The Poll On Post-COVID Church Attendance

There's been a small stir this week over a new Gallup poll that says church attendance in the United States is lower than it was before the COVID lockdowns. On one hand, this shouldn't be a surprise, as stories have already covered this without the need for Gallup to ask about it again. A Pew Research poll just this past March reported:

There are some indications that in-person engagement in religious services has declined slightly since 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. The share of all U.S. adults who say they typically attend religious services at least once a month is down modestly but measurably (by 3 percentage points, from 33% to 30%) over that span, and one-in-five Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic.

The Gallup results aren't much different, so I'm not sure why anyone bothered. Per the first link,

In the Gallup survey, 31 percent of respondents said they have attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days.

In Gallup polls conducted from 2020 to the most recent poll — gathered May 1-24, 2023 — an average of 30 percent of respondents said they attended services in the past week.

This data represents a modest decline of an average of 4 points since the four years before the pandemic, when an average of 34 percent of respondents said they attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days.

Neither poll strikes me as meaningful. I could run a survey that asks people if they've flossed their teeth in the past week, and some would probably say they had just to look good to the pollster -- and by the same token, some might say they've been to church when they hadn't for the same reason -- except that these days, there's a growing number of people who'll say they didn't go to church when they did, because they're more and more suspicious of the hidden state devices the pollster potentially represents.

So The Hill, reporting on the Gallup results, quotes Gallup:

“It is not clear if the pandemic is the cause of the reduced attendance or if the decline is a continuation of trends that were already in motion. However, the temporary closure of churches and ongoing COVID-19 avoidance activities did get many Americans out of the habit of attending religious services weekly,” the Gallup survey found.

I had a gut feeling from the start of the lockdowns that they were aimed in considerable part at shutting down churches, or maybe more accurately, putting a coup de grace to something that creeping secularism had already set in a terminal decline. Discussions of the lockdowns' impact certainly include the parishes that were forced to shut down permanently when they lost the revenue from in-person offerings at services.

And it's worth pointing out that the Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the philanthropic arm of the Pew family, who made their money from Sun Oil and who, like other uber-wealthy families, are preoccupied mainly with playing life's video game with an invincibility cheat code. In this, they shape the views of legacy media and prosper the operations of state security. On the whole, they would prefer that religious observance fade from the scene, and it's mildly encouraging that their research into the result of the state's effort to stamp it out once and for all was equivocal at best.

One big defect in the polls' methodology is the imprecision of their premise. They're trying to measure "religious observance" or "church attendance" while asking respondents to self-report on whether they've done something good or bad, and this is under conditions where at least some respondents will have come to be reluctant to tell a perceived proxy for state security that they've in fact been to church.

And the polls leave out important context. The lawsuits against California and New York lockdowns that were brought by Catholics, ultra-orthodox Jews, and Pentecostals in 2020 were the first major blows to the COVID lockdown regime. In other words, religious institutions, especially of the more observant type, fought back, and they fought back successfully.

In addition, the post-COVID emergence of the anti-trans movement is based almost entirely on natural law, which is to say natural religion. Insofar as professional athletes have refused to wear Pride totems or endorse Pride nights, for instance, they cite religious belief, and as a practical matter, that's their only option, since the only alternative is simply to say they're transphobes.

This in fact has caused pro-trans bodies like the Human Rights Campaign, which understands "human rights" to include the right of a male to use female rest facilities, officially to declare

a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time in its more than 40-year history, following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.

The "anti-LGBTQ+" measures the HRC lists include transgender sports bans (21 states); gender-affirming care bans (20 states) restricing bodily mutilations on minors; and bathroom bans (9 states) prohibiting males from entering female rest facilities in schools and sometimes general public spaces. If anything, that the HRC should acknowledge that this is a setback for its agenda suggests that there's a resurgence in a certain type of religious belief, because the philosophical underpinning of this resistance can only be based on the historical undestanding of natural relgion and natural law.

There's a general understanding that people responding to polls are inclined to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear, and this must certainly apply to a pollster who asks people if they've been to church lately. Given the increasing distrust among the general population for the anti-religious bias in institutions like the FBI, the public health establishment, and polls themselves, it seems as though they should be factoring in an increasing willingness in the public to conceal church attendance, to decide politely that it's none of their business (which it isn't), which in turn makes polls like Gallup and Pew on this subject less and less meaningful.

