The Epstein Files and the Limits of Conspiracy Theory

These days I am diligently working on a book about propaganda. Meanwhile, I keep one eye on the news surrounding the Epstein files. That news appears in the margins of the book I am writing; it tries to force its way from the margins into the text, like a Real object seeking recognition and rest in words.

Over the past week I wandered through the work of Walter Lippmann, in particular Public Opinion, published in 1922. Lippmann won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is regarded by many as the most influential journalist of the twentieth century. It is characteristic of our culture that this celebrated journalist was at the same time also a propagandist. During the First World War he worked, among other things, for the propaganda campaign of George Creel, charged with mobilizing American public opinion for war.

I present here one specific passage from Lippmann’s work, a passage that resonates strikingly with the reality that the Epstein files now bring before our eyes:

“The powerful, socially superior, successful, rich, urban social set is fundamentally international throughout the western hemisphere, and in many ways London is its center. It counts among its membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it does the diplomatic set, high finance, the upper circles of the army and the navy, some princes of the church, a few great newspaper proprietors, their wives and mothers and daughters who wield the scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real social set. But its importance comes from the fact that here at last the distinction between public and private affairs practically disappears. The private affairs of this set are public matters, and public matters are its private, often its family affairs.”
(Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 29)

Lippmann - hardly an anti-establishment thinker - describes a world governed by a small social organism of families for whom private and public interests largely coincide. The world is run by them as their private enterprise. Huxley likewise saw global society evolving in this direction: an oligarchy that, assisted by an army of “mind manipulators,” rules under the banner of ultimate democracy.

All the subcultures named by Lippmann appear in the Epstein files: the diplomatic-political world (Clinton, Trump), high finance (J.P. Morgan, the Rothschilds), high military and intelligence circles (CIA, Mossad), religious authorities (including representatives of the Vatican Bank), the academic world (Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky), owners of newspapers and media outlets (Robert Maxwell), and their wives and daughters who function as a kind of ceremonial masters (Ghislaine Maxwell). It is remarkable how accurately Lippmann, in 1922, described the international organism that is now, a century later, being pulled out from society’s shadows. Perhaps only the spiritual world remains to be added to the list: Deepak Chopra, the Dalai Lama.

Let us state this immediately: the mere appearance of a name in the Epstein files means very little in itself. It is entirely possible for someone to be mentioned once or several times without any involvement in the criminal activities orchestrated by Epstein.

Do the Epstein files reveal a grand conspiracy? The Ghent psychiatrist Joseph Guislain argued that one can only understand the human being by knowing l’envers du décor. Put differently: human beings hide behind façades, live in appearances, and “constantly erase their own traces.” This is not a privilege of the elite; it is a structural feature of being human. We hide our shortcomings from the Other, hope the Other does not see them, lose ourselves in who we want to be but are not (yet). We spin our masks so diligently that we no longer recognize our true face in the mirror, and spend our entire lives haunted by the question: Who am I?

Proponents of conspiracy theory will rightly note that many facts they tried to draw attention to for decades - facts for which they were derided as “conspiracy thinkers” - are now becoming openly visible through the Epstein files. In that sense, conspiracy theory is right: a relatively small group of people steers the world and bends it to its will.

At the same time, the Epstein files show the limits of thinking in terms of conspiracies. They do not reveal a tightly knit secret group executing a master plan; rather, they expose a steaming dung heap hidden behind the polished public images of (part of) the social elite - a subculture driven by the lowest human instincts, one that has withdrawn itself from all control and symbolic castration by the law.

Some will object that at a higher level there is strict planning. Epstein, they say, was merely a small fry, obedient to intelligence services such as the CIA or Mossad, which in turn are instruments in the hands of the real world elite. I believe that even at that level the degree of planning is structurally overestimated. The Church Committee of the mid-1970s is instructive here: it did not uncover a grand conspiracy within the CIA, but a chaotic assemblage of rival services and cells competing for resources and prestige, often barely aware of what the others were doing. What united them above all was an almost complete absence of legal and ethical limits in their struggle against “godless communism.” During this Cold War they warmed themselves liberally with whisky and Cointreau; sexual drives were indulged in projects such as Operation Midnight Climax; drugs were traded and consumed in abundance; and under MK-Ultra human beings were tortured to death in grotesque and pointless “experiments” in the search for a ‘truth serum’. All the things one apparently must do to defeat godless communism.

