On the Epstein Files and Oligarchs with Room Temperature IQs
One of my ongoing frustrations of our culture's veneration of capitalistic success is that it causes people to ascribe positive qualities to rich people that they may or may not have--intelligence and competence, in particular. I wrote about evidence of this in the Epstein files for The Nation, and here it is in your inbox:
Epstein Class Clowns
One key revelation in the wide correspondence of the late pedophile: The rich and powerful just aren’t all that bright.
by Elizabeth Spiers
A disturbing number of the oligarchs responsible for the mess we’re in are not very smart. I realize that this seems like a minor complaint when so many of them are also evil, incompetent, and causing enormous amounts of human suffering. (Though perhaps it’s better that they’re dimly lit, because who knows how much worse things would be if they were truly evil geniuses?)
Still, after reading through the Epstein files this past week, I think it’s important to underline this basic point—especially since so many of the plutocrats clustered around the late pedophilic sex trafficker get described in press accounts as s geniuses and brilliant thinkers solely because they are powerful and wealthy. It’s precisely this benign assumption of competence and intelligence that lets them get away with murder. (For any lawyers reading this: I am not talking about any specific or literal murder, though I think I can safely and legally say that the hyperbolic overestimation of their collective intelligence lets them get away with, among other things, participating in a global sex-trafficking ring.)
Is it more important that they’re immoral than that they’re wildly incurious people—mediocre thinkers who only seek out opinions and research that conform to their worldview that their privilege and power as wealthy white men (they’re almost all wealthy white men) is both natural and correct? Sure. But their evil and their ignorance are neither mutually exclusive nor unrelated. On some level, much of society thinks these men are wealthy because they know better than most and deserve the power and plunder they luxuriate in. This idea is intertwined with the Horatio Alger myth—that if you work hard, you’re smart and determined, and apply yourself and you’ll be a great American success. The myth is so ingrained in our hyper-capitalist culture that it’s often also assumed that the equation is true in reverse: If you’ve achieved success in America, by any means whatsoever, you must have worked harder and been smarter.
That presumption of intellectual capacity and competence protects the über-rich from accountability, and allows policymakers to hold the poor to a higher standard of behavior than they do for any given billionaire. It is not a small thing, and it’s not ancillary to the systemic problem of an unequal society controlled by unapologetic hoarders of wealth.
I had hoped that when Elon Musk started tweeting a few hundred times a day, it would thoroughly debunk the idea that he was brilliant and should be invested with the ability to control multiple large enterprises, including a very large public company, other people’s retirement portfolios by extension—and for a while, the president of the United States. Musk enjoys trolling and is routinely snowed by fake news reports. These traits by themselves are not exactly the hallmarks of a rigorous mind, and neither is doing enough ketamine to kill an elephant. But the world’s richest man is most out of his depth when he’s trying to engage authoritatively on topics where he possesses zero expertise—like genetics and biological sciences. Among the boneheaded claims he’s confidently made in public: that C-sections have caused babies to be born with larger brains, that the coronavirus panic was dumb (in March of 2020), that Italy would soon have “no people” thanks to declining birth rates. This has not stopped people and institutions from continuing to hand him money and influence on a cosmic scale. When presented with evidence that this largest of oligarchs doesn’t know what he’s talking about, they consider it data secondary to Tesla’s stock price.
Musk’s obsession with genetics, race, gender, biology, and population growth is a recurring theme in the Epstein files. Its adherents include many of the bigger-name entries there—again, all wealthy white men who’ve had some outsize business success. Even the Epstein cronies who are not outrageously wealthy are well-connected and powerful in academia, where Epstein spent a lot of time trying to establish himself as a thinker and sophisticate, possibly to counter his lack of actual academic credentials.
The files are full of these men spouting theories about population decline, the supposed inferiority of non-white people, and what rights women should and shouldn’t have. These theories are bigoted and evil, but they are also—and I mention this again for a reason—very, very dumb. Epstein and Musk both believed that they are, as white men, genetically superior and tried to (or did) impregnate large numbers of women because they wanted to spread their supposedly superior DNA far and wide in order to create a more intelligent population. This is a childlike understanding of genetics, population sciences, and probably the female reproductive system. When Epstein floated his theories to rooms full of well-credentialed academics and scientists, many of them nodded along because he offered them research money. (This, too, is the behavior of people who are definitely venal and quite possibly not all that bright.) He told one scientist that he believed atoms behaved “like investors in a marketplace”—an eyebrow-raising claim that is easily contradicted by fourth-grade science textbooks.
There is nothing wrong with not understanding things that aren’t in your field of expertise; as Socrates said, the origin of true wisdom is acknowledging that “I know that I know nothing.” But these particular know-nothings are a far cry from Socrates. Instead of learning more in a spirit of humility, their typical response when confronted with evidence that their store of knowledge is thin wasn’t to consult with actual experts; rather, it was to assume the experts whose facts and research contradict their theories are wrong and that anything can be learned simply by thinking from first principles. (This is why Elon Musk dreams of colonies on Mars and NASA scientists do not: They have already thought through the problem a lot more, and actually understand the science.)
