Hunting is an archaic institution with elaborate rules, a special language and ancient stories. Politicians, entrepreneurs, managers: many of them hunt. Not primarily for the game. For something else that hunting offers and that exists nowhere else: a particular kind of intimacy among the powerful, outside the normal structures.
Two people who walk side by side through the forest for hours, who sit together in the hide, silent, waiting, develop a familiarity that no business lunch, no conference room, no joint board meeting can create. The silence compels authenticity. One shows oneself differently than one otherwise would. And in this intimacy, at the feast after the hunt, in relaxed moods in the company of willing ladies far from everyday life, decisions are taken that formally are taken elsewhere. Connections arise there that officially do not exist. People are governed there without anyone being able to point a finger at a government.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a description of structure. Dahrendorf named it precisely in 2003: democracy gaps, spaces in which political decisions are made for which there are no democratic institutions. The forest is one of these spaces. The feast after the hunt is another.
When the Game Grows Boring
The hunting party has an inner logic that shifts under certain conditions. When power becomes boundless, when intimacy takes place beyond any control, when the group protects itself through shared silence, then at some point the game shifts. The animal becomes uninteresting. It bores. The hunt needs defencelessness, surrender, absolute availability.
De Sade did not invent this. He described what arises when power knows no limits and fears no consequences. What he dissected in his texts is not the fantasy of individuals; it is the logic of a society that has freed itself from all external restraints.
Jeffrey Epstein was not an outlier. He was a particularly stark exposure of something that has always existed. The small island, the private jet, the willing intermediaries, the shared silence: these are no accidents. It is the hunting party in its final form, with the game that remains when nothing else excites any more: defenceless young women and girls, utterly at the mercy of others, without any counter-power. And around them a network that kept silent, through shared knowledge, through mutual dependence, through the logic of the system that kept everyone alive.
La Catedral
A story from Colombia illustrates the same structure in a way no theoretical argument can.
Pablo Escobar had made his deal with the Colombian state and locked himself into the Cathedral: formally a prison, in fact a fortress he controlled himself, open at the back to whomever he wanted to let in. Famous divas visited him there. And his men regularly went hunting in Envigado, for people. Many of the victims they took to the Cathedral never came back.
The state that had made the deal knew what went on behind the walls. The visitors knew. The men who hunted knew. And all kept silent, through shared knowledge, through mutual dependence, through the logic of the system that kept everyone alive. The Cathedral was Epstein's island: other continents, another decade, identical structure.
After Escobar's death the network decimated itself. The sicarios killed one another. There were few survivors. One of them, Popeye, died a natural death and never regretted anything. The most honest figure in this story: no show, no new narrative, no remorse. What he had done was what he had done.
The Hero of His Own Story
The sicario whom Hans Ley met in Colombia was different, and in a certain way more revealing. 382 murders on his official list. Several attempts on his life narrowly survived. Turned pious after the collapse of the system, but the piety was a show. He told his story like an adventure, with himself as the hero.
That matters more than the piety itself. He never stopped being the hero of his own story. He merely changed genre, from thriller to conversion narrative. The 382 murders are in both versions proof of his exceptionality: in the one as power, in the other as the abyss from which God saved him. Never brought to court. Never truly remorseful. The system did not punish him, and the system did not change him.
That is the megamachine at its most brutal level: it does not produce monsters who see themselves as monsters. It produces people who did the right thing, in the system in which they lived. Escobar's men carried out orders. Epstein's network cultivated connections. Nobody there saw himself as a perpetrator.
The Structure Remains
What connects the hunting party in the German forest, Epstein's island and Escobar's Cathedral? Not the actors; they are interchangeable. The structure: a closed society beyond any democratic control, silence as the glue, defencelessness as the condition, the system as protection for everyone involved.
This structure has not disappeared. It has found new forms. The exclusive dinner in Palo Alto, the private yacht, the closed circle of investors: functionally identical to the feast after the hunt. The same intimacy, the same logic of decision-making away from the public, the same mutual loyalty through shared knowledge.
The question is not whether such structures exist. The question is whose values are trained into systems shaped by people who live in such structures. Nobody decides this consciously. It emerges, as always in the megamachine.
The sicario told his story like an adventure. The actors in Epstein's network did the same, in interviews, in memoirs, in public statements. The structure that made it all possible interests none of them. It was simply the frame in which they lived.
That is the most dangerous thing about the megamachine: not that it produces evil people, but that it produces people who each did the right thing. In Escobar's system a contract killing was the right thing. In the bosom of the religious community in which he later found refuge, salvation by God was the right thing, the perfect narrative. That apart from his physical injuries he never paid for his deeds was part of the inscrutable grace of God. The system changes. The logic remains: one has always done the right thing.