«Is Jeffrey Epstein the devil?»
The question, as Steve Bannon posed it to Jeffrey Epstein, had nothing theological about it, no matter how it was dressed up in the language of metaphysics. It was not a question about evil. It was a question of power.
About structure. On complicity.
And the answer, almost whispered, almost indifferent, «No, but I have a good
mirror,» it was not an evasion. It was a confession. Because Epstein was never an exception. He was a reflection.
The devil is a useful invention. A vessel into which society deposits evil so that it can continue to believe in its innocence. It personifies what it does not want to recognize as structural. It turns system into accident and responsibility into deviation.
But evil does not dwell in persons. It dwells in relationships.
Epstein did not invade a moral world to pollute it. He emerged from a world already polluted. It was not a break in order. It was order itself, in a moment of honesty. It was the system without its mask.
Power is rarely imposed by force. Its most durable form is acceptance. The tacit agreement that «this is the way things work». That inequality is natural. That injustice is inevitable. That some people exist to be used.
That's where hegemony is born. Not as imposition, but as normality.
Epstein was a hub. Not a king, but a conduit. A meeting point where political power, financial wealth, academic prestige, royal glory intersected. He did not rule. It connected. And anyone who connects knows. And he who knows, need not command.
In the rooms where they moved, the currency was not only money. It was the secrets. The weaknesses. The forbidden desires. The silence.
Because complicity is the most stable form of power.
When the powerful share the same darkness, they become indivisible. They do not protect each other from morality. They protect each other from collapse.
Morality, then, does not disappear. It submits.
Neoliberalism is not only an economic system. It is a new anthropology. It redefines what it means to be human. Not as a carrier of consciousness, but as a carrier of value. Not as a person, but as an asset.
In this regime, everything comes with a price.
Work. The information. The body. The desire. The silence.
Even innocence.
That's where Epstein registers. It's not a deviation, but a consequence.
Donald Trump, Bannon, the architects of digital manipulation, the technicians of the soul who worked through mechanisms like Cambridge Analytica, do not belong to a different universe. They belong to the same logic.
The logic that sees man as material. One processes consciousnesses.
The other was processing bodies. Both were working on the same principle,
that power needs no limits.
Sexual violence, in this context, is not just a crime. It is the extreme form of domination. The ultimate affirmation that the other body is not a person, but an object. That it exists to be used.
The scariest thing, however, is not the actions. It's the continuity.
The politicians who remained friends.
The businessmen who remained partners.
The intellectuals who remained in conversation.
Even when they knew.
Because hegemony does not collapse from the truth. It only collapses when its need is lost.
And the need remained.
In crisis Greece, Epstein knew before they were announced. because he did not foresee, but because he knew from the means he owned. Because economies, in this system, are not societies. They are fields. Fields of application.
His contacts continued. The doors did not close. Hands were not pulled.
Power is not averse to crime. It embodies it.
Every hegemony is accompanied by a morality. And the morality of neoliberalism is simple:
There is no «right». There is only «useful».
Epstein did not violate this ethic. He completed it.
It was the magnifying glass that revealed the face of domination. Not as greatness, but as emptiness. Not as superiority, but as absence.
People who, having exhausted every form of power, are still looking for its proof.
Even through the destruction of the other.
That's why society insists on talking about ’monsters«. Because the monster is reassuring. It is unique. It is an exception. It dies and ends.
But the system is not dying. It reproduces.
Where man ceases to believe that the world is natural and begins to suspect that it is constructed.
When he understands that power is not a fate but a relationship.
That poverty is not a failure but a result.
That some people don't have less because they deserved less, but because someone else got more.
This is the moment when the consensus is broken. And the silence becomes a question.
Because society is no longer looking for better managers of itself
reality. It challenges the very logic that underpins it.
It refuses to accept that man exists to serve the system.
And he insists, stubbornly, almost irrationally, that the system should exist to serve man.
And it is this persistence that is most frightening.
Because he cannot wait for salvation. Without making a break.
He does not want a better world as a gift, but a world that will have to be rebuilt.
And once that thought is born, nothing can return to its former innocence.
Because as long as we continue to mourn the faces without touching the structure, nothing changes. The Epsteins will fall, but the Epsteins will return.
As long as society accepts consensus as a natural state, as long as it does not question the logic that turns everything into a means, Epstein will not be an accident. They will be necessities.
It was never the person. It was the time when he needed it.
And as long as the system is afraid of the truth, it will fabricate guilty people to hide it.
Because in the end, it's not the people who expose the mirror, it's the mirror that exposes the people.