The Epstein files constitute a cultural tipping point—a structural moment. We find ourselves at a point where human relationships at the top of society have been hollowed out to such an extent that they can no longer sustain appearances. To maintain appearances, a minimum of love is required. Within a social group, members’ shortcomings are normally covered “with a mantle of love.” Cyclists observe omertà when one of them is accused of doping. High society is no exception: it preserves its collective image toward the outside world for as long as possible. When love between individuals in a group has almost entirely disappeared, the protective maintenance of appearances collapses as soon as someone gets into trouble.

That the Epstein files become public at all is therefore not primarily the result of a “limited hangout” or a strategic sacrifice, but rather the outcome of a mass-psychological process. Totalitarian structures extract love from human bonds and transform it into collective narcissism. In doing so, they ultimately destroy their own capacity to uphold appearances, and the dirty laundry falls out from behind the curtain. Social media ensure that this dirty laundry becomes visible to the entire world. Traditional media report sparingly and selectively on the files, as they have done for centuries: they select and censor according to the public opinion they seek to shape. Current mechanisms of online censorship are hardly sufficient anymore; the only solution will soon be to restrict access to social media - first for children, later for anyone with too low a social credit score. This, too, will not reassure High Society. Somewhere it realizes that its attempts at total control are doomed to fail. In its transhumanist and technocratic hubris it is, above all, desperate, staring with dulled eyes into a universe it has reduced to a machine that rattles on meaninglessly and lifelessly in an empty cosmos.

What can we know?

What can we truly conclude from the published Epstein files? This Kantian question is asked far too rarely. It already requires considerable effort to distinguish which documents are authentic and which are forged. For instance, an email circulates in which Epstein asks whether the plan to start the Third World War on February 8, 2026 is still in force. The stated sending date - Thursday, July 17, 2018 - does not exist. This email is fabricated, like much of the material currently circulating under the label of the Epstein files.

In other cases, the forgery is more subtle. This epistemic confusion is exacerbated by the fact that AI platforms often classify authentic documents as false. This may be related to training processes in which “conspiratorial” content is reflexively labeled as “disinformation.” There circulates an email in which Epstein states that he has “met many bad people, but never anyone as bad as Trump.” ChatGPT initially labeled this email as fake, but it is real. The next question, then, is: what can we conclude from this email? What does it mean if Epstein considers someone the worst person in the world? Does Epstein’s moral judgment suddenly become a valid reference?

What does it mean that figures such as Putin or the Dalai Lama are mentioned frequently? What do we make of unsent emails in which Epstein claims that Bill Gates contracted an STD and requested medication to secretly mix into the food of his - perhaps infected - wife? Why should that not be a fabricated blackmail construction? What is the status of anonymous messages in the files about strangled and burned girls allegedly buried on Epstein’s estate, or of claims that Epstein was trained as an Israeli spy?

In many respects the Epstein files form a suggestive, nebulous world in which everyone recognizes the figures and shapes of their own prejudices. This reinforces the conviction that only one’s own opinion is legitimate, adds a few more stones to the wall separating people from one another, increases frustration and aggression, generates fear, and fuels the demand for security and control. In this way, “wild” interpretations of the Epstein files primarily accelerate the movement toward the surveillance state.

If the Epstein files merely unleash a witch hunt against “the elite,” they are not a moment of truth. The files do not reveal only the pathology of an elite; they expose a symptom of an entire society. Shares in the arms industry, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Surveillance sell briskly, and porn websites attract massive audiences. Who is willing to pay double the price for clothing not produced by slave labor, or for food grown without saturating the earth with pesticides? That the banking system is perverse and transforms society into a kind of slave plantation - I agree. But how many people do you know who withdraw their money from banks and convert it into, say, physical gold and silver?

Is everyone equally perverse and equally guilty? Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell recruited girls as young as fourteen under the guise of “massages” that led to sexual abuse. They threatened them, confiscated passports, and coerced them into sexual acts. This is not about one or a few cases; it concerns hundreds of victims. They were offered to celebrities from the artistic, academic, spiritual, and business worlds, who gave them “lessons” in sexuality; they were forced to perform sexual acts with one another for an audience, and so on. This is roughly what we know so far, but it is more than likely that reality is grayer and darker still.

The materialistic worldview harbors a contempt for ethics and opens the path to the top of the social dung heap especially wide for those willing to throw all ethics overboard. At the very least we can say this: the imagery and symbolism emerging from the discourse of the Epstein files come from the darkest regions of the human psyche; the elite does what the population can only fantasize about in its darkest thoughts. Thus the Highest Society indeed becomes the Lowest Society.

Mattias