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One key revelation in the wide correspondence of the late pedophile: The rich and powerful just aren’t all that bright.

Jeffrey Epstein, along with some of the many plutocratic dopes of his acquaintance.

Adisturbing number of the oligarchs responsible for the mess we’re in are not very smart. I realize that this seems like a minor complaint when so many of them are also evil,  incompetent, and causing enormous amounts of human suffering. (Though perhaps it’s better that they’re dimly lit, because who knows how much worse things would be if they were truly evil geniuses?)

Still, after reading through the Epstein files this past week, I think it’s important to underline this basic point—especially since so many of the plutocrats clustered around the late pedophilic sex trafficker get described in press accounts as s geniuses and brilliant thinkers solely because they are powerful and wealthy. It’s precisely this benign assumption of competence and intelligence that lets them get away with murder. (For any lawyers reading this: I am not talking about any specific or literal murder, though I think I can safely and legally say that the hyperbolic overestimation of their collective intelligence lets them get away with, among other things, participating in a global sex-trafficking ring.)

Is it more important that they’re immoral than that they’re wildly incurious people—mediocre thinkers who only seek out opinions and research that conform to their worldview that their privilege and power as wealthy white men (they’re almost all wealthy white men) is both natural and correct? Sure. But their evil and their ignorance are neither mutually exclusive nor unrelated. On some level, much of society thinks these men are wealthy because they know better than most and deserve the power and plunder they luxuriate in. This idea is intertwined with the Horatio Alger myth—that if you work hard, you’re smart and determined, and apply yourself and you’ll be a great American success. The myth is so ingrained in our hyper-capitalist culture that it’s often also assumed that the equation is true in reverse: If you’ve achieved success in America, by any means whatsoever, you must have worked harder and been smarter.

That presumption of intellectual capacity and competence protects the über-rich from accountability, and allows policymakers to hold the poor to a higher standard of behavior than they do for any given billionaire. It is not a small thing, and it’s not ancillary to the systemic problem of an unequal society controlled by unapologetic hoarders of wealth.

I had hoped that when Elon Musk started tweeting a few hundred times a day, it would thoroughly debunk the idea that he was brilliant and should be invested with the ability to control multiple large enterprises, including a very large public company, other people’s retirement portfolios by extension—and for a while, the president of the United States. Musk enjoys trolling and is routinely snowed by fake news reports. These traits by themselves are not exactly the hallmarks of a rigorous mind, and neither is doing enough ketamine to kill an elephant. But the world’s richest man is most out of his depth when he’s trying to engage authoritatively on topics where he possesses zero expertise—like genetics and biological sciences. Among the boneheaded claims he’s confidently made in public: that C-sections have caused babies to be born with larger brains, that the coronavirus panic was dumb (in March of 2020), that Italy would soon have “no people” thanks to declining birth rates. This has not stopped people and institutions from continuing to hand him money and influence on a cosmic scale. When presented with evidence that this largest of oligarchs........

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