizing that most people would rather swallow their tongues than speak it aloud: the ruling class of the modern world may be, in a very literal and non-hyperbolic sense, monstrous. Not incompetent. Not misguided. Not even merely corrupt. Monstrous. And if that is the case, then every institution we have trusted to organize our lives — our governments, our universities, our courts, our financial systems — is not merely flawed but potentially rotten at the root. Most people, understandably, would rather plug themselves back into the matrix and pretend none of it exists. The alternative is vertigo without a floor.

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Consider one small example that went viral after a recent tranche of disclosures. An email, sent to Epstein, from a name that has been carefully blacked out. The text reads: “Thanks for the fun night. Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” Read that again. Sit with it. Now ask yourself the only question that matters: why is that name redacted? Not who sent it — though God knows that matters — but why has someone, somewhere in the machinery of justice, decided that the author of those words deserves the protection of anonymity? That person does not deserve a private life. That person deserves a prison cell and a very public execution.

And yet the black marker prevails. Whoever wielded it knows exactly who wrote that email. The only rational explanation for the redaction is that the sender is someone so important, so embedded in the architecture of power, that their exposure would trigger not simply a scandal but a genuine political or economic crisis. Possibly societal instability. And so the system, in its infinite self-preserving wisdom, protects the predator. Because the alternative — the truth — is too expensive.

Now, here is where I part company with a great many people, including many who are otherwise outraged by all of this. The question I keep hearing is: How is it possible that our leaders are so evil? How can this be? And I confess that question never really occurred to me. I was not surprised by these revelations. I might have been mildly surprised that the documents were reaching the public — that the usual mechanisms of suppression had, for once, stuttered and coughed up something real — but the content itself? No. It lined up with exactly what I would have expected from a civilization built on the rotten, idiotic philosophical foundations we have been laying for the past four centuries. Understanding why this is not surprising at all requires us to do something that modernity has made almost unbearable: think.

We live in the modern world. That sentence is so banal it barely deserves ink. But what it means — what it truly, structurally, philosophically means — is something almost nobody bothers to examine. The modern age was shaped by philosophical movements that most people have never heard of but that dictate, with remarkable precision, how all of us live, what we value, and what we are capable of ignoring.

The history of philosophy is not some dusty irrelevance confined to tenured eccentrics in underfunded departments. It is the invisible architecture of your daily life. The eccentric, antisocial academics who argued about epistemology in cold European parlors three hundred years ago are, whether you like it or not, the architects of the world you wake up in every morning.

Modernism, broadly speaking, fractured into two camps. On one side: rationalism — the conviction that only what occurs inside the mind can truly be known. Truth, under this regime, is not something you discover in the world outside yourself; it is generated within the sealed theater of your own consciousness. You, the subject, become the sole object of interest. Everything external — the world, other people — is epistemologically suspect at best and irrelevant at worst.

On the other side: empiricism — the belief that only what can be measured and observed through the senses constitutes real knowledge. This is the philosophical wellspring of scientism, of materialist atheism, of the peculiar modern conviction that if you cannot quantify it, it does not exist.

Both of these positions, despite their surface disagreements, converge on a single devastating conclusion: the only experiences that ultimately matter to a human being are sensations. If reality is confined to your own mind, then your subjective sensory experience is king. If reality is confined to what your senses can measure, then once again, sensation reigns supreme. And here is where the trouble begins — with the quiet, imperceptible erosion of everything that once made human beings capable of moral seriousness.

Sensation is, by its nature, fleeting. Compare it to thought, which can linger, evolve, deepen, take on the complexity of a cathedral over years of contemplation. Compare it to emotion, which can shape the course of a life, sustain love through decades, fuel a revolution. Sensation does none of this. You taste something sweet; the pleasure arrives and vanishes in the same breath. You hear a beautiful chord; it decays before you can hold it. The entire experience is over almost before it begins. And a civilization that has decided — through its philosophy, its economics, its technology — that sensation is the highest and perhaps only meaningful category of human experience has condemned itself to a very particular kind of hell: the hell of repetition.

Because the only way to prolong a pleasurable sensation is to repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it again. The sugar hit, the dopamine spike, the sexual thrill, the scroll, the swipe, the next episode, the next drink, the next purchase — the rhythm is always the same. Repetition hardens into habit. Habit calcifies into addiction. And addiction is, by definition, the annihilation of free will.

