Ethics in suspension: Epsteinization of power in today’s post-shame politics

By Mohammad Akhgari

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.

When this logic is replicated globally – at the intersection of politics, capital, media, and neo-colonialism – we confront a pervasive phenomenon that may be termed neo-colonial Epsteindemia: a structural pandemic of immorality in a world where immunity has become contagious.

Components of the formation of the Epsteindemia of immorality

The Epsteindemia of immorality is neither the result of individual error nor a fleeting deviation. It emerges from the convergence of structural components that have gradually solidified in the late liberal-democratic world.

What collapses is not ethics as a value, but the very capacity for moral judgment.

Emptying of the rule-based ethics of its binding force

An ethics grounded solely in rules, laws, and external oversight is effective only as long as an internal sense of obligation persists.

In post-shame politics, the rules remain, but the moral condition of obedience has collapsed. The law is enforced, yet no longer commands reverence.

Transgression ceases to be the exception and becomes part of the calculus of power; rule-based ethics is neutralized in the face of a power that has already accepted the cost of violation.

Erosion of inner piety in the absence of a transcendent horizon

With the collapse of sacred references and external observers, the autonomous conscience was meant to fill the void. Yet what eroded was not faith, but the very criterion of judgment.

Piety became preference, and conscience, feeling. Humanity in this godless world does not necessarily grow more evil, but becomes less capable of judging. In such a landscape, ethics no longer commands; it merely describes.

Structural Machiavellianism of power

In this condition, Machiavellianism is neither an explicit doctrine nor an individual choice, but the default logic of the system.

Power distances itself from ethics not for survival, but for efficiency. Evil is redefined not as evil, but as a “manageable cost.” The Epsteinization of power occurs precisely here: where ethics is neither rejected nor embraced, but removed from the equation of decision-making.

Transformation of wealth into social criteria of judgment

The problem is neither pleasure nor wealth per se, but that they have supplanted moral criteria. Success, visibility, and enjoyment have become the measures of judgment, and scandal matters only when it obstructs consumption or social ascent.

If it does not, it is rapidly normalized. This normalization is what may be called Epstein-fatigue: a moral numbness produced by the saturation of awareness.

Tragedy of the rebellious human at the moment of power

The contemporary human is critical of power while weak; yet at the moment of acquiring power, the same logic reproduces itself. Rebellion without inner piety does not lead to liberation, but merely to a redistribution of roles.

It is here that Epstein-Faustianism emerges: the conscious bargain of ethics in exchange for security, privilege, or survival.

Instrumentalization of critique: When exposure becomes harmless

In such a world, even critique is absorbed into the epsteindemic logic. Exposure, protest, and radical language are not only tolerated but managed and redistributed.

As long as critique does not culminate in a binding judgment, it poses no threat; precisely for this reason, it is allowed to circulate. Power no longer fears critique, because it knows that critique without criteria becomes, rather than a danger, the fuel for its own persistence.

The critic, willingly or not, is integrated into this logic: writing, exposing, expressing outrage – yet failing to translate judgment into action. Critique detaches from ethics and becomes a gesture; a gesture that produces equilibrium rather than rupture.

What is suspended today is not merely political ethics or institutional integrity, but the very possibility of human judgment.

In a world where the transcendent horizon has collapsed, external observers have lost legitimacy, and inner conscience has eroded, the human being has not become freer, but smaller. He has acquiesced to baseness, not out of malice, but from exhaustion in judging.

Power no longer needs concealment, for the human being has already renounced standing against it. Ethics does not die; it is quietly set aside, and this may be the most dangerous form of death.

Final notes and genealogical references 

• The conception of the human being as a moral-judging subject, implicitly framing this analysis of ethical decay in modern politics, resonates with the humanistic-anthropological tradition of Johann Gottfried Herder, particularly where moral judgment is entrusted not to abstract rules, but to historical experience, moral sensibility, and human responsibility. This article does not commit to a specific reading of Herder, drawing instead on his broader anthropological horizon.
   
• In contrast to the rule-based ethics of the Enlightenment, classically formulated in Immanuel Kant, this analysis asserts that in the late modern world, the central problem is not the absence of rules, but the collapse of the possibility of effective judgment. References to Kantian ethics serve a historical-differentiating function rather than an argumentative foundation.
   
• The notion of “evil without a devil,” implicitly employed in the discussion of the Epsteindemia of immorality, aligns with contemporary debates on the normalization of evil within bureaucratic and political structures, without resorting to metaphysical accounts of evil or negating individual responsibility. Here, evil is not the exception, but the natural consequence of the suspension of human judgment.
   
• The use of coined concepts – Epsteinization of power, Epstein-fatigue, and Epstein-Faustianism – is not merely metaphorical or rhetorical; it seeks to name conditions that classical literature in political science and ethics often treats in fragmented or unformulated ways.
   
• The critique of late democracy in the final section does not reject the democratic principle itself, but rather interrogates the erosion of the judging subject within democratic institutions – a condition in which the structural immunity of power replaces ethical accountability, and critique itself becomes a gesture, a commodity, or an instrument for reproducing the dominant order.

Mohammad Akhgari is an Associate Professor at the IRIB University, Tehran.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)

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