Submersibles & Schadenfreude
When the Titan submersible was lost and eventually imploded, people on Twitter were relentless with their mockery of the tragedy. Have people lost their sense of compassion or are they justified?
The implosion of OceanGate’s Titan submersible last month and the resulting deaths of its 5 passengers took the internet by storm. The small submersible’s expedition was meant to take its passengers, P. H. Nargeolet, Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, his son, and its pilot, OceanGate’s co-founder Stockton Rush, to the wreck of the Titanic at about 3,800 meters below the surface of the ocean, but the trip, clearly, did not go as planned. The submersible imploded during its descent, instantly killing its passengers. This tragic ending could have been avoided had its pilot heeded the warnings of experts and allowed his better judgment to take over the wheel from his ego, but the purpose of this post is not to dissect what went wrong with the expedition, but rather to discuss the reaction.
You could not escape the discussion of the submersible online. There were updates, jokes, countdowns to the oxygen tank running out, people surmising about what they would do if they were in that situation, and some more jokes. Five people died aboard the Titan, yet people on the internet, particularly Twitter, relentlessly made jokes about the failed expedition. It was obviously too soon to joke about five people who lost their lives in such a terrifying way, but when we look closer at the context in which this tragedy happened, and at the resources thrown at the attempted rescue of the passengers, the jokes seem a little less heartless.
First, this tragedy isn’t something that would happen to just anyone.
The ticket to go on this expedition cost a quarter of a million dollars and as a result, the passengers were billionaires. These facts automatically separate regular people from the tragedy of the expedition’s failure; there is no way in which this could happen to them or their loved ones. If this bad thing can only happen to a certain class of people and you do not belong to that class, it simply does not land as hard. It’s not a problem until it lands on your doorstep.
The fact that these passengers were billionaires also explains the lack of compassion people showed toward their fate. While the rest of the world is struggling to navigate cost of living crises, climate change, inflation, etc. which could all be addressed, if not solved, by the amount of money these men held, these men chose to spend their money to go on a trip to see the Titanic. Instead of helping out the rest of us on shore, they decided to spend their money on a trip to say “look what my money bought me, a trip to see the Titanic! Bet you can’t say you did that.” Surely part of the appeal of this expedition was to be able to say, I am one of the handful of people who have seen the Titanic and lived to tell you about it. It is a symbol of wealth and access. It might be too much to ask the people who are navigating the consequences of billionaires refusing to spend their money to help them to lose sleep over the fact that some of these billionaires died flexing their wealth on an incredibly risky joy ride.
The phenomenon of schadenfreude, defined as “enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others” by Merriam-Webster, applies to the public’s response to this tragedy as well. I have found that this phenomenon can typically be witnessed in interactions between “normal people” and celebrities (or really between anyone who has more money, fame, or status than another). We put people up on pedestals, praise them and love them, and then the moment they do anything that bothers us or makes us second guess our decision to allot them their 15 minutes of fame, we tear them down to bring them back to Earth and remind them that they are more like us than they think they are. In this instance, the general public, who likely can’t fathom spending $250,000 on a ticket to the bottom of the ocean, takes some small sliver of joy from seeing people who dispose of that kind of money so easily realize that their money can’t protect them from their poor decision-making. Because even if us “regular folk” had that kind of money to spend, we would not even think of spending it on such a dangerous activity built to fulfill the Christopher Columbus dream of needlessly “discovering” a place and crowning yourself as the one who saw it first.
What makes it worse is that when these adrenaline rush expeditions go wrong, the world stops and awaits word as to what happened to those affected. We tune in to countdowns of the oxygen left on the submersible and send out special teams to help locate and rescue the passengers, spending exorbitant amounts of money to save a group of people who went on an extremely dangerous trip just for kicks. This might be fine if this was a universal reaction to such disasters, but what about when people cross the ocean to escape unlivable countries and pursue a better life elsewhere? What do we do when they need to be rescued? Oh right, we let them die.
Last month, the migrant boat Adriana departed from Libya to deliver about 750 passengers to Italy but never made it. The boat capsized off the coast of Greece, killing the majority of its passengers. Greece was capable of rescuing those on the boat, but did not allocate the proper resources to do so, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of over 600 people. Regardless of how one feels in regards to migrants fleeing their home countries to create a living in another, it is obvious that saving these migrants was not a priority for the Greek authorities and that saving the Titan passengers was a priority for American authorities. The stark difference between the two tragedies is not the difference in maritime resources between Greece and the United States, but the people who needed to be rescued and their respective social capital.
Saving migrants is obviously as important as saving some billionaires, but saving billionaires is a less complicated story for a lot of people. They paid for their tickets to go on a trip to see the Titanic. How cool! And if something goes wrong, we should do everything we can to save them. They weren’t doing anything illegal after all. The migrant boat capsizing is a tragedy for sure, but they knew it was dangerous, didn’t they? They knew the risk they were taking. Well, so did the submersible passengers. Neither the migrant boat nor the submersible were built for the trips that they were taking. Both parties onboard knew that they were taking a great risk to embark on their respective journeys, and both stories ended in tragedy. The only difference is the type of people onboard. And it can be more comfortable to align oneself with a billionaire who takes himself on extravagant trips, someone you might want to be one day, than a migrant desperate for a better life, a fate you hope to never face yourself.
When putting the implosion of the Titan in context, it’s clear that the people making jokes are not bad people (in fact, humor is a pretty common way to process difficult emotions), but they are making sense of a world in which billionaires are allotted insane amounts of resources without hesitation to get them out of bad situations they willfully place themselves in, while those who do not have $250,000 to spare are told that they don’t deserve an equal amount of government assistance because they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
And anyway, people on Twitter aren’t the only ones poking fun at the submersible, just check out what movie Netflix put back on its platform this month.