The Brutal Bright Side of the Epstein Revelations
I’m nervous to post this perspective, but it needs to be said.
Let me say this clearly before anything else:
I believe in human rights.
Women’s rights.
Children’s rights to be safe from harm.
The revelations emerging from the Epstein files describe atrocities I can only call evil.
Like many others, I’ve been trying to find somewhere to land with this information.
Some people have had their understanding of what kind of world we live in — and what kind of people govern it — completely shattered.
But the rest of us…
We aren’t that surprised.
Women who were leered at before we were teenagers.
People who were raised to never trust authority blindly.
Those of us who studied history, economics, philosophy — wondering if absolute power always leads to absolute corruption.
And the global majority who live daily with the realities of cruelty, colonization, extraction, violence, and injustice.
Many of us aren’t shocked that such things exist. We’re shocked that anyone believed they didn’t.
So there’s a strange, bitter validation in this moment.
Things we could never quite prove are now written in black and white. Published. Impossible to ignore.
People who once outsourced their safety and freedom to institutions are now questioning them.
People who “didn’t really do politics” are suddenly paying attention.
People who benefited from systems they never had to examine are beginning to see their architecture.
And what the facts make painfully clear is something many already suspected:
A small group of global elites wields wealth and power that rivals entire nations. They operate beyond meaningful accountability. And they cannot be relied upon to keep us safe.
That responsibility belongs to us.
Which brings us to the deeper questions this moment is forcing into the open:
What kind of values have we built our systems around?
Is wealth more important than human dignity?
Are profits more valuable than a livable planet? More valuable than children being safe? More valuable than families being fed and sheltered?
And perhaps the most important question of all:
Is there really nothing we can do?
Moments like this can make people feel sick. Hopeless. Paralyzed.
But despair is useful to systems that rely on our silence. If we believe nothing can change, nothing will.
The systems we live under today are not ancient or inevitable.Colonial capitalism and patriarchy are relatively recent in the timeline of our species. Only a few hundred years old.
Before that, for thousands of years, human beings organized themselves differently.
Community-based systems. Matriarchies. Cultures that remembered something simple and profound:
We are animals. We are part of nature.
And nature has a remarkable habit:
It finds a way.
Even in the rubble of collapsing systems, green tendrils stretch toward the light. Life insists.
Which is why, strange as it sounds, there may be a brutal bright side to this moment.
Now we know. Not as rumour. Not as suspicion. But as fact.
This is not the system of values most people want to live by.
We want women and children to be safe.
We want harm to be met with accountability.
We want food, housing, healthcare, and dignity to be accessible to everyone.
So people are asking the obvious question:
What do we do now?
Some will numb themselves. Some will wait for institutions to fix themselves. But others already know the answer:
Starve the system. Boycott billionaires. Redirect resources into our communities. Rebuild around a different set of values.
None of this is new.
This is matriarchal wisdom. This is Indigenous wisdom. These are ways of living that existed long before the systems we are now questioning.
They were never truly erased. Only buried.
And buried seeds, given the right conditions, grow.
Laurel Anne Stark is an Irish-Canadian decolonial technologist, founder of Remarkable Communications, and lifelong social justice advocate. Laurel gratefully acknowledges she lives, works, and plays as an uninvited guest on unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory in the area now known as Victoria, BC.