Scanning for Heroes
Virtue has become uncool
The Jeffrey Epstein saga shows that we are living through a crisis of heroism. We are obsessed with the villains of the story - the Jeffrey Epsteins of our times, but he is missing a nemesis. There’s no hero to our story.
The anti-heroes are, as a result, viewed through a lens of mystery and allure. Even some of my friends, who are painters and couldn't care less who Epstein was, said their feeds were clogged with videos of him. Endless posts online are circulating about Epstein. What is striking is how most of the ironic ones focus not on how bad he was, but on how cool he looked. Many videos describe Epstein as “Dripstein”. His magnetism was, apparently, impossible to ignore.
In an interview, the ex-girlfriend of former “Prince Andrew”, Victoria Harvey, said:
He knew everybody who was very powerful, so if you were on the scene, and you were powerful, to be honest, if you are not on those files, it would be an insult, because it just means you are a bit of a loser … Of course, I [am on the files].
At face value, Epstein - unlike most villains portrayed in our fictional or nonfictional storytelling - is not a monstrous, marginalized figure who becomes evil because he was shunned from society. He was popular, admired, charming, and a leading member of the world's elite circles. He was well-dressed and clean-cut, with an effortless, casual style. At the same time, beneath that curated appearance, he was creating an international sex-trafficking blackmail operation that involved the abuse of children, with much more that we still need to learn.
A recent article by British journalist Jake Hanrahan on “The Sinister Epstein Photos You Haven’t Seen Yet” shows the depth of the depravity in his homes. The fact that no victims were shown leaves space to the imagination, making the viewer feel even more disconcerted. When interviewed by Steve Bannon about whether he was the devil, Epstein circled the question with wit and humor. And most of those watching aren’t sure what to make of it. They don’t respond with the kind of shock revelations that this severity and magnitude would normally elicit because they have grown accustomed to the moral vacuum.
The message here is that there is no hero we can look up to who was willing to stand up to Epstein when it mattered, except his victims, whom one would expect to come forward, and who have still hardly won. They went through a tiresome legal process only to have justice evade them before the trial because Epstein allegedly took his own life. This final act only deepened our sense of distrust about how entrenched his power truly was. His death was too much of a convenient coincidence for those he was going to expose.
For a hero in this story, we would have needed an infiltrator to hold Epstein and those he controlled accountable. But none of the figures who could have become his nemesis, who were operationally as powerful or close to as powerful as he was, did anything to stop him or his web of coconspirators and apologists. In fact, what makes the public particularly cynical now is that they all seem implicated. Even Noam Chomsky, the intellectual lion of the anti-war Left, who wrote Manufacturing Consent and who spent his career moralizing the public on the corruption inherent in modern power systems, was seen on a flight having the time of his life with the sexual offender. As a society, we’re waking up to the reality that there are no heroes to our story; we’re ruled by a hypocritical elite. The majority of those in power, irrespective of their ideology, when offered the devil’s hand, weren’t able to resist. They decided to join the corruption brazenly and without remorse because they felt certain of their untouchability, and because being part of that elite made them feel omnipotent, without realizing that it would turn out to be their biggest liability. As a result, instead of a response of condemnation and outrage, of demanding the un-redacted copies of all the files to understand who was being corrupted and why, there is a form of nihilistic indifference.
A right-wing political influencer called Emily Wilson fatalistically suggested:
Just f*cking log off, who cares? There’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing is going to happen to these people.
But this is the defeatist attitude they want us to internalize. The release of these files, and the way they’re being released, isn’t coincidental. They’re intended as a message: By making us believe that heroes do not exist, we feel we have no hope that creating a better society is possible. This narrative is being normalized to make us feel uninspired and to hide the motives of the true culprits. We’re not asking, “Why was this operation taking place? For whom or what?” Instead, the public is entertained by the sensationalism.