Monsters rule your world
Are you too scared to understand?
–Motorhead, “The Brotherhood of Man”

The first thing I have to say about the Epstein Files is that at this point, nobody can tell me that character-based voting is a politically-irrelevant fringe idea, and that my banging on about it for the last decade has been a waste of breath. A person’s sheer presence in the Epstein Files is not by itself evidence of guilt, but when the files do furnish evidence of guilt, it’s obvious that the guilt in question is politically relevant whether or not it’s policy relevant. Imagine that we resurrected a version of Jeffrey Epstein whose policy views aligned with yours, and who was running for office. Would you vote for him? Would Jason Brennan?

If there’s one thing for which we can be grateful to Jeffrey Epstein et al, it’s the master class they’ve all given us on the topic of complicity. There’s a basic difference between being a pedophile sex offender, aiding and abetting pedophilic sex offenses, being involuntarily associated with a pedophile sex offender, and being an innocent victim of pedophilia. The four-fold distinction involved generalizes into a more basic one between primary wrongdoing, complicity, entanglement, and sheer innocence (or victimization). The Epstein episode is just one concentrated and grotesquely instructive instance of this taxonomy.

But so is the world as such. The modern world works by the division of labor. The division of labor works by compartmentalization. Compartmentalization gives rise both to economies of scale and to the complicity that lurks within them. Large-scale wrongdoing operates at scale by essential reliance on complicity: totalitarianism, as Arendt argued, is a form of mass politics. What makes the banality of evil banal is that it’s an accepted, normalized, painfully familiar part of the world we all inhabit. The German elite accepted Adolph Eichmann. The American elite accepted Jeffrey Epstein. Not much separates them. Don’t forget that PornHub is among the top 22 most visited websites in the world (#11 in the US)–between 3 and 3.85 billion visits per month–and that PornHub trafficked in pedophilia for years. You don’t need your own private island to be part of the sexual slave trade, just a computer and some free time. It’s anybody’s game.

If you want a crash course in the workings of complicity, make your way through the Epstein Files. Just remember that the crash course is merely an introduction to a very large subject. The more you learn, the more there is to learn. So it is here.