Perhaps Nobody Deserves To Be Crushed To Death

Sailing the Seven Seas of Performative Sadism

I know I’m a little late to this beat, all the OceanGate stuff happened two weeks ago, and in the brave new frontier of Cyberspace that is an eternity, but this was also the piece I was working on before the Jonah Hill thing suddenly became the virus eating my brain, so I’m choosing to circle back.

The whole OceanGate thing was one of those cultural events that was so ever present in everyone’s lives I feel like it doesn’t warrant much explanation, but in case you were in a bunker I’ll summarize. Rich Guy builds his own submarine and offers underwater tours to other rich people to go see the wreckage of the Titanic. The Titanic was a movie my Mom and a lot of other bored suburban women loved in the late 90s before they figured out they could find bondage themed Twilight Fan Fiction at the local library. The movie was about 2 people who fell in love on a transatlantic cruise liner that sank, killing 1500 people, including one of the hot ones, who mercifully died before he could live to see 30 year olds lose their minds every 6 weeks arguing about whether or not he’s allowed to have consensual sex with 24 year olds. Crazy thing is, the boat thing actually happened.

Anyway, contact was lost with the submarine during one of these underwater tours, setting off a days long search along the ocean floor to find them. This dominated the news cycle for what I hypothesize are a few reasons; first, the Titanic is a cultural touchstone event. The movie was a massive global hit, it was the highest grossing movie of all time for nearly a decade and currently sits at #4 on the all time list, so you’re talking about something everyone knows, hell you probably have a copy of it in your bunker. There’s also the race against time, developing minute by minute aspect that people love. Apollo 13, Chilean Miners, Thai Soccer teams, people love to watch a rescue. And finally, it’s a unique story. As much as the “why is this even news when x awful thing is happening” brigade want to hem and haw the reality is that migrant ships capsize every day. Man bites dog remains one of the iron laws of the universe.

As the search stretched on, the outcomes became more grim. The fight against time to reach the submarine before oxygen ran out failed. Eventually wreckage was recovered, the sub had imploded. All 5 passengers crushed to death, if not inside and by the sub itself, then by the pressure of the depth that would’ve pulverized their bodies. One can only hope it was instantaneous.

The response on the internet was pretty standard for anything that draws the attention of more than three people online. There were the jokes and the memes. I don’t really subscribe to the school of thought that there are things you can’t joke about, I’m more or less a free speech absolutist, I was raised on a much meaner internet and a friend group that was even meaner when roasting the people we love. Gallows humor is both a natural and healthy coping mechanism. The fact that this multi million dollar operation was piloted by a 15 year old 3rd party gaming controller is so incredibly strange, specific, and funny it feels like a detail from a Paul Verhoeven movie. Even the kids piloting the drones that drop bombs on Yemeni weddings from a trailer in Vegas get genuine Xbox products. The step-son of one of the men is an insanely specific kind of weirdo product of the current internet age, who among other things made a heartfelt post how about even though tragedy struck, you have to power through tragedy, do some self care, and attend a Blink-182 concert (personally, I would’ve preferred to be on the sub). The observation that more than a century later the Titanic managed to kill 5 more people is also very funny. There’s other jokes that floated around. Some good, some bad, but people were having fun and most importantly, trying to make one another laugh.

The International Symbol for “Mom says I get to be Player 1”

But then, of course, because we live in a cruel God’s Milgram Experiment, this whole thing became another hill in the never ending culture war. The sub imploded because it was Too Woke. Actually the sub imploded because it Wasn't Woke Enough.

There were also lots of people actively cheering their deaths. Ostensibly on the “left” based on the hammer and sickles and black flags adorning their twitter bios. This isn’t anything particularly new, there is a certain brand of online cretin who considers themselves a vanguard of a coming revolution despite not being able to do a single pushup, and they believe the single greatest praxis is winning an internet arms race of who can act like a bigger sociopath. I’m mostly a pacifist, but I have no illusions that that to take this world out of the clutches of our current rulers would require a long protracted war that resulted in the deaths of a lot of people, and maybe like a lot of wars, everything should be done to avoid that, but it could end up being necessary. We shouldn’t revel in that though, nor should we kill people we have the choice not to, there’s a lot of daylight though between armed struggle and outright executions.

It’s strange to see people who don’t own a gun, let alone know how to fire one, talk such a big game. But again, it’s not about creating any actual substantive changes, it’s about in group signaling between the self proclaimed Antifa and Tankie LARPers, same with how the online Cosplay Crusader Catholics talk about “degeneracy” like dollar store Rorschachs, but it betrays a lot more than a casual disregard for human life. Once you start openly fantasizing about executing your enemies, whether they’re landlords or woke college professors, you lose your righteous distinction. Your critique isn’t one of the nature of power, it’s that you simply do not have it. Your issue isn’t that there’s a boot on someone’s neck, it’s that you aren’t the one wearing it. But I digress…

My surprise came more when I saw people in well…my circle of the leftish internet, people who claim to actively oppose dehumanization, reveling in the deaths of these people and scolding anyone who pointed out this betrayed a deep lack of empathy. I don’t know how you can argue that every person has an intrinsic value, and then jettison that based on their economic value. I’m not linking to this stuff because this isn’t a call out of anyone in particular, it’s an interrogation of a response that multiple people had. I don’t think they’re hypocrites, I just think everyone, including myself as I outlined in great detail in my last piece, can get caught up in very common human emotions (among those being revenge and desire for catharsis from our current moment) and come into dissonance with their central values.

