From Pelicot to Epstein: This Isn’t About Evil: It’s About Permission.
What makes cases like Pelicot so destabilising is not only the cruelty involved, but the ordinariness of the people implicated. The men did not present as caricatures of evil. They had jobs, families, routines. They looked like everyone else.
That collision between horror and normality forces a deeper question: are humans secretly monstrous, or are we looking at something more structurally predictable?
History complicates any comforting answer. Extreme violence, sexual coercion, slavery, pogroms, genocides, ritualised humiliation of women, and scapegoating of minorities appear across cultures and centuries. The repetition is too consistent to dismiss as aberration. There is clearly a stable human capacity for cruelty, domination, and dehumanisation. At the same time, most people do not spend their days seeking opportunities to harm. The tension between those two truths is where serious thinking has to begin.
Individual differences matter.
Temperament varies. Some nervous systems are more impulsive, more sensation-seeking, less constrained by anticipated guilt or shame. Others are more empathically attuned, more risk-averse, more inhibited.
These traits influence who escalates when disinhibited, who pursues taboo as thrill, and who experiences internal resistance even when harm is socially sanctioned. But it is a mistake to turn this into biological fatalism. Behaviour is not simply a trait expression, it is an interaction between disposition and context.
Alcohol and drugs illustrate this interaction clearly. Intoxication narrows attention and weakens executive control. In someone already high in entitlement or aggression, that can increase the likelihood of harm. In someone with strong internalised moral restraint, it may simply produce clumsiness and regret. Alcohol does not implant new values, it lowers the brakes on the values and impulses already present. Treating substances as root cause distracts from the entitlement scripts, peer norms, and opportunity structures that precede them.
The idea of the “social contract” also requires nuance. There are two forms of restraint, one is external: fear of punishment, loss of status, legal consequences. The other is internal: empathy, identity, and aversion to moral injury. In war, even when killing is sanctioned, some soldiers hesitate or refuse to fire. That suggests internal inhibition remains powerful for many. Yet war also demonstrates how quickly moral disengagement can be normalised when institutions provide justification, dehumanise targets, and diffuse responsibility.
The lesson is not that humans are secretly monsters. It is that moral disengagement can be socially engineered.
When women and girls are structurally devalued, the external half of the social contract weakens and reporting becomes costly. Victims are doubted, investigations stall and perpetrators retain status. In that environment, opportunists perceive lower risk, and this is exactly the culture we are witnessing that grew up around Jeffrey Epstein. This does not require a population of sadists, it requires enough individuals willing to rationalise participation when accountability is thin and group narratives provide cover.
The recurrence of “monstrous” behaviour across history can create an illusion of inevitability.
That is a thinking trap.
Repetition proves risk, not destiny. Slavery was once normalised, marital rape was legal in many countries within living memory and public torture was state spectacle. Norms and laws changed not because human nature was transformed, but because accountability shifted and moral narratives were contested. The range of human behaviour is wide; it is culture that determines how often the darker edges are activated and who they are directed toward.
Another useful distinction is between organisers and joiners. Many large-scale abuse patterns involve a small number of architects who create the conditions: they recruit, normalise, provide access, and reduce psychological barriers. Around them are joiners who might never have initiated independently but participate once permission structures exist. Prevention strategies differ depending on which group is addressed; disrupt organisers and networks collapse, raise detection and consequences and joiners hesitate.
It is also important to resist symmetry traps. Women can and do participate in sanctioned harm. History contains examples of women who upheld racist violence or enforced patriarchal cruelty. This underscores a broader truth about moral psychology: humans of any sex can rationalise harm when identity, status reward, or fear align. Acknowledging that does not erase asymmetries in victimisation patterns or institutional power. Both realities can coexist.
So what now? Neither naïve optimism nor total cynicism. Naïve optimism assumes most people are good and therefore systems do not need hard edges, whereas cynicism assumes most people are bad and therefore change is futile. Neither position matches the evidence of history or psychology. The more sober stance is to design thinking about human nature. Assume the capacity for cruelty exists, assume rationalisation is easy, assume power corrupts and shields itself and assume victims will be disbelieved when systems prioritise comfort and reputation. Then build institutions that make harm difficult and costly.
That means tightening accountability where it is currently loose, it means resourcing investigations properly and reducing the personal cost of reporting, it means disrupting online and offline recruitment spaces where coercion is normalised, it means clarifying consent in behavioural terms rather than slogans - especially in intoxication contexts - it means training bystanders in concrete interruption skills. It means designing high-risk environments, such as heavy drinking venues, with real friction rather than symbolic policy.
Stable jobs and friendly demeanours are weak protective factors. Normality is not proof of safety. The presence of internal inhibition in many people is real, but it cannot be the sole defence against those with weaker brakes or those emboldened by group narratives.
History shows that when structures lower the cost of harm, participation expands. When structures raise the cost and remove justification, participation contracts.
The repetition of cruelty across human systems is not evidence that humanity is irredeemable. It is evidence that without intentional guardrails, the darker capacities embedded in ordinary psychology can scale. The task is not to divide the world into monsters and innocents. It is to design societies that do not rely on optimism about human virtue, but on sober recognition of human range.
Patriarchal systems have repeatedly shown that when power is concentrated and accountability is weak, the lives of women and girls are treated as negotiable. History makes that clear and that is why women cannot rely on goodwill alone. Social safety nets, legal protections, and cultural guardrails have to be demanded, defended, and strengthened and they must bind those in power, not merely appeal to them.
