When looking at this graph, where do we place ourselves? Most of us, hopefully, somewhere on the left. And yet, some of the worst people might place themselves there too because, despite what they do, they want to be perceived as good. The question of morality is one of great importance today. We don't speak about it directly, but we express it constantly — in who we cancel and who we forgive, in what we consider as going too far and what we let slide, or in how we decide what deserves punishment, what deserves a second chance, and what we choose to look away from altogether.

Morality differs in various cultures due to the cultural philosophy that ruled them at a defining point in time. To trace back the origins of moral philosophy one needs to look at the first and most ancient philosophers: Plato (c. 428–347 BCE), Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE), and Zoroaster, also known as Zarathushtra (c. 1500–500 BCE). These three figures – emerging from Ancient Greece, China and Persia, respectively – form the earliest foundations of how entire civilisations came to understand right and wrong. And the differences between them matter, because they gave birth to two very distinct moral worlds.

Western philosophy:

• - To lie is okay as long as it's for a bigger purpose. In The Republic, Plato argued that the ruling class could use lies to maintain social order and keep citizens obedient, for the greater good of the “city.” 
• - To be beautiful is about physical attributes and symmetry. Greek philosophy tied beauty to mathematical proportion and physical form.
• - The age of consent in Ancient Greece: boys were considered marriageable at 12–14; girls as young as 12 were routinely given away in marriage by their fathers with no say of their own.
• - Laws of violence, murder and torture: Athenian law permitted slavery, sanctioned execution by the state, and allowed the physical punishment of slaves and women by male heads of household with no legal consequence.

Eastern philosophy:

• - To be truthful is key. Confucius placed ren (benevolence) and xin (integrity/honesty) at the centre of moral life; a person without truthfulness could not be considered virtuous, regardless of their status.
• - To be beautiful is to be good. Confucian and Zoroastrian philosophy tied beauty to moral character; being beautiful was possible through virtue, not appearance.
• - Confucian ethics emphasised structured family roles and protection of children within the family unit; marriage was arranged but governed by ritual propriety (li) rather than individual desire. 
• - Zoroastrian philosophy is built on the principle of light and truth against darkness and lies. Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, represents light and truth, eternally opposed to Angra Mainyu, the spirit of the lie. Truth (asha) is placed against lies (druj) as the fundamental moral axis. Violence in the service of truth was permitted, but cruelty for pleasure or dominance was considered the work of Ahriman, the evil force. 

Victory Monument of Ardashir I. Photograph by Johannes Lundberg (CC BY-NC-SA).

The foundations of human thinking as we know it came from some of these ideas above. 

One might be wondering though why the leading philosophy of the West and the East now is that of the Western schools of thought, and, of course, that is due to colonialism and imperialism. Even societies in the Middle East that are ruled under extremist religions follow the Western ideologies of lying, corruption and lower age of consent than the Eastern philosophy of their indigenous ancestors. This Western domination over the Eastern and indigenous ones consist mostly of one defining factor of truth vs. lying, which is a foundational pathway to evil. As Nietzsche spoke regarding Zoroastrianism, the Zoroastrian philosophy was fundamentally built on truth (asha) as the highest moral virtue, and lying as the root of all evil. But since the Greeks, and later the Romans, won the cultural and imperial battle (and with the loss of the library of Alexandria, believed to have contained many of the Eastern philosophical texts), it was the Western philosophical tradition that spread worldwide and dominated. A tradition that Plato himself admitted had room for the noble lie.

Why is lying and the truth correlated to evil? Because lies allow a very powerful and rich person to commit evil acts without consequence, knowing it is bad but doing it anyway. Lying actually allows evil to exist.

Right now if we think about “evil,” who comes to mind first? Many names might pop up, but a familiar one with the events unfolding in the past months would be: Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein is an important case of evil to be discussed, since his relationship with intellectuals and the academic space was a close one. He greatly funded institutions such as Bard College, MIT, the MIT Media Lab, and Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He was interested in science extensively but, as an individual, he wasn't an intellectual himself, nor deep in any shape or form. Many might have already analysed Epstein from a psychological point of view, but what about a philosophical one? It is

important to know who was in the files and who partook in the criminal activities of abuse, but what is also important is to realise the origins of this sort of thinking and system of morality.

