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Not so long ago, if you said there was a shadowy cabal of elites who were involved in the sex trafficking of young women and girls and that some of the most famous people in the world were allegedly involved, then you would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
On a certain level, it feels psychologically safe to “other” people who have conspiracy theories – Jon Ronson even wrote a book called Them about extremists and conspiracy theorists.
Conspiracies were for people who needed a coherent story in order to make sense of all the bad things in the world. They were for people who could not handle chaos and desired a neat narrative, the way children like a bedtime story.
Having worked in the media and politics – two areas often accused of being in on the conspiracy – what I saw instead were people just trying to get through each day and get the basics of their job done, rather than being players in some shadowy network that operated according to hidden rules. People who worked in newsrooms were too disorganised to be part of a global plot! They were too busy trying to get a paper out.
There are many unsettling and vile elements to the Epstein story, which has now seen former Prince Andrew arrested in the UK on suspicion of misconduct in public office, but one of the most unnerving is that conspiracy theorists may be on to something with this one.
For years, the broad outlines of what Epstein was doing were available to anyone who cared to look. Journalists had reported on it. Survivors had spoken. And yet the story kept not quite landing, kept being filed away in the part of the brain marked too strange, too vast, too much like something a paranoid person would believe.
The powerful men in his orbit, the politicians, the financiers, the scientists, the royals, remained largely in their positions, collecting their awards. We let them, in part because the alternative required believing something that felt, to reasonable people, unreasonable.
This is the epistemological trap the Epstein case springs on the rationalist.
We tend to think of conspiratorial thinking as a failure of critical intelligence, the category error of people who see patterns where there are none, who mistake coincidence for coordination, who are drawn to the narrative satisfaction of a hidden hand pulling strings. And mostly conspiracy theories are wrong. The moon landing happened. Covid is real.
But here, the systems designed to hold people accountable and protect the vulnerable failed. Big media organisations had the story and didn’t run it. Prosecutors initially gave Epstein a sweetheart deal. And a team of lawyers enforcing strict NDAs meant those in his orbit could not speak out.
Epstein himself “threatened harm to victims and helped release damaging stories about them to damage their credibility when they tried to go public with their stories of being trafficked and sexually abused”, according to a report in the files. Epstein also instructed that evidence be destroyed.
Even now, the powerful are protected through the US Department of Justice’s extensive redactions of the Epstein files, which according to members of US Congress who have seen the files, include the name of six powerful men.
These are not the far-fetched claims on a QAnon message board. They are institutions that rationalists, implicitly, trust.
What is emerging from the Epstein files does look like a conspiracy.
When we accept the existence of a conspiracy like this, it opens the possibility for more conspiracies just like it, hiding in plain sight - just like the Epstein case, and before that in the UK, the Jimmy Savile case.
This will further weaken trust in institutions, the media and government.
Already this age is marked by a departure from the rational. Astrology is huge among young people, trust in science is waning and old diseases like measles are coming back due to a decline in people getting vaccinated.
Conspiracy theories feed on distrust and extend it into a worldview where official explanations are automatically suspect.
With the Epstein files proving conspiracy correct, expect conspiracy theorists to become emboldened and their numbers increase. It’s a time-honoured way of trying to find order in the chaos.