At the same time, crises lke the ones we see building on a national and world level are likely to reinforce the instinct to turn to religion in times of trouble. If I were the powers who'd commissioned Gallup and Pew to find out, in effect, how we did in killing religion with the COVID pretext, the answer would be that at best, any progress was imperceptible in the short term, but over the longer term, it will have proven counterproductive.

Bobos In Paradise, Impostor Syndrome, And Affinity Fraud

At the end of yesterday's post, I said I was still mulling over the question of how the latest crop of famous white-collar crooks had suddenly sprung from the authentic American upper class, or at minimum the prestigious gentry represented by Ivy League faculty, when their earlier equivalents like Ivan Boesky. Jeffrey Epstein, and Bernard Madoff had been middle-class Jews or other ethnics who'd gone to public school and often hadn't finished college.

I'm nowhere near done with that task, but I think I've found three directions from which to approach the problem, outlined in the title here: bobos in paradise, impostor syndrome, and affinity fraud.

The first refers to David Brooks's ploddingly obtuse 2000 book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Its thesis in brief is that the Ivy League and other top-level universities were traditionally bastions of wealth and privilege, but after World War II, for reasons Brooks never quite explains, they dropped Jewish quotas, adopted the Scholastic Aptitude Test for admission, became selective with a wave of new applicants in the 1950s, and turned the US into a meritocracy. Just like that!

One of my favorite topics over the years I've been blogging has been how the Ivies never did any such thing. I revisited the topic in this post from 2021, where I asked why I found, once I arrived at Dartmouth in the fall of 1965, that so many of my classmates, guys of 17 or 18, were already superficial, psychologically disturbed, alcoholic, or drug dependent. One answer I came up with in that post was that a remarkable number had come from prestigious prep schools, where they'd already gotten that way, which was simply to say they were rich kids from the upper class. As a public school kid in the early 1960s, I knew nothing about marijuana; as soon as I got to Dartmouth, I was encountering experienced stoners from private schools, where the problem was already well established.

Huh? I thouight the SATs would have weeded those guys out and replaced them with achievement-oriented middle-class public school boys -- or did David Brooks have this all wrong? The short answer is, of course, yes, David Brooks had it all wrong. The table at the top of this post illustrates another approach to the same problem, that across the Ivy League, an applicant's chances of admission are three or four times greater if the applicant is a legacy, i.e., someone whose parent or other relative is an alumnus of that school. Harvard, at the top of the table, accepts 40% of legacy applicants, but only 11% of non-legacies. Thus Alissa Heinerscheid.

I've already cited many times Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel's 2005 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which goes into detail on the many other paths by which the Ivies and equivalent prestige schools jigger their admissions to favor generational upper-class wealth, newer money, and political influence. He outlines how admissions offices categorize applicants into "baskets", which can include legacies, graduates of favored prep schools, offspring or proteges of major donors, and recruited athletes -- remembering that Ivy athletes are recruited for sports like rowing or lacrosse, for which only prep schools normally have programs.

Karabel's point is that prestige-university admissions policies have never been meritocratic, so why is anyone objecting to new policies that privilege minorities in admissions? That's an intricate question. Writers like Alan Dershowitz maintain that the Ivies never actually dropped Jewish quotas, they just disguised them by favoring middle class walk-on applicants from outside prosperous suburbs while continuing to admit rich WASP legacies and preppies. More recently, Asians complain that policies favoring politically correct minorities discriminate against their expectations for merit-based admissions.

While the Ivies have recently been providing -- or have been forced to provide -- glimpses into just how many applicants from their traditional market of old family money continue to be admitted vis-a-vis achievement-oriented public school students, espeically those from Jewish, other ethnic, or Asian backgrounds, the actual total numbers and percentages are still a closely guarded secret. My 2021 post above linked to an Atlantic article that said that from 25 to 30 percent of Ivy entering classes are from prep schools, but this leaves out other "baskets" like legacies, politically correct minorities (who segregate themselves once they arrive on campus), and offspring of other favored groups like politicians, celebrities, and major donors. My surmise is that those from outside these "baskets" are actually a minority in Ivy entering classes, and that this is apparently a deep secret reinforces my impression.

Thus David Brooks's "bobos", the bourgeois bohemians that form a "new upper class" are pretty much the old upper class that has remade itself in the image of a meritocratic, selective Ivy League that's been a fiction from the start. An Ivy degree since the 1950s has been marketed as a seal of approval, a sign that someone has advanced on merit, when a substantial portion of those with such a degree have been skating on the prestige of a much smaller number of achievement-oriented and talented students and graduates, while the skaters themselves continue to be the same old dilettantes, idlers, drunks, druggies, psychopaths, and psychotics.

