Titan tragedy: Why the schadenfreude just because they were billionaires?

It is not always easy to understand (or agree with) how the public reacts to certain news.

Certainly, this week’s major global headline, that a submersible had disappeared off the radar and lost all contact, was made more intriguing because of the nature of the actual voyage, and who the passengers were.

The missing vessel, named Titan, was a tourist submarine, which is a truck-sized sub that holds five people and usually dives with a four-day emergency supply of oxygen. It takes passengers to the depths of the sea to view the wreckage of the infamous Titanic at a depth of 3,800 metres. The tickets cost $250,000.

On board the Titan were a billionaire Pakistani businessman and his son, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet who was an expert on the shipwreck and its artefacts and Stockton Rush, the CEO of the vessel’s operator, OceanGate Expeditions.

One hour and 45 minutes into its dive, all contact was lost and despite a massive search and rescue mission being launched in the Atlantic Ocean, we now know that the Titan had imploded, and no one survived.

The story is undeniably a tragic one for all the families and friends of the deceased, but to read certain online comments one would think that the lives of these four men and a 19-year-old boy do not really matter because, “who cares? They’re wealthy, this was a frivolous pursuit and they brought it on themselves”. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist of a lot of the commentary.

There were also a lot of comparisons with those refugees who drown while trying to flee their war-torn countries on ramshackle boats, with some asking why should so much effort be made to rescue five people while hundreds of migrants are regularly left to die. This is a valid point that the respective governments should be made to answer because, after all, all lives should matter in equal measure (even though the inequalities and social injustices of this world have proved time and again that this is a mere pipe dream).

But when it comes to whether we should feel compassion is another story. After all, it is possible to feel sorrow for the poor and desperate and to feel equal sorrow for the rich and mighty, both of whom have met their fate out at sea.

It is true that one group is dying in order to reach another country in the hope of a better life, while the other group died in an attempt to visit what is basically a rich man’s tourist attraction. But to me it just underscores the ultimate bitter irony of extreme wealth - one could say that the watery graves of both groups prove that no matter how much money one has, it really does not matter in the end.

For others, however, it is clear that it is the extreme wealth which rankles; they are rubbed the wrong way by people who are so obscenely rich that they have literally done everything and been everywhere on land, so they have to come up with new ways to get their thrills.

Both Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) set their sights on outer space and have travelled on their own spacecraft themselves. In fact, one of the deceased, Hamish Harding, described as a noted explorer, had also flown on a Blue Origin flight, further confirming how the playgrounds of the rich have extended beyond the cliched destinations of the past.

Until the news of the missing Titan emerged this week, I had no idea that there was such a thing as a submarine which takes you down to view the wreckage of the Titanic but, like outer space, it seems that the bottom of the ocean is another new frontier.

Of course, this begs the question, should a tragedy which claimed thousands of lives even be considered within the realms of a ‘tourist attraction’? That, too, is debatable.

What I do not get, however, are the jokes and memes about the five deaths on the Titan. Whereas there are times when the powerful are directly responsible for the misery and suffering we see all around us and should be taken to task (we have enough local examples at our fingertips) it is not fair to make the correlation with these rich men who died and global poverty.

I could sense a feeling of grim satisfaction - best described by the word schadenfreude - as if these billionaires embodied all that is wrong with the world today and that they “had it coming”. When these tragedies occur, it is so easy to come out with quick, glib statements, rather than taking a beat before saying anything. There are times when cynical quips are misplaced and unjustified… and I believe this is one of those times.

All week long, all I could think about was the thought of being in a confined space with oxygen running out by the hour, thousands of metres under the sea - a nightmare scenario and a horrible way to die. When I read that the catastrophic implosion caused by the loss of the pressure chamber would have killed the five men crew in milliseconds, and that they probably died on Sunday shortly after contact was lost, I was relieved for their sake that it was a merciful death, rather than a slow and agonising one.

And, as if to continue to underscore the terrible, twisted irony of this whole saga, it was reported that the Titan imploded just metres away from the Titanic.

The best quote which encapsulates this whole tragedy comes from Dr Michael Guillen, a scientist, journalist and author who was the first TV correspondent to report from the Titanic, who himself survived a close call in 2000 when the submersible he was in got caught in an underwater current, causing a collision with the propeller of the Titanic wreck.

In an interview with CNN, he explained:

“Number one, the sea is dangerous. This is not a playground. The ocean is restless and I think of it when I was looking at the North Atlantic waters. They're dark, they're cold; they just want to swallow you up if you make the tiniest little mistake. Second of all, what I took away from my trip down there was that this isn't just a shipwreck. I went down there thinking I'm just going to report on a shipwreck, but what hit me — especially in that moment of prayer, and it came home to me — that people lost their lives. Men, women, and children. More than 1,000 of them. This is their final resting place. This is sacred ground. I think we should pause, figure out what happened so we can fix it in the future, but also think of the danger and think of the sacredness of this site. It's not a joyride. It's not a Disneyland destination.”