One of the most comforting illusions of modern democracy is that those who rule are, in some essential sense, like those who are ruled. They may be wealthier or more educated, but they are presumed to share the same basic moral structure, the same constraints of conscience, and the same vulnerability to consequence. The Epstein revelations shattered this illusion. They exposed not merely the crimes of one deeply corrupt individual, but the existence of a social ecosystem in which extraordinary power, wealth, and influence coexist with extraordinary moral degeneration. The significance of Epstein was never Epstein himself. It was the network. Politicians, financiers, royalty, academics, and media figures intersected within his orbit, not by accident, but because elite power is not merely individual — it is structural, relational, and mutually protective.
The recent analysis published by Macrobusiness.com.au, argues that elite networks do not merely accumulate wealth; they shape the economic and policy structures that determine the life outcomes of entire populations. Housing affordability, tax burdens, asset inflation, and labour precarity are not impersonal forces of nature. They are consequences of decisions made by specific individuals operating within institutional environments designed to protect their interests. What Epstein revealed was not a deviation from this structure, but a glimpse into its deeper moral reality. The same class of people who design financial systems, regulate markets, and influence governments also inhabit a parallel moral universe in which appetites are indulged, consequences are deferred, and accountability is largely theatrical.
This raises a deeper philosophical question: what kind of human being is produced by such conditions? Power, particularly unaccountable power, does not refine character. It removes the adaptive pressures that normally shape psychological development. Ordinary people must regulate themselves because they face consequences. They must negotiate with equals, compromise with rivals, and restrain impulses that would provoke social or legal sanction. The elite, by contrast, gradually exit this feedback loop. Wealth shields them from material constraint, influence shields them from institutional constraint, and social status shields them from reputational constraint. Over time, this insulation produces a distinctive form of psychological arrest. Appetite expands to fill the available space. Self-regulation atrophies from disuse. The individual becomes, in effect, developmentally incomplete — possessing adult power but adolescent impulse control.
This moral condition does not remain invisible. It inscribes itself upon the body. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), with characteristic bluntness, observed that "the human body is the best picture of the human soul." This remark is not mystical but diagnostic. The human face is not merely a biological structure; it is a historical record of habits, impulses, and emotional patterns. Chronic indulgence, habitual deception, and the exercise of power without restraint produce measurable psychological stress and internal fragmentation, which in turn manifest physically in posture, expression, and presence. The dissipated body of the elite is therefore not incidental. It is autobiographical. Every act of indulgence that escapes consequence reinforces the internal disintegration of restraint, and over decades this disintegration becomes visible. The body records what the social system conceals.
This is why elite corruption possesses a recognisable aesthetic. It produces individuals who appear simultaneously powerful and depleted, confident yet curiously lifeless. Their authority rests not upon inner coherence but upon external structures that shield them from consequence. They metabolise power, but not meaning. They accumulate influence, but not integrity. Their physical presence often conveys a peculiar combination of aggression and exhaustion, as if the perpetual maintenance of dominance consumes the very vitality it seeks to preserve. This is not a moral judgment imposed from outside. It is the natural consequence of a life organised around appetite rather than purpose.
The Epstein network illustrates how such individuals function not merely as isolated actors but as nodes within a broader system of mutual reinforcement. Epstein provided access, coordination, and, perhaps most importantly, mutual vulnerability. Shared secrets create bonds stronger than shared ideals, because exposure would destroy all participants simultaneously. In this way, corruption becomes self-stabilising. Individuals protect one another not out of loyalty, but out of rational self-preservation. The network persists because each participant's safety depends upon the silence of the others. This dynamic explains both Epstein's longevity and the extraordinary reluctance of powerful institutions to confront him decisively. His existence was not an anomaly within the system. It was an expression of its logic.
The policy consequences of this structure are profound. Decisions affecting millions are made by individuals whose lived reality bears little resemblance to those affected by their choices. The risks of economic instability, housing inflation, and labour insecurity are borne by the public, while the benefits of financial expansion and asset appreciation accrue disproportionately to the elite. This asymmetry is not the result of conspiracy in the crude sense, but of structural alignment. The system selects for individuals whose interests coincide with its perpetuation, and those individuals, in turn, shape policy in ways that reinforce the system's underlying distribution of power and reward.
The final irony is that the modern elite, despite their immense structural power, often exhibit profound internal weakness. They command institutions, but not themselves. They control systems, but not impulses. Their dominance rests upon external scaffolding rather than internal strength. In evolutionary terms, they have escaped the constraints that normally enforce psychological integration, and in doing so, they have lost the very pressures that produce resilience and coherence. They rule not because they are superior specimens of human development, but because they occupy positions within systems that amplify narrow forms of cunning into structural dominance.
Epstein's exposure briefly illuminated this reality, but only briefly. The system absorbed the shock and continued, as systems do. Individual actors may fall, but the underlying structure persists because it is sustained not by individuals but by incentives. The deeper problem, therefore, is not the existence of particular corrupt figures, but the existence of institutional environments that reliably produce them. Power, when sufficiently insulated from consequence, does not elevate human beings. It reveals them. And what it reveals, more often than democratic mythology would like to admit, is not wisdom or virtue, but appetite without restraint, influence without integrity, and souls whose condition is written plainly upon the bodies they inhabit.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/02/toxic-elites-set-policy-and-shape-your-life-outcomes-too/