I know I’m endangering myself with the titles of my two latest essays back to back, but what can I say, I’m a provocateur. And this one is too topical to delay.
The Epstein Files have made their mark on politics by now, I would say. It’s an impressive bruise: livid and visible, but only skin deep.
No one in power has, to my knowledge, suffered for their involvement since their publication, and barely any had at any point previously, when Epstein was incarcerated and all signs pointed to what we now have in writing for all the world to see.
But people are angry. Disenfranchisement with our rulers and the disempowerment they have inculcated in us is growing more and more. But the public narrative is, unsurprisingly, weak to the point of derailing what could be a huge push toward a mass revolutionary movement.
Before I go further: child rape is indefensible. Human trafficking and sex slavery are indefensible. I haven’t said anything in this essay yet to indicate I don’t believe that, including the title, but trans women are never given the benefit of the doubt, even when we’re talking about banal things not connected to our dominant stereotyping as degenerate, deceitful rapists.
I would like now to lay some groundwork for the crux of the argument that my titillating title suggests.
First, I am a firm believer (even if I fail in practice in times) in the notion that people are not good or bad, but actions and systems can be. This is a principle I derived from Ibram X. Kendi’s excellent book, How to Be an Antiracist. In it, he makes a thorough and compelling case that, whether or not people are Racists, as a noun describing their moral character as an individual, it is more productive to addressing racism that beliefs, policies, and institutions are Racist or Antiracist (and anything “neutral” typically tends to be Racist because it is passive in the face of a Racist status quo). This is a framework that really aligns with my overall theory of change and ideal view of humanity; it can be applied outside of racism.
I also don’t think morality is the best benchmark to inform praxis. Morality in our current American culture is derived from Christianity; the good and virtuous go to heaven, the evil and sinful go to hell. Even when morality is a lens applied by people who explicitly disagree with and reject that judgmental paradigm, who have been personally harmed by it, I see a lineage underneath that goes, even if unconsciously, back to a need for a hierarchical religious institution to tell us right from wrong, rather than to do the messy and difficult work of deciding that for ourselves.
I do look at things through a moral lens, all the time. But I think effective critical decisions about where to spend our money, time, and labor, who and what to platform or criticize, should come from other values more than morality.
Who benefits from a policy or narrative, and at a cost to who else? What are the underlying motives? What could be done or said instead, and why have those not happened while this has?
These questions can be answered with morality: for example, two statements I broadly agree with: “Police are evil because they get off on killing and terrorizing minorities.” Or, more topically, “the ruling class are evil because they all frequented an island full of child sex slaves, or participated in covering that up.”
But the moral lens, while it feels good to look through (regardless of your political alignment), paints things in the colors of a crusade. “We are the good guys because we aren’t billionaires or cops” is a slippery slope toward “We can do no wrong because we aren’t the ones who hold most of societal power.”
Intersectionality and power dynamics can save us from falling prey to this black-and-white thinking. Yes, I think that choosing to hoard a significant portion of the wealth and power in the world just because you think you deserve it more, while people starve and die, is wrong. And it’s a choice billionaires are making every second of every day, which makes them (and those who are constantly choosing to enforce their rule) the only group that I can support framing in an “us vs. them” mentality. But if you start letting yourself applying that logic any further, you are doing a disservice to any kind of leftist or humanistic agenda.
I do understand and strongly empathize with marginalized people viewing those who uncritically support or enact their oppression as universally evil. It’s nearly impossible for me not to think cis people are evil when they gleefully insist on deadnaming me or using slurs, or leverage systemic power against me in ways most likely motivated by hate, or disbelieve me when I say these things are happening. But if I cave into the depression brain and start thinking of all cis people as evil for being cis, I am supporting the same logic they use to fear and hate me for being trans.
It’s actually very easy to
bring this back to pedophilia and the Epstein Files. Pedophilia is
generally defined as a sexual attraction to children. If you are
queer, and do not feel that you can just choose to stop being lesbian
or bisexual or asexual or gay, because you can’t, then how can you
hate pedophiles as a blanket statement?
It is VITAL to
distinguish between an internal attraction one cannot control and the
ways one does or does not act on it.
Please read the above sentence again and pause to think on it before you read on, especially if you are still rankled by any of what I’m saying.
Pedophiles cannot choose to stop being pedophiles. But they can choose not to rape children.
Now, in considering the above arguments in relation to the Epstein Files, I would like to explain why I don’t think pedophilia is the cardinal sin of the ruling class, as stated in the title.
Their cardinal sin is choosing to have unrestrained, unaccountable, absolute power over the entire rest of humanity. The vehicle for this power is the hoarding of almost all extant wealth and the deployment of it to safeguard their dominance and suppress any effort to challenge it, even potential ones.
If they lacked this power, then even if they wanted to rape children all day long, and own them as property whose purpose is their own sexual gratification, they simply would not be able to have been doing it for so long, on such a massive scale. They couldn’t have kept it a secret for so long, or controlled the media’s expression of the truth to dull and distract from public outrage about it, or prevented themselves from facing any kind of material consequences for their actions.
There is also an attitude
among the ultrarich which is genuinely terrifying, despite its
existence being logical if you stop to think. There is a reason they
don’t think twice about buying up kids to sexually abuse to their
heart’s content in the way that anyone else would, even if they had
a desire to do so.
They believe they are straight-up better than the rest of us. That they are the most intelligent, beautiful, and good people there are, because they are voluntarily surrounded at all times by sycophants and only sycophants, whose motivation for ass-kissing ranges from delusion to opportunism. And because their purity and greatness is a prerequisite for the fact that they are all-powerful. If they saw themselves as any closer to the squalor and sin of the rest of us, they would have to question their status, and then the whole thing would come tumbling down.
So I say, when we talk about the Epstein Files, we should be talking about choices and the systems that support them. We should be calling attention to power dynamics on a global scale.
We should condemn billionaires and their supporters, not because they are intrinsically evil, or because they are pedophilic monsters, but because they wake up every day and decide to do nothing less than indulge their most destructive and harmful impulses, and reinforce their “God-given right” to do so, for no other reason than that they can.
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