Amidst last week’s cancer anxiety dance, I tried to take my mind off of it by reading the newly-released Epstein files. My water bill will likely be very high this month. I needed to take a few showers after reading a couple hundred pages. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it’s just another reminder of why moral beauty is such an essential and scarce quality in our modern landscape.
Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile. Many of the people around him? Probably not. Let’s just say they weren’t chasing innocence—they were chasing influence. They are powerphiles.
Powerphilia isn’t about a clinical sexual attraction. Instead, it’s about the pathological attachment to power dynamics — the hunger for status, leverage, access, or dominance — even at the expense of ethics, empathy, or accountability. In this sense, many of the behaviors exposed in the Epstein files go beyond individual criminal acts: they reveal how elite networks and systems can shield, normalize, or enable abuse because of who wields power and how much they can protect themselves. It reminds of my Stanford Psychology professor Phil Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment, the ugly truth that many people dramatically change based upon their habitat.
Writers and analysts discussing the Epstein case often point less to a unified clinical pathology than to how power itself becomes a mechanism that distorts relationships, accountability, and moral restraint. Not all powerful people are abusers, of course — but when power becomes an obsession and a currency above all else, it creates conditions where exploitation and impunity flourish. Where’s Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” philosophy in all of this? We are not objects. We are divinely-inspired humans.
While powerphilia isn’t yet a widely established psychological diagnosis, it captures something real: a social pathology in which power becomes the central object of desire, overshadowing humanity, integrity, and justice.
-Chip