28 Scandals Later:
Jeffrey Epstein and the Rage Epidemic
(Still of Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later)
What is rage?
Rage is a kind of anger that consumes its host entirely.
We do not “feel angry,” but we “become enraged.” It is pathological, and our society has become saturated with it.
The film 28 Days Later opens with a group of masked animal rights activists breaking into a medical research facility to release the infected chimpanzees under experimentation.
“Infected with what?” the activist says…
“In order to cure, you must first understand...”
“Infected with WHAT?”
“Rage.”
Rage. That’s the last word we hear before the lock clicks open and the chimp runs out, killing everything in its path.
The rage spreads from person to person, erasing their humanity from within.
Since 2016, our society has been overturned by scandal after scandal. These scandals broke our sense of trust and eroded our faith, first in the system, and then in one another. And, after this decade of unending scandal, it appears that we too have become infected with a pathological rage.
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The Epstein files may be the scandal that finally broke society’s back.
When one looks back at the past ten years, the sheer number of major scandals that took place is almost breathtaking.
From email scandals to pandemic deception to leadership opacity, the pattern repeated itself until deception seemed to be the norm.
Our public trust was already at an all-time low, and these emails reveal that the rot beneath these institutions was even greater than we realized.
Distrust is contagious. It spreads through the population like a disease.
Distrust breeds anger, anger begets rage. And we have become enraged.
On the surface, our rage is politically motivated. We express our rage at our political enemies, believing them to be the source of it. We stand off against each other in the streets, screaming through at one another, “there he is! That’s the source of my rage.”
The right blames the left, and the left blames the right, but the rage is the same.
However, as we teach 5 year olds, no one can “make you angry.” People will do what they are going to do; you choose to let yourself become angry in response.
But 5-year-olds possess a level of social trust and personal honor that we adults have lost.
We have let ourselves become enraged, and now the rage is all that’s left.
That’s the beauty of 28 Days Later.
It’s not a zombie movie; it’s a rage movie.
Rage turns men into zombies. It deprives them of their agency and their humanity.
28 days after rage is introduced into the population, England is no more.
What happens when we hit 28 scandals – when so many things have shattered our trust, that there is no going back? What happens when we start turning to violence as the most expedient form of discourse?
Maybe we already have.
If you look at the conversations about Epstein, not the ones happening on the news, the ones happening in the comments section on social media, you will see a kind of blind rage that is unlike anything we have seen before.
Epstein is the new Rothschild; the latest receptacle for all of the world’s fears.
People who feel displaced by modernity, young men who are downwardly mobile, see the Epstein scandal as proof that they have been lied to and manipulated by the powers that be.
They have begun to ascribe everything to Epstein, everything from the Iraq War to the creation of 4chan and alt-right antisemitism.
I don’t know if Jeffrey Epstein was behind the development of the alt-right on 4chan. I don’t know a lot of things about this scandal, and I know that there is no way to know anything.
The danger of theories like this is not that they are true; it is that they cannot be disproven.
Rage does not respond to reason; it responds to rage.
No amount of logic, evidence, or facts can stop it.
The release of these files did not initiate our interpersonal distrust; it exacerbated it. It has accelerated the spread of our rage, and it has made us empty and hollow.
We have lost the ability to speak; we can only scream.
(The Scream, by Edvard Munch, 1893)
So what can we do?
What can men do against such reckless hate? How can we rise above the social rage and distrust that surrounds us?
We can be courageous.
We can refuse to let our anger become rage. We can privilege our humanity over our hatred.
Courage is the refusal to surrender our moral agency to our baser instincts, even when hope feels impossible.
Rage makes men small. A man enraged is ruled by fear. But courage makes men grow. A man encouraged is governed by his hope, and hope, while more fragile than fear, is far more powerful. Fear enslaves the mind; hope liberates it.
Rage may be contagious, but so is courage.
And it takes courage to be hopeful in times like these.
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Spread Love, Spread Light,
Am Yisrael Chai
The Epstein files turned out to be much ado about nothing. As a radio host stated, "there was no pedophile ring, just Epstein telling guys how to get women, ADULT women".
Stop fueling this crap.
Your article reminds me of why I despise Gen Z so much.
Gen Z is miserable worthless garbage; all they do is rage even as their generation has it easier than any generation before them. They are evil, antisemitic, communists and nazis.
The Jewish youths are an exception for the most part.
Ted Goldstein tells us the truth again. I totally agree that courage is the only way to confront rage. To label rage as rage is helpful in being able to understand it. And gives one the courage to maintain it is not a solution for any perceived wrong. Because as you say, rage leads to more rage and to violence, and ultimately to when a political voice is abruptly silenced by violent erasure. Which begets more violence and other attempts at violent erasure of the one the enraged one blames. As you kindly remind us, we must calmly and courageously make our way out of this darkness back into the light!