But this brings me to the next head of my discourse, impostor syndrome:

a psychological occurrence in which people doubt their skills, talents, or accomplishments and have a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as frauds. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon do not believe they deserve their success or luck. . . . they may think that they are deceiving others because they feel as if they are not as intelligent as they outwardly portray themselves to be.

Alissa Heinerscheid, in the wake of the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, has scrubbed much of her social media, but I recall soon after the episode first broke that she said in an interview that she herself suffered from impostor syndrome. As I recall, she reported that once in a corporate environment, she found herself surrounded by marketing geniuses, and her own capabilities would never measure up. I think this is the inevitable result for Ivy types who skate into prestigious corporate positions based on their Ivy degrees, when quite a large proportion of these are awarded to people who were never qualified for admission to their undergraduate, graduate, or professional programs to start with -- and based on the record we have, this included Ms Heinerscheid and likely her Harvard graduate lawyer father as well.

But let's recall that nobody at Bud Light thought to double-check Ms Heinerscheid's choice of the agency-sponsored program that featured Dylan Mulvaney as a brand partner. One may certainly argue that Ms Heinerscheid herself never dreamed up the Mulvaney campaign or the can with their face on it, but she looked at the pitch from the agency and approved it, because she didn't have a clue -- she just thought it might be the non-fratty sort of thing she thought would fly. And her peers and superiors, right up to Harvard MBA Brandon Whitworth, greenlighted the choice. Because all of them came from the same Ivy environment, and like so many of their Ivy forebears, none of them had a clue.

And this brings me to my last point, affinity fraud:

Affinity fraud is a type of investment fraud in which a con artist targets members of an identifiable group based on things such as race, age, religion, etc. The fraudster either is or pretends to be, a member of the group. Often the fraudster promotes a Ponzi or pyramid scheme.

The best known affinity fraudster up to now was Bernard Madoff,

Madoff’s victims were not a random assortment of the well-off; he decimated a segment of the wealthy Jewish community and several Jewish charitable organizations.

Such crimes would not have been possible without the cultural ease and social entre Madoff enjoyed in the Jewish community. To put a name on things, this was one of the worst affinity frauds in Americans history, whereby unscrupulous people exploit their cultural connections and people’s communal identities to rip them off. In that sense, Madoff’s crimes were a warning to everyone about how in-group feelings of trust leave people vulnerable.

What we've seen with FTX, Theranos, and OceanGate has been an Ivy-based version of affinity fraud. A similar dynamic operated with Alissa Heinerscheid and Bud Light, whereby a widespread clique of Harvard and Groton alumni assumed everyone else knew what they were doing because they were from Groton and Harvard, whether or not any of them individually had any confidence in their own abilities -- thus corporate disaster. Elizabeth Holmes exploited a veneer of cultural ease and social entree she'd picked up at prep school to bamboozle a remarkable meagerie of the US upper class into joining the Theranos board and both endorsing and protecting the swindle.

Stockton Rush's target market was something very like the traditional Ivy population, rich, well-traveled dilettantes, skewed perhaps toward a proportion of nouveau wannabes. The world is very slowly coming around to a recognition that this was somewhere between an impossibly hamartic overextension on Rush's part and an outright con, but the efforts he made deliberately to avoid any type of independent review, regulation, or certification for his subs suggest it was closer to a criminal enterprise that he knew, as Madoff also knew, was bound eventually to collapse.

The odd thing is that Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Elizabeth Holmes, and Stockton Rush either felt the need to, or simply had to, rely on authentic Ivy credentials to perpetrate affinity frauds on the wealthy, when earlier outright frauds like Jeffrey Epstein and Ivan Boesky had no need to do this. But this is just one among the many puzzles I still see in this story.

Why Are Famous Crooks Going Upscale?

One thing I began to notice about this decade's crop of highly publicized corporate fiascos and white-collar crooks is how many people come from the upper echelons of society. Stockton Rush, late CEO of OceanGate, was descended from two signers of the US Declaration of Independence and has degrees from Princeton and Harvard Business School. Alissa Heinerscheid, one of two Bud Light executives put on leave after the Dylan Mulvaney debacle, comes from a wealthy Houston family, went to the upper-crust Groton prep school, and has degrees from Harvard and Wharton.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, went to the elite Crystal Springs Uplands private school and then MIT; his parents are Stanford professors. His FTX colleague Caroline Ellison went to Stanford; her parents are MIT professors. Elizabeth Holmes, who went to prison for the Theranos fraud this past May, is descended from the Fleischmann Yeast fortune, went to the private St John's School in Houston and then to Stanford, although she dropped out there. Her father is a high-level federal bureaucrat.

