Jeffrey Epstein: God is unknown
Thrasymachus and Epicurus
In my ethics class, we just covered the character Thrasymachus from Plato’s Republic. Thrasymachus is an ethical egoist who says that the best life is one where you can do whatever you want and not get caught. The worst thing isn’t being evil; the worst thing is getting caught being evil. That is because he denies that there is any objective “good and evil,” there is only “what you believe.”
Thrasymachus teaches that all is power. There are the rulers who have power and define what is good and evil, and there are the followers who must live in that system, out of their control. The Marxist professor accepts this power dynamic and argues for a revolution so that the currently oppressed group can take control and use power to define what is good and what is evil.
It was with all of that on my mind that I caught part of an interview between Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein. It was an “intellectual” discussion of the history of physics, mathematics, and philosophy. I’m not recommending it, but there are a couple of themes that stood out to me, which I think explain (in part) Epstein.
When there is a moral monster, we try to make some sense of it. The most common solution in American pop culture is to say, “He’s a sociopath.” The idea is that because the moral monster has no empathy, he does not behave morally or act according to social norms. The problem with this explanation is that even without empathy, we can use our minds to figure out what is right and wrong and act toward the good.
Instead, when you examine the thought process of the moral monster, you find that it traces back to some fundamental unbelief. And that is what stood out to me here. He explains that physics tried to use mathematics to explain the world and failed. The world is not, in the end, explainable. We reached “a limit,” he calls it, which is unknown and beyond reason. What is beyond that limit, unknowable, is what some call God (he says). He likens it to dividing a number by zero: irrationality.
Later in the conversation, he says the same thing about the soul. Humans have souls, he says, but what they are and what happens to them is unknown to us.
In other words, he is a classical Epicurean (like Thrasymachus) who claims there is no God and there is no soul. Saying that God and the soul are real but completely unknowable amounts to the same thing.
That is the foundation from which the rest of his conclusions about life flow. The moral monster denies God and, from there, denies any moral order. Instead, all is power, all is will—do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.
Moral monsters are often “intellectual.” It is a way they protect their own mind from itself. They deceive themselves into thinking, “I’ve done my best, I’ve searched things out, I can talk about the history of ideas with the elite thinkers of my day, and we all agree God and the good are unknown.” They then use their “intellectual gifts” to “wow” others. This is a form of self-justification. They want the other to leave the conversation thinking, “he’s clearly very smart, and has tried his best to know, maybe he’s got a point.”
You need to learn discernment and how to see through self-deception and self-justification.
Don’t be a Thrasymachus. Power does not define good and evil. God is clearly knowable and has made His law known to all the world.