Motive is in Your Hands

We’re inundated with coverage of the Epstein files as they trickle out. Headlines, podcasts, and reports dissect what they reveal about Epstein, wealth, and power. Even the release itself tells a story: the Department of Justice holding back some files, redacting perpetrators’ names while releasing victims’ names. It is hard not to notice that the process looks a lot like the pattern it exposes, a system that bends to protect the powerful.

What I keep pondering is: Who said no? Who refused the invites? Who didn’t attend the parties, fly on his jet, accept his invitations once Epstein’s conviction made clear he was a predatory pedophile?

We don’t know, because those names aren’t in the files. They’re not in the news. But there must be some. There must be some people who resisted, who didn’t yield to the temptations Epstein offered.

Why? Each has their reason. But as I see it, they had no motive to participate. Or possibly their morals overrode their motive.

As I wrote in my book, how we use power comes down to means, motive, and opportunity.

Means are the capacities power confers: access, reach, and the ability to act without resistance. Power expands what you can do, and how easily you can do it. It gives you authority over decisions, over outcomes, and often over other people’s livelihoods. Means buffer you from consequences, soften feedback, and reduce the likelihood that others will question or challenge you. And they create distance, making it easier not to see, and not to feel, the effects you have on others.

Opportunity is the context that makes action possible, and often easy. It is the moment that creates an opening, or the environment that looks the other way. It’s the removal or absence of constraint. There’s less oversight, fewer checks, and more discretion.

Motive, however, is in your hands. Motive lies in your inner world: your unmet needs, frustrations, ego, vulnerabilities, ambitions, and fears. Motive is the match that lights the fuse. When you have a motive, you take advantage of the means and opportunity power affords.

And the Epstein files reveals the ways in which the means and opportunity of power increase motive.

Status has no ceiling

When you look at the emails being released, something becomes abundantly clear. As journalist Anand Giridharadas said on a podcast with Ezra Klein, Epstein didn’t just groom victims. He groomed the powerful, offering them access, exclusivity, membership in a club.

Epstein knew, intimately, that status seeking has no end. And those who feel hungry, for whatever reason, feeling that they need more, or don’t yet belong, are the most manipulable. Giridharadas referred to these people as “outer borough” types, people born on the fringe who spent their lives clawing toward the inside. We’ve seen this pattern before: Bernie Madoff, Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein. To the rest of us, they look powerful. But internally, they’re still striving.

Status seeking is a more dangerous place to be than status holding. The ambition, drive, and hunger distort judgment even more than holding power does. And status seeking triggers motive.

But the truth is that there is no “there” there. Status only exists in comparison, and comparison has no ceiling. No matter how high you climb, someone is always one rung ahead. The hunger for status is never sated. I think back to the Varsity Blues scandal. Fifty people were charged with bribing their children’s way into elite universities. What is most striking is who these people were: movie stars, executives, investment bankers. These were not struggling families. They were among the wealthiest people in the country. And yet it wasn’t enough. They gambled their careers and freedom for one more status marker.

The more we invest in status, the more there is to accrue. And sadly, the quest for status diminishes our capacity to enjoy life’s simpler satisfactions, like friendship, meaning, nature, and genuine connection.

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Power becomes a crutch

Power makes life easier. It removes friction. It buys autonomy, options, and deference. But as I’ve written before, this is one of the traps of power.

Whenever you remove friction or take a shortcut around a difficulty, you lose a bit of your capacity to navigate that difficulty on your own. Over time, the privileges of power become less a luxury and more a dependency. Power becomes a tool not just for solving problems, but for getting needs met without risk, without effort, without emotional effort. Why tolerate discomfort when you can bypass it? Why risk vulnerability when you can insulate yourself from it? Why subject yourself to someone’s opinion, feedback, or demands, when you can just buy your way to instant gratification?

The inability to do hard things becomes a motive. And it shows up in disturbing ways, as the Epstein files show. Older, wealthy men exploiting younger, vulnerable girls is the ultimate sign of someone who cannot abide the friction of a real relationship: no rejection, no reciprocity, no risk of being seen or challenged.

As our emotional muscles atrophy, our dependence on power to feel okay, to get our needs met, increases, locking us into a cycle where the very shortcuts that make life easier erode our capacity to function without them.

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Your Network Binds You

What the files reveal, as many have reported, is that Epstein wasn’t a financial genius. His wealth and power came from his network. He was a master at building networks.

Network theory shows that the most powerful person in a system is not the one who dominates a single field, but the one who straddles multiple fields. Epstein built an infrastructure of influence across politics, finance, science, philanthropy, and business. He positioned himself as indispensable and valuable to others. This is also what protected him. Exposing him would have been socially costly for too many people at once.

At a basic level this network was pure advantage. It brings introductions, board seats, capital, access, prestige. But the emails reveal more than just a network of transaction; Epstein also offered something that felt like warmth and friendliness. For the rich and powerful, where genuine reciprocal relationships are often replaced with sycophantic ones, and real emotional connections rare, this can be intoxicating. You feel chosen, included, special. To blow the whistle, or even to just refuse the invite, is to risk all that. It’s to risk a form of exile. the oldest, and most painful human punishment. Courage always falters when belonging is on the line. And so your network, belonging becomes a motive. So you stay quiet. You look the other way. You protect yourself, even when others suffer.

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In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf refuses the Ring because he knows it would corrupt him. In The Odyssey, Odysseus has himself tied to the mast to resist the sirens. In Star Wars and Harry Potter, the greatest fear is not defeat, but becoming the thing you oppose, succumbing to the motive to abuse power.

The real battle with power is an internal one. Power feeds on our need to feel important, secure, and invulnerable. The Epstein files show that the more power you have, the more inner strength you need to resist the means, reject the opportunity, and not take the easy path that power provides.

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​Thanks for reading.