Contrast this with Jeffrey Epstein, one of the most famous crooks of the 2000s and 2010s, who went to New York public schools but was only briefly enrolled in undergraduate programs after that and never earned a four-year degree. He was able to convince MIT and Harvard that he was a major donor without apparently donating very much, and he associated himself with their brands, but that was part of his non-profit swindle, and unlike the more recent perps, he never earned an Ivy degree or even matriculated at an Ivy school.

But the farther back we go, the lower the social level of even white-collar scammers. The earliest modern Ponzi schemes I'm familiar with start with Goldstein Samuelson from the 1970s. Harold Goldstein went to prison for the fraud in 1973 (there never was a Samuelson); thereafer, he accumulated an extensive criminal history punctuated by mental disorder. His educational backgound is unknown.

Equity Funding collapsed in 1973 for creating 60,000 bogus life insurance policies that it sold to reinsurance companies for a fee. It was founded by Stanley Goldblum, who pled guilty and went to prison in 1973. He never completed college.

Ivan Boesdky pled guilty to insider trading in 1986 and cooperated with the SEC. He received a prison sentence of 3-1⁄2 years and was fined US$100 million. He attended courses at Wayne State University, Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan but never received an undergraduate degree. Despite this, he was admitted to Detroit College of Law (now Michigan State University College of Law) and graduated during 1965.

Michael Milken was indicted in March 1989 on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud, including allegations that he'd conspired with Ivan Boesky. In 1990, he pled guilty to six counts of securities and tax violations. However, critics of the government's conduct charge that it indicted Milken's brother Lowell to pressure Milken to settle, a tactic some legal scholars condemn as unethical. Over the years, Milken successfully had his sentence reduced and eventally received a full pardon from Donald Trump in 2020.

Milken is a somewhat anomalous figure in this group, as he received a BA from UC Berkeley summa cum laude and an MBA from Wharton. In addition to the fines he's paid, according to Forbes, Milken has given away between 5-10% of his fortune.

Among the figures in the scandals of the early 2000s, the Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are probably closest to Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison. Lay had degrees from the University of Missouri and the University of Houston, but this wasn't an Ivy-level pedigree. Jeffrey Skilling went to Southern Methodist University and had a Harvard MBA. Nevertheless, these men appoear to have been prosperous middle class, not gentry like Bankman-Fried and Ellison.

Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom,

briefly attended the University of Alberta and Calvin College before enrolling at Mississippi College on a basketball scholarship. Between schools, he worked as a milkman and bouncer. An injury before his senior season prevented him from playing his final year and he was instead assigned to coach the junior varsity team. In 1967, he received a Bachelor's degree in physical education, with an academic minor in secondary education, from Mississippi College.

On August 27, 2003, Attorney General of Oklahoma Drew Edmondson filed a 15-count indictment against Ebbers. . . . On March 15, 2005, Ebbers was found guilty of all charges.

Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco International, was

convicted in 2005 of crimes related to his receipt of $81 million in unauthorized bonuses, the purchase of art for $14.725 million and the payment by Tyco of a $20 million investment banking fee to Frank Walsh, a former Tyco director.

He attended Seton Hall University.

In December 2008, Bernard Madoff confided to one of his sons that he had been running a Ponzi scheme and pled guilty in March 2009.

Madoff graduated from Far Rockaway High School in 1956.

Madoff attended the University of Alabama for one year, where he became a brother of the Tau Chapter of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, then transferred to and graduated from Hofstra University in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science. Madoff briefly attended Brooklyn Law School, but left after his first year.

What I can conclude from all these figures is that at best, up to Theranos and FTX, the famous white-collar perps were middle class from at best middle-class families. They went mostly to middle-class universities from public schools, but not all graduated. Michael Milken was the biggest exception, a high-achieving kid from a solid Jewish middle-class family, while at the beginning of the timeline, figures like Harold Goldstein and Stanley Goldblum had more shadowy backgrounds. Up to Jeffrey Epstein's arrest and puzzling death, all these figures came from a range between sketchy and just prosperous middle class.

