Hunting is an archaic institution with elaborate rules, its own language, and ancient stories. Politicians, entrepreneurs, executives — many of them hunt. Not primarily for the game. For something else that hunting provides and that exists nowhere else: a specific form of intimacy among the powerful, outside normal structures.
Two people walking side by side through the forest for hours, sitting together in a blind, silent, waiting — develop a familiarity that no business dinner, no conference room, no joint board meeting can produce. The silence compels authenticity. People reveal themselves differently than they would elsewhere. And in this intimacy — at the celebratory dinner afterward, in loosened atmospheres with willing company far from the usual constraints — decisions are made that formally fall elsewhere. Connections are established that officially do not exist. Governance happens without anyone being able to point to who is governing.
This is not conspiracy theory. It is structural description. Dahrendorf named it precisely in 2003: democratic gaps — spaces where political decisions are made for which no democratic institutions exist. The forest is one such space. The hunting celebration another.
When the game bores
The hunting society has an internal logic that shifts under certain conditions. When power becomes boundless, when intimacy happens outside any oversight, when the group protects itself through shared silence — the quarry eventually changes. The animal becomes uninteresting. It bores. The hunt requires helplessness, surrender, absolute availability.
De Sade did not invent this. He described what emerges when power knows no limits and fears no consequences. What he dissected in his texts is not the fantasy of individuals — it is the logic of a society that has freed itself from all external constraints.
Jeffrey Epstein was not an outlier. He was a particularly stark visibility of something that has always existed. The private island, the private jet, the willing intermediaries, the shared silence — these are not coincidences. It is the hunting society in its terminal form, with the quarry that remains when everything else no longer satisfies: helpless young women and girls, completely at their mercy, without any countervailing power. And around them a network that stayed silent — through shared knowledge, mutual dependence, through the logic of a system that kept everyone alive.
La Catedral
A story from Colombia illustrates the same structure with a precision no theoretical argument can match.
Pablo Escobar had made his deal with the Colombian state and locked himself into the Cathedral — formally a prison, in practice a fortress he himself controlled, open at the back for whoever he wanted to admit. Famous celebrities visited him there. And his men went hunting regularly in Envigado — hunting people. Many of their victims who were brought into the Cathedral never came out.
The state that had made the deal knew what was happening behind those walls. The visitors knew. The men who hunted knew. And all stayed silent — through shared knowledge, mutual dependence, through the logic of a system that kept everyone alive. The Cathedral was Epstein's island — different continents, different decades, identical structure.
After Escobar's death, the network decimated itself. The sicarios killed each other. There were few survivors. One of them — Popeye — died a natural death and never regretted anything. The most honest figure in this story: no performance, no new narrative, no remorse. What he had done was what he had done.
The hero of his own story
The sicario Hans Ley met in Colombia was different — and in a specific way more revealing. 382 murders on his official list. Several assassination attempts barely survived. After the system collapsed he found God — but the piety was performance. He told his story like an adventure with himself as the hero.
That matters more than the piety itself. He never stopped being the hero of his story. He only changed the genre — from thriller to conversion narrative. The 382 murders are proof of his exceptionality in both versions. In one, as power. In the other, as an abyss from which God rescued him. Never legally charged. Never truly repentant. The system did not punish him — and the system did not change him.
The structure remains
What connects the hunting society in the German forest, Epstein's island, and Escobar's Cathedral? Not the actors — they are interchangeable. The structure: a closed society outside any democratic oversight, silence as mortar, helplessness as prerequisite, the system as protection for all participants.
This structure has not disappeared. It has found new forms. The exclusive dinner in Palo Alto, the private yacht, the closed investor circle — functionally identical to the post-hunt celebration. The same intimacy, the same decision logic outside public view, the same mutual loyalty through shared knowledge.
The question is not whether such structures exist. The question is whose values get embedded in systems shaped by people who live within them. No one decides this consciously. It emerges — as always in the Megamachine.
The most dangerous thing about the Megamachine is not that it produces evil people. It is that it produces people who have done the right thing in each context. In Escobar's system, a contract killing was the right thing. In the religious community where the sicario later found shelter, salvation through God was the right thing — the perfect narrative. That he had never paid for his acts, apart from his physical injuries, was part of unfathomable divine grace. The system changes. The logic remains: one has always done the right thing.