The purpose of a writing class is to develop a meaningful thesis, direct or implied, that will generate a compelling essay. Most importantly, a meaningful thesis will have a strong emotional connection between you and the material. In fact, if you don’t have a “fire in your belly” to write the paper, your essay will be nothing more than a limp document, a perfunctory exercise in futility. A successful thesis will also be intellectually challenging and afford a complexity worthy of college-level writing. Thirdly, the successful thesis will be demonstrable, which means it can be supported by examples and illustrations in a recognizable organizational design.
Other Website: http://herculodge.typepad.com/
Since paragraphs are the building blocks of our essays, we should ask ourselves: What makes a strong, effective paragraph?
Salience
First, a paragraph should be salient, meaning the writer is addressing a topic that is remarkable, meaningful, relevant, and timely. When writers are salient and relevant by addressing the needs of the time, they achieve the principle of Kairos, meaning that you are impressing your reader with ideas that are timely and are relevant to “the times we live in”--zeitgeist.
Main Idea or Topic Sentence
Second, a paragraph must have a single topic, often stated in a topic sentence but sometimes states through implication or suggestion. Whether or not there is a topic sentence, the paragraph will be governed by a controlling idea or what is called the main idea.
Unity
Third, a paragraph must achieve unity by consisting of supporting details that all point to the topic sentence or main topic.
Coherence
Fourth, a paragraph must have coherence, the state of being clear from the logical flow of one sentence to the other, often enhanced by appropriate transitions.
To summarize, paragraphs must have salience, a controlling idea, unity, and coherence.
Example #1 An argument in a thesis paragraph
The proposal to make community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a salient example of good intentions ushering us into the bowels of hell. The misguided plan to make parking lots into a homeless sanctuary will curdle into chaos, stench, and criminality. For one, colleges cannot afford enough law enforcement officers to patrol a vast area rife with assault, thievery, and other criminality, resulting in bankrupting the college with lawsuits. Second, the college cannot afford enough bathrooms to accommodate the thousands of people, which will in turn make the college a giant sewer that contaminates the entire community with infectious diseases. Third, the majority of people will look at the college as a cesspool of criminality and disease and avoid attending this lame excuse for a college, resulting in enrollment numbers so low that the college will soon cease to exist.
Example #2: A rebuttal to an argument
The above rebuttal against the proposal to turn community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a classic use of the slippery slope fallacy in which someone cries Chicken Little and all worst-case scenarios while assuming the parking lot plan won’t have any specific contingencies designed to prevent the panic-based emotionally-charged scenarios that have been hysterically described above. The above hysterics are in truth a smokescreen designed to make a selfish excuse for ignoring those students for whom horrible life circumstances beyond their control have put them in a homeless situation. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s contention that there will be criminality in the parking lot, obviously colleges will have a maximum occupancy at the level of which its law enforcement feels comfortable creating a secure place for the students. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s claim the college will “become a giant sewer,” obviously campus engineers will put enough bathrooms on the premises in proportion to the maximum occupancy allowed. Regarding the fear tactic that non-homeless students won’t enroll in the college, this is a paranoid scenario based on the irrational premise that the college won’t have any limits on the amount of homeless people it accommodates and under what restrictions those accommodations will be based. Let us, therefore, address the needs of our homeless population and leave the selfish Chicken Little arguments in the argumentative dustbin where they deserve.
Example #3: An argument with a topic sentence
Sure, Universal Basic Income sucks. It’s hardly enough money to create economic justice. It’s surely a pacifier for the masses who are getting punk-fed the bare minimum to live a half-decent existence. I’m also certain that UBI will relegate most of us to some sweaty, dank room where we’ll intoxicate ourselves with a myriad of unsavory substances while looking on with bloodshot eyes at some entertainment or other on YouTube or Netflix. We will grow fat, complacent, brain-dead. We’ll become less than human. We’ll become more like zombies, slogging through life without an ounce of pride or dignity as we live a sedentary life without individual goals, responsibility, or life purpose. We will be soulless pods hooked up to our private entertainment centers while the 1%, the real people, pull the strings, create technology that advances civilization and enjoy the spoils of their efforts as full human beings flourishing in some opulent environment while the rest of us poor UBI-receiving bots live like crammed sardines in shared housing with our equally depressed, brain-dead zombie roommates. So am I arguing against UBI? Hell no. Even if our lives are as crappy as the one I described above, the life without UBI as we head for the Great Unemployment Age presents an even greater hellish existence, one with starvation, a lack of basic medical supplies and treatment, and abject homelessness. Yeah, UBI sucks, but not getting UBI sucks even more. Don’t count on the government to share the 1%’s wealth with the rest of us. The 1% will only share as much as they have to, and they have calculated that giving us just enough UBI so that we don’t become a raging, lawless mob is worth the 4-trillion UBI annual price tag. We should just admit we lost the class war. We are now in the unenviable position where we can either take our UBI pittance, which sucks, or not take our UBI table scraps, which sucks even more. That is our dilemma. We must take this painful truth on the chin and move on with our crappy lives. The alternative is certain death.