We strengthen our appetites — which have no moral compass whatsoever — while systematically weakening the will, which is the only faculty capable of choosing between right and wrong. We become, in the most precise and clinical sense, less free with every cycle. The machine of sensation runs faster and faster, and the human being inside it becomes progressively less capable of doing anything other than feeding it.

Oswald Spengler, writing over a century ago in The Decline of the West, identified this pattern, as we have already discussed. He described the late stage of every civilization as one characterized by what he called the transition from culture to civilization — from living, organic form to polished, hollow mechanism. The symptoms he catalogued read like a clinical description of the twenty-first century: “senile need for rest, post-heroism and historylessness, artificiality and rigidity in all spheres of life, dominance of inorganic world-cities over vital countryside, cool factuality replacing reverence for tradition, materialism and irreligion, anarchic sensuality, bread and circuses mentality, entertainment industries, moral collapse and artistic death.” He wrote this in 1918. He might as well have been live-tweeting from your local shopping mall.

But there is a second pathology that grows directly from the first, and it is arguably worse. The person enslaved to sensation does not merely repeat — they bore. The monotony of doing the same thing over and over again, chasing the same diminishing returns, eventually becomes intolerable. And so the addict — whether they are addicted to sugar, porn (and in extend sex), status, or spectacle — begins to chase not just sensation but novelty. The new, the unfamiliar, the exotic, the strange. Anything to break the deadening rhythm of repetition. Anything to feel something again.

This is why modern art abandoned beauty for the grotesque. Beauty requires contemplation; the grotesque demands only a reaction. A urinal in a gallery, a canvas slashed with a razor, a building that looks like it was designed by a migraine — these things do not reward sustained attention. They provoke a momentary jolt of disorientation, which is the closest thing to genuine experience that a sensation-addicted culture can still manufacture. And as soon as the jolt fades — as soon as the strange becomes familiar — we tear it down and build something even stranger.

Our ancestors built cathedrals meant to stand for a thousand years. We build glass towers that last two decades before we demolish them because the aesthetic has gone stale. And now we have crowned our civilization’s architectural ambitions with “marvels” like the Burj Khalifa — a $1.5 billion empty, ugly Arabic phallic monument to absolutely nothing, rising out of the desert like a middle finger aimed at taste itself. Built by slave laborers, bankrolled by a torture-loving pedophile and admired — admired — primarily by a swarm of intellectually vacant influencers who fled to Dubai so they would not have to pay taxes on whatever pittance they scrape together by filming themselves pointing at things and posting it online. This is our Chartres. This is our Parthenon. A vanity project for a petrostate, worshipped by people who cannot locate it on a map. For context: sending the New Horizons spacecraft to explore Pluto — an actual expansion of human knowledge, a genuine extension of the species’ reach into the cosmos — cost $700 million. Less than half of what it took to erect a glittering desert obelisk that exists for no purpose other than to sugarcoat Muslim inferiority complexes. Which way, Western man?

Alexander Demandt, the German historian, captured this perfectly: “Beauty was displaced on one hand by the pleasant, on the other by the aberrant, ugly, bizarre. A wastebasket at Documenta became art through a catalogue number. There is no noise the Philharmonic’s auditorium won’t accept as music if the program announces it as such.”

“Beauty was displaced on one hand by the pleasant, on the other by the aberrant, ugly, bizarre. A wastebasket at Documenta became art through a catalogue number. There is no noise the Philharmonic’s auditorium won’t accept as music if the program announces it as such.” - Alexander Demandt, German historian

This same restless hunger for novelty explains our addiction to our phones, to the infinite scroll, to the algorithmic drip-feed of content that promises both sensation and surprise just below the bevel of the screen. For-profit technology companies have understood this about us better than we understand it about ourselves. They have built machines that exploit the precise vulnerability that four centuries of modernist philosophy created: our inability to sit still, to be silent, to contemplate anything that does not deliver an immediate sensory payoff. The average American stares at a screen for eight hours a day like it is their life support for a soul that has forgotten what it was built for.

The same principle governs our moral landscape. Our values shift from decade to decade with the frantic pace of fashion precisely because they are not rooted in anything permanent. Go back twenty years and try to explain the concept of preferred pronouns to the average person. They would stare at you as though you had grown a second head. Not because they were “Nazis”, but because the entire idiotic conceptual framework had not yet been invented — or, more accurately, had not yet become novel enough to be interesting. We chase moral novelty with the same desperate energy we chase every other kind, discarding yesterday’s convictions like last season’s wardrobe, not because they were wrong but because they were boring.

