I am sharing this from ‘The World' newsletter from the New York Times this morning. In it, the newsletter's editor, Katrina Bennhold (who seems like a very good journalist, to me) and NYT journalist Matthew Goldstein discuss the fallout from the Epstein case, and this exchange takes place:
But as you said, he was a publicly known and officially registered sex offender since 2008?
Yes, and in that way it's also revealing of how some people in elite society viewed women. There was very much a class aspect to this. A lot of the young girls came from broken homes and poor backgrounds. Some of them had been abused in their own families. And they were viewed, basically, as objects, if not to be sexually used, then to just be around, almost like furniture. They were viewed as disposable people.
There is nothing very new, in a sense, about anything said there, but the last line does stand out. Note it in isolation:
They were viewed as disposable people.
I have no doubt that is how those around Epstein viewed the young women they abused. But have no doubt that this is how many who are rich and powerful view many people.
This is how central banks view those they deliberately leave unemployed through policies that create that status for millions by using interest rates to reduce economic activity. Those who suffer as a result are considered disposable. They are the sacrifices made to keep central banking theory intact, even though it is very obviously wrong.
That is how politicians view those who claim benefits, whom they consider a cost the state must bear. Their actions show that they consider those in deep poverty who are making claims and living lives of incredible stress as disposable people.
And so too are those whose jobs will be lost to AI, boosting the productivity and GDP figures that politicians crave in the process, considered disposable people, to whom not a thought will be given.
Other examples are, of course, available.
I do not say any of this to diminish what was done to Epstein's victims, or to justify how they were treated. I say it to point out that the belief that people are disposable, beneath consideration, and presumed to be unfeeling about the consequences of actions taken against them by a powerful elite extends beyond the particular type of abuse Epstein enabled. It is, in fact, normalised by far too many people in power across many fields. That explains how and why this abuse happened in plain sight, and no one took much notice: treating people as disposable is just what the rich and powerful do.
We live in a society where the abuse of people has become so commonplace that we hardly notice it, and that is why Epstein could carry on. The reality is that so many with power have lost sight of the fact that no one is disposable, everyone matters, and we are all equally human.
We need to bring the abusers Epstein enabled to account.
But we also need a fundamental change in the attitudes of those in power. There are no disposable people, anywhere.
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I strongly agree with your central moral claim that no human being should ever be treated as disposable. That principle should underpin economics, politics, and social policy alike.
However, I’d be a bit uneasy about placing the abuse and exploitation of women simply as one example within a wider category of disposable people. Gender-based abuse is not just another manifestation of general dehumanisation; it has its own distinct roots in patriarchy, misogyny, and control over women’s bodies and autonomy. It involves specific forms of violence, coercion, and silencing that differ in kind from harms created by such things as labour markets, welfare policy, or technological change.
If we subsume this issue under a broad umbrella, we risk blurring the very mechanisms that need to be confronted: unequal power between men and women, failures of policing and justice, cultural attitudes that excuse male entitlement. Those require targeted feminist and human-rights responses, not just a general appeal to dignity.
The wider ethic of non-disposability is essential. But the exploitation of women must remain a category in its own right if it is to be effectively challenged.
So, let’s have a good look at that line of succession thing.
I accept what you say. I acknowledge you are right.
Biut what I am saying is that also do not treat this abuse – horrific as it is – as exceptional in the sense that it is isolated and otherwise the perpatrators are “normnal”. They aren’t. The abuse of power, and the promotion of abuse of all sorts is endemic in our society and that is what provides the cover for the abuse of women. That is the point I am making.
As a woman survivor of horrendous abuse I have to agree with Richard on that. In recovery, I came to understand the dynamics of abuse. I managed to escape to a place of safety to recover, only to realise that I hadn’t in fact escaped, because the patterns of abuse were very evident in all of those in power, and it felt like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Now I no longer feel safe. Anywhere.
The government is hell bent on creating a panopticon, I am trapped on benefits and ALL OF IT is abusive.
I laud people’s efforts to tackle gender-based violence but the root is much deeper. Women’s health, for example, has become so politicised that it’s not even about women’s health anymore. See Sick of It by Sophie Harman, for how. It’s still all about money and power!
People do not have any right, ever, to subjugate others. Whether this is sexism or racism or any otherism, the root is the same. Controlling other people in the absence of meaningful consent is always wrong. That’s got to be the most fundamental truth in a democratic society. But hierarchy and ‘oneupmanship’ is so entrenched in worldwide neoliberalism that the entire democratic system has torn itself free of its roots. I wonder if that was always the long game of neoliberalism. Totalitarianism is the result. I am starting to think I may need to flee again, unless as we say, people wake up and start caring about their neighbours again.
Anonymous for obvious reasons.
Many thanks.
