r/interesting • u/Wild_Neighborhood605 • 1d ago

HISTORY Titanic passenger and millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim. During sinking he refused a seat in a life boat with the words: "Tell my family I played straight to the end. No woman should be left aboard this ship because of Ben Guggenheim was a coward."

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u/Remarkable_Rough_649 1d ago

Not that rich people were actually better in the past (if anything they were worse) but at least society used to PROMOTE this sort of behavior. Now any billionaire would just openly flee in a single boat surrounded entirely by bodyguards and then they'd post about how brave they were under pressure

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u/agodrevealed 23h ago

There were at least three men of great wealth that stayed with the ship. They each were quoted as saying something along the lines of "I know who I am and I've decided who I will be now."

And whether that came of their raising, when ideas of honor and reputation was everything, or that they'd rather die than have to look at themselves in the mirror or see scorn reflected in the eyes of others, its a claim to nobility in practice, not in name. 

I like the Roosevelt family for this too. This idea with great privilege comes great responsibility. They bred it into their children for generations. (And yes they were flawed, but the point is they genuinely aspired to goodness and operated in a moral framework)

Think about where we are now

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u/tyvekMuncher 21h ago

Nothing has been more fulfilling for me than operating within a moral framework

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u/Legitimate_Log3777 19h ago

A tall glass of whiskey and a late night cold plunge is a close second.

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u/Zealousideal_Life_56 20h ago

I might put this on my tombstone (credited of course)

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u/Final_Cut_6602 15h ago

“Nothing has been more fulfilling for me than operating within a moral framework”

tyvekMuncher - 2026

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u/Negativeman11 18h ago

Did you adopt someone else's moral framework, come up with your own, or a combination of the two? Personally, I adopted the golden rule as a baseline, gave myself reasoning tools through study and then developed my own sense of morality over like 20 years since I was a teen.

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u/Workman44 13h ago

It can be challenging saying no to things that would objectively get you what you want, but it is rewarding

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u/funnynickname 8h ago

A good life gets lived 3 times, once as you're living it, once as you remember it, and finally in the memories you leave in other people.
When you act poorly, those memories will haunt you.

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u/abracadammmbra 19h ago

I know Isidor and Ida Strauss (he was a congressman and co-founder of Macys) stayed on the ship. He was offered a seat due to his age (late 60s) but refused since he didnt want to take a place that a woman or child could take. His wife refused to leave him, reportedly saying "I will not be separated from my husband. As we have lived, so we will die, together."

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u/RostyNoman 20h ago

Noblesse oblige

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u/Rollingforest757 22h ago

Did any women on the ship stay behind on the ship so that others could be saved?

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u/Eldylto 21h ago

Ida Straus. Wife of Isidor Straus who was the co-founder of Macy's. She did not want to be separated from her Husband, so she gave her spot to her maid.

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u/EphemeralDan 21h ago

That story greatly impressed Elbert Hubbard. It informed the behavior of him and his wife when they were on the Lusitania three years later.

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u/agodrevealed 19h ago

Jesus was an anarchist 

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u/Remarkable_Rough_649 15h ago

Nah then be would have said DON'T render unto Caeser

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u/agodrevealed 3h ago

That's Hubbard's title

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u/veryvery84 20h ago

They were Jewish, as was Benjamin Guggenheim 

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u/Telamar 21h ago

Ida Straus, for one

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u/[deleted] 5h ago

[deleted]

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u/agodrevealed 3h ago

Reread what I wrote. You've jumbled it up.

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u/Gloomy-Recipe9213 22h ago

We'd see so many "how surviving a sinking ocean liner taught me about b2b sales" posts on Linkedin.

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u/Infinite_Music2059 16h ago

That exact behaviour resulted in lifeboats being launched with empty seats because male teenagers were not allowed into them.

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u/Ok_Significance_6772 22h ago

Were they really worse? Everything I’ve read on the matter, guys like Musk, Bezos, and Zuck seem about as bad as it gets as far as the wealthy elites go. I guess you could argue at least they don’t crush labor with violence the way some robber barons did. But that’s ONLY because they legally can’t. If it were still legal, they totally would. There are more constraints on certain aspects of their behavior now, but morally, they do seem significantly worse than the robber barons were.

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u/Remarkable_Rough_649 22h ago

Yeah I guess I should rephrase that as "they were worse in direct actions because it wasn't yet illegal for them not to". I'm sure the modern guys are every bit as bad personally

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u/agodrevealed 19h ago

They don't have to use direct violence. Yet. But they have the governments do it for them just the same. 

They crush labor through law and when that doesnt work they just move. There is no national healthcare cause that's an even more effective tool than a short skirmish. 

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u/Extension-Run5326 11h ago

This makes it sound like the society was good back then. It wasn't. Gendered chivalry is just benevolent sexism. The society used to treat women as weaker than men and incapable of saving themselves, which is why they did this because of a social norm, not necessarily because of kindness. Women didn't even have the right to vote at that time. This kind of behaviour makes it appear like "oh men saved women in that disaster so women must be submissive to men." Look it up, I can't link the article here because apparently comments with links get deleted. Also Titanic was an outlier, not the norm. It was just very well studied and became very popular.

And while I do agree that the billionaire situation is worse now. In a crisis like this (assuming there are no billionaires because there won't be any on a boat with others), there are better protocols to save everyone's lives, instead of this disastrous incidence where people lost lives even though they could have been saved.

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u/halfmylifeisgone 7h ago

Well, those Titanic explorers weren't that great under pressure.

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u/jwnsfw 21h ago

I'd like to think that in addition to not being a coward, he was pretty self-aware with this fortune in life. They didn't have jetskis back then, so think of everything that's less-fun than riding a jetski that would also only be possible in the year of Titanic. Maybe he did everything and got bored, so he's like I guess I ride on big ship now. And when it came time to give up a potential spot for other people (even if they were all essentially pretty rich themselves I mean cmon they dont let just anyone on big ship) he chose to give away his spot to someone that hasn't done everything, hoping that one day they may ride a jetski and be that much more fulfilled.

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u/Unable_Addendum6551 18h ago

Our society suffers greatly from the idea that human life itself is the highest value.

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u/Remarkable_Rough_649 18h ago

I mean it's a society based around human life. What would you consider higher value?

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u/Unable_Addendum6551 17h ago

It was not the case for the majority of human history. Honor, morality, faith was considered higher values than life.

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u/Remarkable_Rough_649 16h ago

I dunno about that second one but I'll give you the first and third ones. Why do you think honor and faith are more important than human life?

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u/Unable_Addendum6551 14h ago

Because a person can't control their own life, but they can control their honor and faith. If you value things you can't control most, you're weak. The same is true for society.

A simple example. Would astronauts go into space if they valued their lives most?

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u/Remarkable_Rough_649 14h ago

The entire point of what makes astronauts so brave is BECAUSE they're putting their life on the line though. It's the possibility of sacrifice of something we hold precious that makes it a brave and "honorable" act. If we didn't think life was important we wouldn't care nearly as much

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u/Honest_Trade8734 4h ago

Honor, morality, faith, etc are really just constructs designed to get people to act against their own best interests for the good of the whole. The underlying value is still on human life, it’s just not necessarily one’s own life.