The clinical definition of a psychopath is someone who not only lacks an internal moral compass, but is categorically dependent on others for their judgment, and chooses to rebel against it. The psychopath experiences life, norms and the social order as constraints they must release themself from, but the satisfaction doesn’t come from the release from the norms, but from the act of rebellion. The defiance itself is the meaning and purpose. The kind of defiance that as much as possible, breaks the specific norms the society tries to uphold. The kind of norms that can be bent to the joy, not necessarily the advantage, of the psychopath.

Jeffrey Epstein and the individuals around him chose to enact the specific types of crimes committed because these crimes bent the social norms of their community, the Anglo-American, Protestant social order. The act of prostituting the underaged and to subject them to lab experiments unwillingly aimed to defy the norms of the nuclear family, erase the agency of the victims and to deny them their humanity through an systematic funnel. The sexual gratification were the bait to lure participants in, but the goal were to enact the scene of defiance against social norms.

The presentation below, by Sam Vaknin inspired me to frame my blog post. In the video, he narrates the psychopathological mechanism and the motives of the psychopath, and why Jeffrey Epstein had a compulsion of criminality, despite of his apparent success in the fields of business and international relations. The same motives also explain his compulsion of corruption and bending the rules in his trade.

The tragedy in Jeffrey Epstein’s case has in my opinion less to do with an individual psychopath who used his leverage over influential people to commit crime and to defy social norms for the sake of defiance alone, a rebel without a cause. Inside all of us lives a little rebel, and rebellion against social norms, sexual restrictions and business practices can be a net positive, if the rebellion has a higher purpose and the suffering of others is minimized. Psychopaths don’t have that kind of internal moral compass. The tragedy is that when psychopathy and amoral judgment broadly takes hold in the ruling classes of a society, the culture itself becomes poisoned and the society drifts towards tyranny. The belief of “might makes right” only goes so far as the physical constraints set by nature and the socio-economic constraints set by the society, or the socio-political constraints set by rival groups let the tyrant run wild. The story of Lucifer as the fallen angel who rebelled against the divine order is an allegory of this very phenomenon: the illusions of grandeur taken too far and the rebellion against the reality becoming the sole purpose of being, inevitably leading to fall from grace.

The lesson in Jeffrey Epstein’s story lies in our own executive function

What’s the moral of the story? Sex? fine, I guess. As long as you do it with consenting adults and try to not hurt other people, have all the fun you can get. Teenagers are still learning this stuff, so let them receive their education first. Drugs? don’t expose yourself and others to health hazards, but it’s your body, your choice. Rock n’ Roll? business has rules, and to be specific the rule against conflicting interest applies in all transactions. The regulator cannot regulate itself, and the business transaction has nothing to do with friendships. Now that this is out of the way..

The excesses of the Western society, specifically those of the business elite, the academia, the media establishment and those of the intelligence community or state-adjacent strategic sectors, if not properly regulated, are in the grave danger of falling into self-reinforcing autocracy resembling feudal societies where the castle-owner had absolute power over their serfs, and they could raid the serfs of the neighboring castle-owner and use them as chattel slaves. This is the story of the Dark Ages, after the Fall of Rome, not unique to the European tradition, but seen in every collapsing society throughout human history. A ruling class becoming self-righteous and above the law, enacting their defiance on the poor and the downtrodden until the social fabric itself lets go and the society collapses on its own absurdity. These forces operate in the human psyche, so they may take root in any of the social institutions that loses their accountability. This institution then becomes the rot that eventually kills the host.

Rebellions and revolutions, when successful, may temporarily heal the rot, but risk exposing the damaged social body to its renewal. Failed rebellions simply embody the rot again and re-enact it under a new branding.

The therapy that seems to work seems to be on one hand high individual agency and thus freedom, but strong civic education and strong institutional norms. Constraints that are loose within the bounds of the society’s norms but challenging them becomes exponentially more expensive requiring constantly more thorough explanation, as the exception is a further outlier. A healthy society tolerates exceptions, as long as they can explain their reason of being, and whether the exception is harmful or harmless. Applying this logic may help.