Example #4: A counterargument with a topic sentence
The above argument, which essentially paints us as starving dogs that should be grateful for the table scraps of UBI is so full of grotesque logical fallacies that the person who wrote this specious argument should be thrown into Logical Fallacy Prison. For one, the writer gives us a false dilemma of only two choices: A crappy life with UBI or an even crappier life without UBI. There are other possibilities that the writer does not address because those possibilities present an inconvenience to his argument. For example, some people will continue to work and use UBI to supplement their income. Others will use UBI to fund their higher education, but the above writer is too busy enjoying his despair to consider these possibilities. Secondly, the writer presents a pessimism that is unfounded on evidence. He seems to think dehumanization from UBI is inevitable, yet he presents no facts to back up his claim. Rather, he indulges in his personal crapulent attitude and wishes to impose it on the rest of us, as if he’s doing us a favor by lavishing us with some universal truth, yet he is not. He is merely a Minister of Darkness contaminating us with his gospel of despair. Finally, he assumes the worst-case scenario of UBI and paints a broad brush over the human reaction to receiving guaranteed income to fulfill our basic life needs without addressing the complexities and unknowable, tentative outcomes. In short, the above writer is a grotesque nihilist who is hell-bent on infecting us with his anguish and despair. For the truth about UBI, I suggest we look elsewhere.
Example #5: A personal narrative with a topic sentence
We need stories to explain to us our ever-changing role in this world. Otherwise, we are doomed to be forever infantile. As an example, when I was a toddler, I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket, a white silken prized possession that became inseparable to me like one of my appendages. Tattered and mottled with yellowish spots, Geekee was my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me everywhere I went. At night, I rubbed the blanket’s corners on my cheek, the pleasant tickling sensation lulling me to sleep. To my consternation, my parents were not as enamored with Geekee as I was. They complained that Geekee smelled. It was threadbare. It had visible stains that I paraded to the public who must have believed that my parents were too cheap to buy me a new blanket. At four years of age I had outgrown Geekee, they said, and it was time Geekee and I part ways, a suggestion that sent me into a rage. This battle between my parents and me continued until one day, as we were moving across the country from Florida to California my father slyly opened his window and told me to look out the window opposite his, for he said there was a baby alligator on the side of the road. As I looked in vain to spot the alligator, my father ripped Geekee from my hands and threw it out his open window. It all happened so fast that I didn’t know my father had grabbed my blanket. Instead, I believed his lie that the powerful wind had sucked Geekee from my grasp and had flung the blanket out of the window. I told my father to stop the car at once. We had to retrieve Geekee. But my father said we had to keep on going. Besides, he said, Geekee was now keeping the baby alligator warm. With no mother to fend for him, the little reptile needed the blanket’s warmth far more than I did. Imagining the baby alligator swathed in my blanket helped me part ways with Geekee, for I was now convinced that there was a creature on this planet who needed Geekee more than I did. When I was 15, I worked out at Walt’s Gym with a 25-year old bodybuilder, Bull, who had his own Geekee--Gilligan’s Island. When the local station took his favorite TV show off the air, he was so overcome with rage that he kicked his mother’s TV screen with his combat boots. He remained inconsolable, and I was sad that I could not share a story with him that might wean himself off Gilligan’s Island forever.
Example #6 Personal narrative with a topic sentence
As a thirteen-year-old in 1974, I had reached the conclusion that adult life was a loathsome existence and therefore not for me. I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Quite at home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up.
Example #7: Brief Movie Critique with a lack of unity due to some rambling:
White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a documentary currently running on Netflix about a clothing company that sold its clothes by hyping chiseled bodies and “exclusive” beauty status in the late 90s to early 2000s before its collapse, is a decent, not great, documentary, but it’s worth watching for the pleasure of watching such an immoral business fall flat on its butt. It gives you a taste of the pre-social media zeitgeist and makes you wonder if all those chiseled “hot bods” might get lost in the mix in the age of Instagram and social influencers. My favorite line from the documentary is when a culture critic says the genius of Abercrombie & Fitch is not in delivering consumer goods to what the market dictates, but rather telling the consumers what they wanted, essentially implanting desires in their heads that they never had had before. Now that’s genius. On a personal note, I’ve never been inside an Abercrombie & Fitch store, but I have had students over the years tell me how cheap the clothing is, how they’ll find tears in the armpit of their shirts and loose threads within just a few days. The company was all smoke and mirrors, selling the chimera of exclusive beauty and status. It did so in part by exploiting racist mythology. Good riddance to its demise.
