Perhaps no scandal conveys the rot in our world more than the Jeffrey Epstein affair. I watched in amazement in the hours after the latest tranche of (heavily redacted) documents were released as politicians hit the American cable TV channels seeking to make capital out of the ruined lives of girls as young as 13. Democrats pointed to photos of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, while Republicans gleefully seized on images of Bill Clinton and Larry Summers. I felt physically repulsed.

For this isn’t a story about left and right; it is a story about right and wrong. More specifically, it is about power; about how the rich and powerful of all political persuasions live by a different set of rules from everyone else, not just in America but throughout the western world. The story we like to tell ourselves is about equality under the law — Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, the separation of powers. But this fairytale has now become an object of derision for millions of “ordinary” people — me included, and perhaps you too.

How could it be otherwise when dozens of vulnerable children were trafficked, abused and threatened by Epstein and other rich men but not a single one of those men has been brought to justice beyond Epstein himself? The only person serving time is Ghislaine Maxwell; the others who enabled, participated or pretended not to notice (did they not find it odd that armies of sad-eyed pubescent waifs were offering massages or that Epstein’s jet was nicknamed “the Lolita Express”?) are still protected by a system that has little to do with justice and everything to do with power and privilege.

• Epstein files: photo of Andrew on women’s laps was at Sandringham

That is the real story here and it has ancient precedents. When I read about the first “prosecution” of Epstein in 2008 — a man whose home contained extensive evidence of abuse on an industrial scale — I couldn’t help thinking of pre-revolutionary France, where nobles were tried in lenient courts not available to the great unwashed. Isn’t that the only way to make sense of a multimillionaire securing a deal to be housed in a private wing of prison and permitted to leave on work release for 12 hours a day while his “trailer trash” victims were not even consulted? Epstein and his unnamed “co-conspirators” also secured future immunity, a travesty that defies words.

Equality before the law? Don’t make me laugh. In the Harvey Weinstein case the real story wasn’t his belated conviction but the way that he used civil settlements as a shield, intimidation as a sword and non-disclosure agreements as a mechanism to suppress evidence, all while being enabled by a côterie of extravagantly paid enablers (ie, accomplices). It took a global social movement, involving millions of brave women, for Weinstein to meet justice that any ordinary bloke would have been subject to in five minutes flat. As Rousseau observed not long before the onset of the Terror: laws are always useful to those who own and harmful to those who have nothing.

And let’s be frank: this pathology extends far beyond sexual abuse; it’s about a system rigged in favour of the rich and powerful. Britain has its own genteel version of the same disease: honours for donors, a cronyistic House of Lords and a culture of “VIP lanes” that long pre-dated Covid and protracted inquiries designed to cover up the truth rather than expose it. In the Post Office scandal hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters were ruined while senior figures have escaped consequence so far. In the Greensill affair a former prime minister turned public office into private advantage and then failed to apologise when he was scrutinised. Anthony Trollope had it exactly right: “Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him.”

I am not a man of the left, and this is not a left-wing newspaper. But it is surely time to confront the most glaring pattern in the world today: how ever more grotesque concentrations of wealth and power are creating a culture of impunity. Lord Acton’s warning was not a slogan; it was a timeless observation. Power tends to corrupt — and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The male ego, properly channelled, is a source of ambition, creativity and progress. But, as Freud understood, it requires boundaries. This is what parents, friends and enlightened institutions are for: to offer chastisement when we go too far, take too much, trample on others. We call this process “maturity”.

But those constraints are disappearing in an ever more oligarchic world. I am conscious how often we seek to offer geopolitical explanations for big events, but shouldn’t we reserve a place for out-of-control narcissism? The Ukraine war is discussed in terms of Nato expansion or land bridges, but what about the egomania of a tinpot dictator willing to see millions of innocents die (including his own soldiers) in pursuit of a place in the history books? Is that so different from Epstein preying on young victims for his own form of perverted gratification? Or take the wolf warrior diplomacy of Xi Jinping, another who has eliminated all constraints on raw power, as he seeks a place alongside his hero, the monster Chairman Mao.

The West was supposed to be different, wasn’t it? The logic of the separation of powers was to guard against these dynamics; it offered a kind of institutional parenting for leaders who might otherwise drift into what psychologists call grandiose narcissism. But look at Trump’s America as this squalid president deploys power to further enrich himself and his friends. Look at how he finds new ways to gratify his ego, most recrently announcing that the Kennedy Center has been renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center by a board stuffed with his allies. Congress, supposedly the principal check on executive excess, has become supine, the cabinet sycophantic, the Supreme Court feeble. This is incubating risks that make me shudder.

The Epstein affair, for all its horrors, belongs in a long historical tradition. In the final decades of the ancien régime French nobles did not see themselves as lawless; they simply believed the law was not aimed at them. It was a L’Oréal culture — because we’re worth it. Special courts, royal indulgences and quiet settlements insulated the elite while public faith in justice ebbed away. The revolution that followed was not driven by envy but by moral outrage: by the sense that society had been divided into those who were accountable and those who were untouchable. That is the fundamental warning Epstein leaves behind — a world in which the rich and powerful come to behave without compunction for a simple but devastating reason. Because they can.