Hubris and the Titan Submarine Disaster

New documentary reveals astonishing arrogance of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush

The Titans were the first race of Greek gods that ruled before the rise of Zeus and his fellow Olympians. Zeus rebelled against his father, the Titan Cronus, and then waged war against his father’s entire race. Ultimately Zeus and his siblings prevailed and imprisoned the Titans in a deep chasm in the Underworld called Tartarus.

The poet Hesiod described Tartarus as a chasm so deep that an anvil dropped from the earth would take nine days to fall to Hades (the underworld), and then another nine to fall to Tartarus.

The RMS Titanic was the second of three Olympic-class ocean liners. At the time of its maiden voyage, it was the largest ship afloat. With its multiple bulkheads and watertight compartments that could each seal off in an emergency, it was billed as an unsinkable ship.

The Titanic embarked from Southhampton, England on April 10, 1912. Just over four days later, on April 14 at 11:40 pm (ship's time), she struck an iceberg and sank 2 hours and 40 minutes later. Several of the era’s wealthiest men and women were on board for the maiden voyage, and many—including John Jacob Astor IV and his pregnant wife— went down with the ship. Harvard graduates are indebted to Titanic casualty Harry Elkins Widener—a young bibliophile whose mother built the college’s splendid Widener Library in his memory.

The Titanic sank about 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland and 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in 12,500 feet of water—or 2.367 miles below sea level. At that depth, the water exerts a pressure of 40 Megapascal or 5801 pounds per square inch.

On June 18, 2023, the tourist submersible Titan—containing OceanGate Expeditions CEO, Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French dive expert Paul Henry Nargeolet, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman—began its two-hour descent to the wreck of the Titanic.

However, apparently just before it reached the Titanic, the Titan lost contact with its support ship, the Polar Prince. Four days later, a debris field was discovered, which confirmed that the experimental, carbon fiber hull had catastrophically imploded, instantly killing all five passengers.

I just finished watching a new Netflix documentary about the incident, Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, which presents CEO Stockton Rush as suffering from titanic hubris. Despite multiple engineers pointing out the obvious fact that his experimental carbon fiber hull was guaranteed to fail at around the depth of the Titanic, he refused to listen to them, apparently believing himself and his convictions to be beyond the laws of physics that apply to ordinary mortals.

In one news interview he proclaimed that the Titan simply couldn’t fail. When the interviewer pointed out that similar assurances were made about the Titanic, he smiled wryly and didn’t reply. The name of the company, OceanGate, was also eerily apt, given that enormous scandal of getting four other people killed in an experimental submarine whose dangerousness had been well characterized.

The word hubris comes from the Greek ὕβρις (húbris), which means “pride, insolence, outrage.” The quality has been portrayed in innumerable works of literature since antiquity.

Hubris is also a major theme in our new book Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality, which presents a 300-year history of men grossly overestimating their understanding of nature and how to intervene in complex natural processes. Please click on the link below to see the book’s description and initial reviews.