International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES)[1] from Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly monitors and analyzes key global developments that shape contemporary international relations. The recently released Epstein files reveal not isolated crimes, but the operational logic of modern power: at the highest levels, morality is optional, law is selective, and vice is institutionalized. These documents expose an order in which accountability is suspended and privilege becomes a structural function. In his analysis, titled “Epstein. Evil in the Empire of Power: Not Chaos, but Order,” Ambassador and Associate Professor Dr. Arben Cici provides a critical examination of the Epstein case and its broader implications for understanding contemporary power structures.
The recent release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein did not shake the world because they revealed something entirely unknown. They shook it because they confirmed, with documentary coldness, a truth usually spoken only in whispers: that absolute power does not live within common morality, but creates a parallel morality of its own.
Their publication is not a moment of scandal. It is a moment of moral exposure. Not because it introduces new faces, but because it briefly strips away the most persistent myth of the modern order: the belief that great power coexists with responsibility. In reality, the higher power ascends, the thinner morality becomes, until at the summit it does not disappear, it simply becomes unnecessary.
In this sense, the Epstein files are not a scandal. The scandal is that we still call them scandals. They are merely temporary cracks in the thick curtain of an order that long ago abandoned the notion of guilt. What comes to light is not crime, but its normality at the top of the world. These files reflect an invisible order in which vices are not deviations, but functional elements of the architecture of power.
In the modern empire of power, morality is a rhetorical relic, preserved for electoral speeches and “corporate responsibility” reports. At the top of global hierarchies, where political, financial, diplomatic, cultural, and academic elites intersect, the law no longer appears as a universal norm, but as a selective mechanism. It is applied rigorously to the many and flexibly to those inside the inner circle.
These elites have built an ecosystem in which the law does not serve to restrain their power, but to manage it. Justice has been reduced to a technical procedure administered by lawyers, committees, and deadlines, while ethics has been compressed into a ceremonial vocabulary for public consumption. Within this order, those in power do not behave like hidden criminals, but like administrators of their own privilege.
Political leaders, global financiers, and technocrats of influence do not see themselves as violators of norms, but as justified exceptions to them. The law is not a limit; it is a protective architecture. Ethics is not an obligation; it is decoration. Defenders of this system will call it institutional stability, political realism, even strategic wisdom. But a stability that survives only by suspending moral responsibility is not order. It is the amortization of guilt.
They do not rule through open violence, because they do not need to. They rule through invisibility: confidential contracts, fragmented jurisdictions, investigative commissions that lead nowhere. This is the triumph of modern power, not to crush the masses, but to exhaust them.
In this world, vices are not accidental breaches of the norm; they are proof of membership in the club. Private islands, guarded and isolated villas, closed-door events, aircraft without public itineraries, these are not merely symbols of luxury, but territories of real sovereignty. Where cameras do not enter and the law stops at the gate, power indulges itself without the need for justification. These are the modern oases of vice, where immorality is not punished, but regulated.
What is most disturbing is not the extremity of the abuse, but the normality with which it is absorbed by the system. Political leaders respond with institutional elegance, financiers retreat behind deals and secrecy, while intellectuals close to power relativize everything in the name of “complexity.” Silence is not fear; it is refined complicity.
In this order, no one feels guilty, because guilt is dispersed into collective responsibility without an author. Each link protects the next, not out of moral solidarity, but out of shared interest in preserving the system. Thus, evil does not appear as a brutal act, but as a managed process. It does not scream or reveal itself; it is signed.
The untouchability of these figures is not a flaw of the system, but its highest achievement. It does not arise from the absence of laws, but from their excess; not from a lack of evidence, but from the fragmentation of truth. The public receives enough information to be shocked, but never enough to demand real accountability. Scandal turns into spectacle, and spectacle into fatigue.
In this sense, Jeffrey Epstein was not an exception, but a function. An intermediary figure linking political power with money, cultural influence with secrecy, desire with immunity. His fall did not destroy the system, because the system was not built upon him; it was built upon the need for figures like him.
Jeffrey Epstein was not a monster. The monster is the idea that he was alone. He was merely the dark functionary of a system that needed someone to hold secrets, to connect desire with influence, perversity with power, and money with silence. When the function became dangerous, the system sacrificed him, but not itself.
What these files force us to accept is that the modern empire of power does not rule through visible violence, but through organized amorality. Democracy remains a façade, transparency a slogan, and justice selective. For the masses, the law is an obligation; for the elite, it is an option.
The empire of power does not fear the truth. It fears memory. That is why scandals arrive in cycles, disclosures are released in fragments, and responsibility is dispersed until it disappears. Truth is allowed to surface briefly, just enough to create the illusion of transparency, never enough to change the order.
The hypocrisy of power lies not only in the acts it conceals, but in the masks it carefully presents to the public. Those who preach morality from podiums, who speak of values, family, order, and responsibility, are often the same ones who treat ethics as a ceremonial costume: worn for the cameras and removed when the lights go out. The propaganda of power does not seek to persuade with truth, but to numb moral sensitivity. It produces clean public figures, exemplary narratives, and abstract enemies, while reality is pushed backstage. When the masks fall, as in the case of the Epstein files, what is revealed is not merely individual hypocrisy, but the mechanism of an entire order that survives by preaching virtue while administering vice.
The true tragedy, and our collective failure, lies not only in hidden crimes, but in society’s acceptance of this order as “normal” and inevitable. We have learned to call this political realism, institutional stability, even strategic maturity. We demand justice only for the weak and admire the cynicism of the powerful as a sign of intelligence. At its core, we have accepted an order in which power no longer feels the need to justify itself morally. Because where power knows no ethical boundaries, evil has no need to be masked. It is simply administered, documented, and protected, until another file is opened, and another silence is closed over it.
But a power that knows no shame is not strong; it is rotten. An order that survives only by suspending morality is not rational; it is afraid of any genuine form of accountability. And a society that accepts this is not naïve; it is surrendered.
The Epstein files do not show us how dark the elite is. They show us how much darkness we have learned to tolerate. For where power lives without shame, evil no longer needs to hide. It governs; and we call it order.
About the author:
Ambassador Assoc. Prof. Dr. Arben Cici, currently lecturer of International Relations at Mediterranean University of Albania, former Ambassador of Albania to Denmark, Croatia, Russia, twice Advisor for the Foreign Policy of the President of the Republic, twice Director of the State Protocol at the Ministry of foreign Affairs, author of the Official Ceremonial of the Republic of Albania, analyst and excellent expert on the foreign policy.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IFIMES official position.
Ljubljana/Tirana, 18 February 2026
[1] IFIMES – International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has Special Consultative status at ECOSOC/UN, New York, since 2018 and it is publisher of the international scientific journal “European Perspectives”.
