Let's Discuss The Left Wing Psychopaths Who Think The Titanic Tourists Deserve To Die

As you probably know by now, on Sunday, an underwater tour group heading to visit the wreckage of the Titanic went missing. The news went wide Monday as US and Canadian maritime authorities steamed East of Cape Cod to aid in the search for the missing submersible.

When you found out about this, you probably thought, “Wow that’s awful. I hope they find them.” And then, as you thought more about it or read further coverage, you probably realized that the chances of recovering the vessel (or even finding it in the first place) were not great, and you probably then felt quite a bit worse about it. And by then, you probably knew some now familiar details about the situation: the Titanic is really far down there; going to those depths is very risky; they don’t go down there a lot; it is very expensive and dangerous, and the people who do go down there have to pay $250,000 a ticket; only five people can go on the experimental submersible at a time; it has a 96-hour reserve supply of oxygen which means if it is still intact and the five people are still alive that the search parties have at most until Thursday to find and rescue them before they asphyxiate. 

Armed with these details and perhaps an actual image from the news of the wayward vessel, you probably couldn’t help but imagine what it is like down there in that situation. You may or may not have gotten physically queasy and claustrophobic just thinking about it, but you almost certainly got a little more horrified. Imagining the darkness, the cold, the fear; putting yourself there; empathizing with the passengers. 

That’s what you were doing: empathizing.

And then, for the third time in two seconds, you probably thought, “Wow, this is awful,” and that time, you probably meant it more. You probably felt it more. The awfulness is something you probably at that point felt in your bones. Because that’s one of the things that happens when we empathize with people. At the outset, you can know something is bad on paper, but it’s through this mental act of mounting the show, casting ourselves in it, and thinking how we would feel in the shoes of others that we really get closer to touching some sort of shared humanity and feeling the real feelings.

Now, you can do that too much! You have to develop some discretion; emotional levees must be constructed; because if you feel everything all the time forever and ever, you won’t get anything done, and you’ll be a sad type of someone who other people harbor worries about.

One of the things our subconscious learns as we march through the years is when to issue a stand-down order to ourselves so that we have a healthy but controlled engagement with the sad things that happen in the world. But on Monday, you probably let yourself empathize a bit more than normal because it’s a very sensational story. 

There is a ticking clock emergency going on with lives on the line in one of the most remote places on Earth that also happens to be the resting ground of the most infamous shipwreck in history, which (wouldn’t you know it) still fascinates the world more than a hundred years after it sank into the great abyss! The situation at hand as a news story has got a lot of compelling, sensational elements!

So on Monday you probably ended up thinking about it a bit and felt sad.

I assume that is true of you because I assume you’re a normal human being. This is how people process things. It’s how normal people process things. It is unremarkable. 

The thing about normal people, though, is that they aren’t all of the people. There are also other people who are not normal—Qu'est-ce que c'est: abnormal—and the thing about those people is that a lot of them are fucking psychopaths.

This isn’t a clinical definition or anything but one way of thinking about those people is that they actually issue stand-down orders to their empathy machine too much. In fact, their empathy machine might not even be up to code. It’s there! And it can work! They can feel empathy. It’s not a total paperweight. They can do the thing! But their protocols for when to let the mind do it are dysfunctional; in some cases, they only allow themselves to humanize people they personally know. Or people who look like them. Or people who believe the same things they believe. Their empathy machines are pathologically reinforcing the segmentations of society that undergird their moral framework.

We all do it a bit! No one is saying we don’t. Normal people do it too—and in certain moments, you know, normal people have done genocides as well—but these abnormal people? They do it too much. More than par.

Because the thing about empathy is that it’s something we developed evolutionarily. A long time ago (and forever and always until relatively recently) humans lived in fields, and if you didn’t get help, you died. So the evolution fairy said, “you care about him, and he’ll care about you, and blah bah blah maybe you together will live a little longer.”

We, Princes of Maine, Kings of New England, live in the future of tomorrow and have medicine and shelter and Grubhub, so our empathy machines are not as directly responsible for our immediate survival as they were for people who knew that if their buddy didn’t help them out, they would get eaten by hyenas. But that doesn’t mean empathy totally just for funsies. On a societal level, it’s pretty important that people be generally against unnecessary suffering, and setting life and death aside, there are lesser but still important benefits to the social contract.

(I’m paraphrasing, so if you are really interested in some of this evolution stuff, I think you should check out your local library.)