Now all of a sudden, from Theranos to FTX, we're seeing perpetrators from the gentry and upper classes with family pedigrees, Ivy faculty parents, prep schools, Ivy degrees, and awards for being child prodigy overachievers that put even Michael Milken to shame. What's going on here? I'm still working on it, but I'll discuss this more tomorrow.

Valkyrie Lite

John Sexton at Hot Air didn't even bother to put up a new post. He just edited the title of the same one I linked yesterday, The rebellion in Russia is really happening (Update: It's over). The outcome of all yesterday's excitement turned out to be a hybrid of Valkyrie Lite and the Whiskey Rebellion -- the feckless coup attempt by the Stauffenberg plotters was put down within hours by Hitler on July 20, 1944, but it was followed by ruthless executions of thousands. In contrast, George Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 on terms a lot like Putin's:

Washington himself rode at the head of an army to suppress the insurgency, with 13,000 militiamen provided by the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The rebels all went home before the arrival of the army, and there was no confrontation. About 20 men were arrested, but all were later acquitted or pardoned.

The bottom line for Hitler, Putin, and Washington was that the various decapitation or resistance attempts against them were thwarted without much effort, and in the cases of Putin and Washington, on remarkably generous terms. Last year, I said the best sources on the Russo-Ukraine War were Reddit r/Ukrainian Conflict and the Daily Kos. I hadn't looked at them for at least six months, but I continue to think this in trying to find out what's up with the weird Prigozhin not-quite coup. The Daily Kos:

There have been mountains of speculation about Prighozin’s one day rebellion and “protest march” towards Moscow, but the simplest and probably best explanation is that his business, the Wagner group, was being taken from him by the Russian military without compensation. The rebellion was about Prigozhin getting paid and getting to keep his business. That’s why he and his remaining forces have gone to Belarus. He was getting pushed out of business by the Russian generals, but now he has a sponsor and a new home.

. . . There could also be another motive. Putin may be using this stunt to gain better control of Belarus.

It's worth noting that the Institute for the Study of War, the neoconservative think tank that's advocated US involvement in the Russo-Ukraine War from the start, published no campaign update on its site for yesterday, June 24, although it normally posts seven days a week, and it heavily covered the opening of the Prigozhin campaign on Friday.

I think this is a problem, because the overwhelming feeling I had during yesterday's early reports of an armored column racing toward Moscow without resistance was that if this succeeded, it would be complete vindication of the neoconservative rationale for supporting Ukraine, that a relatively minimal level of assistance in a proxy war would result in dismantling the Putin regime and potentially the Russian state. But this fails the reasonability checks that have emerged since last fall: Russia may be degenerate and corrupt, but it's a big place with a lot of people, a lot of ammunition, and a lot of tanks.

In spite of that, there are people who continue to try to put the best face on developments:

If in fact Wagner is standing down it is likely because Army Chief of Staff Gerasimov & Defense Minister, Shoigu are being replaced by officials loyal to Prigozhin & that would make him the most powerful man in Russia now

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 24, 2023

The day after Prigozhin's capitulation, there are rumors of changes at the top in Russia's military, but so far, nothing concrete and no indications that Prigozhin allies would be installed whatever changes might be made. The best conclusion we can draw is that either Prigozhin's actual goals were so small that he could accomplish them with a one-time motorcade -- for instance, he simply wanted some money -- or they were so unrealistic that when it became clear that the Russian army would remain loyal to Putin, he had no choice but to give up immediately. Neither suggests Putin is weak or that Prigozhin has won some sort of effective victory.

The takeaway is that we had a brief, bright pseudo-event that burned itself out within 24 hours and left everything unchanged. Its only effect was very briefly to give the impression that Ukraine hawks' wishful thinking could be vindicated.

“For Now, The Graduation Balls Have Been Delayed For Just One Week, Moving Around Moscow Has Been Partly Restricted.”

It looks like we have news that overshadows both new Hunter e-mails and the imploded Titanic sub, so of couse, these are the headlines at the conservative Rantingly aggregator as I write this (click on the image for a larger version):

The big thing that's impressed me over the past few months has been how easily Conservative Inc has segued from spring break into Memorial Day into Juneteenth and is now heading into an early Fourth of July. And Labor Day isn't that far off! John Sexton at Hot Air covers it thus:

Normally I don’t work this late but there are potentially world-changing events happening tonight. . . . I’m running out of steam so I’m going to call it a night. I’ll probably update this some more in the morning.

