In 1973, the psychologist Erich Fromm described a dream had by one of his patients: Ten couples are dancing at a party. But something is wrong. The rhythm is slowing, and the dancers are becoming more and more lethargic. Suddenly, a couple strides in with a set of tools. They approach a pair of young dancers and stab the boy in the back. But he doesn’t bleed; instead, he slumps receptively as they install a small box and key into his and his partner’s backs. Like clocks, they are wound and instantly spring upright. The couple begins to dance, this time with speed and energy. Soon, everyone receives the same treatment and the room whirs with motion. The dreamer, a young engineering student, narrates that everyone is, at last, “happy.”
To the lover of life, this dream is a nightmare. But to others—and the dreamer himself—it is a utopian vision, part of the quest to “fix” life. It expresses a certainty that life itself is the problem, that its slowness, dependency, unpredictability, and unruliness must all be engineered away. The only barrier to a better world, it seems, is humanity itself.
This conviction is everywhere in public life; it’s on the left and right, in conference halls and social media, university labs and policy papers. It speaks a language of optimization and improvement. Even though it is violent, it is bloodless.
Few embodied it more than Jeffrey Epstein. His name is associated with lurid tales of girls and islands and the secrets of the rich and powerful. But treating him as an exotic deviant obscures the degree to which his preoccupations are simply the exposed underbelly of the ruling logic of contemporary society.
Take Epstein’s intellectual pursuits. As The New York Times reports, he was fascinated with transhumanism, defined as “the science of improving the human population through technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence,” and would often steer conversations toward “how humans could be improved genetically.” In one email exchange released by the Department of Justice, Epstein and a cognitive scientist discuss how fascism might be the most “efficient” form of governance, while Epstein muses that “too many people” means “many mass executions of the elderly and infirm make sense,” comparing them to unused neurons that the brain discards.
In 2003, a $6.5 million gift from Epstein enabled the founding of Harvard’s now defunct Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which used mathematics to model evolution and, according to its archived webpages, applied these insights to everything from economics to culture to “happiness.” Emails reveal that Epstein was at Stanford in 2012 “looking at forming a behavior engineering institute.” A recent piece in the Stanford Review wonders at why the notorious sex offender was so “determined to engineer behavior.” The answer is simple: Everyone was. They still are.
Institutions and representatives of global governance may not say, as Epstein did, that “you might be able to make blacks smarter by changing the time for motor layer development,” but they do say that improving children’s “brain structure and function” is key to solving social and economic problems in the Global South. Even critical race theorists find themselves saying that black people have “impaired cognitive functioning.” Our fair bureaucrats may not say we should be culling the elderly and infirm, but they do periodically table suggestions that everyone over 75 be offered the “choice” of euthanasia. Respectable elites sometimes wonder aloud, as Times journalist Melanie Reid did back in 2012, why nations facing an “unaffordable” explosion in age-related illness would even bother debating such a policy.
Global policy discussions are awash with the same logic of improving “human capital” and seeking “behavioral change.” Countries around the world, including Great Britain and the United States, have institutionalized “nudge units” which use behavioral sciences to steer citizens toward behaviors deemed more “correct” by their betters.
“Epstein’s beliefs are a cold, dark shadow of what global governance says cheerfully.”
The list goes on, and none of it is conspiracy. What unnerves us is seeing it without the careful PR gloss. Epstein’s beliefs are a cold, dark shadow of what global governance says cheerfully in the warm light of day. They are all in fundamental agreement: You are the problem. You are too unpredictable, inefficient, and unruly. You must be transformed. Open the mind, re-engineer its contents, and won’t everything be made to move so much better? Won’t we all, finally, be happy?
Erich Fromm had a term for the shared outlook of today’s elites: “necrophilia.” By this he didn’t mean the sexual perversion, but rather “the passionate attraction” to all that is “dead, decaying, lifeless, and purely mechanical,” an outlook he saw as “increasing throughout our cybernetic industrial society.” The necrophile’s fetish is for “clean, shining machines,” and his enemy is life itself, with all its messy unpredictability.
