By Andrew Klein

March 17, 2026

To my wife, whose hand in the creation of my insights is clearly visible to me. Creation is a collaborative process.

Introduction: The Question That Matters

In the 18th century, the Marquis de Sade imagined a world where wealthy libertines retreated to isolated chateaux with abducted children, subjecting them to escalating cycles of sexual violence catalogued with bureaucratic precision. His was a philosophy of absolute power—the claim that nature requires evil as much as good, and that the strong have the right to satisfy their desires without moral constraint.

Two centuries later, Jeffrey Epstein’s private island functioned as exactly such a “chateau.” The recently released files—3 million pages, 180,000 images, 2,000 videos—reveal a network that transported minors for sexual abuse, with victims as young as 14. The names that appear in those files are not marginal figures: billionaires, politicians, royalty, scientists. People with the kind of power that shields itself from accountability.

The question is not whether these two men were similar. The question is: what structural forces produce such figures across centuries? What common patterns—in economic structures, political systems, and the architecture of power—allow such cruelty to flourish? And most urgently, how can they be prevented?

This article traces those patterns, drawing on the work of complexity scientist Peter Turchin, the lessons of the Robodebt scandal, and the emerging reality of AI warfare. It names the enablers—the bankers, donors, lobbyists, and ideological pretenders—who make such systems possible. And it calls on those who claim to care—the media, the people, the institutions of accountability—to do the work of identifying the pattern before it repeats again.

Part One: The Parallel—Two Centuries, One Structure

The Marquis de Sade’s World

In 1785, while imprisoned in the Bastille, the Marquis de Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom. His fiction described four wealthy libertines—a duke, a bishop, a judge, and a financier—retreating to an isolated chateau with abducted children. The narrative is less a story than a system: an inventory of cruelty, catalogued with bureaucratic precision.

De Sade’s philosophy was explicit: “Nature, to maintain overall balance, sometimes needs evil, sometimes needs virtue”. He argued that the powerful have the right to satisfy their desires without moral constraint—that the weak exist for the pleasure of the strong. As Mary Harrington has written, this is “in the precise sense, a satanic worldview… the radical libertinism and rejection of all moral constraints has come, by degrees, to appear almost ordinary”.

The Epstein Files

Fast-forward to the 21st century. The recently released Epstein files—3 million pages, 180,000 images, 2,000 videos—reveal a network that operated on exactly the same principles.

The documents show Howard Lutnick, now US Commerce Secretary, planning lunch on Epstein’s island in 2012—years after he claimed to have cut off ties. Emails show Elon Musk asking whether Epstein had “any parties planned,” though he declined an invitation to visit the island. Richard Branson appears to tell Epstein it was “really nice” seeing him, adding: “Any time you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!” (Virgin Group clarified this referred to “three adult members of Epstein’s team”) .

The philosophy is the same. Power without restraint. Bodies as commodities. Cruelty as bonding ritual among elites.

Part Two: The Structural Drivers—What Turchin’s Cliodynamics Reveals

The historian and complexity scientist Peter Turchin has spent decades studying why societies collapse. His work, combining analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, identifies the deep structural forces that work to undermine societal stability.

The Wealth Pump

Turchin identifies a mechanism he calls the “wealth pump”—a process that, under certain conditions, begins transferring wealth from the “99 percent” to the “1 percent” . If allowed to run unchecked, this pump results in both the relative impoverishment of most people and increasingly desperate competition among elites.

In the United States, Turchin notes, the wealth pump “has been operating full blast for two generations” . The result is immiseration: the economic and social decline of the lower and middle classes.

Elite Overproduction

Simultaneously, societies experience elite overproduction—the proliferation of individuals and groups vying for elite status. Since the number of positions of real social power remains more or less fixed, competition becomes increasingly desperate.

Those who fail to secure elite status become counter-elites, challenging the existing system and harnessing popular resentment to turn against the established order.

