Welcome to Planet Titanic

The sinking of the Titanic is an apt metaphor for both my life and our pending anthropogenic extinction. All three were caused by people, all three had tragic effects, and all three were theoretically preventable. But, as I would learn much later in life, theory and practice are not the same, and on a species level we do not practice the theory of prevention.

My first encounter with collapse was on a personal level. It coincides with my first memory of life: being raped by father when I was two years old. Oddly, having little knowledge of the world, at that time I thought this was normal. But my mother did not, so when I was three, she took me in the bathroom and sliced my face up with a razor blade in the belief that, if I was ugly, he would stop raping me. Unfortunately, he was not interested in my face, and his rapes went on unabated, two to three times per week, until I was five. My mother, in complete denial, blamed me for his continued bad behavior and would beat me into unconsciousness whenever we were alone.

The collapse of my family structure widened as, in an effort to intimidate me from ever speaking about their abuse, my parents taught my older brother to also beat me. The intensities of these sibling attacks escalated over the years, putting me in the hospital on three separate occasions. His final assault came on Christmas Eve when I was seventeen years old, and it was so severe that the police officer who found me said his first response was to shot me because he thought I was a rabid dog.

As goes the family, so goes society, and from a very young age I knew I would never bring a child into this horrible world. Abandoned by both God and humanity, I grew up at a time when society was still locked in the binary mind set of straight or gay, with nothing in between. Since my parents portrayed themselves as normal heterosexuals, wanting never to be like them, I assumed I must be homosexual. Though it would take me decades to realize that I was neither hetero- or homosexual, in my young adult years I became a gay activist, pursuing the hope that we could heal ourselves and the planet if we just learned to accept and love one another. Here’s a link to a gay and lesbian civil rights speech I gave in 1990.

This was also the era of AIDS, during which I wrote my first book, SYPHILIS AS AIDS, which was a comparative study of the two diseases. Though not widely read, this book did gain me entrance into medical school, an experience which would expose me to an even broader form of societal collapse. Unlike its do-gooder image, I would come to see how the money motive perverts the helping hand, stratifying us into haves and have nots, and turning the world of supposed health-care into a world of greed-driven wealth-care.

I was so disgusted by the reality of this unhealthy, systemic monstrosity that I became an outsider in my own profession, treating only other outsiders like myself. Having turned to drugs in my teenage years to mask the pain inflicted upon me by my family, I would spend decades helping others who suffered from addiction. In doing so, I soon realized that, like myself, most of my patients had also endured significant childhood abuse. This lead me to write a book about my survival - SPEECHLESS: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHILD MURDER AND RAPE - so as to share my story and let them know that they were not alone. Recently, I made a movie based upon this book, and it is available for free viewing. I also wrote another book - CHILDREN OF PAIN: 4 STEPS TO RECOVERY FOR SURVIVORS OF CHILDHOOD ABUSE - to further help my patients in their recoveries. I expanded upon this by running a year-long Children Of Pain support group, and though this group no longer meets, the website and its resources are still online. (Contact me through my email below if you would like a link to the film, website, and books.)

As I was learning to live with the scars of childhood abuse, I also became aware of global warming. After many years of reading and studying this phenomenon, I wrote my first book on climate change: BURSTING THE ATMOSPHERE - WHAT HAPPENS WHEN RAIN FALLS UP. I then went on to write two more related books: LETTERS TO GRETA and INTENTIONAL DESIGN AND HUMAN EXTINCTION. Like all of my books, none of these were widely read, but they did help me to understand the importance of climate change and the necessity for human extinction.

I have concluded that, contrary to popular belief, anthropogenic human extinction is a good thing, because if we do not go extinct, then the universe will suffer. While most of us, even the worst of us, do have our good moments, in the big picture, as a species, we are a failure. Individually, we are the most important resources we have, yet, on the species level, we hurt rather than help one another, enslave rather than uplift one another, and kill rather than include one another. If we were a singular organism with each individual as one of its cells, then it would be dying from an incurable and fatal auto-immune disease. If we do not go extinct while confined to this planet, it is this inherent, unsolvable, underlying failure which will drive us to spread our cancerous beliefs, attitudes and behaviors to other parts of the universe, producing incalculable harm wherever we go.

My point of view is most often countered by the claim that, as per the Beatles, all we need is love. But love is not enough. There is something far more important than love which we entirely lack when viewed from the global perspective: trust. For you can have trust without love, but you cannot have love without trust. This is not to say we are unable to trust one another in limited, small circles of families or friends, but in the big, planetary picture, trust in each other is completely absent. If you disagree, I invite you to count your keys, count your guns, count your bullets, count your bombs, and to count your jails, prisons and borders. Count the endless laws we use to punish one another, and the futile religions we use to separate ourselves from each other. There is no global trust, and so there will never be global peace, nor global love, for one another. And so, as we have done for hundreds of thousands of years, we will continue to spiral downward along our self-destructive path toward self-imposed oblivion, an extinction which will leave the universe a far safer and better place by our absence.

My life, beginning to end, has been a mirror of this trust deficit and all its outcomes. I was born dead into a world where the people I should have trusted turned out to be my torturers, and the place I should have been the safest turned out to be my prison. When I finally escaped into the larger world, to my horror I found even more abuse, hidden behind masks, sustained through greed, and perpetuated by our inherent mistrust of one another. I realized that saving our species was both futile and counterproductive, as this would spread, rather than end, a fundamentally incurable disease. Yet, this epiphany also lead me to an unexpected absolution: we are not to blame.

Whatever the cause of our eternal mistrust, no one of us is its singular cause. I cannot say where the root of this evil lays - in our DNA or somewhere deeper - but since it is in all of us, then no one of us can be singled out: neither Jesus nor Hitler, nor anyone before, in between, or after. It is simply a curse we all carry throughout life, a never-ending, inter-generational tumor from which we cannot be saved. So we poison our planet as we poison ourselves, trapped here on Planet Titanic, doomed to go down with the ship: unsavable, unsalvageable, and unstoppable. Yet, in our moments of despair, we can aspire to be like that namesake ship’s band leader, Wallace Henry Hartley, putting aside our differences, our grievances, and our mistrust of one another, so as to do the only positive thing possible that there is left for us to do: be kind and share.

If you are interested in any of my books, my film or my website, please email me at trafn@yahoo.com - Robert Ben Mitchell