Our ancestors built cathedrals meant to stand for a thousand years. We build glass towers that last two decades before demolishing them because the aesthetic has gone stale. And now we have crowned our civilisation’s architectural ambitions with “marvels” like the Burj Khalifa — a $1.5 billion empty, ugly Arabic phallic monument to absolutely nothing, rising out of the desert like a middle finger aimed at taste itself. Built by slave labourers, bankrolled by a torture-loving pedophile and admired primarily by a swarm of intellectually vacant influencers who fled to Dubai so they would not have to pay taxes on whatever pittance they scrape together by filming themselves pointing at things and posting it online.
This – apparently – is our Chartres.
This – evidently – is our Parthenon.
A vanity project for a petro-state, worshipped by people who cannot locate it on a map. For context: sending the New Horizons spacecraft to explore Pluto — an actual expansion of human knowledge, a genuine extension of the species’ reach into the cosmos — cost $700 million. Less than half of what it took to erect a glittering desert obelisk that exists for no purpose other than to appease Muslim inferiority complexes.
Alexander Demandt, the German historian, captured this perfectly: “Beauty was displaced on one hand by the pleasant, on the other by the aberrant, ugly, bizarre. A wastebasket at Documenta became art through a catalogue number. There is no noise the Philharmonic’s auditorium won’t accept as music if the programme announces it as such.”
This same restless hunger for novelty explains our addiction to our (smart)phones, to the infinite scroll, to the algorithmic drip-feed of content that promises both sensation and surprise just below the bevel of the screen. For-profit technology companies have always understood this about us better than we understand it about ourselves. They have built machines that exploit the precise vulnerability that four centuries of modernist philosophy created: our inability to sit still, to be silent, to contemplate anything that does not deliver an immediate sensory payoff. The average European now stares at a screen for some eight hours a day like it is their life support for a soul that has forgotten what it was built for.
The same principle governs our moral landscape. Our values shift from decade to decade with the frantic pace of fashion precisely because they are not rooted in anything permanent. Go back twenty years and try to explain the concept of preferred pronouns to the average person. They would stare at you as though you had grown a second head. Not because they were “Liderally Naazis”, but because the entire idiotic conceptual framework had not yet been invented — or, more accurately, had not yet become novel enough to be interesting. We now chase moral novelty with the same desperate energy we chase every other kind, discarding yesterday’s convictions like last season’s wardrobe, not because they were wrong but because they were boring.
The average person, enslaved to sensation and starved for novelty, causes relatively limited damage. Your doom-scrolling habit is not going to destabilise a nation – at least not yet. You are constrained, as most of us are, by the simple brutalities of necessity — the job, the bills, the mortgage, the sheer logistical impossibility of acting on every appetite. But wealth, real wealth, the kind measured in billions, does one thing above all else: it multiplies choice. It removes every practical constraint between desire and action.
The tropical beach you daydream about? For a billionaire, that is a Tuesday. The exotic cuisine you save up to try once a year? That is their airplane food. The experience you consider a once-in-a-lifetime thrill? They exhausted that entire category before they turned twenty-five. A human being with no formation in objective morality, conditioned by sensation alone, obsessed with novelty, and possessed of virtually unlimited resources is not merely a decadent figure. They are a dangerous one. Because the territory of the novel, for such a person, extends far beyond what ordinary people can even conceive. What is exotic to you is monotonous to them. What shocks you is, for them, last year’s indulgence. If they are going to fend off the creeping frost of boredom they must venture into territories that the rest of us would find not merely unfamiliar but morally unthinkable. And with no philosophical framework to tell them stop, with no cultivated moral intuition to intervene, with nothing but appetite and means and the suffocating fear of boredom, they will drift — inevitably, predictably, almost mechanically — into the darkest corners of human experience.
An anecdote about the French novelist Gustave Flaubert and his traveling companion Maxime Du Camp, talks about them journeying through the Middle East in the mid-nineteenth century, when such a trip still qualified as exotically avant-garde. The two men encountered, on the water, two Arab boats transporting slaves to Cairo. The cargo was mostly women and girls. Flaubert and Du Camp boarded the vessels. They stayed as long as they could. They haggled over ostrich feathers and, grotesquely, over an Abyssinian girl. Their purpose, as Flaubert himself recorded, was “to enjoy the chic of the spectacle.” Read that again and let the full weight of it settle. A boat full of kidnapped women and girls, destined for sexual slavery in a foreign country, and two of Europe’s most celebrated literary minds treated it as dinner theatre. Not a horror to be obstructed. Not an injustice to be fought. An experience to be consumed. A novel sensation. “Progressive” tourism at its most literal and most obscene.