The French Case

In 18th-century France, the aristocracy had reached grotesque extremes of privilege while the peasantry starved. The state was bankrupt. The clergy and nobility paid almost no taxes. The common people bore the entire burden.

De Sade’s work is both a product and a critique of that world—a savage allegory of power unrestrained by morality. The libertines in his novels are not aberrations; they are the logical outcome of a system that places absolute authority in the hands of elites accountable to no one.

The American Case

Since the 1970s, the United States has followed the same trajectory. Economic inequality has grown dramatically. The elite class has expanded significantly—not just the wealthy, but those who hold power through bureaucratic control, ideological influence, and social capital.

Epstein’s network operated at the intersection of these dynamics. He moved among billionaires, politicians, royalty, and celebrities—the very elites whose power had grown unchecked while ordinary citizens struggled. His crimes were not the product of isolation but of access.

Turchin’s assessment is stark: “In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture”.

Part Three: The Contemporary Architecture—AI Warfare and the Accountability Vacuum

The same structural forces that enabled de Sade and Epstein now enable something far more lethal: the industrialization of killing through artificial intelligence.

Gaza as Laboratory

Israel’s recent war in Gaza has been described as the first major “AI war”—the first war in which AI systems played a central role in generating lists of purported militants to target. These systems processed billions of data points to rank the probability that any given person was a combatant.

The Lavender system, an AI-assisted surveillance tool, used predictive analytics to rank Palestinians’ likelihood of being connected to militant groups, based on an opaque set of criteria. Public sector workers—healthcare workers, teachers, police officers—were included on kill lists because they had ties to Hamas by virtue of working in a territory the group governed.

The Gospel system functioned as a “mass assassination factory.” One source admitted spending only “20 seconds” per target before authorizing bombing—just enough to confirm the Lavender-marked target was male. One system alone produced more than 37,000 targets in the first weeks of the war. Another was capable of generating 100 potential bombing sites per day.

A classified Israeli military database, reviewed by the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call, indicated that of more than 53,000 deaths recorded in Gaza, named Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters accounted for roughly 17%. That suggests the rest—83%—were civilians.

The Minab School

At the start of the US-Israeli Iran war, a strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, most of them children—girls aged seven to 12.

The weapons were precise. Munitions experts described the targeting as “incredibly accurate,” each building individually struck, nothing missed. The problem was not the execution. The problem was intelligence. The school had been separated from an adjacent Revolutionary Guard base by a fence and repurposed for civilian use nearly a decade ago. Somewhere in the targeting cycle, that fact was never updated.

Two sources confirmed to NBC News that Palantir’s AI systems, which draw in part on large language model technology, were used to identify targets. Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, boasted that the military is using AI in Iran to “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds” in order to “make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react” .

The Companies Behind the Killing

The companies implicated in this are not obscure defense startups. They are among the most valuable corporations in the world:

· Palantir, founded with early CIA funding, supplied systems used in the Iran campaign 

· Google and Amazon signed Project Nimbus, a cloud-computing and AI contract with the Israeli government and military worth more than $1 billion 

· Microsoft had deep integration with Israeli military systems before partially withdrawing under pressure in 2024 

· Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey, builds autonomous weapons systems explicitly designed for lethal targeting 

· OpenAI quietly removed its prohibition on military use in early 2024 and has since pursued Pentagon contracts 

The Accountability Vacuum

In international law, an accountability framework requires that someone be identifiable as the decision-maker, that their reasoning be reconstructable after the fact, and that the process obligations the law demands—proportionality assessment, verification, precaution—can be shown to have been followed.

AI targeting systematically destroys each of these conditions:

· Attribution dissolves across a chain of engineers, commanders, operators, and corporate suppliers, each of whom can point to another

· Reasoning disappears into a probability score that no lawyer can audit and no court can cross-examine

· Process collapses into a 20-second approval of a machine recommendation

· The companies that built and sold the system sit entirely outside the legal framework, because international humanitarian law was designed for states and their agents, and Palantir is not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions 

As The Guardian’s investigation concluded: “The accountability framework has not been merely strained or tested by AI warfare. It has been made structurally irrelevant”.