The text that really makes it come to light best is that of Marquis De Sade, 120 Days of Sodom, written in 1785, France. Sade was an interesting figure — an intellectual, nobleman of aristocratic origins and the founding father of Sadism (hence the name). His books and ideas are very much rooted in philosophy. He makes philosophical arguments on why being unjust is a natural part of human nature. He has even written plays like Philosophy in the Bedroom and books like Justine, which are even more specifically about the fact that there is no point in virtue and being unvirtuous and “bad” is a good thing as long as it's in the pursuit of desire and pleasure.

His work is tied to the philosophy of libertinism: a higher and more extreme form of hedonism, a way of living under atheism while rejecting social norms, with pleasure as the only goal. His work was very much about this:

"[W]e libertines wed women to hold slaves: as wives they are rendered more submissive than mistresses, and you know the value we set upon despotism in the joys we pursue."

— Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom (1785)

"For above six years these four libertines, kindred through their wealth and tastes, had thought to strengthen their ties by means of alliances in which debauchery had by far a heavier part than any of the other motives that ordinarily serve as a basis for such bonds."

— Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom (1785)

The parallels to Epstein appear from the novel's opening pages: four wealthy, powerful libertines using their position to abuse and control minors, sealed off from a world that cannot reach them.

What’s even more interesting, however, is the philosophical argument Sade uses to justify acts of torture and sexual abuse. He further argues that cruelty is natural, even animalistic, and that anyone who found themselves in a position of power would do the same. 

Intellectualising crime is not a new phenomenon among Western academics; there were Western medical writers who spoke in depth about women being inferior and being a sub-human of man.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) argued that women were inferior on a physical basis, as male bodies housed more heat, even claiming women possessed fewer teeth than men. A conclusion he reached without, allegedly, ever checking. Galen (131–201 AD), whose writings became the standard medical texts in Western Europe for over a thousand years, went further: to him, the female body was a necessary imperfection, an underdeveloped version of the male. As one analysis of his work puts it, women were, in his view, not simply different but inherently inferior — "worse off non-men." (Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, c. 175 AD)

This, of course, was absurd and has since been debunked. What Darwin actually described in On the Origin of Species (1859) was adaptation — the process by which organisms develop traits suited to their specific environment over generations. A population living at high altitude develops different traits to one living at sea level. Neither is superior, they are simply adapted. Darwinism says nothing about racial hierarchy, intellectual capacity or civilisational worth. It describes how species adapt to their environments, not a ladder of superiority. Social Darwinism was not Darwin's theory — it was a political ideology retrofitted onto his science by men who needed a respectable name to justify what was already a conclusion they had reached for other reasons entirely. Darwin himself was opposed to slavery. The science was hijacked, as science so often is, by those with power who needed it to say something it never actually said.

Many male intellectuals and philosophers were immoral people with a number of terrible ideas and questionable moral systems, yet, we somehow trust their word a lot more than we should. Even today, a lot of them are crowned in academia without criticism. 

Michael Foucault (1926-1984), a French philosopher and historian, was apparently well-documented to have signed a 1977 petition to the French Parliament calling for the decriminalisation of all consensual relations between adults and minors, co-signed alongside Sartre and Derrida (Le Monde, 1977), and has since faced documented allegations of paying for sexual access to young boys in Tunisia, with a colonial dimension explicitly noted by those who witnessed it: that he "would not have dared to do it in France." (Guy Sorman, The Sunday Times, 2021)

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a German philosopher, was a paid-up member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. He joined ten days after being elected rector of the University of Freiburg and used his position to implement what he called the “Führer-principle” across the university — replacing elected faculty governance with absolute authoritarian control and setting Jewish student quotas. His ambition, documented in his own correspondence, was to become the leading philosopher of the Nazi regime. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Wikipedia: Martin Heidegger and Nazism)

Now, there seems to be a pattern between justification, intellectualism, and the ego, specifically the intellectual man, that just because you use fancy words and have read books, does not mean you are, in fact, good, true or right in your theories. Academic institutions should be more careful with who they're shaking hands with, who they're receiving funding from and the moral compass of the people they support/endorse. Curricula should not shy away from decolonising themselves and revealing the darker truth about these men's characters, as the morality of a thinker and philosopher, of course, affects the philosophy. Unlike art, separation from the artist is more complex than that, as it is a question of someone’s core values and their wide influence on others.