Now — and here is where the Epstein files become not merely a scandal but a parable — consider what all of this means when it is scaled up to the level of the most powerful human beings on Earth.

The average person, enslaved to sensation and starved for novelty, causes relatively limited damage. Your doom-scrolling habit is not going to destabilize a nation - at least not yet. Your sugar addiction is not going to traumatize a child. You are constrained, as most of us are, by the simple brutalities of necessity — the job, the bills, the mortgage, the sheer logistical impossibility of acting on every appetite. But wealth, real wealth, the kind measured in billions, does one thing above all else: it multiplies choice. It removes every practical constraint between desire and action.

The tropical beach you daydream about? For a billionaire, that is a Tuesday. The exotic cuisine you save up to try once a year? That is their airplane food. The experience you consider a once-in-a-lifetime thrill? They exhausted that entire category before they turned twenty-five.

A human being with no formation in objective morality, conditioned by sensation alone, obsessed with novelty, and possessed of virtually unlimited resources is not merely a decadent figure. They are a dangerous one. Because the territory of the novel, for such a person, extends far beyond what ordinary people can even conceive. What is exotic to you is monotonous to them. What shocks you is, for them, last year’s indulgence. If they are going to fend off the creeping frost of boredom they must venture into territories that the rest of us would find not merely unfamiliar but morally unthinkable.

And with no philosophical framework to tell them stop, with no cultivated moral intuition to intervene, with nothing but appetite and means and the suffocating fear of boredom, they will drift — inevitably, predictably, almost mechanically — into the darkest corners of human experience.

An anecdote about the French novelist Gustave Flaubert and his traveling companion Maxime Du Camp, talks about them journeying through the Middle East in the mid-nineteenth century, when such a trip still qualified as exotically avant-garde. The two men encountered, on the water, two Arab boats transporting slaves to Cairo. The cargo was mostly women and girls, stolen from the territory of Gallaas. Flaubert and Du Camp boarded the vessels. They stayed as long as they could. They haggled over ostrich feathers and, grotesquely, over an Abyssinian girl. Their purpose, as Flaubert himself recorded, was “to enjoy the chic of the spectacle.”

Read that again and let the full weight of it settle. A boat full of kidnapped women and girls, destined for sexual slavery in a foreign country, and two of Europe’s most celebrated literary minds treated it as dinner theater. Not a horror to be obstructed. Not an injustice to be fought. An experience to be consumed. A novel sensation. Avant-garde tourism at its most literal and most obscene.

Flaubert was no ignorant brute. He was the man who wrote Madame Bovary, a novel whose entire architecture is built around the dangers of boredom — of what happens when ennui, “like a spider, silently spins its shadowy web in every cranny of the heart.” He understood the disease. He simply could not resist participating in it. The modernist mind, even when it sees the abyss, keeps walking toward it, because the abyss is at least interesting.

If you understand this — if you see the through-line from Flaubert on that slave boat to the guests on Epstein’s island — then the strategy behind someone like Epstein becomes almost banal in its legibility: If you want to manipulate, control, or blackmail the richest and most powerful people in the world, you do not offer them money. They have money. You do not offer them status. They have status. You become a curator of sensations — the kind so exotic, so far beyond the ordinary menu of earthly pleasures, that even a billionaire will find them unfamiliar. And the only sensations that remain genuinely novel to someone who has already exhausted every legal and socially acceptable form of pleasure are, by definition, the ones that cross into the morally unthinkable.

You become, in other words, precisely what Jeffrey Epstein was: a concierge of depravity, catering to a clientele whose philosophical formation — or total absence thereof — has left them incapable of recognizing a moral boundary until they have already obliterated it.

And these people do not think of themselves as monsters. That is the crucial thing. They think of themselves as Napoleons, as Alexanders, as beings so far above the common run of humanity that ordinary moral categories simply do not apply. The same standards that govern a Thérèse of Lisieux or a Mother Teresa — humility, restraint, compassion, self-denial — are, in their minds, the quaint scruples of the provincial and the weak. They are among the great and powerful. And to the great and powerful, nothing should be refused. Not even by their own consciences.

Cardinal Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, gave a speech in which he warned of what he called a “dictatorship of relativism” — a regime that “recognizes nothing as definitive and leaves only one’s ego and its desires as the final measure.”

