The Titanic question

Let's say... you are scheduled to travel on the Titanic to New York with your family, and the night before it was revealed to you that the Titanic would sink, and therefore you knew this beforehand with absolute certainty. Also, let's say that you knew that most of the passengers died, but you didn't know if your family and you would survive or not. (If you did know that your family wouldn't survive, I think that might affect one's deliberation, but I'm not sure if it would change the answer.)

So, you try to convince your family to stay, but they don't take you seriously and to your horror proceed to board the Titanic.

Would you: stay on land and save yourself? Or would you join your family and do what you can to save them? (and perhaps even the ship?) If the latter, would you be prepared for the possibility that despite whatever preparations you might make to save your family, you may still die with them? Would you be already resigned to it and be ready for death?

In some ways that is the problem people who believe in Peak Oil have to face. It's amazing though how many of them, self-proclaimed 'liberals' or 'Democrats', show no concern for the well-being of their fellow citizens, even if they truly are guilty of stupidity and other short-comings. Just take a look at the comments for James Howard Kunstler's blog. Some may acknowledge their own complicity for the current problems, but many still blame the 'right-wing,' 'conservatives,' the 'religious right' or 'fundamentalists' for this and that, even though both parties are guilty for neglecting the issue and defending current economic and social practices. It's amazing how the prospect of disaster and death can't mitigate an ideological commitment and partisanship for some. Some even go to the extreme of hating on the human race, saying how we deserve to destroy ourselves, and that we should disappear off the face of the earth because then things would be better. It's rather blasphemous. While they may understand it's a moral problem (because American consumption and consumerism are opposed to temperance), they don't realize the unity of the moral virtues. Rather, if they are libertarians they resort to talk about freedom and the limits of law; if they are relativists, then it's "if it feels good, it's ok" or "sex as I want it is permissible"; and if they are secularists then "the religious are stupid."

Sin leads to blindness.