Alastair Crooke
After Epstein, nothing can continue as before: neither the 'never again' values, nor the bipolar economics of extreme disparities, nor trust.
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.
This mechanical way of thinking has played a large part in the third tier to the 'Davos Rupture' (after the intellectual demise and the collapse of trust in the leadership). Mechanical thinking based in a deterministic pseudo-scientific world view led to economic contradictions which prevented western economists from seeing what was under their nose: a hyper-financialised economic system placed entirely at the service of the oligarchs and insiders.
No failure of our economic modelling, however great, "has weakened the vice-like grip of the mathematical economists on the policies of governments. The problem has been that Science, in that binary cause-and-effect mode, could not cope with either the chaos or the complexity of life" (Aurelien). Other theories - other than Newtonian physics - such as quantum or chaos theories largely have been excluded from our mode of thinking.
The meaning to 'Davos' - followed by the Epstein revelations - is that the Humpty-Dumpty of Trust has fallen from the wall and cannot be put together again.
What is also apparent is that the Epstein circles were not just about twisted individuals; "What has been exposed points to systematic, organized, ritualized practices". And that changes everything, as commentator Lucas Leiroz observes:
"Networks of this kind only exist when they are backed by deep institutional protection. There is no ritual paedophilia, no human trafficking on a transnational scale, no systematic production of extreme material - without political, police, judicial, and media cover. This is the logic of power".
Epstein emerges from the myriad emails as a paedophile and utterly immoral certainly, but also as highly intelligent and a serious geo-political player, whose political insights were prized by high-level figures around the globe. He was a master-player behind geo-politics, as Michael Wolff described (as far back as 2018, as well as in recently released email correspondence) in the war between Jewish power and the Gentiles, too.
This suggests that Epstein was less a tool of Intelligence Services, but more their 'peer'. No wonder leaders sought his company (and for grossly immoral reasons too, we cannot not ignore). And clearly the Deep (uniparty) State manoeuvred through him. And in the end, Epstein knew too much.
David Rothkopf, himself a former political affairs adviser in the U.S. Democratic camp, speculates on what Epstein means for America:
"[Young Americans] realise that their institutions are failing them, and they're going to have to [save themselves]... you've got tens of thousand of people in Minneapolis, saying this is not any more about Constitutional issues, or the rule of law or democracy - which may sound good - but which is at a remove from the average person at the average kitchen table".
"People are saying the Supreme Court is not going to protect us; Congress is not going to protect us; the President is the enemy; he is deploying his own army in our cities. The only people who can protect us - are: We ourselves".
"It is 'the billionaires stupid'" [a reference to the old amorphism: 'It's the economy, stupid'] Rothkopf explains:
"The point I'm trying to make is that - if you don't realise that equality and élite impunity are central issues to everybody, that people think the system is rigged and is not working for them... don't believe the American dream is real any more - and that the control of the country has been stolen by a handful of the super-rich people, who don't get taxed and get wealthier and wealthier - whilst the rest of us fall further and further behind - [then you can't understand today's despair amongst the under 35s]".
Rothkopf is saying that the Davos/Epstein episode marks the rupture between the people and the ruling strata.
"Western societies now face a dilemma that cannot be resolved through elections, parliamentary commissions, or speeches. How can one continue to accept the authority of institutions that shielded this level of horror ? How can respect be maintained for laws applied selectively by people who live above them?", Leiroz says.
Loss of respect however, does not go to the core of the impasse. No conventional political party has an answer to the failure of 'kitchen-table' economics - the lack of reasonably well-paid jobs, access to medical services, costly education and housing.
No mainstream party can provide a credible answer to these existential issues because, for decades, the economy has exactly been 'rigged' - structurally re-oriented towards a debt-based financialised economy, at the expense of the real economy.
It would require the present Anglo liberal market structure to be wholly up-rooted and replaced by another. That would require a decade of reforms - and the oligarchs would fight that outright.
Ideally, new political parties might emerge. In Europe, however, the 'bridges' that potentially could take us out from our deep structural contradictions have been deliberately destroyed in the name of the cordon sanitaire designed to prevent any non 'centrist' policy thinking from emerging.
If protest has no effect in changing the status quo, and elections remain between the Tweedle Dee and Dum parties of the existing order, the young will conclude that 'no one will come to save us' - and they may conclude in their despair that the future can only be decided on the streets.
Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.