Epstein is a symptom

No one deposes a king because of their belief in democracy. They do it because the king has used his power to harm people.

History is a cyclical thing, and one of the key cycles is this: a given society is fairly stable. There is a system that benefits a small group of people disproportionately but still leaves almost everyone else more or less content to shift along as best they can.

Over time, the disproportionate benefits that the small group collects grow, and the rate of increase also grows. They keep siphoning wealth and power from everyone else and as they do so, they start to go insane. This is not a coincidence.

At a certain level of wealth, fame, and power, you have the option of only ever listening to people who validate you and that is extremely mentally unhealthy. At a certain level of wealth, fame, and power, you become protected from the consequences of your actions and that also is extremely mentally unhealthy.

There is a tendency for the small group of powerful people to become amoral. They are, at this point, so removed from the rest of the world that it becomes less and less relevant, less and less real. And because they hold all the power it gets harder and harder to mete out consequences.

Power corrupts because it seeks more power. Because exercising control is addictive.

No one deposes a king because of their belief in democracy. They do it because the king has used his power to harm people.

Which will always happen, eventually. A system that keeps all the power and wealth tightly controlled within a small group relies on that small group keeping control of their moral health. Inevitably they will fail – both because eventually the crown will fall to someone and selfish, and because the conditions of that power actively corrupt.

So the next stage in the cycle, once the divide between the elites and the masses become so stark the elites have become depraved, the masses start to get angry.

There arises a challenge. Organisations are founded; in the modern era political parties, activist groups, newspapers, unions. They exist in opposition to the establishment. The point of them is to break the status quo.

Eventually, the challenge succeeds, somewhat. You get King John to accept the Magna Carta and it changes things a bit, and begins the process of things changing more over time. Or you behead Louis XVI and change things completely all at once but it's desperately unstable and they change back, and then back again for a while.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, the challenge is a perfect success. All the crimes done by the elites are prosecuted, all the structures that supported their misdeeds are undone, a new system built by and for the people is put in place and works.

For a while.

The challengers now become the establishment. They have good intentions, they mean what they say, they follow through on their ideals.

But the decades pass. Society is fairly stable, but it still needs to be managed by someone. And those people become used to power. The new status quo works for them and there is no incentive for them to question whether it works for everyone else.

We can see this now in the institutions we used to look to for support. The Labour Party. The New York Times. Barack Obama. Sometimes it feels less that they're failing to meet the moment than they're failing to recognise there is a moment to be met. Which is easily done because by this point they have so much wealth and power as to be protected from the realities the rest of us are having to face.

No one deposes a king because of their belief in democracy. They do it because the king has used his power to harm people.

Every year brings society further from the horrors of the past, and society doesn't have a great memory. Society doesn't like to think of itself as part of an ongoing historical era. The idea that we could be subjected to the kind of upheaval you read about in books – it's hard to take in.

So you move forward without thinking too hard about how the structures of your world are slowly shifting. Without worrying about the moral courage of those tasked with upholding those structures. Everyone starts taking everything for granted.

The people who have power start to want a little bit more power.

We have not yet developed a way to prevent this cycle from recurring. Systems are only as strong as the people who maintain them, and people are so very corruptible.

We have had an amoral ruling class for decades now. We knew this when the Panama Papers were released and we know it now with the Epstein files.

A strong, democratic political and social system is supposed to protect ordinary people from exploitation by the powerful, but that requires the agents of that system to have their own power and the will to use it well. But those people benefit from the establishment as it is. They benefit from the current status quo and they're rewarded for upholding it.

It is obviously grotesque that a collection of the world's most powerful men exploited young girls for their own amusement. But the fact that they could, the fact that so many influential people still sought Epstein's help when his crimes were known – that is indicative of the real problem.

No one deposes a king because of their belief in democracy. They do it because the king has used his power to harm people.

People cannot be permitted to have this much power.

The answer is, of course, that we will always need challengers. We will always need people who set themselves against the establishment. And we need to remember that they too will one day become the thing they fought.

And we will do it all over again.