The abnormal psychopaths, refusing to admit that they are indeed psychopaths, would argue that their empathy machines are, in fact, the ones that are doing the purest evolutionary function. They are caring about people like them because a world that cares about people like them is easier to live in for people like them, and they are a person like them. History has shown us that this can lead to very bad things like war and death and prejudice and those travel adapters you have to bring with you when you go to Europe, but there is a bit of a certain “ok, sure, in some limited ways,” you have to hand them.

But one of the defining characteristics of normal people is that our empathy machines, fortunately for society, are not so singularly transactional. We care about people even when it isn’t immediately obvious that there is something in it for us.

The normal people on Monday did what the normal people do. But the abnormal people didn’t do that.

They heard the news, read the stories, took in all of the information that made you sad, and their first reaction was: anyone who can afford a $250k tourist trip deserves to die.

You might think I’m fucking with you—or you would have had I published this post sooner. By now, you probably have spent two days confronting the existence of these abnormal psychopaths, but if you haven’t, feel free to check out the replies and quote tweets to this thread.

Because when these thousands of lunatics made the mistake of lending voice to thought, a lot of normal people recoiled in horror and said, “What the hell is wrong with you?” The abnormals then decided to double down on the widespread appraisal that they are the baddies. They went deeper into the crevasse! They argued that the passengers deserved to die more, and they argued it louder. Heads on pitchforks because capitalism kills! These rich fucks haven’t stopped capitalism from killing people, so it’s good that they have been reclaimed by the sea!

That isn’t a very popular argument in the world of the 21^st century, let alone in the United States, so some smarter but more disingenuous abnormal psychos searched for other reasons that might do better in the wild west of the discourse.

It’s a graveyard! People died there, after all! It’s sick to visit cemeteries!

And if the word visit didn’t resonate with you, what about defile? 

They’re defiling the graves! It’s totally reasonable not to have any empathy for grave defilers.

Since one of the main characteristics of “the past” is that people died in it most people have come to terms with the fact that visiting historical sites tends to mean visiting places where sad things happened, so this didn’t get a lot of purchase. 

But abnormal people went further: 

The third-class passengers in the Titanic were all murdered by the rich people on the boat who locked the gates to the lower decks on purpose.

This is a thing that happens in the movies but in reality is a myth, and unfortunately for the people who said it, a lot of people know it’s a myth. 

Grave defiling is a thing that white, rich people have been doing to indigenous people forever! Why do you care about some rich white grave defilers and not the indigenous victims of European colonialism?

At this point, they were obviously reaching for Hail Marys, but the cycle went on, uninterrupted by even the developing awareness of more details about the situation. The identities of the five people on the boat were released. Their pictures were spread across social media and splashed on newspapers. One of the passengers is from Pakistan, so the “white colonialists got what they deserved” narrative sort of fell apart.  But some of the passengers were super wealthy industrialists, and the abnormal said, “See? industrialist billionaires do deserve to die.” This is a crazy belief that only lunatics have, but it’s one that we already knew about. There are some people on the left in 2023 who would make good political officers in the Soviet army. 

But for the normal people, a detail that resonated was that one of the wealthy industrialists had brought their teenage son. Now when the empathy machine turned on, and we mounted the production in our minds, we thought of a child down there, in the cold and quiet and horror. And it made us even sadder. 

You might not have a child, but you were one. You probably imagined what you would have felt at 19 had you been trapped in a metal drum with your father 10,000 feet under the sea. You probably wondered what your father would say to you as the oxygen ran ever lower, and what you would say to him. You probably thought about how you’d both think of your shared family members who, barring some unlikely miracle, were about to lose two loved ones.

But the abnormal people didn’t do that. The abnormal people focused on the cost of the kid’s ticket.

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It’s a bad habit to judge other people’s souls. You can’t totally avoid doing it. Sometimes the hideous nature of someone’s soul is so pronounced that it barks at you. Jeffrey Dahmer had a bad soul. He might have had trauma and hard circumstances that played a role in his development and contributed to his raping and killing, and eating, but he also had a bad soul. Bashar al-Assad has a bad soul. Might have had his reasons for some of his actions, but: bad soul. 

Most of the time, when this sort of judgment is unavoidable, is when there is blood on the floor.  And not just a few liters. Making judgments about people’s inherent wickedness without that sort of extreme data is a mug’s game. You don’t know enough about people to know their circumstances and how they got there. You can turn on your empathy machine’s cousin, your imagination, and fill in some blanks in your mind, but it’s not great. Our imaginations aren’t perfect. They have lots of biases, one of which is assuming intentionality in other people’s actions because we tend to overestimate our own intentionality. We underestimate the number of mistakes in the world, and the problem with that is that mistakes, in most cases, don’t really speak to someone’s soul. They speak merely to imperfection. And imperfection is uninteresting. It’s not sexy. If people are mostly just incompetent, then it’s hard to use their actions as admissible comparisons in the never-ending self-assessment of our own goodness that humans engage in every waking moment. 

