The 2019 death of Jeffrey Epstein and the cultural reaction to it will go down as one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of our already bewildering age. It is the kind of thing that historians will later use to introduce books and book chapters as an illustrative example for what they want to discuss, which I realize is in fact what I am doing at this precise moment. Here we had a man of great wealth connected to some of our most elite institutions from Wall Street to Harvard University, who was also implicated in crimes of the most unspeakable sorts, and died while in the custody of our criminal justice system under circumstances that beggar belief. Epstein, it appeared, knew everyone, but nobody would admit they knew him. It all seemed too perfect.
The most fascinating part of it, though, was the near instant memeification of the affair. “Epstein didn’t kill himself” became an absurdist punchline despite its connection to a very dark way to pass from this world. Most important, however, is that in this rare cultural moment, you could question the accepted narrative – that Epstein really did take his own life – without being written off immediately as a crank conspiracist only briefly taking a break from hocking gold investments and UFO-landing hypotheses. The way in which authorities explained Epstein’s death seemed so absurd that to think it true required no more willing suspension of disbelief than to think a conspiracy afoot. When the criminal justice system relies on the explanation of “yes, we actually are this incompetent,” they practically invite conspiracy theories
If the official story of Epstein’s death appeared so implausible, it was not only because the known facts of the case themselves did not seem believable. It was also because the institutions charged with bringing him to justice had already so thoroughly riddled their own credibility with holes. I do not think I exaggerate when I say that police and criminal justice agencies have not exactly covered themselves with glory in the last few years. When the FBI politicizes its own investigative powers in the way that it has for the reasons that it has, and when it becomes clear that those who sit at the top of our social hierarchy do not have to follow the same rules as the rest of us – Hillary Clinton anyone? – it is small wonder their credibility goes down the toilet faster than an incriminating document at a company about to be investigated by the SEC. And when Americans increasingly think they cannot trust the media to tell them the truth about the world, their credibility collapses as well. Epstein, incidentally, kept a coterie of associates comprised of individuals as wide-ranging as Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Lawrence Krauss, Steven Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, and Harvey Weinstein. I find a strange poetry in Epstein’s cozy relationship with so many of the institutions that have become so weak in recent years, from government, to media, to higher education, to the media.
It should also surprise nobody that scarcely anybody in the nation’s cultural elite has learned any lessons from this. Among the most phenomenally stupid events in an admittedly target-rich epoch is the declaration that defying social distancing in the interest of protesting white supremacy was legitimate because white supremacy is itself a public health risk. I am not an epidemiologist, and I do not even play one on a limited series available for streaming only on Hulu, but I am as confident as I am in anything in my belief that viruses do not care about what cause drives you to protest. Either gathering in public poses a public health risk or it doesn’t, and while people may not always exercise wise judgment, they are smart enough to know when their self-appointed betters try to play them for fools. People notice when the authorities hold a politically relevant gathering to one standard and a private funeral to another. People readily perceive the pecking order of cultural priorities, and they rapidly learn and resent when they discover their low place on it. To all public health “experts” who have worsened this problem we can only say “physician, heal thyself.”
If our public health authorities get only the amount of respect they deserve, we ought to accord the same to journalists. No outlet that thinks the number of ice cream scoops the president eats stands out as something worthy of public attention can lay any serious claim to operating in the public interest. When the press runs a smear campaign on students who happened to find themselves in front of the wrong camera a the wrong time, they cannot say that truth really guides their endeavors. When our national press organs give soft treatment to representatives of one party and subject representatives of the other to repeated colonoscopies, they cannot claim non-partisanship. Those who behave like partisan actors ought to accustom themselves to treatment as such. If their audiences no longer take them seriously as impartial umpires, for journalists to inquire what went wrong with the American public is to ask the wrong question. The media’s credibility crisis is coming from inside the house.
This crisis has replicated across institutions, from organized religion to the academy. Sadly, we live in an age calculated almost perfectly to generate a crisis in institutional credibility. At a time when we are quite literally plagued by a public health crisis of historical proportions, when the world looks less stable than it recently has, when a powerful nation with interests opposed to our own looks poised to assert itself, when national unity looks tenuous at best, and when people believe more and more that the economy no longer serves them, we need now more than ever institutions we can count on to mediate and solve these crises. Instead, we have self-interested, time-serving partisans whose only loyalties lie in the next paycheck and the next news cycle. What is worse, our elites do not even seem to care that the crisis exists beyond its immediate effects on them. The crisis to them is not that our institutions no longer fulfill their purpose in society, but that the rest of us are questioning their authority. What we find now is a crisis testing all of our institutions, and most of them are failing. I do not know what the way out is, but I do know one thing. In world history, things are generally pretty stable until all of the sudden, they aren’t. We are in the now the clause that precedes the comma in the history book after which everything gets really bad. Perhaps we can navigate our way out of the next crisis, but we presently lack the cultural capital to do this because our institutions, most definitely, have killed themselves.