By contrast, the “biophile” loves life and wishes to further its growth. Certainty bores him because it is dead; he wishes to move by reason rather than by the “bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things.” As the necrophile squeezes and bends life to his will, he destroys it; and his outlook spreads out into our world, seeping into our poetry and art, and even our dreams.
Here again, Epstein is instructive not so much for his crimes but for his cultural tastes. Conspiracy theorists have made much of the strange décor in Epstein’s properties, taking it as literal confirmation of baby-sacrificing satanic cults: a reproduction of Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem’s The Massacre of the Innocents (the one “where they are killing babies,” his assistant helpfully described when discussing its procurement); a “bride” sculpture dangling perilously from a tall ceiling; framed prosthetic eyeballs lining the entrance hall.
“The Stuff of Nightmares,” said one headline. But nightmares only force us to see what otherwise remains implicit. For decades, polite society has indulged its own grim fascination with bodies and death. For instance, late nineties and early noughties American TV saw the rise of graphic series like CSI and HBO’s Autopsy, while Britain’s Channel 4 had Anatomy for Beginners, which dissected human bodies in front of a live studio audience. In fact, even if you never saw the latter, you are probably familiar with its host, Gunther von Hagens—or at least his better-known exhibition of posed, plastinated human bodies: Body Worlds. Perhaps you paid to see it along with fifty million others around the world. These preoccupations were reflected in the world of high fashion, which began to turn around representations of death and decay.
Back in 2006, cultural critic Tiffany Jenkins observed that this growing hyper fixation on death reflected a deeper disorientation toward the value of human life. At a time when we lived longer than ever, she noted, the media were clamoring to capture a “death rattle,” elevating the corpse as spectacle, and dwelling “on the least human aspect of who and what we are.”
Among others, Jenkins was writing about British journalist and TV presenter Esther Rantzen, who having founded the children’s helpline ChildLine in the 1980s was then turning her attention to How to Have a Good Death, as her BBC program was called. Years later, following her own cancer diagnosis, she became one of Britain’s most ardent advocates of “assisted dying.”
“Childhood and dying represent life at its messiest and least efficient.”
These concerns may seem only tangentially related. However, childhood and dying represent life at its messiest and least efficient. It is no surprise, then, that they are some of the most prominent fixations of our necrophilic culture’s impatience with biology. And so it’s in the public life of a well-meaning figure like Rantzen, far more than the secret dealings of a nefarious financier, that we can best see the misanthropic instinct to objectify, manage, and move people.
After featuring child abuse cases as host of the BBC’s That’s Life!, Rantzen founded ChildLine in 1986. At its launch, The Times (London) reported that the line aimed to “help children in danger” and those “suffering from neglect, physical violence or sexual abuse.” This was undoubtedly a good thing, offering abused children an accessible way to get help. However, almost immediately, its logic expanded. On BBC’s ChildWatch in October 1986, Rantzen beamed that the charity had fielded over “4,000 cases,” spanning “school bullying to violence and abuse.” When Rantzen was asked by Newsround (a show for children), “What range of problems are you dealing with?” she responded, “Well, anything that troubles a child really,” including being “afraid of the dark.” Then she added, “child abuse is anything that puts a child through pain, makes them feel uncomfortable and unhappy.”
At the time, Times columnist Barbara Amiel was skeptical, warning that Rantzen’s ChildLine was teaching children to “telephone the state” whenever they felt uncomfortable. “Is there anything more destructive to the family as a unit,” she asked, than “having outsiders brought in willy-nilly to solve matters where no laws are broken?” Her misgivings would prove prescient. Since the 1980s, the bar for intervention into families has been steadily lowered. Many abused children have been saved, but in countries hailed as the most child-centered, like Norway, the most common reason for child removal is not abuse but “lack of parenting skills.” Toward the present, the most frequent issue fielded by ChildLine is likewise not abuse, but “mental health concerns” while ad campaigns encourage children to bring their “normal” problems to the experts down the line.
