Monthly Muse: 10/2025
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the October 2025 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published since last month’s Monthly Muse
Contemplation
During my recent podcast appearance on the What’s Left? podcast, we discussed whether or not Jeffrey Epstein was an anomaly. The following passage from my article, “Jeffrey Esptein and the Cult of Scientism,” came up in the course of this discussion:
It is easy to write off Epstein as a sociopathic deviant, an exception...It is much harder, however, to reflect on the fact that it is figures like Epstein who are most invested in the scientific and technological progress that so many well-adjusted, liberal Americans uncritically support. Although Epstein’s actions are especially deplorable, his Epicurean scientistic worldview is one that is held by many others as a default. The fact that a man like Epstein subscribes to such a widespread epistemology and funds what is ostensibly the scientific research and technological development of the future should give us all pause.
At the end of the same 2019 piece, I warned that, short of a major reckoning with these issues, “there are likely to be many more Jeffrey Epsteins and, even worse, a world that looks more and more like one created in their image.”
Despite the widespread outrage at Epstein’s crimes, we are, six years later, closer to a world created in the image of these Epsteins. The ascendance of “human-like” AI, the explosion of OnlyFans, and the tightening control of tech barons over scientific research all point toward a world that is more—not less—Epsteinized.
Though he is a much more public figure than Epstein was, Larry Ellison has recently emerged as a vanguard figure in these developments. Ellison enthusiastically funds AI-powered mRNA vaccines and actively buys off Oxford scientists for his personal research fiefdom. The long list of Ellison’s increasingly brazen control campaigns appear, as was the case with Epstein, to exist within the framework of an Israel First politics.
In the past six years, awareness of Epstein’s significance has grown exponentially. However, this awareness has not translated into organized resistance to the rise of an increasingly Epsteinized world. If we want to truly resist this accelerating Epsteinization, we have to realize that Epstein was a reflection of—not an exception to—a widespread outlook on science and technology in the United States.
Provocation
“Sure, I can pound the world into pavement, but what else happens because of this? Sure, I can force matter and energy to jump through hoops on command, but what else happens because of this? The world is never so simple as me and you. I am not so simple as me, and you are not so simple as you. And the spaces and ties between us are never so simple as the spaces and ties between us. There is no such thing as an isolated incident. Life is indirect, and beyond, and there is meaning beneath meaning beneath meaning…If you make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, then there will be unintended consequences. And they will be severe.
—Derrick Jensen, “Stars Influence But Do Not Compel”