Epstein and the Wage Slaves: How Are We Supposed to Live Like This?
There's a connection between the jobs market and the Epstein trafficking ring. Let me explain...
Our society is sick.
I know; what a groundbreaking revelation! Nobody has ever discussed this before, I’m truly a revolutionary thinker.
I’m also a sarcastic little brat, as we all know.
But truly, when you get a little free time to stop and reflect on what most of our daily lives look like, it becomes obvious that there are severe and crippling issues impacting us all.
I mean, think about it. Are you happy with your life? Are you content, free from depression or anxiety, feeling completely fulfilled with your career and your living situation and the direction your country and the rest of the world is heading?
It’s true that nobody in history has ever been perfectly happy with the whole world, but… how often have entire generations been associated with sadness and despair?
I mean, we now live in a world where the very concept of empathy for your fellow human being is being actively painted as a bad thing by the people who lead the most powerful country on Earth!
My generation — Millennial — and younger are perpetually depressed, showcasing gallows humour about dying at work, never retiring and never owning a home. Our most common topic of conversation online is about how we’ve never experienced prosperity, and unlike previous generations, we have no hope that we ever will.
Unless you’re born into wealth, but how many of us are? The great game of Capitalism has been rigged against most of us since before we were born.
We’ve never had a chance to dream of more. We work ourselves to death to survive, our culture berates us for a lack of success that simply isn’t within reach, and at this point, working one job isn’t enough to keep you under a roof or put food on the table.
I know people working two, sometimes three jobs just to get by. Desperation is our default position.
And the worst thing of all is that it’s artificial. None of this is an accident. Our society has been designed this way. And with the release of the Epstein files, we’re finding out exactly how bad it is.
We’re the end result of a fundamental betrayal, and now we know it.
Have you ever heard the term ‘wage slavery?’
The idea is that people who are trapped on the edge of poverty by a high cost of living are completely dependent on their job for survival. They live paycheck to paycheck, unable to put away savings over time because they simply don’t make enough money to do that.
After paying their bills, their debts, and buying groceries, there simply isn’t anything left over. And with the hiring market being what it is, their chances of simply getting a better job are virtually nill.
In this situation, you don’t have many options. Especially in the United States, where even your access to healthcare depends on you having a job, workers literally cannot afford to risk rocking the boat and losing their employment.
This creates an atmosphere where workers are unable to advocate for themselves. Even if you’re being abused by your boss, what are you going to do about it? Risk getting fired by fighting back? Will HR help you, or protect the company?
Do you have the money to hire a lawyer to back you up? And with the holes that exist in the social safety net, can you be sure you’ll land safely if you fall?
For most people, the answer is no. So, they keep their mouths shut and deal with whatever’s happening just to keep pulling in the money necessary to stay afloat.
With Artificial Intelligence taking a sledgehammer to the jobs market — particularly creative jobs and analysis jobs that require data-gathering skills — a lot of people are being kicked out of the workforce entirely.
It’s cheaper for companies to use AI rather than pay humans to do the work.
As an aside, I don’t use AI for my work here. This is all human writing, right down to the typos.
On top of all of this, the job market is insane. The requirements and qualifications are ridiculous, and the pay range is meagre.
The chances of a company ghosting you are high, the chances that job postings are even real are low, and half the time companies are either trying to look like they’re hiring with no intention of actually doing it, or just gathering data for sale by collecting resumes.
If you’re job hunting, expect to apply to hundreds of jobs before you even get a single response. Expect to have to tailor your resume to every single job listing to make sure you can get past the AI hiring bot before a human even sees it, and expect to have to interview three or four times and wait weeks before you find out if you’re in or out.
That’s if they even bother to tell you.
This state of desperation creates conditions that are ripe for exploitation. It creates a breeding ground for predatory behaviour.
The way our society is structured welcomes foxes into the hen house.
People like Jeffrey Epstein.
Most of the world’s wealth is consolidated in the hands of around 10 people.
Read that again. On a planet with over 8.3 billion human beings around the globe, around 10 people hold most of the planet’s money and assets.
There are around 3000-ish billionaires worldwide, out of that 8.3 billion. Around 60 million-ish people millionaires. These are ballpark numbers because of how the financial world fluctuates and how wealth is actually calculated — it’s hard to get concrete numbers from day to day.
Suffice to say, the majority of the world’s money and assets are in the hands of a very, very small percentage of the global population. The rest of us get by, mostly as wage slaves like we talked about above.