And a great deal I recognise, or know about, and am angry about, and agree with you on.
Thanks. And I agree with you too. This, from Laura Clancy, is worth a read. It’s a few years old now but the action she called for then hasn’t happened yet. It’s time it did.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/prince-andrew-monarchy-women-suffering-b1905135.html
The monarchy’s silence is going to do for them soon. And they are still sheltering him.
Something keeps niggling at me. Post WW2 a politics of care was created. It built up the nation. But something else happened which was perhaps an important precursor to creating the politics of care. For the first time, people of different classes fought together in battlefields. This brought the different ‘classes’ together in ways which peacetime does not. Rich people’s lives were saved by those they’d previously considered disposable. And perhaps that was necessary for that change to happen then.
How do we go about doing that now? Especially since neoliberalism has, so effectively, isolated people.
Abolition of public schools would help in this sense, and many others. The boys in public schools grow up with an elitist view of the world, and a conviction that money buys power and privilege. Not true of all of them, but I think it holds as a generalisation.
Three other related aspects, I think.
Many competent working class people gained insight into the incompetence / impracticality of their “betters” – Dad’s army, Spike Milligan humour grew from that.
4-5 Million people had learned how to fight & use guns. They’d travelled, seen other cultures. They demanded something for what they’d fought for /defended.
Woman had been introduced to different work places, earning “good money” in their own right. After the war, women’s ability to work in these types of environments was reduced…..
The rich (powerful). Career politicians (powerful).
“Rich” needs defining. Somebody with a £1m pension or £10m of assets is very very well off but not in the same league with respect to influence as somebody with £100m or £1bn.
National politicians in place for 20+ years have the possibility to carve themselves nice niches as recent history shows.
In one case (the rich) there could be an upper limit set £50m? I dare say there will be those with those sorts of assets that could be as bad as Epstein et al – but £50m whilst buying some influence (UK politicos are dirt cheap) is not in the same league as Epstein. In the case of dirt cheap UK politicos – limits on the time they can be politicos with more layers of political control (House of People replacing the Lords – selected by e.g. sortition). No presents etc etc. I am confident that none of this will happen under the current gov & the greens are far far too disorganised – policy wise..
Apparently it was the same with the ‘grooming gangs’. It was not only the gangs, but also the police, the social workers etc – who seemed to regard the girls as already street trash – and was the reason they didn’t act to save them.
Agree with Cliff B on keeping abuse of women and girls as distinct category, and also Mike Parr on the necessity to clean up our corrupt politics – and get rid of the moneyed interests which have now bought it up entirely. Will the Greens campaign to do that ?
This attitude is part of the ‘pleonexic’ spectrum for sure, and extends pleonexia to none financial covetousness – coveting other peoples bodies and freedoms.
Eugh!
Youy are right.
And right with Eugh
All my adult life I have been aware that in many countries, a huge swathe of the population is both disregarded and exploited. I also became aware that other countries had a part to play in squashing attempts to improve matters (colonialism, CIA, Investor-State contracts and disputes for starters). And I could not see how justice could prevail against those vested interests on at any kind of scale. Now the same inhuman and senseless logic is being applied to the remaining parts of the world where the thirty years after WWII gave a different experience. Can the majority be woken up before things get as bad here as they are in the US?
I hope so
”Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1926
Indeed
There has always been a massive misogynistic mindset in this country, very evident when I lived and taught in mining areas (S.Wales and mid-Notts). This is still manifest in attitudes to young women in particular amongst those deep in ‘male’ culture or afraid of not being ‘manly’, and that is further exacerbated by online influences. The political classes are a separate phenomenon, something I began to observe in politics in the late 80s and onwards. The ‘manly’ bit is still there (drinking, womanising etc) but there is a class element observable later in the Blair era, that somehow the rank and file were slightly ‘unclean’ and slightly ‘below’ the political class, and certainly not possessing the ‘knowledge’ that the politicos had.
Fitzgerald was, and is right.
Growing up in a relatively poor community, I never saw any of the attitude towards other people that Fitzgerald ascribed to rich people. Only when I stepped beyond my community did I meet people who I think are ‘disdainful’ towards others less wealthy.
It’s probably a universal truism whichever society you examine throughout history.
It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor that gets the blame.
It’s the rich that get the pleasure:
Ain’t it all a bleeding shame.
None of that means it cannot be changed or challenged. I’ve been challenging it all my life and will continue to do so, as effectively as I can. I enjoy doing it, as you do.
Agreed, and thanks.
Privilege and the advantages and power that comes with it always, it seems, leads to arrogance and a sense of entitlement that results in a total lack of respect and empathy for others. Often to the extent that those others are viewed as expendable and disposable by the privileged. Which is why I, amongst many other things, am against private education and am anti monarchy