Shock overtook a merchant named Gregor Samsa when he awoke one morning to discover that he had turned into an insect, gradually becoming aware of this astonishing transformation. This is the image portrayed by Franz Kafka in 1915 in his short novel known in Arabic as The Metamorphosis, and originally titled Die Verwandlung in German.
Today, a century later, the imagination described as Kafkaesque can easily offer us new forms of metamorphosis inspired by Epstein Island, long hidden from view. It was a place that hosted a globally prominent elite who, once there, appeared to transform instantly into something starkly at odds with their public image.
What must be acknowledged is that this astonishing stream of thunderous scandals does not, in essence, mean that anything new has emerged in the ethics of the privileged elite at the centre of what is termed the “free world”. What has likely changed is the awareness of the public, across the globe, of parts of a reality long concealed from them. The grotesque Epstein files offer a rare opportunity to peer into fragments of the lives of the favoured men and women whose world remained hidden for decades within the heart of the so called enlightened modern world.
The Epstein scandals are not evidence of a sudden moral decline or an unexpected collapse of values. Rather, they reveal a shameful and staggering ethical reality in which a globally privileged elite had long immersed itself, before and after, without a single conscience stirred enough to prompt a public confession or a legal complaint over many years.
These figures were not saints who later became sinners. The exposure of their reality confirms that the condition was always as it was, in both its depth and scale. Even while avoiding generalisation, it remains true that the Epstein scandals gnaw deeply into the American elite and into other Western and non Western elites alike, political, capitalist, social, artistic, cultural, academic, and beyond.
It may be difficult for a global audience to fully absorb the reality now plainly visible through the Epstein window. A broad and internationally prominent elite became accustomed to this moral abyss, value erosion, and legal lawlessness. They normalised it, adapted to it, and deceived their societies, systems, and institutions, operating in spaces that lay outside coverage, where principles were suspended, slogans abandoned, and the law ignored.
These scandals sketch a rare, approximate picture of the lifestyle of the so called one per cent, represented by the concentrated sample documented in the millions of Epstein related records released sparingly by the US Department of Justice.
They reveal how men and women of the privileged elite managed a lifestyle unrestrained beyond the expectations of the ninety nine per cent, to borrow the language of the Occupy Wall Street protesters who filled New York’s squares in the autumn of 2011.
Yet the Epstein scandals represent only a sample of a concealed reality that may harbour other hidden centres, entirely unforeseen. Today, fertile imaginations, with Kafka or without him, are justified in roaming freely as they speculate about what may be unfolding in other obscured spaces, whether similar or even more astonishing.
There are transgressions that occur beyond the field of vision, shielded by collusion among those who know of them and those who participate in them, even though they are effectively common knowledge within those circles. How, then, can it be argued in the Epstein case that such rampant misconduct was an absolute secret, when so many individuals living under the spotlight were implicated?
One of the most shocking aspects of this case is that it is not the story of a single immoral individual overtaken by a fleeting impulse in some hidden corner. It is a tale of sustained and interlocking collusion across multiple elite sectors, spanning fields and generations, deceiving Americans and peoples across the world for what felt like a thousand and one nights.
What unfolded in Epstein’s orbit persisted for a long stretch of time, nearly a generation in terms of changing ages, without a single voice from that vast circle daring to disclose the truth or experience a moral awakening through public confession, until these files finally emerged to strike at claims of transparency, assertions of disclosure, and the supposed effectiveness of the rule of law.
A comparable lesson can be drawn from 2017, when the scandal surrounding Harvey Weinstein, the powerful Hollywood titan, exploded. It quickly became clear that artistic, financial, and social elites, who mingled at receptions and rose to applaud at Oscar ceremonies, alongside segments of the political elite, had colluded in ignoring years of grotesque exploitation committed by the cinematic predator against young women aspiring to the fame controlled by the producer who held the keys.
The scandal erupted only after its evidence and files had grown too large to suppress, overcoming barriers of silence and intimidation imposed by powerful figures in society, wealth, and media upon the victims of brutal exploitation.
That moment saw the launch of the collective disclosure campaign known as MeToo, which exposed entrenched traditions of exploitation and harassment across art, cinema, media, culture, and parliamentary life on both sides of the Atlantic. Even the European Parliament, draped in moral slogans and strict codes regarding the protection of women and girls, was not immune.