Epstein and Marquis de Sade are very similar; both committed criminal activities against minors in practice, but just one wrote about it extensively and justified it extensively. 

The way in which someone defends their criminal activities is the way in which criminal activities continue to occur. Epstein was involved in arms dealing, criminal finance and other criminal activities beyond his sexual and sex trafficking crimes — all in pursuit of money and power to fuel his desire.

What makes this parallel so precise is that Sade's four libertines in 120 Days of Sodom do not simply abuse — they build an entire financial and logistical infrastructure to enable it. They pool fortunes, establish procurement networks, and retreat behind walls of wealth and prestige. Epstein did the same.

Arms dealing and the Iran-Contra affair, adjacent operations, built the initial fortune. That fortune bought access, power of attorney, islands, planes, and silence. The plane was even named Lolita Express — after Nabokov's novel narrated by a paedophile who intellectualises his abuse of a child. That is not a coincidence; that is a man who knew exactly what he was. 

These unhealthy levels of desire are not experienced by normal people, as they do not consume desire greedily, in a libertine manner. The libertine way of life, that some people still practice extensively in cities like Paris and Berlin, has its downsides — desensitising one to sexual activity to the point where it gets darker.

Research published in Addictive Behaviors (2024) studied over 2,300 male pornography users and found that desensitisation, a numbed response requiring progressively more extreme material to produce the same effect, was the central mechanism driving problematic use, with users moving from quantitative tolerance (more volume) to qualitative escalation (darker genres) over time. A UK government-commissioned literature review (2021) found the same pattern: content that initially appears shocking becomes normalised through repeated exposure, with personal boundaries progressively weakening. In a smaller but significant number of cases reviewed by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, individuals reported escalation toward illegal content including the sexual abuse of children.

And these men, the worst of them all, are not simply satisfied with what’s on their screens; they want it in person, for themselves. And this leads them to want enough power to execute their new threshold of desire. These thresholds are even marked by Sade himself in the introduction, through the character of the Président de Curval — the oldest and most depleted of the four libertines, worn down to almost nothing by decades of excess, who requires hours of increasingly extreme stimulation just to feel anything at all: 

"[E]ntirely jaded, absolutely besotted, all that remained to him was the depravity and lewd profligacy of libertinage. Above three hours of excess, and of the most outrageous excess, were needed before one could hope to inspire a voluptuous reaction in him." 

— Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom (1785), on the Président de Curval

I mean, who wants to end up becoming like Président de Curval? But the reality is: they don't actually care. 

So what has happened to their care?

One could go down the psychological route and explore these people's childhoods, but as Sade quite smartly left out, the childhoods of these evil men are not written in the book, since he was trying to showcase his argument clearly of how these men are unjust because of the resources they have that allow that, arguing that if you find yourself powerful, you'll do the same, and secondly, that it is purely natural. Nature is evil and unforgiving in Sade's eyes, so it's only natural for humans to be:

"[V]ice being just as necessary to Nature as is virtue, she perhaps does not implant in us, in equal quantity, the penchant for one or the other, depending upon her respective needs," 

— Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom (1785)

But nature's evil is actually different, since nature is unforgiving not due to reasoning, logic or desire but rather through climate, physics and science. Things that cannot be changed or influenced with philosophy and values. Your virtue, however, is within your own control, and many people who participated in the slave trade would excuse this notion of free will and say that there is no control, but the reality is that even saying that you have no free will is free will in itself; you are exhibiting a thought and idea freely and you can go against it freely. The Protestant Calvinist theology that drove much of colonial expansion argued that there was no free will, that God had already predetermined everything and that the coloniser's goals was simply God's will manifesting on earth. This became the perfect theological alibi for colonialism. If everything is predetermined, then the enslaver is not choosing evil.

He is simply fulfilling God's plan. Removing responsibility and intellectualising evil by connecting it to theory, either by justifying it through theology or philosophy, is a pattern within powerful men in the past and today.

