Epstein Files: Carry No Illusions
For a period of my life, I worked as private secretary to a very powerful man. A billionaire. Well known. He is dead now, and I have no interest in turning him into a character study. Names matter less than proximity. What matters is that I saw power from nearby.
It did not shock me that the powerful were connected to one another. Power behaves like weather systems. It clusters. It circulates. It creates its own pressure zones. Influence pulls influence into the same rooms. People meet not because they admire one another, but because gravity insists.
What stayed with me from that time was not outrage. It was recognition.
I was reading Montaigne then. In one of his essays he observes that if you live close enough to any person, especially one elevated by status, you will eventually see behavior that unsettles you. But examine the servant just as closely, he implies, and you will likely find the same mixture. The difference is not purity. The difference is exposure.
Distance manufactures illusions.
From far away, lives appear coherent. Up close, they resolve into appetite, vanity, loyalty, compromise, generosity, contradiction. The powerful are not a separate species. They are human beings operating at higher amplitude. Whatever exists in ordinary proportions elsewhere grows louder where money and influence accumulate.
Proximity clarifies. It does not necessarily darken the world. It removes the lighting effects.
Which brings us to the latest waves of outrage surrounding the Epstein files. Documents surface. Associations reappear. Reputations tremble. The reaction is enormous, almost ritual in its intensity. Before going further, one point must remain fixed: exploitation is not a philosophical abstraction. It is harm. Harm requires moral clarity.
But the shock many now express tells its own story.
If revelations about elite networks produce total disillusionment, it is worth asking what belief was in place beforehand. Disillusionment is not spontaneous. It is the collapse of an expectation, often an unexamined one: that extreme success refines character, that visibility implies virtue, that those who rise far above the crowd must be made of sturdier material.
These were always fragile assumptions.
Societies polish their elites into symbols. Wealth becomes shorthand for discipline. Influence is mistaken for wisdom. Philanthropy is read as proof of inner architecture. A mythology forms quietly, then hardens. When scandal strikes, the statue shatters and the public reacts as if something unprecedented has occurred.
Nothing unprecedented has occurred. Exposure feels dramatic because projection was strong.
Power does not sanctify. It amplifies. Ambition expands. Blind spots widen. The radius of consequence grows. At altitude, the air thins and the margin for error shrinks, but the human material remains the same.
It is tempting to reduce this to a story about monsters at the top. That version restores psychological order. Evil acquires an address. We condemn it and reassure ourselves that we stand elsewhere.
Reality is less consoling. Elite circles are dense environments built from alliances, convenience, mutual advantage, strategic silence, and occasionally genuine friendship. People cross paths through banks, foundations, conferences, political initiatives, boards. Over years, the web thickens. From the outside, moral proximity and operational proximity blur into one indistinct mass.
This is not a defense. It is a description of how ecosystems form.
The public theater of scandal serves a function. It allows collective moral release. But the traits we recoil from in amplified form are not imported from another species. They belong to ours. The scale changes. The material does not.
Montaigne returned repeatedly to this point: self-knowledge begins when we abandon the fantasy that we are fundamentally different from those we judge. Examine any life closely enough and irregularities appear. Not equivalence, not symmetry, but continuity of human substance.
This recognition does not excuse predation. It prevents moral seriousness from resting on fairy tales about spotless hierarchies.
Societies will rebuild workable forms of trust after each rupture. They always do. What fades is reverence. Awe cools. Deference becomes harder to command. That is not decay. It is adulthood.
Having seen power from nearby, I cannot say the world became more dangerous. It became more recognizable. I saw capability, vanity, calculation, and at times deliberate harm. I saw what human beings are capable of.
Perhaps that is the real invitation hidden inside every scandal: not to collapse into cynicism, but to relinquish the need for illusions altogether.
Carry no illusions about the powerful.
But carry none about yourself either.