So, if you’re a mug and you’re playing your game: people are bad, and they mean to be, because you are better, and you meant to be, and when bad things happen to them, it’s just because they deserve it, since when good things have happened to you, you deserved it.

And social media has made all of this worse! The group behavior of it all; the size and breadth of the inputs our brains aren’t made to handle, they supercharge all of this. Our groups are bigger because we are exposed to more people like us, and our groups are more reinforcing because of stronger confirmation loops. We’re also more aware of the other groups because, well, they’re playing in the same sandbox, and they’re subject to the same influences.

But actually, they aren’t in the same sandbox, are they? They’re in the same playground, but you really only become aware of them when they do something that catches the attention of your buddies, and those buddies then bring it over to your sandbox and say, “Look at this prick.” It’s not that the yard is plagued by simple epistemic closure. You are exposed to the out-group, but what you’re exposed to are the most inflammatory things about them, framed in the harshest light. So the people most invested in their own groups are also the people who are worst at accurately describing the members of other groups, you dig?

When you take your chips to the Judging Other People’s Soul table, you lose a lot! You’re not good at this. Fortunately, like all other tables in a casino, no one is forcing you to play. 

If you believe that only the righteous get into Heaven after getting the go-ahead from Saint Peter, then, you know, guess what? Saint Peter has it under control. No one needs you to decide that someone is bad. Maybe one day you’ll be on a jury, and our legal system will, in fact, need you to judge someone’s actions to a certain extent, but outside of that, you don’t need to, which is good since you, and me, and everyone else is terrible at it.

A good thing to understand about an activity that you engage in but are bad at is that you shouldn’t be too confident. You shouldn’t be stubborn about stuff you are constantly getting wrong. And judging people’s souls is something we constantly get wrong. 

But a second defining feature of the abnormal folks is that they are not just superficially invested in their moral pronouncements. They are really invested in them! They are fueled by certainty! 

So the abnormal people see the story about the missing people and judge their character and worthiness based on a Wikipedia page and say, “fucked around and found out—and I’m right!” 

That is bad! That is unhealthy. It is bad for people psychologically to have that mindset, but it’s also bad for society. It’s bad. 

Bad behavior! Bad thoughts! Bad outcomes!

But here, friends, is where this diary entry zags instead of zigs, because it is written by and for normal people.

These abnormal psychopaths who have so repulsed me these last few days are not bad people. At least not necessarily. (Statistically, some probably are.) 

The normal thing that makes you normal and separates you from the abnormal is the ability to empathize with them. 

They are stupid and annoying! They have and share these awful thoughts because they’re fuck ups. They have broken brains and warped views of the world, and it’s a very good thing that they aren’t in charge of FEMA, but their souls? Their souls are things I don’t know enough about.

They have world views that are reductive and dumb. (People have world views that are reductive and dumb.) They have misjudged public opinion and shared their unpopular beliefs. (People misjudge public opinion and share unpopular beliefs.) They have doubled down and made it worse. (Take it from me, people double down and make things worse.) 

I’m not perfect. Lol. My limited observations of these sick disgusting pigs probably aren’t enough to capture everything about them. A lot of them maybe were just having bad days or had recently been kicked in the head by a horse. 

I wish them the best and hope they get wise.

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 Doing this thing that we just did—empathizing with these psychopaths—is not a fun thing to do. It doesn’t spike your endorphins or get you trending on Twitter. But it’s what normal people do. And it;’s why the evolution fairy favors the normal. Interpreting people generously is something you do not just for them, but because you yourself will one day hope to be on the nice side of an interpretation.

People who don’t do what we just did—who don’t empathize with people who don’t immediately remind us of ourselves—are people you should keep an eye on! If these people enter your life, they should set off some alarms! 

 The people who rejoiced these last days over the terrible situation at the bottom of the Atlantic?  They’ve got some ground to make up. Haven’t made the best first impression! They’d have to be exceptionally beautiful and rich to be worth dating at this point, which might seem unlikely since one of the only things we know about them is that they believe the rich deserve to suffer the most awful death imaginably, but this is the American left we’re talking about. Most of them are almost certainly just wealthy dilettantes.