Epstein’s Special Theory of Relativity

In a class today, I amused an otherwise rather muted set of students when, by accident, while expounding a general theory of politics, and meaning to refer to ‘Einstein’s theory of relativity’, I said, “Epstein’s theory of relativity.” Laughter. I added: “You know what I’ve just been reading about.” Indeed, just before the class, I had just been in my office reading through Michael Wolff’s interesting “whitewash” (as one of the commentators below-the-line put it) of Jeffrey Epstein in the Daily Sceptic. So, in the spirit of not letting a good accident go to waste, let me outline Epstein’s special theory of relativity. Special, not general. Oddly enough, it takes a familiar form:

E = mc²

• where E = the amount of effective executive energy added to your stock by Epstein
• m = the number of million dollars you possess multiplied by your eminence
• c = the conviviality constant

Explanations of the terms:

• E. The amount of effective energy is measured in ‘episteins’. These are a bit like epicycles (defined in the dictionary as “a small circle whose centre moves round the circumference of a larger one”), as your episteins inevitably mean you are forever destined to have your reputation move around the circumference of Epstein’s reputation.
• m. The number of million dollars you possess is important. But this alone is not ‘m’. For it is multiplied by an eminence factor: measured in units called ‘eminems’, this relates to how famous you are, or how powerful. Now, political power, new style, counts for quite a lot (hence Mandelson), but political power, titled but retired, old style, counts for quite a lot too (hence Andrew). Your ‘m’ number is your millions multiplied by your eminence. It is not enough to be a Thiel or a Gates: one can be almost penniless but if one is considered to count then one’s eminem count increases, and overcomes the disadvantage of lacking the millions or billions. In the case of Sarah Ferguson and Noam Chomsky a lack of millions was more than made up for in the magnitude of eminems.
• c. The conviviality constant is the maximum amount of pleasure – measured in benthons (named after Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher) – achievable in a maximum environment of exquisite food, expensive massages, travel by private jet, exclusive male company (limited to film directors, Nobel Prize winners, tech billionaires, Ivy League university presidents, CEOs of major banks, cash-strapped royals, grifting politicians and some opportunistic ideas grifters), and experience of women limited to some few knowing hangers-on and enablers plus many spritely and helpful and sometimes handy or should I say handfully young beauties. Normally, for anyone else, any other host, the conviviality constant ‘c’ would not be squared: but, though no one can explain why or how, for Epstein it was always squared. It is only Epstein’s special theory of relativity that has the squared constant. (Otherwise it would be a general theory.)

No one else was quite like Epstein.

Wolff’s piece made me think. I mean, one hears the standard argument, which is simple, stunning and short – paedophile, billionaires, corruption, crime, suicide – and one immediately switches on one’s primitive-sophisticated MeToo moral horror sensor and starts warming up the room or the pages of the Guardian with one’s invective. There was one very amusing piece in the Guardian last Saturday, with the headline, ‘Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club’, by the wonderfully named Amelia Gentleman. Gentleman by name, er, Gentleman by nature? No, for this article complained about the exclusion of Ladies like Gentleman from this Gentleman’s Club.

The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.

Some might be tempted to dismiss the Epstein files as just evidence of the extreme behaviour of a prolific sex offender.

But strip away the lewd and crude content, and they also reveal much about how patriarchy works day to day.

Somehow the women have not yet learned that they cannot expect to sit at the table. The women cannot have their own preferences; the women must always be ready to dance.

Well, if I understand Gentleman correctly, then she wants women to have been accepted as equals at Epstein’s table. Men are rich and powerful, women are not ­– and, er, glass ceiling, representation, call Ofcom, they should be, let’s tell Jeffrey that from now on if he is to have a private flight there have to be an equal number of boring and staid middle-aged and sexually-unscrupulous mover-and-shaker women as men. Damn it: I want some Tennessee Williams youngster who looks like Marlon Brando aged officially 18 but actually [redacted], to massage me and give me a happy ending. Jack shack? Where’s my rub-a-dub-dub lab? my frot plot? my frig rig?

Excuse, dear reader of the Daily Sceptic, this colossal loss of taste. But our palates jade soon with all this rich fare and have to adapt.

And I haven’t yet got to what struck me about Wolff’s piece on Epstein. Yes, it was a whitewash, of sorts; but it was also one sort of true representation: a representation of one slice of Epstein’s life, in fact several slices. Not the island, and not the underage girls shipped in: but a lot of the rest, and especially the following interesting details.