Putin is comparing events to the Whites vs Reds in the 1918 civil war, but ol' John Sexton doesn't like working late. It's all about him as he desultorily skims over history. And it's now morning, but it looks like he's so pooped from last night he just can't get back to it.

It isn't just the elites who act like elites these days. Remember, he earns a salary for this.

So far, US reporting seems to be well behind the curve, whether it's legacy media or Conservative Inc. I've fallen back on Reddit r/Ukrainian Conflict, which carries the most recent reports from a wide range of sources, Russian, Ukrainian, and Western, with the caveat that they're all self-serving in one way or another, and we're looking at major fog of war.

For now, that's all I have to add.

Down With The Old Canoe

There's something evocative about the story of the Titanic sub. It probably owes a lot to the Titanic myth itself, which is reflected in the title of the book Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster by Steven Biel (1997), which according to this review,

". . . seared itself into American memory not because it was timeless but because it was timely". . . . Groups on all sides of the volatile issues of gender, class, religion, and race all found in the Titanic lessons and judgements to bolster their causes.

The much smaller Titanic sub disaster is having the same effect. Biel's title, by the way, is taken from a 1938 country song by the Dixon Brothers:

The lyrics conclude,

Your Titanic sails today, on Life's Sea you're far away
For Jesus Christ can take you safely through
Just obey his great command, over there you'll safely land
You'll never go down with that old canoe

Sailing out out to win her fame, the Titanic was her name
When she had sailed five hundred mile from shore
Many passengers and her crew went down with that old canoe
They all went down to never ride no more

The image of going down and never rising is powerful indeed. That it is now and was then a group of wealthy people reinforces the association. The YouTube psychologist Dr Todd Grande had this to say about Stockton Rush, the CEO of Ocean Gate:

He clearly desired to have extreme, high-risk adventures. Among the wealthy, this appears to be a common sentiment. Several companies are offering trips to orbital and sub-orbital space for price tags ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. Some wealthy people have climbed Mount Everest. For $100,000, a person can visit the South Pole, and, with OceanGate, at least until the Titan disaster, $250,000 would buy a front-row seat to Titanic. What drives wealthy people toward extreme tourism? I think it really comes down to how people find and fulfil purpose in life.

Some people are quite content engaging in safe activities like spending time with family, going to the movies, workng, and reading, but for others, life needs to contain a series of adventures in order to be interesting. The people tend to accomplish one challenging goal, only to move on to another. The purpose isn't found by achieving the goal, the purpose is the never-ending pattern of adventure. It's always having another goal in the crosshairs. When they complete one, they're looking toward another.

When people become wealthy, they may not be satisfied by simply earning more money. There's a point where a person has so much money, they can essentially have anything they want. There is no longer a chance of losing the game. There is no more risk of gettng harmed. It's like playing a video game with an invincibility cheat code. It may be novel at first, but it quickly gets boring. A large quantity of money permits a person to seek an even greater source of stimulation. Just like using drugs, they have developed a tolerance for everything that can give them a rush, so they need a stronger drug.

. . . These wealthy adventurers rationalize the trips by saying they promote science or technology, but in reality, they're just looking for the next high.

This goes some way toward answering my favorite question, "What problem are people like Stockton Rush, Victor Vescovo, and Alissa Heinerscheid trying to solve?" It certainly goes to the issue that their money has, just for starters, bought them admission not just to elite Ivy-level universities, but also to the exclusive prep schools that are recognized as an even more accurate class indicator than an Ivy degree. But that, again, was just the start of an ongoing set of "challenges" for which they already had an invincibility cheat code.

After all, they had degrees from Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford whose prestige comes from a presumably "selective" admissions process, but from the start, they were in separate baskets from the plebes taking SATs and such, they were legacies or the offspring of major donors. The same, we must assume, applied to their corporate careers. All this led to a deep insecurity that they didn't measure up -- and in fact, they didn't. Thus the need to undertake steadily more "challenging" adventures to prove themselves, but these "challenges" were just like all the others, something prestigious that could be bought.

There's something deeply evocative about the meme at the top of this post, a Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light can superimposed on the image of the Titan sub. It goes to the phoniness behind the official culture of our time, and that goes even as far as the legacy media narrative of a "desperate search" for the Titan sub as "time runs out" -- when we now learn that the Navy's sonic detectors told them the sub had imploded within moments of the event, and for whatever reason, it was deemed appropriate to withhold this news for the better part of a week.

The things money will buy.

