From Depravity to Redemption

Part one of a series

The word power can mean many things: moral power, spiritual power, the power to heal, the power of love. Here I will speak of another kind, the kind we use to refer to presidents and billionaires and the people in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book. It is the power to subject others to your will, to direct their actions, and to rise above the rules that others must obey. This sort of power is naturally attracted to depravity.

Some who pursue domination will naturally take it to its extreme. Even if one doesn’t pursue power, but is born or brought into it, depravity exerts an insidious pull. It may start with a subtle sense of one’s own superiority, an aloofness, a patronizing attitude toward inferiors, a tendency to associate with other powerful people as peers while subtly dehumanizing the rest. From there, under the right circumstances, with nothing to limit its drift, it may progress toward its fulfillment: the most heinous acts of complete domination of one human being over another.

The dehumanization that is so routine in modern society—that turns us into consumers, functionaries, market opportunities, profit centers, voters, sex objects, characters in degrading political narratives, occupants of racial, gender, or ethnic stereotypes, and so on—seeks somewhere to take on its most extreme forms. Any society that commodifies nature and normalizes dehumanized relationships will necessarily harbor, in its darkest recesses, in its prisons and concentration camps and black sites, behind the closed doors of its normal-seeming houses, in the recesses of its family secrets, and in the fortified compounds of its elites, the most grotesque violations of human dignity. It is an organic necessity. Abnormalized degradation complements and completes the normalized. It is impossible for a world that has one, not to also have the other.

The Epstein files are a ringing indictment of our society, but no such indictment is necessary for those of us who have studied the normalized exploitation and degradation of human beings (and other-than-human beings) on earth. We never believed the system was sound. We saw the sweatshops, the toxic waste dumps, the slums, the landless peasants, the refugee camps, the child labor, the neoliberal extraction and the wars, prisons, death squads, and torture regimes needed to maintain it. We saw the conversion of life, earth, beauty, community, and imagination to money. We didn’t need the Epstein files or notions of Satanic cabals to reject it. But for most people, these costs to humans and nature were relatively invisible, hidden behind global supply chains and ideologies of progress, of development, of the ascent of humanity. The Epstein files pierce that obscuring haze. They show us the true nature of power, in its distilled form.

The files arouse a feeling of confirmation, of vindication, that does not depend on the factual truth of the specific claims surrounding them. The smaller truth is: “Aha! I knew it! Inhuman elites are running the world.” The larger truth is: “Something inhuman is running the world.” The second truth contains the first, neither denying nor depending on it. If the elite predators are byproducts of something greater, if they are its functionaries, if they are among its symptoms, then the task before us is much larger than merely to send them to the guillotine. If we are serious about ending the age-old civilizational reign of terror, we must resist the familiar reflex, the familiar problem-solving template of “find someone to kill.”

We have been well-versed in that template. What Hollywood action movie doesn’t hinge on defeating the villain who is the ultimate cause of the problem? Those films program our understanding of what action is, what the cause of suffering is, and how to erase it.

Some of my critics think I must not be serious about ending the horror because, they think, I want to “let the perpetrators off the hook.” It is the reverse. It is because I am absolutely serious that I want to find the real cause and not the easy answer. If a spasm of bloodletting would forever end the cycles of exploitation and horror, I would say yes, let’s do it. But if it would only give the appearance of a solution while distracting us from—and thereby perpetuating—the underlying causes, then those of us who care must look deeper. We must ask, why are the elites so naturally drawn to depravity? What is in the “job description” of power that includes depravity? What in our deep, unconscious narratives, myths, and collective psychology generates that job description in the first place?

Please—I am not advocating that we sit back and philosophize while giving predators a free pass. Those who have violated trust must be removed from power. Is that the final solution though?

A friend of mine was a South African labor activist, a revolutionary radical in the 1970s and 80s who ended up serving in Nelson Mandela’s cabinet. After decades on the outside, he and his comrades were now in positions of power. The good guys won! The age of corruption was over, because the old elites, crooked and cruel, had now been replaced by an incorruptible revolutionary cadre with the fiercest ethics. Well, you know what happened. It didn’t take long for the new elite to start behaving just like the old. Their skin color was different, but the dynamics of power remained the same. Mandela himself was exceptional, but he could do little to stem the tide even when he was still in office, much less posthumously. My friend had the choice of whether to join the corruption, one compromise at a time, or to retire from power entirely. He chose the latter course. He literally could not remain in office and remain uncorrupted. Because, that was simply the way things were done.

I’m not saying that the South African government is full of pedophiles and torturers. Not everyone in the elite—probably only a small minority—takes power to its most extreme expression. The point is that when the roles are available, someone will step in to fill them. And these roles are systemically produced. They self-replicate.

I just spoke yesterday with a survivor of Satanic ritual abuse who was trafficked by her family of origin throughout her childhood. She goes by the name of Shoshana. She has been on a long healing journey. Before she began to heal, she had no memories of any kind from before age 12. Now she has full access to her childhood. I have her permission to share whatever might be useful. Over years of abuse, Shoshana witnessed the process by which her older brothers were broken and trained to abuse and traffic her, their sister. They did not start out evil. They started out as sweet, innocent babies. The abuse their father inflicted shattered them. They became monsters. And what of the father? What happened to him to turn him from a sweet innocent baby to someone who would rape and traffic his own daughter?

Maybe the whole generational pattern was consciously conceived by some evil mind long ago. Who knows. But no evil mind or deliberate plan is needed to perpetuate it. It is like a malware program that has commandeered the entire system to run itself endlessly, autonomously, long forgetting its author.

Generational patterning, the cycle of trauma, is only one means of depravity’s perpetuation. The essays that follow in this series explore primal forces of human social psychology, archetypal dramas, ritual magic, and morphic fields that have aggregated over tens of thousands of years. If we understand them, however dark they may be, we will have hope. We will have agency. We will know how to contribute to a world where such things never happen again.

Many of us feel despair confronting material such as the Epstein files. The despair has two sources. First is the apparent power of the perpetrators, their money and political position, their influence over media, law, government, religion, technology, and so forth, enough to crush all resistance. Second is deeper. It is the despair that cries out in anguish, “How could human beings do this to one another?” recognizing that I too am human. It is not a force external to humanity that is committing these horrors. Even if we cast the perpetrator into a separate category of being, still the despair remains that we face something that, because it is part of us, is inescapable.

The despair draws on false premises about how creation works and what a human being is. Ironically, these are also the premises of the very thing we despair of ever changing. First, power is not what we have been taught. The world is subject to causal influences far transcending the instruments of force that the elites wield. We can align with a larger intelligence—Shoshana calls it spirit—that guides us toward extraordinary creative and transformative power. Secondly, human nature is not fixed. What we call human nature has developed to host the dramas necessary for its evolution. When someone like Shoshana heals, she does a great service to humanity, not just to herself. She removes a filament of human nature from the weave and replaces it with a different kind.

Shoshana has no desire to see the perpetrators of the Epstein files swing from the gallows. Our call ended with a prayer: “May your healing ripple back through time to heal your ancestors. May it ripple forward to heal your descendants. May it emanate outward to heal the world.”

Whether or not your theory of change can account for it, you probably have had the experience of feeling gratitude—not just admiration or respect, but gratitude—for another person’s healing. That feeling comes from a deep wisdom. It recognizes that soul’s generosity in taking on such horror so that it might be removed from circulation forever.

This is another kind of power. As we grapple with power in the normal sense, let us also stay tethered to this kind. It is not a diversion. It is not a bypass. It will make us brave and unblinking as we face the worst of what human beings have done, and it will show us how to respond.