1) Epstein evidently worked hard, in a windowless room in his New York mansion, endlessly offering his advice to all manner important people with social, political and economic problems, from investment to management. And his work had a point. Wolff explains:

Epstein’s long-time business thesis is that the rich know very little about money. They may know about their own businesses, but the great sums that are the result are an ultimate afterthought and demand an entirely different sort of intellectual discipline.

So Epstein evidently did have a theory, at least, a special theory of billionaires. If his advice to those lower down the dollarchain (like Wolff) was how to make more; his advice to those at the top of the dollarchain was how to get rid of what they had, without wasting it, upsetting the wife, damaging the children etc. These and other precepts, to be published later, obviously struck the extremely rich and influential as brilliant, decisive, necessary, and he made himself something of a Grand Vizier of Management. It was probably one-10th tech-whizzery and nine-10th old-style-voodoo-and-shaman-stuff: come in, big man, smoke this, sleep with my wife, ach, I have others, she’s not actually my wife, who needs wives, the smoke clusters, the conspiracy tastes of tobacco, here are the statistics, the ‘quants’, did you hear about Clinton, etc.

2. Epstein was frank about his sexual tastes. No wives. He said he would rather go to jail. No children, obviously. So he was entirely aesthetic or therapeutic about sex: and this meant young women and prostitutes and massages and secretaries; and he also seems to have been, if the ‘victims’ are to be believed, not just aesthetic or therapeutic about sex, but a bit sadistic, coercive, tyrannical about it too, and incessant, or factory-style: expecting the girls to work him the way Chaplin worked those bolts in Modern Times. Wolff speculates that the first part of this – the bit Epstein did not attempt to hide – was all something of an affront to anyone even slightly puritanical, especially if sexual puritanism was allied to Piketty contempt for the privileged rich. This seems to have been the attitude of some people to Epstein all along, of others after his spell in jail in 2008, and, in the case of some others, they felt no disgust or disdain or anything until Epstein’s reputation became an abyss plus whirlpool plus quicksand plus time machine and then they suddenly had to express the disgust and disdain that they had never felt but now felt it expedient to confess. I apologise to the victims, and all that.

This is all interesting, of course; and I think it explains two-thirds of our substantial interest in Epstein. The other third is the crime-cum-conspiracy angle. The angle where we ask: why were the files taken? Why were the files hidden? Why were the files released? Why were the files redacted? Was the cide ‘sui‘ or ‘homi‘? How much actual criminality was there? Wolff says that procuring women, even minors, is not much of a crime usually. So there is the question about why the FBI decided to overlook the plea deal of 2008 or whenever it was and keep investigating. Yes, it might have been the girls. But usually the girls are the most expendable thing. And even the 2019 arrest was in relation to much earlier alleged crimes. It is all very unclear. It is unclear whether Epstein was the conspirator, or whether he was conspired against.

But it seems to me that the current interest in him is just as suspicious as the things he did in the first place. Can it all be explained by silly prurience, fascination and hypocrisy? We have to ask the great question that echoes down the centuries: qui bono?

Even if no answer to that question is forthcoming, we can be sure that the posthumous fate of Epstein is to have become vastly more famous dead than he ever was alive. His reputation has soured and soared at the same time: a rare thing. He is almost unique in history in this regard. Yes, somehow our age managed to be entirely original. Well done to the century for that.

And whatever the truth of Epstein’s special theory of relativity, of E = mc², there is no question that ‘episteins’ do resemble epicycles in that every billionaire or royal or academic who prospered somehow from Epstein’s conviviality constant, in being blessed with many benthons, in having generated for them so much more ‘E’ than they originally had, has now and forever ended up cycling or circling around the great tragic and triumphant and probably badly misunderstood figure of Epstein. Wolff is very good on how Epstein was too insouciant about the side-effects of fame and notoriety: simply out of his depth. He had no idea. Epstein became of much more interest to the FBI once he was close to Clinton. If he had known what was waiting for him, he would not have returned to America in 2019.

It is a tawdry tale, full of sound and fury, probably signifying nothing, but it is still a morality tale for the age: and it is absolutely necessary, if we are reading about this at all, to consider exactly what it was that made Epstein something of a keystone or linchpin in the whirling sands of the rich and famous.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.