‘You wonder? That’s all? What about “care”? Don’t you care?’

Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon

Call them psychopaths – Jon Ronson got the measure of them. You are at once envious, contemptuous (you hate/ desire those who have what you can’t (won’t?) have), fascinated – because they move upon God’s earth with an apparent singleminded, lasereyed focus on what is beneficial for themselves alone. The use of the third person plural here obscures the sheer individualism of their life’s endeavour. (Endeavour contains ‘devour’: Everything around them exists to be either devoured or discarded.) Anyone who tries to get their attention will see. There is a raw calculation, a rare ability to block out doubt and self-loathing. A capacity to disdain weakness in themselves and others, to gravitate towards power and to toady up to those who wield it but only with a view one day to usurping it for themselves; the shifting shifty alliances of convenience that they form, huddles of temporarily fellow conspirators.

The antidote to these occasional personalities who inhabit the realms of politics, showbusiness, elite sport, high academia, corporate c-suites, is the visibily self-effacing religious icon. Both archetypes need each other like the earth and the moon, the one trapped in the other’s orbit, but also the reason for the tides of the sea. Was Christ a psychopath? Was the force of his aura such that the subversive didactics, the seeking out and embracing of the marginalised… it was all basically a powerplay that ended, like all political careers, in a bitter downfall? A show, driven by messianic convictions that were sincerely felt, that tormented him at times (in his desert quarantine, in Gethsemane, in his daily devotions), but which remained to the last sufficiently potent to enable him to cast aside his own family? His legacy was to elevate an insurgent cult movement that was eventually swallowed up and appropriated by imperial Rome when it became expedient – In hoc signo vinces. The pietistic veneer that legitimised the past crusades and the present fascism of American evangelicals and the Russian orthodox church.

The slow reveal of the phenomenon of Jeffrey Epstein will be written of in years to come as the cellulite of international decadent western power. Power for the sake of power, with young girls and boys the central lure for the primal urge of alpha men and women to possess, exploit and toss aside the beautiful weak. Jonathan Swift’s bruising satire made flesh. If there is a spectrum of autism, there is also spectrum of psychopaths which begins with your relatively benign CEO, passes through the likes of Pep Guardiola, Taylor Swift and Donald Trump, and ends with Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan.