A friend and business associate just stunned me by professing belief in a conspiracy theory that I had never encountered before. He doesn’t see it as a theory, either: he is certain that it is historical fact, that it has been covered up by historians and other malign forces, and that eventually it will all be revealed.
This one is, I am quite certain, bonkers, just as bonkers as the Truther claim that Bush and Cheney were really behind the attack on the Twin Towers. My cognitive dissonance scale is in revolt: I have to trust and rely on this individual, whom I respect and admire. Yet embracing something this wacky is a red flag. A big one.
The short version of the conspiracy is that the calamitous sinking of “Titanic” in 1912 was secretly orchestrated by financier J.P. Morgan. His motive was to remove three powerful businessmen—Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, and John Jacob Astor—who opposed the formation of the Federal Reserve.
A related conspiracy theory is that as part of an insurance fraud scheme, Morgan had “Titanic” secretly switched with one of its sister ships, “Olympic.” That one is, if possible, even wackier than the murder plot, and like it, the theory is easy to debunk. Both ships had distinct construction identification numbers or yard numbers that were stamped on many of their parts, including their wood paneling. “Olympic’s” yard number was 400 and “Titanic’s” was 401. Many artifacts bearing the number 401 have been raised from the wreck of “Titanic,” and items auctioned off after “Olympic” was retired in 1935 show the number 400. Also, I can’t figure out why switching nearly identical ships would benefit anyone, but we don’t need to go into that.
As for the murder plot—
1. There are a lot easier, less expensive and less risky ways to kill three men than to sink a cruise ship and kill another 1500 innocent souls while incurring terrible publicity.
2. There is no convincing evidence that Guggenheim, Straus, or Astor did oppose the formation of the Federal Reserve. In 1911, The New York Times reported that Astor supported the idea.
3. How could Morgan—he was an evil bastard, but he was not stupid—be sure the sinking would kill these three moguls? Survivors reported that each of them were visible during the chaos after the iceberg collision that led to the ship’s demise. Guggenheim removed his lifebelt and told a passenger that he and his butler were “dressed in their best and prepared to go down as gentlemen.” (The movie “Titanic” includes this incident, though James Cameron’s film is hardly a stickler for historical accuracy.) Straus and his wife could have made it into a lifeboat, and were urged to do so. He refused, insisting that women and children be rescued first, and his wife refused to get in a lifeboat without him. The couple died together: the movie also shows this, and their touching demise is well documented.
Astor helped his wife into a lifeboat, but Second Officer Lightoller told him that, like the other men in First Class, he could not board until all the women and children had been accounted for. As everyone knows, there were not enough lifeboats to rescue all the women, never mind the men. A “Titanic” historian says, “If a conspiracy to kill these three men had been so deep and involved so as to actually sink an ocean liner and kill hundreds of innocent people, one would think that the individuals responsible would not have left the survival of these three men to chance.”
One would think…if one were thinking. This theory was birthed on (all together now!) social media, and has proven harder to kill than the Hydra. Another part of it—my friend asserted this as fact also—is that explosives were used to sink the ship, and that the iceberg wasn’t the real cause “because ice can’t cut through steel.” But the iceberg didn’t “cut” through the “Titanic’s” steel structure: the force of the collision caused the starboard side steel plates to buckle and pop their rivets. 1912 steel was lower quality than 2025 steel, and became brittle in the cold. An iceberg wouldn’t sink a cruise ship sailing today.
I know a lot about the 1912 disaster: after all, the sinking took place the same day Fenway Park opened. My experience is that when I give irrefutable proof to the advocates of conspiracy theories that their facts don’t “hold water”—“Titanic” reference!—they just smile, pat me on the head, and say, in essence, “Poor confused child! Well, you’ll understand that I am right some day.”
Then what?
Ethics Alarms 
Great motivational lines spoken by the leader
—————
Guggenheim: “My butler and I…we are prepared to go down as gentlemen”
Butler: “slow down there boss”
Lone Ranger: “well, there 5,000 savages riding us down, Tonto. Looks like that’s the end of us”
Tonto: “what do you mean ‘us’, white man?”
Henry V: “once more into the breach dear friends, once more! Or close up the wall with our English dead!!!”
Soldier: “wait wait wait… we’re with you except for that final bit… could we just get in without the whole filling the gap with our English dead part…?”
Anymore I try to be patient with people holding to bonkers theories.
1) I’m too lazy to engage everyone
2) I also recognize that in our particular era of “experts” crapping their pants in support of blatantly wrong partisan efforts have undermined their believability and in so doing have undermined everyone’s trust in past experts and past authorities.
Ask him if the earth is flat. Those people are really nuts.
I think when you say “red flags” here, I’m curious what your risk tolerance is. Are these “red flags” in that, someone who thinks the Titanic was sunk to kill 3 millionaires is also likely to harm my children level risk? Or is it more like I wouldn’t trust them with personal information risk?
Because if it’s in the flavor of the latter, I imagine you are already guarded enough against those types of risks that allowing someone with incredibly eccentric theories would already be excluded.
If it is similar to the severity of the former…maybe you’re worried too much about it?
It is someone whose judgment I am depending on in other matters. Believing in such a conspiracy theory calls judgment into question. This one, I think, is a product of general distrust of institutions, historians, and bankers—and there are valid reasons for such distrust. But not to that extent.
Has his judgment in your other matters proven sound?
If yes, then if your concern that his judgment is faulty because of the conspiracy theory then you must also conclude it’s only been luck that his judgment has been good so far in the other matters.
If no, then I think you have reason to question y’all’s work together based on that.
If it was the first time you considered associating with someone and right off the bat you discover this, I think it’s fair to question future dealings.
I think that conspiracy theories are hard to deal with. Facts do not matter to those who have made up their minds. In addition, lately, things called conspiracy theories are being proven true, which has an effect on conspiracy theories on the cognitive dissonance scale. Remember the conspiracy theory that the WuFlu was leaked from the Wuhan Institue of Virology, that was studying coronaviruses in gain of function research in an inappropriately secure lab environment? All who believed that (including me) got laughed at and treated horribly. Now the current view is that this was the case. How about the Deep State doing what they could to tank Donald Trump while pushing forward a mentally incompetent Biden? We have had that basic theory, if not all claims, proven, with the Time article on “how we kept Trump from the Presidency”, and now what we are getting out of the AUC about when they knew Biden was mentally unfit. We have Hunter’s laptop, the Steele Dossier, efficaciousness of homemade cloth masks, and I can provide multiple more “conspiracy theories” that have proven true.
This is not to say that the Titanic was actually a murder weapon, just that people are more disposed towards conspiracy theories today. Conspiracy theories, especially historical ones, are common, and while you can disprove them, people claim all kinds of things to ignore the proof. One of my most hated responses is, “the powers that be changed all the documents. The fact that all sources support your view is proof of my claim.” At some point, I just downgrade the person’s intellect on my scale and avoid the topic. I also double check more of their statements, trusting their claims less than I would have before.
On the other hand, I have a friend who presented what I thought to be a ridiculous claim and now that I’ve been looking further into the claim, I’m leaning more towards her point of view. The exercise of finding proof against these claims can be a good way to check our own biases.
That absurd conspiracy theory reminds me of another absurd conspiracy theory, chemtrails.
A simple to-the-point rebuttal phrase that I’ve used over and over again comes to mind,
That simple phrase is useful to oppose a wide variety of fact less theories and covers the breath of everything that human hindsight tells you that “you could have, should have, said”, this gives you a respectful no regret out.
Another useful phrase to use in conjunction with the phrase above is,
The one that irks me the most is the “faked moon landing” which I encountered just last week. There was a substack that I liked to read and then out of the blue he wrote about how it is impossible to go to the moon today and therefore impossible that it was done in 1969. That is a line you don’t cross with me; I deleted the bookmark.
Buzz Aldrin was being badgered by Bart Sibrel in 2002 and punched him in the jaw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_Sibrel
Some famous wit allegedly said of John Jacob Astor: “He was a gentleman. It was the death of him.”
When considering conspiracy theories, I am always reminded of the irish(?) saying, “There can be no secret when 3 people know.”
-Jut
apparently, Ben Franklin had a corollary to this proposition: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
-Jut
Yup. I think this is the definitive rebuttal of theories about massive conspiracies, like 9/11, JFK and the Titanic. But the counter argument is: “the only conspiracies we know about are the one where someone blabbed: it doesn’t prove that there aren’t others where nobody did!”
Except that, with things like JFK, the secretiveness of the government creates the problem. If the CIA orchestrated the assassination of JFK (IF!), the problem is that we would expect an intelligence agency to keep such secrets, because keeping secrets is their job. When your lies and deception are your stock-in-trade, one might not trust you.
But, as Kant observed (I think), secrets engender distrust and government secrets should be minimized, even if they are a necessary evil. (I am attempting to paraphrase Perpetual Peace from memory.)