Example #8: Thesis paragraph
In Jordan Peele's masterpiece Get Out, the hero Chris Washington must survive and resist The Sunken Place, which is evident through Chris' pressure to code-switch at the Armitage home, his confrontation of numerous microaggressions, which erode his psyche and question his humanity; Rose's gaslighting of Chris, which makes him not only question his reality but his sanity; and the stealing of black bodies, which is a metaphor for cultural appropriation and exploitation of African-Americans in a rigged system.
If McMahon Were Writing Essay 4, This Would be His Outline:
Paragraph 1, define The Sunken Place
Paragraph 2, Thesis: Argue that The Sunken Place is a critique, not of Southern Jim Crow racism, but of white liberal racism in the form of pressuring black people to code-switch, afflicting black people with microaggressions, and inflicting economic racism on the Black community.
Paragraph 3: Show The Sunken Place of code-switching by comparing Chris to Aaron in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 9.
Paragraphs 4 and 5: Compare the microaggressions Chris experiences to Loquarreous in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 1, "Three Slaps."
Paragraph 5: Compare microaggression Chris experiences to those shown in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 7, "Trini 2 De Bone."
Paragraph 6: Show that neoliberal America has done little to improve the economic landscape for African-Americans by examining the issues in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 4, "The Big Pay Back." Notice in Get Out that whites steal black bodies; this is a metaphor for all kinds of stealing, including wealth and cultural stealing (cultural appropriation) and shows America as a kleptocracy, a country built on a foundation of stealing.
Paragraphs 7 and 8: Explain why Get Out succeeds while Them fails as a critique of racism.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis
Body Paragraphs
Two. Code-Switching is a cause and symptom of The Sunken Place:
When black people try to make white people more comfortable or try to pass as white, black people will code-switch, assuming the body language, vocal intonations, and mannerisms associated with whiteness.
The implicit message in code-switching is “White is good. Black is bad. I will try to win you over by being white.”
The motivation for code-switching is shame, self-rejection, and self-apology.
Code-switching teaches us that racism is not merely a bias against people of color; it is a bias against the culture of black people.
There is a cruel irony to code-switching: A lot of people want to act black, be cool, and be down, so they’ll appropriate black mannerisms and speech as their whims dictate; however, these same white people will expect black people to code-switch white to make them more comfortable.
Some other examples of code-switching are in the movie Sorry to Bother You and in the Atlanta episode 9 of season 3.
Three. Microaggressions are a cause of The Sunken Place:
Microaggressions are “small racist acts or comments” done in a spirit of ignorance, condescending patronization, discomfort, or all of the above.
Microaggressions are caused by the following personality traits:
bull-headed ignorance
arrogance
insensitivity
presumptuousness
crassness (social nincompoop who blunders in human relations)
laziness
narcissistic entitlement
Buzzfeed has a good list to get acquainted with some common examples.
Get Out is full of microaggressions with white people trying to hard to ingratiate themselves, using excessive flattery toward Chris, talking about the great physical wonders that Chris must possess.
Jeremy says that with Chris’ “genetic makeup,” he’d be a great MMA fighter.
Microaggressions can also be expressed as unintentional racism from the privilege of systemic racism. This, too, is a cause of The Sunken Place.
In Get Out, we see intentional racism, a willful attempt to steal black bodies as a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
But we also see unintentional racism. For example, when the cop asks for Chris’ driver's license, Rose becomes self-righteous and hostile, acting like she is sticking up for Chris when her white privilege fails to see she is putting Chris in even more danger.
Dean Armitage is another example. He tries too hard to be nonracist, bringing up his love for Obama every chance he can get. His saccharine manner is condescending and fake. He is a man with something to hide.
When people lard you with their friendly manner like Dean does, they are afflicting you with toxic positivity.
Then there is Jeremy, Rose’s brother, who says to Chris, “With your genetic makeup, you could be a great fighter.”
Four. Gaslighting is a cause of The Sunken Place:
“Don’t trust your senses. I’ll tell you what the reality is.”
Gaslighting is when the bully makes the victim feel like the culprit by turning reality upside down. The gaslighter is so incessant in his gaslighting that he wears down his victim through sheer fatigue.
In Get Out, we see examples of Gaslighting when Chris is worried that Rose’s white parents will be uncomfortable that she is bringing a black boyfriend to their house.
“Do they know I’m black?” he asks.
But Rose repeatedly dismisses his concern as a non-issue. He’s crazy for being so worried even when his past experiences tell him otherwise.
