Today, the world suffers neither from a lack of revelations nor from a shortage of information. Documents, images, names, and narratives circulate endlessly, and scandal has become commonplace.
What has grown scarce is not truth itself, but the moral response to it. The Epstein scandal is neither the first nor the last. What made it emblematic of a broader condition has been the silence – a silence born not of ignorance, but of habituation.
In earlier times, scandal marked a moral moment. Seeing led to judgment, and judgment to shame. The parable of “the naked king” carried weight only because the exposure of power implied its potential collapse.
Today, however, the king is naked, documented, named and yet remains standing. Not because the truth is concealed, but because judgment no longer functions.
The world sees, but feels no compulsion to act on what it sees.
This condition may be called the Epsteinization of power: a state in which power functions not by denying ethics, but by rendering itself independent of it. Epsteinized power knows that exposure is no longer dangerous because society lacks a shared standard of judgment.
Accountability has yielded to the management of scandal, and ethics has been reduced from a structuring principle of politics to a tolerable margin. (more...)
Ethics in suspension: Epsteinization of power in today’s post-shame politics
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