So, secrets about JFK spawn conspiracy theories about the Moon Landing and. 9/11.
You can blame the conspiracists for that; but the government shares in the blame.
-Jut
This quote by the philosopher Cicero seems relevant:
“As, then, it belongs to friendship both to admonish and to be admonished, and to do the former freely, yet not harshly, to receive the latter patiently, not resentfully, so it is to be maintained that friendship has no greater pest than adulation, flattery, subserviency; for under its many names a brand should be put on this vice of fickle and deceitful men, who say everything with the view of giving pleasure, without any reference to the truth. While simulation is bad on every account, inasmuch as it renders the discernment of the truth which it defaces impossible, it is most of all inimical to friendship; for it is fatal to sincerity, without which the name of friendship ceases to have any meaning.”
Your friend has arrived at a conclusion that is based on, generously speaking, an implausible interpretation of the evidence surrounding the Titanic’s disaster. If he were looking at the evidence with no biases, he presumably would not have come to this conclusion. Therefore, I suspect that he has either an emotional attachment to the conclusion, or an emotional attachment to the process he used to reach it.
An person’s attachment to a conclusion might be as personal as a belief about what that conclusion says about them or someone they respect, or it might be as impersonal as preferring a more pleasant view of the world, such as one where disasters don’t just happen by accident.
An attachment to the reasoning process may be based on a fear of not having a good alternative reasoning process to turn to, a fear of what conclusions those alternative processes might lead to, or (similarly) an attachment to another conclusion that they arrived at through their current process. For example: “I have to believe this person wearing a cape is a bad person, because if people who aren’t bad can wear capes, that means that maybe I did a bad thing by attacking those other people for wearing capes.”
I’d like to talk with your friend and see how his worldview compares to what I suspect it is. My preliminary hypothesis is that your friend’s subconscious reasoning process is loosely based on the following premises, which I am not rendering judgment on at this time:
In other words, sometimes it is far more pleasant to think that a bad policy or catastrophic event happens because of bad actors engineering it, and not because of random disaster. Whether the real J. P. Morgan would consider it a good idea to sink an entire ship in order to kill three political opponents is irrelevant. What the most likely cause of the Titanic’s sinking is, given the evidence and testimonies at hand, does not enter the equation.
The top priority for a true conspiracy theorist, as opposed to a regular person who suspects deceptive machinations by a company or government, is to find an explanation for the world’s ills that makes them part of a plan. This is an encouraging worldview. The agents that create that plan can be outsmarted, revealed, and overpowered. A person who takes on such an enemy has a noble purpose in life. A person who identifies enemy activity performs a valuable public service whenever they share what they know.
(This worldview is older than you may realize. You may have heard sermons about how the Devil is constantly working to trick and afflict mortals with his infinite cunning, and how the only protection is to believe and do as one is told and not listen to alternative possibilities. It’s the same principle as a modern conspiracy theory, just serving a particular set of cultural values.)
A world where bad things just happen sometimes has no unifying order, or at least not one that humans can readily perceive. A human living in such a world may struggle to find direction. There is no obvious most important problem, no ultimate skill or secret knowledge that can end the nightmare of confusion and drudgery that grinds away at people. No nexus of purpose, and no simple way to make it stop. The world doesn’t look like this because someone warped it to be this way, ready to revert to something better when they’re defeated. This is how it looks naturally. Making it better requires insight, constructiveness, and ongoing work. For someone who hasn’t seen that before, they might not realize the world can get better unless a villain is the reason it isn’t already.
One thing I share with conspiracy theorists is the refusal to resign myself to allowing the world to continue stumbling headfirst into tragedies. The closest thing I’ve got to an ultimate skill is that of helping people to understand each other and work together, to learn from each other’s perspectives and skills and combine them to create better situations. That collaboration will accomplish more than any one person could alone. The trick is that to figure out how to make it work, you have to be completely honest with yourself. If a hypothesis doesn’t fit reality, you have to let go of the joy of pretending it does. You have to do the work of continuing to learn and unlearn, with the faith that eventually you’ll put together something really useful.
It’s worked for me, at least.
Fascinating!!! Thank you for sharing it.
The Youtube channel Oceanliner Designs has several videos thoroughly dismantling the Titanic Olympic swap conspiracy theory. You could recommend that channel to your friend if he seems willing to learn about the history of that conspiracy theory and why it just doesn’t make sense once you get into the facts.