Almost every day, the leading newspapers of the world air the dirty linen of the ruling elite and their social acolytes in public. In the July 2019 issue of The Atlantic, Molly Jong-Fast, an American journalist, novelist, and political commentator, published a story on Jeffrey Epstein titled “Jeffrey Epstein’s Weird World of Influence.” It contained revealing biographical details of the known social climber, underscoring the functional necessity of an intermediary for the ruling and social elite. She has also contributed recently to The New York Times on the Epstein affair.
In her early piece of July 2019, written almost a month before Epstein committed suicide, Jong-Fast illustrates how Epstein, otherwise an ordinary man, exploited his acumen to bring the social elite into his circle, facilitating favours, introductions, and institutional shortcuts. “His indulgent lifestyle was not peripheral to this role but central to it, serving as a symbolic marker of elite immunity and distinction,” she writes.
In fact, the case study of Jeffrey Edward Epstein reveals a complex relationship between morality and elite influence, since morality has long been a tool to consolidate and preserve the power of the ruling elite. Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony highlights that, alongside coercive tactics, the ruling elite exercises “intellectual and moral leadership” to organise consent across society.
Thus, private virtue is not intrinsic but a tool of coercion, embedded in culture and institutional machinery, which enables the ruling elite to form a formidable societal group. Paradoxically, power allows them to transgress the very moral boundaries they deem necessary for maintaining social order.
In religious ethics, indulgence is considered a sin and warrants chastisement by the state, yet the powerful often have the right to keep concubines outside wedlock. Many societies condemn indulgences among the masses but permit moral transgression by the elite. In pre-modern Christian France, the general population was chastised for indulgence, whereas it was institutionalised for kings and high nobility; keeping royal mistresses was a common feature of the French nobility.
The ruling elite relies on intermediary figures, brokers, loyalists, and socially mobile actors to maintain consent and manage contradictions within power structures
The Epstein files bring into focus the pre-modern and pre-democratic norms of the ruling elite and nobility. Epstein’s life as a social climber illustrates the inherent contradictions of moral values, projected as necessary for social order. Notably, power asserts itself through indulgence, as it grants the elite freedom to trespass on the laws they themselves have promulgated for the general population.
While researching the socio-economics of social climbing, I came across a revealing study by Antonio Gramsci on the subject. He argues that “the ruling elite relies on intermediary figures, brokers, loyalists, and socially mobile actors, to maintain consent and manage contradictions within power structures.”
In Epstein’s case as an intermediary, many people approached him for “a job for their child working on a Woody Allen film, or a shortcut for Mr Allen’s own child to get into Bard,” writes Molly Jong-Fast. He possessed an acumen to “pull so many strangers close” to create a circle of nobility, and in Epstein’s case, it was women, particularly underage girls, who helped him maintain his powerful network.
Here, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction proves helpful in disentangling the complex relationship between moral values and the social elite. He explains that the ruling elite influences cultural practices, including indulgence, as a form of social distinction. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu argues that taste functions as an assertion of social class and to ‘naturalise’ inequality.
Paradoxically, while the elite avoids the social and moral constraints it imposes on subordinate classes, it controls the symbolic boundaries of respectability. As Bourdieu maintains, “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” The transgressions of the social elite do not disrupt social order because the elite themselves determine the limits of respectability.