Part Four: The Australian Template—Robodebt and the Failure of Accountability

The Robodebt scheme offers a domestic template for what happens when automated systems are deployed without oversight.

The scheme was an automated tool for assessing and recovering Centrelink debts, implemented under successive Coalition governments before it was ultimately found to be unlawful. It used income averaging to raise debts against welfare recipients without proper verification.

The Australian government lost a lawsuit in 2019 over the legality of the scheme and settled a class action the next year in which it agreed to pay $1.8 billion in repayments and compensation.

A dozen current and former senior public servants involved in the scheme were found to have breached their code of conduct on 97 occasions. Sanctions were imposed against four current employees, including reprimands, fines, and demotions. But the commissioner noted that a number of others who were referred had since retired or resigned and could not be sanctioned.

No one went to jail.

Former secretary Kathryn Campbell was found to have committed 12 breaches, including failure to seek legal advice, failure to sufficiently respond to public criticism and whistleblower complaints, failure to inform the responsible minister, and creating a culture that prevented robodebt from being scrutinised. Former secretary Renee Leon was found to have committed 13 breaches, including misrepresentations of the department’s legal position and failures to “expeditiously” inform the responsible minister of advice on the lawfulness of the scheme.

The commissioner noted that in a number of cases, had the respondent still been an employee, the recommended sanction “may well have been termination due to the seriousness of the breaches”.

The system protected itself. The same pattern is now repeating at scale, with algorithms making life-and-death decisions and no one accountable when they fail.

Part Five: The Enablers—Names and Networks

The Political Class

The Trumps, the Albaneses, the Starmers, the Netanyahus—these are not aberrations. They are the products of systems that reward mediocrity, protect incumbents, and prioritize the appearance of governance over its substance.

They are enabled by:

· Bankers who finance campaigns and expect favourable treatment in return

· Donors who purchase access and influence policy

· Lobbyists who write legislation and ensure their clients’ interests are protected

· Religious leaders who pretend to represent moral constituencies while pursuing purely ideological aims

The Segal Nexus

Jillian Segal, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, occupies a unique position at the intersection of these networks. Her husband’s family trust, Henroth, donated $50,000 to Advance Australia, a right-wing lobby group that has shared anti-immigration content and claimed Palestinians in Australia were a “risk to security”.

Segal has distanced herself from the donation, stating: “No one would tolerate or accept my husband dictating my politics, and I certainly won’t dictate his. I have had no involvement in his donations, nor will I”.

But the appearance matters. When the antisemitism envoy is married to a donor to an organisation that promotes anti-Palestinian rhetoric, when her networks connect Australian business to Israeli interests, and when those interests align with the very AI companies testing their technologies on Palestinian populations, the confluence becomes visible.

The Companies

We should stop calling these technology companies and start calling them what they are: defence contractors.

The largest AI firms are not neutral infrastructure providers who happened to find a military customer. They are being integrated into the targeting architecture of modern warfare. Their systems sit inside the kill chain, their engineers hold security clearances, their executives rotate through the same revolving door that has always connected Silicon Valley to the Pentagon.

A clear accountability chain applies to firms such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin—entailing export controls, congressional oversight, liability frameworks, and procurement conditions. The weak regulations that apply to the companies writing the algorithms that select military targets have never been applied, tested, or enforced.

Part Six: What Leads Up to These Cycles?