The Titanic Sub, The Rich, And The Super Rich

What's held my attention most in the story of the missing Titanic sub is the subplot involving wealth -- and it sounds like much of it is either inherited or of unidentifiable origin -- and a strange subcluture where a clique of wealthy people feed their own deep insecurities. Let's just start with the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush. According to this story,

In past media appearances, Rush appears calm, collegiate and telegenic. With silver hair and business-casual attire, he looks like he might be more at home on the golf course than thousands of feet under the sea. However, questions are now swirling about some of his decisions related to the submersible.

. . . Rush has described himself as having been "born into" wealth and then "grew it," according to a 2017 Bloomberg profile.

The grandson of an oil and gas magnate, he became a private investor alongside working in aviation, earning his pilot's license at the age of 19, the outlet reported.

In 2009 Rush founded OceanGate Expeditions, which remains a private company, with entrepreneur Guillermo Söhnlein, who's since left, according to Bloomberg. Per OceanGate marketing copy, the company is "dedicated to direct human exploration of the undersea world."

It turns out Mr Rush comes from precisely the same social stratum as Alissa Heinerscheid, the Bud Light executive who greenlighted their deal with Dylan Mulvaney: looks the look, talks the talk, rich as Croesus on granddad's money, skating through a corporate career, but on balance doesn't have a clue. Notice the gaseous corporate mission statement, "dedicated to direct human exploration of the undersea world." As far as anyone can tell, this means they take billionaire tourists on sub joyrides, but they give them the cachet of being sorta-kinda idealistic, not just conspicuous consumption.

As soon as the news of the missing sub broke, I couldn't help but think of another member of this small universe, Victor Vescovo,

an American private equity investor, retired naval officer, sub-orbital spaceflight participant, and undersea explorer. He is a co-founder and managing partner of private equity company Insight Equity Holdings. Vescovo achieved the Explorers Grand Slam by reaching the North and South Poles and climbing the Seven Summits, and he then visited the deepest points of all of Earth's five oceans during the Five Deeps Expedition of 2018–2019.

Like Stockton Rush, who has degrees from Princeton and UC Berkeley, and Ms Heinerscheid, who's from Groton and Harvard, Mr Vescovo's background includes the elite St Mark's School of Texas, Stanford, MIT, and Harvard Business School. This suggests his family was more than routinely prosperous, and so far, I've found that his father, from a prominent Tennessee family, was an entertainment executive, but beyond that, my information is sketchy. However, Vescovo himself has acknowledged that he's closely associated with Rush, OceanGate, and the Titanic submersible fiasco:

I have been asked to comment by many in media and other avenues, but I am sorry, I have no comment at this time. I have good friends onboard the submersible. https://t.co/3lcl0gA0L9

— Victor Vescovo (@VictorVescovo) June 19, 2023

Like Stockton Rush, Vescovo has his own submersible:

Working with Triton Submarines, Victor spent over four years developing a brand-new deep-sea submersible that would be up to this immense task. It needed to be capable of multiple descents into parts of the ocean where pressure levels can reach in excess of 1,000 times that at the surface. The result was DSV Limiting Factor – arguably the most advanced deep-sea crewed vessel in the world right now.

He deploys this submersible from its own "research vessel" mother ship, the Pressure Drop. Although media accounts of his career as an explorer are uniformly adulatory, it's hard to avoid a sense that the whole thing is an elaborate vanity project, and one of his main goals is to be given awards, like The Explorer Medal (2020) and the Captain Don Walsh Award for Ocean Exploration (2021). Here's an interview at Oceanographic:

The Five Deeps Expedition creator Victor Vescovo is no stranger to adventure. In 2017 he completed the ‘Explorers Grand Slam’, having climbed the highest peak of all seven of the world’s continents. This summer, he became the first person in history to have been to both the top of all the world’s continents and the bottom of all its oceans.

We caught up with this intrepid explorer on board the Five Deeps research vessel, Pressure Drop, to find out a little more about where his drive comes from and what his experiences were of heading into previously unexplored ocean areas.

Oceanographic Magazine (OM): You seem to have moved from the world of pure adventure into one of exploration. What prompted that shift?

Victor Vescovo (VV): Well one is a good transition to the other. I guess the transition came from adventuring and mountain climbing – that’s a wonderful thing to be able to do. To then be able to migrate into exploring the areas that nobody has ever been to before is extremely exciting.