He also observed “a strange and only pathologically explicable self-hatred in the West, which laudably tries to understand foreign values but no longer likes itself.” This is not a man given to hysteria. And yet his diagnosis aligns perfectly with what the Epstein files reveal: a ruling class unmoored from any transcendent standard of good, drifting through an ever-expanding ocean of available sensation, protected by the very institutions they have hollowed out.

But here is the part that should keep you up at night, the part that transforms this from a story about them into a story about us. We are guilty of the same disease. The difference is only one of scale. Our appetite for the latest Epstein disclosures — the new emails, the new photographs, the new names — is itself a manifestation of the same hunger for novelty that created the conditions for Epstein’s operation in the first place. We are not contemplating the horror with the gravity it deserves. We are consuming it. Scrolling through it. Treating it as content. As spectacle. We are, in our own modest way, Flaubert on the slave boat — not perpetrating the evil, certainly, but savoring the chic of it, the thrill of proximity to something so dark it qualifies as novel.

We stare at screens for eight hours a day because those machines deliver a steady intravenous drip of sensation and novelty directly into the pleasure centers of our brains. We cannot imagine logging off, being still, being silent, sitting with the questions that might surface in the absence of stimulation. We have lost the capacity — or perhaps the courage — to contemplate the deepest depths of the soul and the lingering moral questions that haunt anyone who dares to be quiet long enough to hear them.

And if we, with our limited means and our mortgages and our nine-to-fives, are already this enslaved to the cycle of sensation and novelty, then who among us can say with certainty that, given unlimited resources and zero moral formation, we would not end up in precisely the same place as the names in those redacted files?

The honest answer is: we cannot. The only difference between us and them is that we have not yet been afforded the same temptations. Our poverty — of money, of access, of opportunity — is, paradoxically, our protection. But it is a fragile protection, and it is eroding daily because when you look at adult content readily available to everyone for free, it is not about naked women or watching two people having sex anymore. It is evolving—or maybe devolving. More depravity, more weird fetishes, more “barely legal teen” titles, more degradation of females as sex slaves—and it’s free for you to watch. Every day. Men watch this as if it’s the evening news. Nothing here is different. It is the poor people’s digital version of Epstein’s island. It is the philosophical infrastructure that produces Epstein-class predators is the same one that produces Epstein-class consumers. We are all downstream of the same polluted river.

Jerry Seinfeld once quipped that the secret to life is to waste time in ways that you enjoy. It is a funny line. It is also, if taken as a philosophy, a prescription for moral catastrophe. Don’t just enjoy yourself while wasting time. That is how you become a moral monster without ever noticing the transformation. That is how you wake up one morning on an island in the Caribbean, surrounded by people who have lost the ability to distinguish between pleasure and predation, and realize — if you are still capable of realization — that the road to this place was paved not with dramatic acts of villainy but with a million tiny surrenders to the tyranny of sensation.

The antidote — the only antidote — is to refuse the terms of the deal. To refuse to believe that sensation and novelty are all this life offers. To cultivate silence. To practice stillness. To orient yourself, deliberately and stubbornly, toward the things that modernism has taught us to ignore: truth as an objective reality that exists whether we acknowledge it or not; goodness as a standard that binds us regardless of our preferences; beauty as something real and worthy of sustained, selfless contemplation — not as decoration, not as content, but as a window into the permanent things that outlast every trend, every appetite, every empire.

Spengler was right about the arc of civilizations. Demandt was right about the marriage of refined lifestyle and declining life force. Ratzinger was right about the dictatorship of relativism. Flaubert, in his bitter, self-destructive way, was right about ennui. And John Senior was right that the death of a culture begins not with an invasion but with the slow, voluntary abandonment of everything that made the culture worth defending.

We were made for the eternal. Fleeting sensations will never satisfy that hunger — they only deepen it, producing addiction and boredom in an endless, tightening spiral. Breaking free of that spiral is how you avoid becoming just another tourist in the kind of moral nightmare that men like Jeffrey Epstein are willing to curate in order to exploit every soul they can reach.

The files will keep coming. The names will keep surfacing. The Reels will keep playing. And the choice before each of us remains exactly what it has always been: to consume the spectacle, or to step away from the screen, sit in the terrifying silence, and ask ourselves the only question that has ever really mattered — what kind of person am I becoming?

Give me a Like or buy me a coffee, then turn off the screen. Do it!

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