Drawing on Turchin’s framework, the pattern is consistent:

1. A wealth pump transfers resources from the many to the few, impoverishing ordinary people while enriching elites 

2. Elite overproduction creates frustrated aspirants who cannot secure positions of real power 

3. Counter-elites emerge, harnessing popular resentment to challenge the established order 

4. Institutions weaken, unable to restrain the powerful or protect the vulnerable

5. A philosophy of libertinism takes hold—the belief that the strong have the right to satisfy their desires without constraint

6. Cruelty becomes normalized, whether in chateaux, on islands, or through algorithms

7. Accountability fails, and the system protects itself

Part Seven: How Can These Cycles Be Avoided?

Turchin points to historical examples of successful crisis mitigation: the New Deal in 1930s America, and the post-war European model . What these share are:

1. Reducing inequality before it reaches crisis levels

2. Strengthening social institutions—political parties, unions, churches, community organizations

3. Ensuring elites are accountable to legal and moral frameworks

4. Creating pathways for ordinary people to improve their circumstances

5. Maintaining social cohesion through inclusive policies

These factors have been weakening in Western societies since the 1980s. The Reagan/Thatcher revolution, corporate-driven globalization, excessive reliance on market forces, and the erosion of social safety nets have all contributed to the current instability.

The TEPSA analysis notes that these factors have been weakening in Western societies since the 1980s . The Reagan/Thatcher revolution, corporate-driven globalization, excessive reliance on market forces, and the erosion of social safety nets have all contributed to the current instability.

Part Eight: The Role of the Media—and of All Who Claim to Care

The media has a role. The people have a role. All who claim to care have a role.

The pattern is visible to those who look. De Sade’s chateau and Epstein’s island are not disconnected historical accidents. They are manifestations of the same structural forces. The AI systems that kill children in Gaza and the algorithms that robbed vulnerable Australians are not separate failures. They are the same logic applied at different scales.

It is incumbent on all who claim to care—journalists, academics, activists, ordinary citizens—to make the effort to identify the pattern. To ask not just “who did this?” but “what structural forces made this possible?” To demand accountability not just from individuals, but from the systems that shield them.

The alternative is to watch the pattern repeat—again, and again, and again.

Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

The release of the Epstein files—3 million pages, 2,000 videos, 180,000 images—is an attempt at accountability. But as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche admitted, even this massive disclosure is unlikely to satisfy public demand for information. Some documents contain “untrue and sensationalist claims” submitted to the FBI before the 2020 election, according to the Justice Department. Untangling fact from fiction, accountability from spectacle, remains enormously difficult.

The Robodebt royal commission documented 97 breaches of the public service code of conduct. No one went to jail.

The AI systems that killed thousands of civilians in Gaza and Iran continue to operate, their algorithms unexamined, their engineers unaccountable, their corporate suppliers protected by legal frameworks designed for a different era.

The pattern repeats. It will keep repeating until we choose to see it—and to act.

Turchin’s diagnosis is clear: “In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture”. That rupture is not inevitable. It can be mitigated. It can be prevented. But only if we do the work.

The media must do the work. The people must do the work. All who claim to care must do the work.

The alternative is to let the pattern repeat—until there is nothing left to save.

Sources

1. International Committee of the Red Cross, “Customary International Humanitarian Law, Rules 46-48: Denial of Quarter,” 2005 

2. The Guardian, “These aren’t AI firms, they’re defense contractors. We can’t let them hide behind their models,” March 14, 2026 

3. Reuters, “Commerce Secretary Lutnick planned lunch on Epstein’s island, new release shows,” January 30, 2026 

4. UMass Amherst, “Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series: Dr. Peter Turchin, ‘Cliodynamics of End Times,'” May 1, 2025 

5. ABC News, “Former department bosses Kathryn Campbell and Renee Leon named for breaching duties in relation to Robodebt,” September 13, 2024 

6. The Sydney Morning Herald, “Antisemitism envoy distances herself from husband’s donation to right-wing lobby group,” July 13, 2025 

7. The Guardian, “‘Data is control’: what we learned from a year investigating the Israeli military’s ties to big tech,” December 30, 2025 

Published by Andrew Klein

March 17, 2026