For Sade, his argument falls apart simply due to where care comes from. Care comes from reason and logic. The most reasonable person will probably not drink and drive, since they know that it will put others in danger. The most reasonable person won't cheat on their partner as their desire is only for their existing partner, and they've learned to love strongly for one rather than multiple. The reasonable person comes back to ancient Greece and learns to control their desires rather than let them consume them.

Plato, in The Republic, divided the soul into three parts: reason (logos), spirit (thumos), and appetite (epithumia). Reason is the highest faculty, containing wisdom and rationality. Spirit is the courageous, assertive element. Appetite covers physical desire and hunger. A rational person is one in whom reason governs the other two. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, appetite is "primarily concerned with food, drink and sex", and in a corrupt soul, the parts can turn against reason entirely — spirit and appetite rendering reason "temporarily impotent." (Plato, The Republic, c. 375 BC; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 'Ancient Theories of Soul')

If you have your beast (desire) on a leash, as Nietzsche argued in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), suppressing your desires entirely does not produce virtue; it actually does the opposite and the repression explodes one's desire beyond the point of control. And in this moment, it will take over your reasoning and logic.

Hence, it is of utter importance to tame your beast (desire) and be friends with it. In Sade's world, he lets his beast rule his life and calls it natural. But what is natural, actually? A mother caring for her child is natural. Mammals across every species do this without philosophy or justification. A swan bonding for life with one partner, and dying of grief when that partner is lost, is natural. Plants orienting toward sunlight, sustaining insects and bees, is natural. There is as much evidence of care in nature as there is of violence, but the violent acts of animals are not driven by desire; they are driven by necessity and survival, never by greed or the pursuit of pleasure at another's expense. To use nature as justification for this kind of evil is not only philosophically weak, it is disrespectful to nature itself.

Since living one's life with no reason is not the life of an intellectual or that of a “natural” human being, but it is that of a human being who has exuded so much greed in the pursuit of desire that it has lost all or any reason to begin with.

Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, retired from his position due to the news that came out from his close ties with Epstein.

"Miss you. Leon"

— Leon Botstein, email to Jeffrey Epstein, 2012, released in the DOJ files

He was president of Bard College for 51 years and retired from his position on 1 May 2026, following the findings of an independent investigation by law firm WilmerHale, commissioned by Bard's Board of Trustees after the DOJ files revealed the true extent of his relationship with Epstein. The investigation found that Botstein had visited Epstein's Manhattan townhouse around 25 times, visited his island, and welcomed him onto Bard's campus, all after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea. When a senior faculty member raised concerns about engaging with Epstein, Botstein overruled and silenced them. His justification, recorded during the legal investigation, was that Epstein was "an ordinary sex offender, in his words" and "could be presumed to be rehabilitated in the same way that any other convicted person should, in his view, be given that presumption." And when defending why he continued pursuing Epstein as a donor regardless, he told investigators: "I would take money from Satan if it permitted me to do God's work." (WilmerHale Independent Review, Bard College, April 2026)

But how can someone whose philosophy of life is to make others suffer for their selfish, desensitised desire, change? Epstein was not a man who stumbled into wrongdoing. He was a man who built an entire architecture around it — who funded eugenics and transhumanism projects, who paid scientists to pursue ideas about designer babies and seeding the human race with his DNA, who named his plane the Lolita Express and used it to transport wealthy and powerful men to his island for the abuse of minors. Every detail was deliberate. Every structure was constructed. Is there a rehabilitation for a philosophy you hold for years? Can you therapy your way out of a worldview? 

Going down the route of pornography and hyper-involvement of your desire constantly, without the grounding that Nietzsche and Aristotle's theory provides, is a dark hole, one that can distance any individual from reason.

Epstein was Sade's theory in practice. A real life libertine, with real victims, real institutions, and real intellectuals who looked the other way. And it’s hard to believe that you can change someone who doesn't use reason in their life. But what you can do is teach people to look out for those who don't use reason, who are leading lives plainly through desire, who are using their intellect to justify their messy moral compass, who are greedy and selfish, and who do not care. Because the most dangerous person in the room is never the openly cruel one. It is the one who has built a system and philosophy to defend it. The one who has the scientists, the academics, the presidents of colleges writing them emails that say "miss you."

 © perediza 2026