The world did not end in a mushroom cloud or a clash of grand ideologies. It ended, more quietly and more perversely, on private jets and private islands, where the people who had “won” history amused themselves with the bodies of the powerless. If Francis Fukuyama was right that liberal democracy is “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” Jeffrey Epstein is what that endpoint actually looks like when you follow it all the way through.
Fukuyama’s thesis in The End of History is frequently caricatured as a claim that “nothing happens” after 1989. In reality, his warning was far darker. He argued that while Western liberalism had defeated fascism and communism, it had failed to solve the problem of thymos—the deep-seated human hunger to matter, to be recognised, and to be seen as possessing dignity.
But he is very blunt about a problem most readers skip over: Human beings don’t just want comfort. They want to matter. He calls this drive thymos, and explains it in very down-to-earth terms: People want their worth to be recognised, and they get angry when it isn’t.
He notes that even a wage dispute is not just about money. The worker isn’t thinking, “I’m greedy, I want more,” but “I am a good worker, I am worth more, I am being treated unfairly…my human dignity is being violated.” That is why, he says, strikers are often angrier at strike-breakers than at management: The scab has “overwhelmed” his dignity for short-term gain. It feels like betrayal.
Fukuyama also draws a simple but powerful distinction. There is the desire to be recognised as equal to others, and there is the desire to be recognised as better than others. He uses the term megalothymia for the second: “The desire to be recognised as superior to other people,” the passion that drives “the tyrant who invades and enslaves a neighbouring people.” In older times, this was the spirit of conquerors and empire-builders.
In that world, the people we look back on as “great” were almost always tied to something beyond themselves. George Washington believed in a republic where rulers leave office; he proved it by walking away from power—twice. Winston Churchill believed Nazism was evil and should be resisted even when everyone else thought that was old-fashioned. Augustus believed he had to restore Roman order and piety after civil war.
Fukuyama’s point is that people who act like this are not doing a cost-benefit analysis; they are moved by a sense of dignity that makes them willing to sacrifice comfort and safety. In other words: Their egos are chained to a cause.
By contrast, the people circling Epstein had very few chains left. They were not fighting for God, nation, or revolution. For many of them, the highest “cause” in their life was their own brand: Their foundation, their NGO, their tech company, their party leadership bid.
That is the context in which Mark Steyn’s mordant jokes bite so hard. In his recent columns on the newly released “Epstein files,” he describes a world in which presidents, princes, billionaires, and senior diplomats treat a convicted sex offender as a social hub—and at times, as a fixer. The documents include, among many other things:
- Draft emails Epstein wrote to himself, in which he claims Bill Gates asked him to obtain antibiotics so he could secretly medicate his wife after allegedly catching an STI from “Russian girls”. Gates has called these claims “absolutely absurd and completely false,” but the emails are in the DOJ release.
- Logs and messages showing Norway’s former foreign minister Børge Brende, then already head of the World Economic Forum, scheduling dinners and friendly meetings at Epstein’s New York townhouse in 2018–2019—a location multiple victims say was used for abuse.
- Communications showing former Norwegian prime minister and Council of Europe secretary-general Thorbjørn Jagland in regular contact with Epstein, including a line about “extraordinary girls” in Tirana, and Epstein telling Noam Chomsky that “Jagland will be with him. ‘He awards the Nobel peace prize'”
Steyn pushes this further, with his trademark black humour. He riffs on stories of British grandees in their underwear in Epstein’s salons, on rumours and tabloid reports about MPs and “male models”, and on the emails where supposedly respectable men exchange notes about “torture videos” and “Russian girls”. Some of his claims rest on partisan or tabloid sources and should be treated as such, but his larger picture aligns disturbingly well with what the official document dumps and serious outlets are now showing.
What Steyn is really describing is Fukuyama’s megalothymia with nothing left to conquer. If you can no longer be Caesar or Churchill, you can at least be the kind of man for whom normal rules do not apply.
At this point two explanations compete.
One is the “honey-trap” theory. Eastern-European and Western media are now full of reports, sourced to intelligence officials, that Epstein’s operation looks suspiciously like a giant kompromat factory. The Daily Mail and others have quoted anonymous sources calling it “the world’s largest honey-trap scheme,” allegedly tied in various ways to Russian or other intelligence services, aiming to collect compromising material on Western elites. Poland’s prime minister has gone as far as ordering an analytical task force, warning that if adversaries hold that kind of material, “they also possess compromising material on many of today’s acting leaders”.
