Economist Adam Tooze, interviewed by Surplus Magazine editor Lukas Scholle, pointed to British radicalism as the historical roots of the “Epstein system.” “One has to acknowledge [that] such a degree of objectification, of dehumanization” has “a long historical background and probably goes back to de Sade… In other words, a libertine, a man who recognized no boundaries. The dark side, one might say, of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, which arose from secularization and the rejection of all Catholic values of conservative Christianity, then built an absolutely unrestrained, erotic philosophy, which of course then led, among other things, to all forms of what are commonly seen as perversions.”
Tooze said it is shocking to see how this network “was directly linked to absolute mainstream science, it must be said, economics via Larry Summers’ business, geopolitics, foreign policy. The conversations go wildly through everything being mixed up. They literally order for each other female bodies and discuss the IMF or Israeli foreign policy and/or some business insider trading on the eurozone crisis or the Maidan-Ukraine crisis, everything is completely mixed up in a mess.”
