If I were Ghislaine Maxwellās lawyer, a job only slightly more desirable than being Prince Andrewās valet, I would have spent most of my time at her trial painting a picture of her father. Itās true that the sheer Dorian Gray-like loathsomeness of such a portrait might have caused a stir. Some jurors might have fainted, while a few hardened police officers might have rushed out of court in order to throw up. Even so, I would have ploughed doggedly on, convinced that this was the most effective way to get my client off. Could the child of such a monster ever stand a chance?
Ghislaine was born with every disadvantage: extraordinary privilege, limitless resources, endless leisure, posh friends, inborn entitlement, and a repulsive beast of a father who seems to have bullied and indulged her by turns. Other people were born to do her bidding, while she herself was immune to accountability. She referred to the young women she exploited as trash. You donāt need to be a card-carrying Freudian to see that the man she pimped for, Jeffrey Epstein, was a surrogate father whose affection she could probably never depend on.
It wasnāt women of her age who attracted him. One unreliable father had already died on her, and another might metaphorically speaking do the same. In several of the photos of the pair, Maxwell is looking adoringly at Epstein, or even kissing him, while he is looking away or at the camera, apparently tolerating her devotion rather than reciprocating it. Desperate to continue as his partner in love, so I would argue in court, she was willing to become his partner in crime. People can do appalling things for the sake of love, but doing them for love is better than doing them out of cruelty or malevolence.
Was Maxwell fated to end up behind bars as a kid with a sexually abusive father and an alcoholic mother? Obviously not. Plenty of people with her upper-class handicaps turn out to be decent human beings. Maxwell didnāt have to inveigle young women into her loverās massage room. That we amount to more than our circumstances is what we know as freedom. You can always act against the grain of your upbringing. Itās just that it can be fearfully hard to do so. Hangers and floggers arenāt wrong to think we have freedom of choice, simply blind to how arduous this can be. We are all free not to smoke, but a nicotine addict is less free in this respect than the Queen. If you want an image of freedom, donāt look at those who regard health and safety laws as fatal to human liberty; look at a man with a revolver who refrains from shooting the rapist of his small daughter.
It is only in the modern period that we start thinking of the will as a heroic force, one which overcomes our baser inclinations. It is thus that the idea of will power comes into existence. It is a matter of tensed sinews and gritted teeth. By contrast, for traditional thinkers such as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the will is more a form of desire than a kind of power. On this view, to will to do something is to feel drawn to it ā even, in the end, to love it. Far from struggling against what we want, the will has to plug into your deepest wishes if it is to work. Instead of a deep desire for heroin, you begin to feel an even deeper desire to be well. You embrace well-being because itās enjoyable, not just because youāre likely to die if you donāt. Most addicts are aware of this possibility, but it rarely stops them from drinking or shooting up, just as nobody stops being a radical Islamist because somebody tells them they should.
The United States, true to its Puritan heritage, is a deep believer in voluntarism, regarding the will as supreme. That youāre responsible for absolutely everything you do is part of American folklore. It is this belief which puts so many of its citizens on death row. To point out that a lot of criminals were deprived and unloved as children is to sell out to determinism. The fact that there are degrees of responsibility goes unacknowledged. Freedom is as absolute in the judicial system as it is in the market place, and appeals to social conditions can be left to fancy-pants sociologists. Yet we wouldnāt have the concept of freedom in the first place, or know how to practise it, if we didnāt live in society. When Margaret Thatcher announced that society didnāt exist, she did so in the English language, which belongs to an individual only because it belongs in the first place to a particular civilisation.
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SubscribeHe managed to work “Thatcher” in, so extra Guardian points for that.
Always a good time to revisit the original “society” quote.
Full interview here:
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
Will I ever understand the relationship the British have with Thatcher? Most criticism sounds Like my 5-year-old’s complaints. “Mummy took our toys away” “Mummy didn’t love us enough”. Since Thatcher, Britain was run by spineless men like Blair, Boris and Cameron. Cameron is currently employed by China! And yet they get a fraction of the criticism that Margareth receives. She had to run a nearly bankrupt country due to socialist pipe dreams. As an Anglophile, I have a problem with two things regarding the British, their over-fondness of pets and their Edipian relationship with Maggie Thatcher
Iām sure it is perplexing. On the flip side, she won one landslide election and two more very comfortably. Many people rightly credit her with reversing national decline; but I accept the criticism that nothing replaced the heavy industry and manufacturing that were lost, although this had been happening since the late 60s. The useless men who followed have had 30 years to ālevel upā as it where, but instead pursued policies of high immigration, low wage jobs and dumbed-down university courses over technical or vocational skills.
Like many western countries the heavy industrial jobs went – and were replaced by work that is thought based, of the intellect. Most folk are better off, and their lives much enhanced because of that. The mistake was not to resist the sucking south east vortex that this created – made much worse by improving transport links so that businesses could be based in the south east. See what effect HS2 will have Birmingham in the long term.
Also of course we insist on educating people for a world that no longer exists. We need vocational education to teach modern technology and all its spin offs. Study the arts when you take early retirement!
How true that quote remains.
Conversely, the existence of society is an excuse for not doing anything to support others
Please to see that you have found the full statement that Thatcher made. It cannot be quoted often enough.
Because all problems can be be solved privately can they? Destroy all affordable public housing, which in turn kept private rents down, allow builders free reign to build anywhere, remove all minimum space, light, area, storage, requirements as “an impediment to the market” MT and what is the reult? Paying 60% of income to rent, rather then 30%. Hooray for the ‘market’.
Why have so many of the men who visited Epsteins Island never been prosecuted?
They were too important and Maxwell probably wanted to stay alive, even if in prison.
And the point of this article is?
The law is based on the idea that we are agents, and finds us guilty (or not) of the things we did. It is one of the ways our societies hang together and don’t degenerate into vendetta.
Claiming ever more distant events added to our causes as an excuse for our illegal actions also means that we should allow for the ever more distant events that improved our behaviour. It is just handwaving, trying to sound profound, when really the immediate causes and effects are enough.
Too little on Ā« But we shouldnāt allow them to get away with it either. Ā»
Thanks TE….prompted some personal reflections and the theme itself is so ripe …just listening to some John Martyn and reading this article…https://www.heraldscotland.com/life_style/arts_ents/17373827.musical-genius-wasted-talent-search-real-john-martyn/
Fate, inheritance, choice, what does freedom mean…in the end the deepest questions possible…glad you address them and prompt reflection, which is what writing prompts and allows…
Many commentators on Unherd never get beyond point scoring politics it seems to me…(he mentioned Thatcher!) every piece is nothing more than a red rag to their ongoing rage…..surely writing is far more than this…it is for me….whether I ‘agree’ with it or not…and so poor is writing if all you can do is ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ with it or what you see in it..
Grief, how many times does it have to be pointed that that is not what Margaret Thatcher said; she said that there is no such thing as the opinion of society; and there isn’t.
But more to the point, this article invents a theory, then invents the facts to fit it. Mr Maxwell’s children were no doubt a bit nervous about him in a rage, but actually they so far as can be seen loved him; they are a very close family. And Ghislaine was a friend of a monster, rich, and English. She was never going to escape that burden in a courtroom.
Wow. How does this guy get up in the morning?
While we may all be victims of our inheritance, Ghislaine Maxwell was also victim of Israel. Maxwell and Epstein ran an Israeli blackmail operation that helped assure perpetual US-Uk-led wars to advance Israel’s Balkanizing Oded Yinon plan of perpetual chaos.
Terry the stuff they sell nowadays is wayyy more damaging than the grass you used to smoke..