The Epstein Distraction
The most corrosive effect of the Epstein obsession is not what it reveals, but what it immobilizes. The story functions as narrative glue. Once attention sticks to it, it does not move. Moral energy circulates in a closed loop of outrage that feels like awareness but operates as paralysis. People believe they are looking behind the curtain. In practice, they are kept busy staring at a single scene replayed without end.
Epstein no longer operates as a historical case. He has become a Rorschach test. What people see in him tells us more about their psychology than about the structure of power itself. Some see proof of elite cabals. Others see confirmation that all institutions are rotten beyond repair. Some see moral apocalypse. Others see a convenient villain, a vessel into which anger can be poured without consequence. The same inkblot, endlessly reinterpreted.
That is why the story never resolves. Rorschach figures do not lead to conclusions. They absorb projection. Fear, disgust, resentment, envy, helplessness are poured into a single symbolic container. Once deposited there, these emotions no longer need to be worked through or redirected. They circulate safely, producing a feeling of moral engagement while quietly draining attention from realities that would require sustained, uncomfortable focus.
The dynamic is reinforced by the Bond-villain fantasy. Epstein is framed as an anomaly, a singular monster operating outside the normal logic of power. This preserves the comforting illusion that the system itself is fundamentally sound and only occasionally contaminated. In reality, he was almost certainly not a mastermind but a functionary. A node. Someone useful to people who never appear in the foreground. Intelligence entanglements, leverage games, compromised social networks among the wealthy. None of this is exceptional. It is the background hum.
Power has never been clean. Extreme wealth combined with insulation from consequences produces excess. Sex, cruelty, boredom-driven transgression, moral decay. This is not moralizing. It is observation. What shocked people was not the discovery of corruption, but the public rupture of the illusion that corruption is rare.
What ends careers and lives in these systems is not immorality but liability. Epstein did not fall because he was evil. He fell because he stopped being controllable. Systems tolerate a great deal of ugliness as long as it remains contained. When containment fails, the liability is cut loose. That is how power manages risk.
The hysteria surrounding Epstein obscures this logic rather than clarifying it. If one were to dissect almost any powerful figure deeply enough, some form of ugliness would emerge. Not necessarily the same acts or victims, but fingerprints would be there. Power leaves traces. Pretending otherwise is childish. Even ordinary lives, examined aggressively enough and amplified by incentivized testimony, can be rendered morally indictable. This does not excuse crimes. It dissolves the fantasy that monsters are a separate species. They are not. They are humans with insulation.
The selectivity of attention reveals the deeper function of the obsession. While Western media fixates endlessly on Epstein, teenage prostitution and systemic sexual exploitation in the global South remain background noise. Normalized. Economized. Forgotten. No ritual outrage. No permanent spotlight. Because those realities implicate supply chains, tourism, governments, NGOs, and comfortable lives. Epstein is safe outrage. Structural exploitation is not.
This is how the Rorschach operates politically. By concentrating moral attention on a single symbolic figure, it allows vast ongoing harms to fade from view. Ethical energy is absorbed by scandal while living systems of exploitation continue, quietly and profitably, in the present.
That is why the story drags on. It is useful. It personalizes what should be structural. It turns power into gossip. It allows people to feel awake while remaining strategically blind. While attention stays glued to a corpse, other games continue. They always do.
The obscenity is not that Epstein existed. It is that he has become a mirror in which society examines its own fears instead of the machinery that keeps producing such figures. Outrage is not the problem. Direction is. And as long as moral attention remains fixed on the inkblot, the machinery will keep running, unnoticed, uninterrupted, and intact.