It feels like reading “The Possibility of an Island" by Michel Houellebecq. If Balzac chronicled the rise and fall of the mercantile bourgeoisie, Houellebecq has become the cynical and disenchanted singer-the anatomist-of a West in dissolution and destined for a sort of perennial adolescence.
The novel tells of a sect that builds an isolated society around sexual hedonism, cloning, and the search for immortality. Epstein was familiar with the novel and recommended it, as a good student of transhumanism. Epstein was not just a reader of the book: he was its missed protagonist. He had an island; he wanted immortality through science and to clone himself through the girls he recruited. When the police knocked on his door, the novel was interrupted.
But the world Houellebecq describes has continued without him, and now we read the chronicle of that decaying world.
The Epstein scandal is not a matter of right or left: it is a “matter of class," as the English journalist Mary Harrington explains. It involves an upper class that speaks the same language, frequents the same salons and islands, uses the same jets, has the same offshore accounts, and above all, shares the same fear: that of being forced to live the life they have imposed on others. An elite that no longer believes in anything except its own perpetuation.
Bankers, lawyers, politicians, music and movie stars. And scientists, such as the great Stephen Hawking, but also Ehud Barak, the Israeli son of a kibbutz who ended up counting money at the top of Tel Aviv’s most prestigious building, the Akirov Towers. There were also unexpected guests, such as Joanna Rubinstein, the Swedish director of the UN refugee agency (always watch out for humanitarians).
Gerard Baker, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, explains in today’s London Times: “They are a perfectly assembled representative sample of the elites who have exercised a decisive influence on our lives". He is right.
The Epstein files contain many documents that could just be rumors and defamation. Anti-Semites see a Jewish conspiracy; Atlanticists see a Russian plot. And everyone else sees conspiracies within conspiracies, like a matryoshka doll. Drawing inspiration from Roman orgies, which accelerated the fall of Rome due to its decadence, some imagine Putin would have orchestrated Epstein’s orgies to realize his dream: to annihilate the West. That is too much, even for the former KGB.
If I had to find a common thread in this sordid story, gossip and sexual abuse aside, it is the contempt for democracy. What Epstein’s emails reveal is more than a scandal: it is the state of the Western world. A globalized aristocracy, without land or homeland, held together by money, sex, blackmail, and privilege, living above the law and suffrage-made of leaders who are nothing more than employees, docile intermediaries of a power that no longer needs them.
A world foreign to democracy, yet compromised up to its neck in the collapse of the West.
Now everyone is trying to turn the revelations into a scandal against their enemies. But it is clear that, at the level Epstein operated, political “parties" were not real. Epstein associated with the right as much as the left; Steve Bannon as Karp and Kathy Ruemmler, now at Goldman Sachs and a former advisor to Barack Obama. And then Trump and Clinton. There was also the former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, from the committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize. I think he is the most pathetic figure in the scandal.
Then there are Epstein’s relationships with the French cultural elite. One name above all: Jack Lang, mentioned 685 times in the correspondence, ten years as Minister of Culture, as many at the Ministry of Education, intellectual, socialist, worldly icon, today head of the Arab World Institute in Paris. Lang is the same person who signed an appeal in Libération, in which heavyweights of French culture asked to lower the age of sexual consent to 12.
Among the signatories were poet Louis Aragon, semiologist Roland Barthes, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, psychoanalysts Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, psychology pioneer Françoise Dolto, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Anyone who knows anything about French culture should be left speechless.
Few remember Le Figaro describing an extraordinary evening: “Dozens of guests crowded into Place de l’Étoile, at the Hotel Landolfo Carcano, headquarters of the Qatar embassy. In the gold-paneled rooms with mosaics and frescoes, His Excellence Mohamed al-Kuwari honored cartoonist Jean Plantu and Amirouche Laïdi, president of the Averroes club, with the ‘Doha Arab Cultural Capital’ award. The ambassador rewarded André Miquel (famous Arabist of the Collège de France), Dominique Baudis (writer), Bernard Noël (famous art critic), and the poet Adonis. From former Minister of Culture Jack Lang to the founder of Nouvel Observateur Jean Daniel, everyone left with a check for 10,000 euros".
An evening like that, neither Epstein nor Houellebecq could have organized.
Epstein was not a solitary monster. He was a facilitator. A maître d’hôtel of nothingness. He organized the banquet for elites who no longer hungered for anything except confirmation that the rules do not apply to them. A nihilistic superclass of transnational kleptocrats whose acolytes-served by Epstein in this occult market that seems straight out of the intellectual hallucinations of ‘68 philosophers-operated, and still operate, at a level where political principles simply have no role, let alone moral or spiritual ones.
While those in Epstein’s circle discussed cryogenics and artificial wombs, the rest of the West was filling up with another kind of flesh-that which arrives on immigration boats, with the blessing of many participants in the Epstein affair. European suburbs have become the mirror image of the Caribbean island: not an erotic paradise, but a hell of gang rapes, stabbings, and girls who can no longer walk alone at night.
There is no longer a distinction between paradise for the few and hell for everyone: it is just one large submerged continent. And there is a powerful group of people making this future a reality.
Meanwhile, Michel Houellebecq warns this week that, more than an island, our possibility is “civil war". When the definitive novel on the collapse of Western civilization is written, Little Saint James island must find a place in a special chapter. Houellebecq is right: after the island, only the possibility of war remains. And the one I fear most is the one the West has declared against itself.