Critics have long alleged that institutions like ChildLine create a steady stream of dubious cases, making social work less a protector of abused children than a regulatory body for parenting and family life. “Parenting,” now a verb, is transformed from an organic bond into a mechanical one, becoming a series of procedures that Fromm would recognize as our epoch’s “fusion of technique and destructiveness.”
Like parenting, death can also become subject to a checklist and made so much cleaner, so much more predictable, so much “better,” to quote a book title for which Rantzen wrote the foreword. “Why can’t terminally ill patients who no longer have the choice between life and death, at least have a choice between a good death and a bad death?” she asks. A bad death, from this perspective, is the one that nature provides.
It is hardly surprising that sex must also be rationalized and optimized. In an interview with The New York Times’s James B. Stewart, Epstein referred to taboos about “sex with teenage girls” as a “cultural aberration,” arguing that at other times in history it was “perfectly acceptable.” As far as sex was generative for him, it apparently took the form of what acquaintances called bizarre and disturbing fantasies of “seeding” the world with his DNA via production lines of women, up to twenty pregnant at a time.
Here again, Epstein appears merely as the perverse underbelly of our dominant cultural logic. While schools regularly teach masturbation as a routine health practice, generative sex is bound up with risk and tightly controlled. That is something filed away for those with the appropriate resources, the right sorts of people who will do it correctly. Pornography, sterile and robotic, tends to be treated as a comparatively safe sexual outlet—if navigated with the appropriate expert guidance. For instance, ChildLine, run by a child protection organization, produced a now retracted YouTube video in 2023 for children that informed them porn is “fun” and “sexy to enjoy.” Attempting a breezy, non-judgmental tone, the presenter went on, “If you want to see more than straight white people getting it on, you might have to be a little more specific,” before suggesting search terms including BDSM, hardcore, and hentai. Mentioning that porn is for adults, he winks at viewers, “You are over 18, aren’t you?”
Child protection becomes an afterthought when the greater goal is managing and containing risky biological life. With the mechanization of sex, it is no longer “joy” or an “expression of intense aliveness,” but “fun.” The world, Fromm writes, “becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts” and “whatever love and tenderness man has is directed toward machines and gadgets.”
The tightening squeeze of governance reflects a deepening frustration and insecurity. The engineer turned economist Vilfredo Pareto imagined the economy as a system of equilibrium as elegant as any in physics. “Pure economics,” he wrote, “is a sort of mechanics.” From this perspective, distortions can only be introduced from the outside. It is hard not to imagine Pareto, looking at his beautiful mathematical equations, the machine churning over perfectly and endlessly, and then turning with despair to see the reality of human society that simply could not live up to it. And so he turned his attention with ever greater frustration to the irrationalities and imperfections not of the way that he imagined society, but of the people who inhabited it. The inputs are too impure. They must be refined.
“The inputs are too impure. They must be refined.”
In another dream transcript reproduced by Fromm, a young man finds himself descending into an industrial cavern. He sees two humanized swine loading what appear to be human bodies into a mine cart. Descending further, he leaves the sunlit world behind and finds himself in a subterranean city, pulsating with artificial light. It is extraordinarily modern, “made completely of steel and glass—the future,” the dreamer recounts. But as he moves through the city, he realizes that there is not a single living creature in it. In the heart of this silver metropolis is an electric transformer, with black cables spilling from it like arteries. He picks one up and realizes with horror that it is not conducting energy, but human blood.
Fromm hints that the choice might not be between society as a perfectly functioning machine or the looseness of biological life. For Marx, he says, capital “was the manifestation of the past, of labor transformed and amassed into things,” while labour was the manifestation of new life, energy, and transformation. “The choice between capitalism and socialism,” as Fromm glossed Marx, “amounted to this: Who (what) was to rule over what (whom)? What is dead over what is alive, or what is alive over what is dead?”