The political world that I’ve called home has always opposed the death penalty. There have always been a variety of reasons for that, but at the center of it is that we shouldn’t be killing anyone. There are those who point to how the system often kills innocent people, and they’re right, that’s a good reason, but it isn’t the best reason. The Death penalty doesn’t need to simply get better at killing the right people, it needs to stop outright. Even killing the right people opens the door for killing the wrong people. The problem with police brutality is not that sometimes (often) police brutalize the wrong people, it’s that people are brutalized, all people are the wrong people. Yes, including the ones you don’t like.

Further, the Leftist critique of the world is not one of moral absolutism. We reject the concept that people are intrinsically good or evil, and understand that there are dynamic systems in place that fail and cause a variety of awful outcomes. The existence of people richer than everyone else is not an individual moral failure, but a giant systemic one, they’re successfully playing within the system the live under. We claim to understand that these systems create and incentivize a great deal of anti-social and destructive behavior and that people are molded by these systems. If you can look at a convicted murderer and see someone whose actions were at least partly influenced by a systemic failure, you should be able to see the wealthy with the same nuance and complexity, otherwise you’ll never be able to solve the problem. Sure, you can say “just redistribute the wealth” but that’s just as myopic as saying “well just stop the murders”. Further if you can say the murderer, who poses no immediate threat, doesn’t deserve to die because they purposely took a life, surely that can extend to people whose crime is allegedly labor exploitation. And that’s because it’s not just wrong, to take their lives takes a piece of everyone’s humanity with them. The complex system of moral and structural failures creates all kinds of human atrocities, not just the humans you choose to see as people.

I’m not above the impulse. If you gave me the option to [redacted] George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, men responsible for the deaths of millions at home and abroad I’d have a hard time saying no. I’d never act like I have never fantasized about the option to permanently never worry again about the people who worked so hard to ruin my life while inflicting as much pain as possible on them. But I have to push back against that part of me because I know it degrades them, myself, everyone I love, and every other human soul. I have to say no, whatever path forward, it is not this way. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t protect myself or anyone in danger, but if somebody doesn’t pose an immediate and unavoidable threat how can you justify violence? When violence eventually and unavoidably comes, how can that fill you with anything but sadness? And even if it doesn’t for you in particular, how can you not at least have enough empathy to be respectful enough of those who mourn.

None of these peoples lives were what was standing in the way of everyone in America getting healthcare and homes. Their wealth doesn’t just magically go into a social programs now that they’re gone. None of the changes you want will come from this, so you’re just performing sadism. It may gain you points within your particular guillotine meme sharing group, but to everyone else on the outside of your insular group, the people whose side you claim to be on and need to win over, you look like a psycho.

I’m not here to scold anyone, I’m here to ask a question: if your principle of unconditional empathy, regardless of ones actions, disintegrates based on tax bracket, is it a principle? Or is it just a platitude? If we’re going to be the people who say nobody is disposable, we’re going to have to still say that about people you hate, in fact, especially about the people you hate. We’re going to have to stick up for the bad people. We understand that once we start making certain exceptions for who we see as human, it doesn’t stop. We don’t stick up for the bad people because they’re actually good people, we stick up for them because they’re still people. The thing at the center of the Abrahamic religions is that not only do all people want mercy, they want to believe they are worthy of it, and I believe we all are, no matter what. The least the left can do is adopt the good parts of Christianity.

And even if you can’t get on board with me on this with principle, if you believe the exception for these people based on their wealth is justified, one of them was 19, an adult technically, but still a very young, new soul in the world, surely he is not his father’s sins, so how do you square that?

A group of people went out for an adventure, they had full inner lives, experiences, dreams just like you. They were excited for something, just like you have been and they likely spent their last moments in this world in the dark, terrified, holding on to one another in a hope for safety that would go unanswered. I pray it all happened so fast they didn’t even notice. You have people you love, these were people somebody loved, these are people other people miss and are broken by their loss. You and every person you care about is always one bad doctors visit, one bad car ride, one bad day or even second away from the same end so have a little empathy when you see it happening to someone else. Act like a fucking human being. And before you go “well what about x other group that died just the same way”, know that my heart breaks for them too. The untold numbers of people who leave this world terrified and in pain that I can do nothing about, not even mourn, not even know, sometimes it stops me from getting out of bed. So no, I’m not going to cheer on a single one of the ones I know about, I am going to pray that there is a world after this one in which pain and terror are not their last experience.

Death is the great equalizing force in our world. Death comes for those that we love and takes them from us. It will come for you, there is no escaping it and in death, we are all the same. We can’t say where we go after we die, but we know exactly what happens to the dead here, and the toll it takes on those left behind still waiting their turn. It is that commonality, the ultimate commonality, that we are all bound, it is the thing that makes us human. It is in that shared experience, the darkness that touches us all, that being a light is needed. All we can do is hold everyone we can close before that darkness eventually takes each of us, and hope we are held in return. And therein lies the beauty in all of us.

We all float down here.