Some people are just straight-up slaves, too. The practice of slavery never ended, guys.
That is a staggering degree of wealth inequality that is completely unprecedented in human history. We have never seen such an extreme division between the haves and the have-nots.
Wealth does something weird to the human brain. It depletes empathy, increases entitlement and creates a bizarre disconnect between the wealthy and the poor. The ultra-rich simply don’t see the poor as fully human.
Extreme wealth quite literally causes mental illness.
It also basically removes the potential for accountability and consequences for heinous behaviour. That is a toxic combination, the fruits of which we are currently witnessing with the Epstein trafficking case.
Epstein was basically a purveyor of depravity for the people who could afford to buy anything they wanted.
His friends and clients included the wealthiest, most powerful people on Earth — and, as has been pointed out by other women, the people who own corporations with the power to shape culture and beauty standards in our society.
As a relatively young woman, I am having to come to terms with the fact that my culture’s standards of beauty basically sexualized me as a literal child. And it wasn’t by accident.
The wealthy felt they could do whatever they wanted with no consequence, so they paid Epstein to provide the experiences they desired. And that included horrific, criminal abuse perpetrated against vulnerable children and young women.
I’m not going to go into detail; what little I’ve looked at was traumatic enough that I don’t have the stomach to dig deeper. If you want detailed accounts, look to other creators.
By the way, there’s no chance it stopped with Epstein’s death. We’re talking about billions of dollars changing hands. There’s already a logistical plan in place, a list of clients, and all of the infrastructure for the business. Epstein was the face, but you can bet your ass somebody else has stepped up to take over by now.
There’s no way all of that power and influence and money didn’t tempt some other psychopath to profit off of it all.
And as we know, children from impoverished regions and minority groups are more likely to suffer trafficking. So when extreme wealth exists alongside extreme poverty…
You get the picture. The same predatory, exploitative dynamics that exist in a toxic workplace also come into play here; how do you protect yourself against people that literally run the world?
As a child? As the child’s parents, assuming you ever see them again? Assuming you ever know what happened to your child in the first place? Assuming the child even has parents or anyone to report them missing? Assuming the parents aren’t complicit?
This abuse doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
It’s not about one man or the individual monsters who he served. We want them held accountable and we want the victims to get the justice they deserve, absolutely! But we should also want to prevent more children from falling prey to this in the future.
For that, we need to consider the system of wealth and power that we live under today.
Epstein is a symptom of extreme wealth and inequality. What he was and what he did could not exist without the extreme division between wealth and poverty.
We’re not just venting about injustice on the individual level, here. We’re talking about a system that is fundamentally unbalanced at our expense. That is what we need to dismantle, that is where our focus needs to be.
In a healthy world, Epstein couldn’t exist. Wage slavery would be unthinkable.
Disease flourishes when the conditions are right. Mold grows when a space is moist, damp, dark, and the air is still. Washing it up once does nothing; if the conditions are the same, the mold comes back. But when we let the light in, fix the cracks in the windows, turn on a fan and clean everything up, the mold doesn’t come back.
It has no way to grow.
The people who profit off of this system are the people who make the rules about how the system works. They are the cracks in the windows that let the moisture in, the curtains that block out the light, the door that shuts and keeps the air stagnant and still.
They perpetuate the status quo. They let the rot fester.
Our society doesn’t need us to clean up once, wash our hands and walk away. We need to fix the problems that cause the sickness so it never resurfaces again.
The extreme divide between the wealthy and the poor needs to be bridged. A world where the ultra-rich could literally afford to purchase countries and the poor are barely able to feed themselves is a world that deserves to end.
Tax laws that allow for the hoarding of extreme wealth need to be changed. Wages need to be adjusted to allow people to actually live, not just scrape by. Profiteering on the part of major corporations needs to be regulated, and healthcare can’t be tied to your ability to find a job.
The basic requirements of survival must not be locked behind a paywall. As long as they are, then we as a society have decided that the poor don’t deserve to live. That is not a world I want to live in. Do you?
This twisted culture of hustle without rest, income inequality, extreme wealth — those are the problems we need to fix.
And by the way, I’m not just talking about the U.S.; I live in Canada! But we have the same problems, and we require just as drastic a solution. Most countries do.
Our society is sick. It is limping along with a fever that continues to broil higher and higher, and the people at the helm aren’t just uncaring, they’re the bloody virus.
If they’re not going to fix this, then we’re going to have to do it ourselves.
Solidarity wins.