A Dam Smith was the moral philosopher who helped invent modern capitalism. In his major work, Theory of Moral Sentiments, written in 1759, he wrote: “The great source of both misery and unrest in human life seems to lie in overestimating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Greed exaggerates the difference between poverty and wealth, ambition that between a private and a public position, vanity that between obscurity and great renown. He who is under the influence of one of these exaggerated passions is not only unhappy in his actual situation, but often inclined to disturb the peace of society in order to achieve that which he so foolishly admires.”
According to Smith’s second major work, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, published exactly 250 years ago in the year of the American Declaration of Independence, capitalism can therefore be seen as a system of morality. The society he creates must be measured by the question of whose “excessive passions” drive people to disturb the peace of others.
Virginia Giuffre, for example, who killed herself on April 25, 2025a few months before her book “Nobody’s Girl” was published, in which she reported, among other things, how she was discovered in 2001 in Donald Trump’s haunted Mar-a-Lago mansion by the always grinning Jeffrey Epstein and his playmate Ghislaine Maxwell. She was the right material, young, pretty, vulnerable. She had her first relationship Andrew, the younger brother of the British King Charles III.a Cinderella of the neoliberal age.
Because the quarter century that the Epstein saga spans, this horror story that unfolds with ever new emails and photos of barefoot billionaires in Bermuda shorts depraved elite of nobility, money, politics and technologyis the quarter century in which the teachings of Adam Smith were finally perverted into ideology.
The nonchalance with which those who associated with convicted sex criminal Epstein brushed off and brushed away the legality or illegality of his actions remains striking. So what is at the core of the story of the Epstein Files, which appear like the raw material of a novel in the Tiktok age in millions of hacked-up emails from the powerful and the immoral?
Is it the question of what influence Jeffrey Epstein, whose wealth is still difficult to explain (blackmail is suspected), had on the men who turned to him in the friendship and love they expressed? Or is it a question of what world these men lived in that made them think they could do whatever they wanted?
We need a moral revolution, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman recently said in four lectures he gave for the BBC – Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Saint James island would be something like a Sun King’s Versailles in the virtual age, where men who built an increasingly speculative and unreal world committed very real crimes. These are men like Leon Black, who made billions with his private equity firm Apollo Global Management, Bill Clinton or Donald Trump’s current trade secretary, Harold Lutnick, who maintained contact with Epstein long after his conviction in 2006.
The rot of elites is real – and it is effective
This conviction was “the deal of a lifetime,” as he put it Miami Herald said: Epstein was accused of organized sex with some 14-year-old girls and women and not only got off very lightly with 13 months in prison – the deal essentially excluded future investigations and was intended to be kept secret from the accusing women. The man who negotiated the deal, Alex Acosta, was labor secretary in Donald Trump’s first cabinet.
It is said that even paranoids have enemies. One could add that even wild conspiracy theories can have a connection to the truth. The revelations about the relationships of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, other powerful men in the financial world, or key two-faced figures of this age such as Peter Mandelson, who led the British Labor Party on a neoliberal course in the 1990s, go back to the time when the post-truth world we live in today was taking shape.
One of the most important and possibly election-decisive conspiracy theories of this time is Pizzagate from 2016 – the stories of a ring of mainly US Democrats with Hillary Clinton as the central satanic figure, who celebrated pedophilia and maintained a ring of young girls for sex games. The story, one might say, was roughly true. Except the location wasn’t the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, DC, but the island of Little Saint James in the Caribbean. And that those involved were not the Democrat Clinton, but male billionaires.
The Epstein Files provide more than a moral portrait of the “misery as well as unrest in human life,” as Adam Smith put it. They are something like the key to understanding the nature of this time, our time. The rot of elites, the good wishes and intimate messages between powerful men suggest, is real and it is effective. The acts were individual, the organization of the acts, their networks, their feasibility were systemic. This neo-feudal age doesn’t need the Marquis de Sade, it has Jeffrey Epstein.