That period revealed a culture of absolute disregard for widely known abuses, and the spread of traditions that tolerated horrific violations committed within elite ranks of supposedly free and modern societies adorned with rhetoric claiming to champion women.
Another concealed domain of a similar nature continues to reveal its traces season after season. It concerns the havens of immense wealth where global elites hide their fortunes from public view, such as the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Pandora Papers in 2021. Each revelation explodes in the faces of oppressed peoples and crushed social classes, without producing any fundamental change in reality afterwards.
The recurring eruption of astonishing truths before the public is inseparable from the emergence of networked digital phenomena that have broken the monopoly once held by governments and the media industry over mass broadcasting. These networks have created active spheres that shape public interests and interact in ways humanity has never witnessed before.
The emergence of WikiLeaks in 2006 marked the beginning of an era of earth shattering leaks that exposed a hidden world with its own language, expressions, and transgressions carefully shielded from the light. Julian Assange was pursued and punished for daring to allow the world’s public to listen through thick walls.
Someone holds the investigator’s lamp and shines it into darkened spaces of the hidden, allowing us, through stored data, to glimpse a concealed world at odds with its outward appearance. Renowned global figures then appear as grotesque forms, transformed from their familiar composed images captured in public scenes.
As the Epstein case constitutes a bundle of scandals that stain the very apex of global power, it invites reflection on the concept of scandal itself. A scandal is the exposure of a buried or concealed reality. What is new is not the existence of that hidden reality, but the public’s knowledge of it. What seeps from concealed spaces remains only a fragment of a much larger whole, suggesting that what appears to view is merely the tip of the iceberg.
The Epstein scandals exposed traditions of concealment, whereby shameful practices remain enclosed within their own circles, retreating into sealed spaces that allow the creation of a private world for the privileged, cut off from public scrutiny. These may take the form of a walled palace, a carefully guarded hotel suite, or an island surrounded by water on all sides, preventing eavesdropping or prying eyes.
Such collusive wrongdoing may even spread within religious institutions secluded from their surrounding communities, as shown by scandals that shattered claims of virtue and moral superiority among corrupt and authoritarian clerical elites supposedly devoted to pure worship.
The exalted elite maintain spaces of withdrawal where they indulge desires far removed from the lives of ordinary people, sometimes turning them into an earthly paradise for unrestrained impulses. This withdrawal from public oversight destabilises the systems that some of these figures claim to uphold, enforce, or judge others by, as earthly accountability has limits it cannot cross. This allows shameful practices to escape scrutiny, much like a ship dumping pollutants into the open sea where no cameras watch.
Modern democratic nations have not transcended this tradition of elite withdrawal into private spaces. In some cases, decision makers and power brokers gather in ways that resemble monopolistic concentrations of wealth and authority under one roof. A well known example is the annual and highly secretive meetings of the Bilderberg Group, among other familiar cases that require no conspiracy theories to acknowledge.
Learning, after the Epstein scandals, of the staggering depth of moral degradation concealed from public view does not make this reality new. What is new is the awareness of it, or parts of it, after a long period of ignorance.
The Epstein files should be understood as a revealing moment that exposes a concentrated sample of the global hidden reality at elite levels where privileges accumulate. They point to the illusion of moral compliance, ethical superiority, and principled conduct in a world that judges itself only by what appears in public view, a sphere that itself is hardly free of faults.
One can imagine what colonial elites once did in distant colonies far removed from metropolitan centres. What excesses unfolded then in the absence of documentation, cameras, or networks? The global elite has never been free of such disgraceful transgression. Books, studies, and testimonies have documented fragments of it, but today’s world offers unprecedented glimpses into parts of the concealed. Cameras capture, devices store, and networks carry fragments of the hidden to the world’s public.
In this same pattern, elites within prominent humanitarian and charitable organisations, adorned with governance frameworks and codes of conduct, continue to collude in exploitative violations, some documented in published reports, against communities labelled as beneficiaries of their services in distant environments of hardship far from their northern headquarters.
It is a mistake to conclude that the Epstein files represent a newly emerging moral collapse. What has emerged is knowledge of their shocking contents, nothing more. That knowledge remains partial, fragmented, and delayed, revealing only one focal point among many embedded within the reality of the globally privileged elite in a world that betrays its proclaimed values and slogans.
The final conclusion is clear. The global elite did not recently fall into the pit of moral corruption. It has been seated at its depths all along.
