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“The Titanic” is a very large ship from early last century that was unsinkable, its builders and owners said, and they believed it, too—so much that in order to make its maiden trip a bit more convenient and impressively speedy, the captain set a course and a velocity that risked collision with North Atlantic icebergs, and then the Titanic collided with one of those icebergs.

The iceberg didn’t know that the Titanic was unsinkable, so it did what icebergs do to ships that collide with them, which is to sink them, and down the Titanic went to the ocean floor.

As for “the ocean,” it is a very large body of water, which we keep mostly on the surface part of our planet. This particular ocean was The Atlantic one, which we keep in between Florida and Norway, roughly.

How large is this ocean? It’s sort of hard to grasp the scale of it. Try this: imagine a pitcher of water. Got it?

Now imagine 187 quintillion pitchers of water. Hopefully that helps.

Down near its floor, “the ocean” has pressures that exert approximately 6000 PSI, or 600 lbs on every square inch, which is sort of like being in a machine designed to turn cars into cubes, except that to turn cars into cubes, Dr. Google tells me, compacting machines only need to exert 2000 PSI.

A “submersible” is a vessel designed to go down to those depths, supposing that you are somebody curious enough about the deep that you are willing to shell out a lot of money to get into a vehicle designed—you hope!—to survive a trip into a vehicle compactor.

This submersible was known as “The Titan,” and a “titan” is the type of ancient god after which the Titanic was named, with nomenclature suggesting that the Titanic was like the Titan, and maybe it was.

Now, “rich people” are people who have a lot of money, and “money” is an innovative human method of make-believe that allows people to exchange goods and services with relative ease, and which is something that in modern society people need to have in order to live.

“Society” is simply the way human beings choose to organize rules and power and social beliefs in order to shape our shared human life together.

In our society, we’ve arranged things so that if you don’t have sufficient money, enough pressure will be exerted upon you that you will eventually be submerged and crushed to death, and then you’ll be gone and those of us with money won’t have to worry about you anymore.

But rich people have no such pressures! It’s like they’re encased within a very well-designed societal submersible, which allows them to survive our inhospitable society in ways that regularly crush regular people to death.

They’ve got enough of this “money” that they can live without struggling for survival or even thinking about survival—they can not only survive but thrive with ease, and purchase comforts, or even luxuries, like seventh houses, and private jets, and legislatures to write laws and judges to enforce them, who will help them get even more money away from people who have less money, and then eventually they get so much money they don’t even know what sort of ease to spend it on anymore.

Once they reach this level of insulation, many rich people blow some of the excess money on trips to other places that are even more inhospitable to human life than a society that has been geared to accommodate only the wealthy, like space, or the ocean floor.

You might wonder why rich people, whose lives have been made so comfortable and easy, would take such risks, but money has observable insulating qualities, which can keep a rich person safe but eventually rather numb to the reality of human dangers.

If a person has enough money it can shield them from almost any societal problems that are out there, and this can lead rich people to often rather understandably believe that—because they are entirely immune to all the pressures that our society has decided to exert upon people without money—they are similarly immune to pretty much anything, and this seems to allow them to believe that even nature’s rules do not apply to them.

Again, it’s not too difficult to see why a rich person might believe that rules don’t apply to them, because as long as those rules are societal rules, they actually don’t apply.

They think that they are in a different boat, when it comes to rules, than everyone else.

Living in a society designed to accommodate the ease of wealth over the lives of humans has, it seems, led them to that belief.