So the implication is that he's evolved from rich-guy thrillseeking to something that's sorta-kinda more serious, but in effect, all he's doing is taking himself and assorted science-celebrities on submarine rides and getting awards for doing it. Left unexplained is how he pays for this -- do people pay him a quarter million a pop for the ride, as they do Stockton Rush, or is this entirely an eleemosynary effort? But maybe more to the point, where is the money for all this coming from in the first place?

Both Rush and Vescovo have "research vessels" (Rush's version was listed in 2005 with a reserve price of $1 million) that carry their ultra-submersibles around but seem in fact more like glorified yachts from which they launch ultra-expensive toys. At the same link,

Speaking to Sky News, former rear admiral Chris Parry warned that crafts like Titan 'are essentially kit cars, they're not normal submarines'.

'They're built in an experimental way, and this particular one is, shall we say, built from components you can get off the internet, from Amazon - they're very flimsy, very fragile, and you can't allow a lot to go wrong before you're in danger,' he said.

And at least in the case of Rush's Titanic sub, they can evade any requirements that they meet some sort of certification, although the whole field is so new that nobody seems to know what certification might involve. By the same token, how do you determine projects like Rush's or Vescovo's have any sort of academic or research-related merit?

But there's a bigger question here --why would anyone sign up for one of these sub rides, with Stanford Rush, Victor Vescovo, or any other like them?

A millionaire adventurer who was supposed to go on the Titan voyage said he backed out over fears that the company was “cutting too many corners.” Digital marketing tycoon Chris Brown told The Sun that he paid a deposit of $10,000 to join his friend Hamish Harding after the two decided to go on the voyage after having a “few beers.” Harding is currently on the missing submersible, but Brown changed his mind after learning how the Titan was built.

Well, that was a guy who decided to do something after a few beers but thought better of it the next day. But even among the quasi-seious "explorer" community there were serious doubts:

Veteran explorer Josh Gates, who hosts a TV series investigating myths and legends around the world, revealed Wednesday on Twitter that the missing OceanGate sub "did not perform well" when he went on a dive aboard the vessel himself.

. . . Gates, who hosts "Expedition Unknown" on Discovery, had gone with Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who is now among five missing along with the Titan sub, on a test dive before the vehicle's first visit to the Titanic site.

. . . "To those asking, #Titan did not perform well on my dive," Gates wrote. "Ultimately, I walked away from a huge opportunity to film Titanic due to my safety concerns w/ the @OceanGate platform."

. . . "There's more to the history and design of Titan that has not been made public – much of it concerning," Gates wrote.

. . . Like British businessman Hamish Harding, who is also aboard the missing sub, Gates is a member of the Explorers Club, a research-minded international society of adventurers, many of them very wealthy, including billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

So I went looking for the Explorers Club on the web and sure enough, the Explorers Club calls Victor Vescovo an "explorer's explorer" and has given him a medal. We're talking about a tight-knit, highly self-regarding clique of rich guys and wannabes who in fact seem to think well of themselves for engaging in expensive, pointless, and risky thrillseeking activity.

This in turn suggests to me that there are dupes and marks in this population. For instance, there's the Simpson's writer Mike Reiss, who'd been on fully three dives in the Titanic sub:

Reiss has gone on three different dives with OceanGate Expeditions, the company which owns Titan, and that they “almost always lost communication.”

“I got on the sub and at the back of my mind was ‘well, I may never get off this thing,’ that’s always with you,’ he said.

While Reiss allows that Titan is “a beautifully designed craft.”

“This is not to say this is a shoddy ship or anything, it’s just that this is all new technology and they’re learning it as they go along,” he said.

Here's cognitive dissonance at work. Reiss, who's presumably done quite well at the Simpsons and had the wherewithal to pay for three of Rush's joyrides, is unwilling to acknowledge that it was a shoddy ship, it's just that they're all pioneers. After all, Victor Vescovo got a medal, and Reiss probably deserves one, too.

I'm not sure if this is especially new in the world of the super rich. I look back at Hartley Dodge (1908-1930)

the heir to the Remington-Rockefeller fortune. He lived at Giralda Farms in Madison, New Jersey. He died in a car accident in France.

As I understand it, young Hartley was fascinated by airplanes and wanted to undertake flying as a hobby, but his mother forbade this as too risky. Instead, he took up fast cars, which his mother apparently felt was less of a risk, but he killed himself at it anyhow.

Now we have deep-sea submersibles that seem to serve the same purpose. I've got to wonder what sort of need this sort of activity satisfies in this sort of people.