The crappy thinking that pervades all of this would be innocuous if the complacent know-nothings in question were just 20-year-olds posting on Reddit boards. But these people influence major policy decisions, allocate money on our behalf whether we like it or not, and are responsible politically for where we are now—at the precipice of utter democratic collapse and bringing back measles.
Some people I know who loathe Elon Musk still keep insisting to me that he must be very, very smart, or Tesla and SpaceX wouldn’t be successful. I do not believe Musk is box-of-rocks dumb, but I’ve known plenty of not very bright people who’ve had success with early-stage start-ups. And the thing about the kind of wealth that a giant financial exit (like Musk’s Paypal payday) gets you is that you can fail a lot and no one notices, if you’re just successful some of the time. (This is how early-stage investments work generally.) The successes are not de facto proof of genius, and often there’s a domino effect: One success facilitates the next one in terms of capital investments and support.
It’s this very quality of inert capital accumulation that made Jeffrey Epstein the consigliere to an apparently endless number of billionaire sex pests and just-asking-questions tenured race science enthusiasts. Epstein got a job teaching high school math at the extremely exclusive and expensive Dalton School in Manhattan with no college degree. He then used his proximity to obscenely wealthy parents to talk his way into the role of financial adviser, initially, and fatefully, to the Limited Group’s CEO, Les Wexner. Epstein used Wexner’s pedigree and credibility to pick up more clients, which in turn made him seem more legitimate to the other high-rollers in what’s now commonly known as “the Epstein class.”
Does it require a certain amount of intelligence to do this? Maybe, to some extent. But what it really requires is a willingness to hustle and trade favors, and in Epstein’s case, to brazenly lie about his background and abilities—and later about his malicious and predatory behavior behind closed doors.
Whether this is cunning and smart depends on whether you think it’s especially sophisticated or intellectually rigorous to introduce immoral and unethical behavior into your plan for success. When Donald Trump said he didn’t pay his taxes because he was smart, he perfectly exemplified this sort of thinking. It’s a distressingly common refrain among elites who have convinced themselves that they’re entitled to any kind of behavior that gets them what they want.
In the Epstein files some of them spell all this out explicitly: They think the little people are too stupid to begin to fathom their world-conquering brilliance. When Bill Gates and Epstein discussed how to “get rid of poor people” as a whole, the implication was that the poor were responsible for their own poverty and that the exploitative rent-seeking behavior of the perpetually coddled rich in this country had nothing to do with it. Personally, I think the average 5-year-old can tell you why it’s true that you can win a game by cheating, but that the win won’t be reflective of your intelligence and talent at playing the game.
Epstein’s questionable grammar and spelling have been the source of much analysis already, but more telling to me is how often he picks up on a simple concept, appears to believe he discovered it, and then struggles mightily to explain it. This too, is endemic to the Epstein class, and it becomes a code of weaponized dumbness when several guys on, say, a private plane to, let’s say an island, pass on theories to other elite figures who know just as little as they do and when they all agree that their now shared theory is correct, they take it elsewhere and do maximum damage with it. Much of what the Epstein cohort advances in terms of genetics and biology is recognizable immediately as long discredited theory and eugenicist folklore, but it’s new to them.
The bad ideas and shallow thinking in Epstein’s exchanges were often wrapped in academic-sounding jargon laden with portentous sounding phrases that Epstein simply made up. He funded the Santa Fe Institute in early 1990s, setting out to “mathematize” unexplained phenomena; not long afterward, he threw in the towel when he had the dimwitted epiphany that the stock market was more of a “miracle” than a “machine.” He also said the global financial system was unintelligible in the way that AI developers find their AI’s output confusing—a statement that would probably make both AI developers and financial experts cry in sheer exasperation at its obtuseness.
Last week, The New York Times published a profile of an influencer named “Clavicular” who is Internet famous for “looksmaxxing.” That’s social media argot for maximizing his looks to fit an exaggerated notion of male beauty. Like many 20-year-olds, he appends the word “maxxing” to an astonishing variety of verbs and nouns when other, more obvious words would do. “I said, Oh, let’s start second-floor-maxxing while we’re at the mall,” he says in the profile. “And people in chat were just like, You’re such an idiot, dude, just say ‘go upstairs.’”
I had the same reaction when I read an e-mail from Epstein declaring that he’s interested in “genetic algorithms,” which he describes as “a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection.” You’re such an idiot, dude, just say “genetics.” **
It should be somewhat of a relief that these men are so unimpressive, pretentious, and incurious. This greatly undermines the myth that they’re the sort of Übermenschen they’re made out to be in media and the culture at large. We in the 99.9 percent shouldn’t be afraid of them, or even cowed before the reflection that they’re cunning masterminds of elite perfidy. They weren’t—in some cases, they weren’t even smart enough to keep their worst behavior out of their work e-mails. No, they erred in exercising the same hubris shared among the chronically dumb but confident—hewing to the belief that, in all settings and circumstances, no matter how farcical and/or depraved, they knew exactly what they were doing.
[**Post publication ed. note--This was in the context of a conversation about Epstein's plan to perpetuate his own genes by siring lots of children, which has nothing to do with computational science or modeling, so to be fair, he was misapplying a term of art rather than making one up. A friend described him to me just now as "a Wikipedia intellectual," and I think that captures it better than the Clavicular analogy. ]
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