Is a core of right ring conspiracy theories.
But here’s the thing, while they’re clearly wrong about the details, that a significant chunk of elites are involved in statutory rape is almost certainly true.
More true is that violation of laws and strong social more is common in elite circles.
The main thing to understand is that violating social norms is a thrill. It heightens experiences. When people become powerful, the opportunity to violate norms that as someone weak they had to obey opens up and the experience can be thrilling.
If you were raised in a very Christian society, pissing on a crucifix or homosexuality or the black mass (which is essentially just an inversion of a normal mass). Pedophilia is a massive taboo in our society, and so on. Same reason some people get off on sex where there’s risk of being discovered.
When you become rich or powerful you also run into desire satiation: you can have what you couldn’t have before: the good food, gambling, legal sex, travel, lovely house, servants, automatic respect and pandering and so on. You become used to that, and soon they don’t satisfy. A normal person can eat gourmet food occasionally, you can have it every day, and soon it means little, and so on.
In general doing what even power isn’t supposed to let you do and forcing people to even what power and money aren’t supposed to let you force people to do, however, remain able to juice your emotions: the last vices of power. “What does even my society forbid to people with as much power as I have?
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The only thing that remains which are able to life you past your hedonic baseline are the taboos and the illegal thrills.
Those who enable, encourage and pander to such “evil awakenings” gain a hold over the people who engage. Indeed, in many circles, to truly be trusted with power, one must have done something transgressive. If you haven’t, other members can’t trust you–they have no hold on you. The Skull and Bones society at Yale operates in this fashion: everyone has to give up blackmail material to the society.
In a properly functioning “evil elite” this blackmail is mutual. Everyone has something on each other. In a pathological one, the blackmail is gathered up and used not for in-group enforcement, but outside control. See Israel’s control over US politicians, for example. An internal or external group, controls other elite groups by having their blackmail, while they don’t have blackmail on them (or don’t dare use it.)
There are many reasons why men and women with actual integrity don’t make it to the top very often or change from good people to bad once they have power. But the hedonic adjustment to the normal perks of power, the panderers who want a hook and the elite need for everyone with power to be compromised are a big part of why.
Feral Finster
“ZOMG right wing talking point ZOMG!” has no bearing on the truth or falsity of an allegation.
Anyway, all this has long been self-evident.
Ian Welsh
True enough Feral, but I have a lot of left wing readers and pointing out that, in fact, just because something is a right wing trope doesn’t mean it’s wrong (or entirely wrong) makes sense.
Purple Library Guy
The odd thing is that it doesn’t seem to appear to exactly the same degree in all elites. And it’s not just about how powerful the elites are. In US politics, frankly the Republicans seem to exemplify this somewhat more than the Democrats, and the bible thumping Republicans most of all. There’s something going on where elites whose power is defined by the forbidding of hedonism are the most prone to breaking the rules they get their power from, or something.
PM
I was thinking about this a lot recently – in my early 20s, I had a minor political awakening after moving to Seattle (just before the WTO protests) and spending a lot of time at a job where I did virtually nothing reading free versions of Noam Chomsky books. It’s been a while since I paid much attention to Chomsky, but his stuff was absolutely foundational in so many ways.
And then he pops up again as a Jeffrey Epstein associate. Not only did Chomsky somehow have no other financial adviser on the planet other than Jeffrey F’ing Epstein to handle large sums of money, but he rode with Epstein on his private jet to have dinner with Woody Allen, yet another famous predator. Leaving aside how the champion of the working class Noam Chomsky apparently had a jet-set, high-income lifestyle, Chomsky’s utterly arrogant dismissal of concerns about associating with one of the world’s most famous pedophiles really threw me for a loop.
I was raised Catholic, and it honestly wasn’t the Scandal itself that affected me (although some of the stories that have dribbled out are vomit-inducing) – it was that same flavor of arrogant dismissal, of what Pope Francis calls “clericalism”, that some people just have privileges others don’t and it’s not your right to question them. That some things – including the sexual use of children – are simply their due. John Paul II and Benedict XVI should have jumped on planes to Boston and wherever else and groveled on the ground to beg for forgiveness. Neither did anything close – and a new generation of Catholic conservatives with crazy eyes (I sat in a room with one of them a few months ago) unashamedly blame it all on evil outside forces and say out loud that victims need to get over it. And of course it’s not just Catholic – virtually every spiritual, religious, political and now secular movement (remember NXIVM?) has abusers or even entire organizations based around enabling abuse.
It’s so, so deep – the Boy Scouts of America (horrifying Netflix documentary recently released) with numbers of victims that dwarfed the US Catholic Church. Imagine all those photos of aging white men you see on the walls of banks, of businesses, of local government buildings, the ones that get things named after them in thousands of towns and cities and realize that many those upstanding pillars of the community either knew what was going on or were doing the child rape themselves. Famous billionaire musicians like P. Diddy/whatever his name is who’ve had former proteges come out with horrifying stories of abuse. And I am positive that there is so much going on that hasn’t been reported yet, and never will be.