Now Flaubert was no ignorant brute. He was the man who wrote Madame Bovary, a novel whose entire structure is built around the dangers of boredom — of what happens when ennui, “like a spider, silently spins its shadowy web in every cranny of the heart.” He well understood the disease. He simply could not resist participating in it. The modernist mind, even when it sees the abyss, keeps walking toward it, because the abyss is at least interesting. If you understand this — if you see the through-line from Flaubert on that slave boat to the guests on Epstein’s island — then the strategy behind someone like Epstein becomes almost banal in its legibility : If you want to manipulate, control, or blackmail the richest and most powerful people in the world, you do not offer them money. They have money. You do not offer them status. They have status. You become a curator of sensations — the kind so exotic, so far beyond the ordinary menu of earthly pleasures, that even a billionaire will find them unfamiliar. And the only sensations that remain genuinely novel to someone who has already exhausted every legal and socially acceptable form of pleasure are, by definition, the ones that cross into the morally unthinkable. You become, in other words, precisely what Jeffrey Epstein was : a concierge of depravity, catering to a clientele whose philosophical formation — or total absence thereof — has left them incapable of recognizing a moral boundary until they have already obliterated it. The millionaire trustifarian Lefties recently touring the slums of Havana whilst live streaming their travails to their chums in Westminster & Hollyweird don’t think of themselves as monsters. That is the crucial thing. They think of themselves as beings so far above the common run of humanity that ordinary moral categories simply do not apply. The same standards that govern a Thérèse of Lisieux or a Mother Teresa — humility, restraint, compassion, self-denial — are, in their minds, the archaically quaint scruples of the provincial and the weak. They consider themselves amongst the great and powerful. And to the great and powerful, nothing should be refused. Not even by their own consciences. Cardinal Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, gave a speech in which he warned of what he called a “dictatorship of relativism” — a regime that “recognizes nothing as definitive and leaves only one’s ego and its desires as the final measure.” He also observed “a strange and only pathologically explicable self-hatred in the West, which laudably tries to understand foreign values but no longer likes – or is at ease with – itself.” This is not a man given to hysteria. And yet his diagnosis aligns perfectly with what the Epstein files reveal: a ruling class unharnessed from any transcendent standard of good, drifting through an ever-expanding ocean of available sensation, protected by the very institutions they have hollowed out.
But here is the part that should keep you up at night, the part that transforms this from a story about them into a story about us. We are guilty of the same disease. The difference is only one of scale. Our appetite for the latest Epstein disclosures — the new emails, the new photographs, the new names — is itself a manifestation of the same hunger for novelty that created the conditions for Epstein’s operation in the first place. We are not contemplating the horror with the gravity it deserves. We are consuming it. Scrolling through it. Treating it as content. As spectacle. We are, in our own modest way, Flaubert on the slave boat — not perpetrating the evil, certainly, but savoring the chic of it, the thrill of proximity to something so dark it qualifies as novel.
We stare at screens for eight hours a day because those machines deliver a steady intravenous drip of sensation and novelty directly into the pleasure centres of our brains. We cannot imagine logging off, being still, being silent, sitting with the questions that might surface in the absence of stimulation. We have lost the capacity — or perhaps the courage — to contemplate the deepest depths of the soul and the lingering moral questions that haunt anyone who dares to be quiet long enough to hear them. And if we, with our limited means and our mortgages and our nine-to-fives, are already this enslaved to the cycle of sensation and novelty, then who among us can say with certainty that, given unlimited resources and zero moral formation, we would not end up in precisely the same place as the names in those redacted files?
The honest answer is: we cannot. The only difference between us and them is that we have not yet been afforded the same temptations. Our poverty — of money, of access, of opportunity — is, paradoxically, our protection. But it is a fragile protection, and it is eroding daily because when you look at adult content readily available to everyone for free, it is not about naked women or watching two or more people having sex anymore. It is evolving—or maybe devolving. More depravity, more weird fetishes, more “barely legal teen” titles, more degradation of females as sex slaves—and it’s free for you to watch. Every day. Nothing here is different. It is the poor people’s digital version of Epstein’s island. The philosophical infrastructure that produces Epstein-class predators is the same one that produces Epstein-class consumers. We are all downstream of the same polluted river.
Jerry Seinfeld once quipped that the secret to life is to waste time in ways that you enjoy. It is a funny line. It is also, if taken as a philosophy, a prescription for moral catastrophe. Don’t just enjoy yourself while wasting time. That is how you become a moral monster without ever noticing the transformation. That is how you wake up one morning on an island in the Caribbean, surrounded by people who have lost the ability to distinguish between pleasure and predation, and realise — if you are still capable of realisation — that the road to this place was paved not with dramatic acts of villainy but with a million tiny surrenders to the tyranny of sensation. The antidote — the only antidote — is to refuse the terms of the deal. To refuse to believe that sensation and novelty are all this life offers. To cultivate silence. To practice stillness. To orient yourself, deliberately and stubbornly, toward the things that modernism has taught us to ignore: truth as an objective reality that exists whether we acknowledge it or not; goodness as a standard that binds us regardless of our preferences; beauty as something real and worthy of sustained, selfless contemplation — not as decoration, not as content, but as a window into the permanent things that outlast every trend, every appetite, every empire.
Spengler was right about the arc of civilizations. Demandt was right about the marriage of refined lifestyle and declining life force. Ratzinger was right about the dictatorship of relativism. Flaubert, in his bitter, self-destructive way, was right about ennui. And John Senior was right that the death of a culture begins not with an invasion but with the slow, voluntary abandonment of everything that made the culture worth defending. The files will keep coming. The names will keep surfacing. And the choice before each of us remains exactly what it has always been: to consume the spectacle, or to step away from the screen, sit in the silence, and ask ourselves the only question that has ever really mattered — what kind of person am I becoming?
© DJM 2026
