Lurid Attachments

What the Epstein files reveal about our dependence on the ruling class.

Feb 16, 2026

The revelations of the Epstein files have been met by a notably tepid response in the US. In Europe, meanwhile, prominent politicians have already been booted from office after their names were discovered in the files.1 Even Republican rep. Thomas Massie pleaded that Americans should be more angry. How do we interpret this disjuncture? The easiest explanation, perhaps, is that no one in the US was surprised by the contents of the files. They seemed to confirm what most already knew: that the international ruling class consists largely of sexual predators and their apologists.

Democrats and the liberal media, during Trump II as during Trump I, delight in sharing exposés about the misdeeds of the president and his coterie of sycophants, but these revelations never seem to elicit the desired outrage, except among those who are already aghast. For years now, commentators have warned that, inundated constantly with salacious scandals, we risk becoming desensitized to the transparent abuses of power that greet us on our phones every morning. Trump political strategists like Steve Bannon exploit this by “flooding the zone:” dominating the news cycles with so many outrageous incidents that it is impossible to adequately respond to any of them. Disaffected political fatalism is a predictable result; one which they are counting on. What new information could possibly shake us from our stupor?

Perhaps the difficulty in answering this question suggests that this is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem. One must admit that there is a kind of lurid enjoyment in seeing our suspicions about the ruling class confirmed.2 Social media is abuzz with forensic cross-referencing and close reading of thousands of documents, even as this interest has failed to translate into a political upheaval. What is the source of this apparent enjoyment? One of Freud’s basic psychoanalytic insights was that our desires and distastes are intertwined and ambivalent. Our abhorrence of something, he invited us to consider, could be a mask that renders our attachment to it palatable. In The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud writes “[Neurotics] complain of their illness but exploit it with all their strength; and if someone tries to take it away from them they defend it like the proverbial lioness with her young. Yet there would be no sense in reproaching them for this contradiction.”3 What if the enjoyment of the Epstein files evinces a deeper, neurotic attachment to a ruling class whom we despise? Might this not help explain their seeming intractability? What neurotic satisfaction would maintaining this class fulfill? More importantly, how might we rid ourselves of it?

In “Notes on the Politics of Divine Kingship,” David Graeber provocatively observes that regardless of whatever pretensions towards universal power monarchs throughout history may have had, they are almost always bound by stringent protocols of decorum and ceremony that keep them relatively cloistered away from society. This, Graeber suggests, owes something to the ritualistic origins of political life. Citing a litany of anthropological examples of societies in which only “clowns” can issue orders during ritual occasions but are otherwise subjects of ridicule and playfulness, Graeber suggests that political power originally seems to have been something that people wanted separate from normal life, even quarantined. Graeber notes, “To be sacred, as Émile Durkheim reminds us, means “to be set apart,” which is also the literal meaning of the Tongan word “tabu.” “Not to be touched.”“4 Only with a persistent use of force and a great deal of instability, Graeber concludes, has sovereignty been able to overcome this ritual separation and become a permanent feature of daily life.

And yet, there remains a distance between the political elite and us. They are subject to different laws and standards. They inhabit different geographies. Our lurid fascination with the Epstein files seems to be, in part, that it confirms this distance: they are not like us. But, however distant in manners and appetites, they perform an important ritual function for us. As Mark Fisher observes:

There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.5

This is not to say that we want our political elites to be sex traffickers per se , but rather we derive a kind of satisfaction from their perversity because it allows us to disavow them. If our world is in disarray, which it usually is, we can always direct our ire and dissatisfaction to this alien class of sex pests who are actually running everything. If we lived in a just society, say a council communist one in which the mechanisms of daily life were transparent to all and subject to our collective authorship, we would be saddled with the grievous burden of knowing that we, in fact, were responsible for the condition of the world. There is an existential calm in surrendering our agency to a class of people whose flagrant disregard for our shared mores serves to advertise their otherness. Our neurotic attachment to a hated ruling class, in other words, both absolves us of our responsibility to shape the world and gives us a convenient target for when the world disappoints.

How, then, out of this miserable codependence? The danger of appealing to psychoanalysis or pre-historical anthropological examples to understand the present is that both methodologies risk conjuring a kind of ineliminable trans-historical essence from which we cannot escape. But, as many have pointed out contra Freud, our psyches and their neuroses are historically and culturally specific.6 Whatever complexes or attachments we may harbor in the present, will transform, if not dissipate, under the shifting tides of history. And contra Graeber, even if the air of ritualistic separateness that surrounds our political class issues from a deep historical substrate, this too is not baked into the fabric of human existence, but rather is a feature of a story of which we are the authors.

In fact, we needn’t go back as far as prehistory to discover the moment when, in search of an alibi, we surrendered our political subjecthood to a class of perverse clowns. This transaction was baked into the logic of liberalism. To greatly simplify a few centuries of history: nineteenth century liberals, in a bid to challenge the hegemony of noble aristocracies, tended to favor some degree of popular influence on the affairs of government, but in practice this was limited to educated male tax-payers, and generally attenuated even more to landowners. Estate owners, the logic went, possessed greater interest in the direction of state affairs (especially as it concerned preserving property relations). By the time suffrage struggles succeeded in opening elections to the masses (finally including women in the twentieth century), government in much of the world had become little more than the timid custodian of capital interests. In short, the emergence of a separate, if semi-permeable, political class who claims to represent the whole but in fact primarily serves to maintain property relations has its roots in the emergence of a liberal political economic order.

One takeaway from the Epstein files is also a compelling argument for socialism: there is a power threshold beyond which one transforms into a depraved alien to the great mass of humanity. Within a just, equitable and transparent system, no one would become powerful enough to unleash a libido unchecked by social interdependence or ethical commitments. Capitalism, by contrast, systematically churns out these sorts of weird, cruel narcissists whose interests are inimical to society.

We are not doomed to a political order in which we love to hate our estranged rulers. Like someone trapped in an abusive relationship, we have only forgotten, or have convinced ourselves that we are unworthy of, another way of relating to the world. But as workers uniting to form a union, or neighbors constructing a barricade against ICE in Minneapolis, or people banding together to form a community land trust can readily attest, there is something joyful and dignified about daring to construct our social world together instead of letting the Epsteins of the world use it as their lascivious playground. It is upon this fertile ground of self organization that we can construct a world without them.