There’s an invisible architecture of human suffering, of sexual use of the young by the powerful. If anything, THAT’s the conspiracy rabbithole I’m trying to get out of. Looking at street names and wondering “how many kids did this guy rape?”. Re-evaluating virtually my entire political evolution from Chomsky to Adbusters to “Democracy Now” to whoever and wondering who else shared Chomsky’s sense of entitlement and clericalism of the elites. Walking by yoga studios and trying to figure out which famous yogi didn’t abuse his followers (Bikram? Jois? Rapists and abusers).
And wondering if there’s a way out of this primate abuse hierarchy.
PM
Oh, and one more thing – Michael Jackson, once the world’s most famous entertainer (or maybe even human being), credibly accused of being a molester himself. Just like most kids, I listened to his stuff. Every time I hear one of his songs come on as background music, it still makes me uneasy. It’s like the whole world collectively said “eh, it wasn’t a big deal”.
I remember thinking back in the 90s how creepy it was that parents would almost sacrifice their children to Jackson’s appetites, letting them have sleepovers at his mansion just so they could feel closer. to Jackson’s fame and glory even though if anyone other than Jackson displayed one-tenth the weirdness Jackson displayed they’d never let their kids near them. Again, there’s a tie back to how Catholic parents would unquestioningly let their kids be alone with or go on extended trips with Father Grabby Hands – maybe most didn’t know, but the disturbing thought has occurred to me more than once that maybe some did know, and the sacrifice of their children was a-OK.
Earlier civilizations did that sort of thing, you know – Carthaginians and Moloch, maybe even Abraham and Isaac. How different are we?
Forecasting Intelligence
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/hermitix/episodes/Cycles-of-History-and-Consciousness-with-John-Michael-Greer-e2cvbec
John, you will find this podcast interesting.
Talks about civilisational rise and decline and why western civilisation is now on the brink of Winter.
Interestingly, that aligns with the most recently updated LGT BAU model – see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.13442
Jan Wiklund
There is some research on this, see https://blog.ted.com/6-studies-of-money-and-the-mind/. The research group concludes simply that “elite” people think they are entitled, because nobody has never dared to point out that they aren’t. They are simply pampered.
But which reasonably normal person would really like to have sex with children? To do that one must be very weird indeed.
There is also another factor that should guide our understanding here: that these people are extremely competitive. They would love being able to overthrow their competitors, and for that reason they wouldn’t expose themselves to attacks from them if they can avoid it. That would be like chiefs of state giving nuclear missiles to eachother for free.
DMC
To be completely fair to Chomsky, Epstein threw a lot of money around MIT. Academics are seldom wealthy and spend a fair amount of time chasing grant money. So when someone comes around and offers to take care of your financial problems, it’s not entirely surprising that they took him up on it. Honestly, I’d like to hear Chomsky’s side of the story. And remember that there were a whole bunch of people that got multiple rides on “the Lolita Express” that don’t seem to be facing any scrutiny at all(” Why, hello Mr. President).
fauna
Chomsly has been given ample opportunity and forum to give his side. When asked about his time on the lolita rape plane, he responded, “If there was a flight, which I doubt…”
Draw your own conclusions.
Oakchair
Epstein had connections with multiple western spy agencies. Epstein was “suicided” in a top US criminal facility. He was in that facility because he was running a pedophile ring that gathered blackmail material on people with power.
What better way to distract from all that then to have all those inane “right wing conspiracy theories” crowding the airwaves? My conspiracy theory is that those “right wing conspiracy theories” started as a psy-opt to distract from the implications of the entire Epstein saga.
Carborundum
I did not have “Satanic Panic-remix” on my 2023 retro-80s bingo card. My bad
The big takeaway for me from how widespread the above nonsense beliefs are is how badly elites have botched things by making themselves unavailable and relatable to the common man.
capelin
This pretty well mirrors my understanding of it.
I think there’s a co-factor or two as well. The drive to become/stay an elite is self-selecting towards psychopaths, (once you have your first whatever millions or chunk of power, most people would throttle back and chill out).
I would also argue that for those who’ve been elite for enough generations there’s probably a DNA shift towards that trait. Probably even shorter time, give the astounding amount of feedback between the genome and “lived reality”.
“Our leaders are shape-shifting lizard-people” is probably not far off.
mago
Sex, power and money go together like flies on shit.
One difference is that flies can’t be blackmailed.
Swatted maybe, but not blackmailed.
Cockroaches on the other hand . . .
Jorge
I suspect this behavior is more common when on vacation, or rather away from the rooted life with family and friends.
For example, there is a floating class of several thousand people in WashDC who are away from family and friends for weeks or months at a time. There will be a few who dally.
PM
Great timing with today’s unsealing of more Epstein documents (Trump! Chomsky! Stephen Hawking! And Bill Clinton, obviously quite the repeat customer…)
Everyone is stumbling all over themselves to explain it all away, but we’re left with the certainty that two living US ex-presidents were either close Jeffrey Epstein associates (Trump) or fully aware, repeat customers of Epstein’s underage sex slaves (Bill Clinton).
We are lead by perverts and kiddie rapists. That’s pretty messed up.