The logic is obvious: you invite presidents, princes, CEOs, ambassadors, Nobel-prize gatekeepers, central bankers, and tech billionaires to a place wired “up the wazoo,” as Steyn puts it, and record everything. Then you can steer policy without ever winning an election.
But Steyn offers an even darker possibility, and it is the one that fits your theory best. Maybe this was not primarily an intelligence operation at all. Maybe this is just how a post-ideological ruling class behaves when it is confident that nothing truly constrains it.
On that reading, Epstein is not the puppet-master. He is the court organizer. His “skill”, as Steyn notes, was spotting “those in proximity to power with certain vulnerabilities” and giving them a place to indulge. The kompromat is not there to overthrow them, but to keep them in the club.
This is exactly what you would expect in a world where:
- There is no God to fear
- Ideologies are marketing labels
- Nations are just platforms for global games
- And the only thing that really matters is staying inside the network
Fukuyama worried that, after history “ends,” men would become too soft—”last men” content with comfort, safety, and small pleasures. What we are discovering is that a class of last men with private jets and no shame is not soft at all. It is extremely dangerous.
A key insight in Fukuyama’s book is that hypocrisy is politically useful. Revolutions and reforms, he points out, are often triggered by relatively small, symbolic insults—particularly where the gap between official ideals and elite behaviour becomes too obvious. East Germans did not rise up because Honecker’s house was Versailles; they rose up because, in a supposedly equal society, seeing their leader’s comfortable home on TV was enough to spark what he calls “tremendous hypocrisy”. That feeling of “this is not what we were told we are” is thymos at work.
In older, ideological societies, elites could at least be called traitors to their own side. The corrupt bishop was judged against Christian teaching. The lying communist official was judged against Marxist equality. The nationalist leader who looted the country was judged against his own patriotic rhetoric. The very fact that they claimed to stand for something gave opponents a language to attack them in.
In the Epstein universe, what exactly are these people betraying?
What is the head of a global tech-and-philanthropy empire a hypocrite of when he is accused in Epstein’s drafts of STI panic and secret antibiotics? What is a Council of Europe grandee betraying when he emails Epstein from Tirana about “extraordinary girls”? What is a WEF boss betraying when he’s logged as scheduling cozy dinners at a townhouse where, we now know, underage girls say they were abused?
“Democracy”? “The rules-based order”? “Diversity and inclusion”? These are vague enough to stretch over anything. There is no thick creed. There is only PR.
That is why your point about fundamentalists is so uncomfortable and so important. The presence of people who really believe in something—even when that belief turns ugly—creates a moral atmosphere the rest of us can use. It sets a standard that can be used to call out hypocrisy, to mobilise anger, and sometimes to force change.
Once that atmosphere goes, law remains, but law alone is thin. It becomes something to navigate, not something to respect. You don’t feel shame, you feel bad luck.
Fukuyama’s more optimistic hope was that as liberal democracy spreads, more and more people would get the basic recognition they crave—rights, votes, equal treatment—and the need for grand, dangerous projects would fade. Some of that happened. But the Epstein files show the other side: The people at the very top are not satisfied with equal recognition. They want to be beyond it.
If they cannot be Caesars or Churchills, they can at least be the men and women who live in a different moral universe than the people under them—those who are, in Steyn’s phrase, “pleasured”, rather than those who “do the pleasuring.” The details vary—Bill here, Børge there, Jagland here, a prince or a prime minister there—but the pattern is the same.
For ordinary citizens, this explains why democratic politics feels increasingly irrelevant. You can vote out governments. You cannot vote out the network. It sits above Left and Right, as Steyn points out with his Norwegian examples: Labour and Conservative, socialist and centrist, all sending friendly emails to the same man.
Which brings us back to our thesis. The world with fundamentalists was often terrible. But it had one advantage: The powerful had something above them that they were at least supposed to fear. A God. A nation. A history. A cause.
Take that away, and the powerful fear only scandal. If Epstein’s documents—official and leaked—teach us anything, it is that even scandal is something they believe they can eventually manage.
Fukuyama thought the end of history might be dull. Epstein, and Steyn’s acid commentary on Epstein, suggest a different image: A ruling class that has slipped the leash of belief, staggering from conference stage to private jet to private island, half-bored, half-aroused, convinced that nothing and no one will ever really call them to account.
That, not peace and prosperity, may be the true endpoint of a world that has forgotten how to believe in anything.
Twisting history to dishonour history’s victims and democracy’s principles