Titan und Titanic
►https://jacobin.com/2023/06/titan-submersible-implosion-search-media-wealth-inequality
L’inconscient régit nos décisions. Il n’exerce son pouvir pas comme les lois qui régissent les mouvements des astres, il n’a rien d’inexorable. C’est dans l’hybris qu’il trouve son expression idéale.
C’est pourquoi la mort des passagers de troisième classe du Titanic n’a rien de l’hybris souvent associé avec ce naufrage. 62 pour cent parmi eux n’ont pas survécu. Ils avaient de bonnes raison pour un voyage vers un avenir meilleur. Ensuite ils ont acheté le ticket le tout juste abordable pour quitter cette Europe qui ne leur faisait plus de promesse à hauteur de leur espoirs. Avec cette décision ils plaçaient leur sort entre les mains des dieux sur terre, les armateurs des lignes transatlantiques.
Le compte n’est pas le même pour les passagers de première classe. D’abord seulement 25 pour cent d’eux ont péri dans le même naufrage. Ils avaient les moyens de vérifier le bien fondé des affirmations des vendeurs de tickets et pouvaient choisir le type d’embarcation, le jour et l’itinéraire du voyage. Pour eux il y avait des canots de sauvetage. Leur foi en la promesse de sécurité absolue par la technologie a conduit les victimes parmi eux dans l’abîme. Leur sort ressemble aux punitions divines pour ceux qui dans l’antiquité transgressaient sciemment les limites du comportement humain respectueux et raisonnable.
On retrouve dans les circonstances de la mort des hommes le sens et la raison d’être de leurs vies. Pour les moins fortunés ce sont le courage, l’espoir et le désespoir. Les naufragés de luxe n’en connaissaient que l’hybris.
111 ans après dans un périmètre minuscule l’hybris de la classe dominante est parfaite. C’est par l’implosion programmée du submersible Titan que meurent plusieurs membres des plus hautes sphères capitalistes et un de leurs laquais. Leur hybris les a conduit au plus proche de l’hybris de leurs ancêtres de classe sur le Titanic .
Le crépuscule des puissants est toujours précédé par le massacre des pauvres, en mer, en guerre et dans les usines.
Le Vaisseau des morts a toujours fait partie d’une profitable armada amarinée des damnés de la terre que la faim et le désespoir poussent à monter sur les embarcations de fortune. Leur chances de survie ne sont systématiquement qu’à peine plus élevée que celle du petit sous-marin qui s’est transformé en tombe de milliardaires.
L’élite n’accepte pas qu’un combat des chefs remplace la guerre où se battent les poilus. Il arrive pourtant que des spécimens de la classe au pouvoir tombent dans le piège de leur propres mythes et jouent aux valeureux guerriers et courageux explorateurs. C’est en ce moment qu’ils s’en aperçoivent qu’ eux aussi ne sont que des mortels en chair et en os.
Qu’ils reposent en paix.
Désormais on aura des choses plus importantes à faire que de leur être serviable.
No Matter How Rich You Are, You Can’t Own the Sea
23.6.2023 y Nicholas Boni - Tell me, O Muse, of the man who dove to the depths of the sea, heeding the siren call of piles of money. Stockton Rush, the millionaire founder and CEO of OceanGate, Inc. and Xbox-controller-wielding pilot of the Titan, was confirmed dead on Thursday after his nonrated, custom-made submersible predictably imploded under the pressure of millions of tons of water, instantly killing him and his four passengers. Alongside him died Hamish Harding, a British billionaire; Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani millionaire, and his son Suleman; and French billionaire Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the director of underwater research at RMS Titanic, Inc., the company that claims to own to the Titanic wreck, and had to settle its debts by auctioning off relics from the site, a practice commonly known as “graverobbing.”
Rescue efforts by the United States Navy and Coast Guard will likely total in the millions, after OceanGate was wholly unprepared for any kind of search and rescue operation for their deep-sea boondoggle: the vessel did not have a locator beacon onboard, and it was even painted white, the color of breaking waves, making it nearly impossible to locate on the surface. Rush’s philosophy for his undersea exploration company was, “I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
David Lochridge, an engineer on the sub, thought differently in 2018, pointing out, among other flaws, that the main viewing port was only rated to a dive depth of 1,300 meters, less than a third of the depth to the seafloor where the wreck of the Titanic lies. He was promptly fired. So now, after years of safety warnings, open letters, and legal proceedings, the American public will pay for the futile, days-long search for a white strand of hay in a white haystack, even after the US Navy heard the vessel implode.
The twelve-thousand-foot-deep pleasure cruise around the wreck of the Titanic is the latest in a fad of highly dangerous and expensive stunts carried out by the uber-wealthy who are desperate to feel something, and willing to spend their vast fortunes extracted from their workers in the attempt to do so. The price of admission to this death trap was $250,000. Trying to live out a Jules Verne fantasy, passengers of the Titan join the wealthy victims of the Titanic, which, when it sank in 1912, also killed by class: of first-class passengers, 62 percent survived the sinking, compared with just 25 percent of third-class passengers.
Letting the lower class drown is a trend that continues today. The most recent example is the horrific capsizing of a ship carrying at least five hundred migrants off the coast of Greece, which has killed at least seventy-eight people. In stark contrast to the all-out, multinational effort to save the Titan, the Greek Coast Guard has been accused of deadly inaction after discovering the ship dead in the water and dangerously overcrowded. This is only the latest incident in a constellation of tragedies involving migrants in the Mediterranean: between 2015 and 2023, it’s estimated that over twenty-four thousand people are dead or missing after setting out for Europe, including over 1,100 this year alone. That’s more than a Titanic every year, but you don’t see the same kind of breathless, wall-to-wall news coverage.
In a world where shipwrecks abound, why are we so obsessed with the Titan and the Titanic? It’s a combination of panache, prestige, and that classically Greek concept of hubris. Important people went down with both vessels: millionaires, royalty, business tycoons. The splendor of the Titanic’s Grand Staircase has been rendered in countless paintings, documentaries, and films. And, of course, there’s the epithet that steams Poseidon’s ears: “unsinkable.” It’s hard for the average person to imagine possessing both the arrogance to claim total victory over the sea, and the influence to skimp on lifeboats based on that claim.
The sorrowful odysseys of migrant ships don’t sell papers because, for one thing, those papers are usually in bed with the draconian, inhumane, and vengeful regimes that allow such horrible fates to befall migrants in the first place; and for another, because the misery hits very close to home for most people. Not everyone has been a refugee, but most people in the post-COVID era know what it’s like when suddenly you can’t afford your home anymore and have to move, or when food becomes absurdly expensive, or your job disappears, and you’re faced with difficult choices and uncertainty for yourself and your family. Staring down the barrel of human-driven climate change, an astronomical cost of living, and a poor economic outlook, most people recognize that they are far closer in life to desperate refugees than they are to the politicians, war profiteers, and rapacious capitalists who create them.
Anyone’s death is a tragedy, of course, and it’s awful that the passengers on the Titan died this way. But their deaths come amid a much larger wave of preventable suffering inflicted by the ilk of those aboard the Titan. Perhaps there’s a ripple of irony in watching these very billionaires, who buy shipwrecks and private submarines with the hoarded treasures of our society, humbled by an inescapable facet of ownership: ius abutendi, the right to destroy, held over every ship by the wine-dark sea.