Five. Cultural Appropriation is a cause of The Sunken Place:
When people of the dominant or privileged culture steal the culture of the less privileged for their own desires, they are committing what is called cultural appropriation.
In Get Out, the stealing of black bodies is a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs in which you address the possible criticism that Get Out, like the Amazon Prime series Them, is making a spectacle of black suffering, helplessness, and victimization for consumer entertainment and as such displaying this racism in such a flagrant form is exploitive. Do the journeys of Chris Washington and his friend Rod Williams have enough dignity, self-agency, courage, mental toughness, and resistance to avoid the same charges exacted upon the TV series Them? Explain.
In paragraph 7, you might summarize the criticism exacted upon the Amazon Prime series Them.
In paragraph 8, you might then argue whether or not Jordan Peele’s Get Out falls into the same pitfalls as Them.
Paragraph 9: Your conclusion is a short dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Works Cited with a minimum of 5 sources in MLA format follow on the last page.
If McMahon Were Writing Essay 4, This Would be His Outline:
Paragraph 1, define The Sunken Place
Paragraph 2, Thesis: Argue that The Sunken Place is a critique, not of Southern Jim Crow racism, but of white liberal racism in the form of pressuring black people to code-switch, afflicting black people with microaggressions, and inflicting economic racism on the Black community.
Paragraph 3: Show The Sunken Place of code-switching by comparing Chris to Aaron in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 9.
Paragraphs 4 and 5: Compare the microaggressions Chris experiences to Loquarreous in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 1, "Three Slaps."
Paragraph 5: Compare microaggression Chris experiences to those shown in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 7, "Trini 2 De Bone."
Paragraph 6: Show that neoliberal America has done little to improve the economic landscape for African-Americans by examining the issues in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 4, "The Big Pay Back." Notice in Get Out that whites steal black bodies; this is a metaphor for all kinds of stealing, including wealth and cultural stealing (cultural appropriation) and shows America as a kleptocracy, a country built on a foundation of stealing.
Paragraphs 7 and 8: Explain why Get Out succeeds while Them fails as a critique of racism.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis
Thesis Structure Example:
Sample #1
In Get Out, the psychological state known as The Sunken Place is effectively illustrated by Chris’ hellish journey, which consists of ___________________, ________________, __________________, _____________________, and _____________________.
Sample #2
Get Out is a microcosm of systemic racism in America that shows racism from a black man’s perspective and how that racism creates a traumatic state of mind known as The Sunken Place evidenced by ______________, _______________, ________________, ____________________, and ________________________.
Sample #3
In the masterpiece Get Out, the protagonist Chris Washington goes deep into the bowels of white liberal America where he descends into The Sunken Place characterized by _________________, __________________, __________________, _______________, and ___________________________.
Body Paragraphs
Two. Code-Switching is a cause and symptom of The Sunken Place:
When black people try to make white people more comfortable or try to pass as white, black people will code-switch, assuming the body language, vocal intonations, and mannerisms associated with whiteness.
The implicit message in code-switching is “White is good. Black is bad. I will try to win you over by being white.”
The motivation for code-switching is shame, self-rejection, and self-apology.
Code-switching teaches us that racism is not merely a bias against people of color; it is a bias against the culture of black people.
There is a cruel irony to code-switching: A lot of people want to act black, be cool, and be down, so they’ll appropriate black mannerisms and speech as their whims dictate; however, these same white people will expect black people to code-switch white to make them more comfortable.
Some other examples of code-switching are in the movie Sorry to Bother You and in the Atlanta episode 9 of season 3.
Three. Microaggressions are a cause of The Sunken Place:
Microaggressions are “small racist acts or comments” done in a spirit of ignorance, condescending patronization, discomfort, or all of the above.
Microaggressions are caused by the following personality traits:
bull-headed ignorance
arrogance
insensitivity
presumptuousness
crassness (social nincompoop who blunders in human relations)
laziness
narcissistic entitlement
Buzzfeed has a good list to get acquainted with some common examples.
Get Out is full of microaggressions with white people trying to hard to ingratiate themselves, using excessive flattery toward Chris, talking about the great physical wonders that Chris must possess.
Jeremy says that with Chris’ “genetic makeup,” he’d be a great MMA fighter.
Microaggressions can also be expressed as unintentional racism from the privilege of systemic racism. This, too, is a cause of The Sunken Place.
In Get Out, we see intentional racism, a willful attempt to steal black bodies as a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
But we also see unintentional racism. For example, when the cop asks for Chris’ driver's license, Rose becomes self-righteous and hostile, acting like she is sticking up for Chris when her white privilege fails to see she is putting Chris in even more danger.
Dean Armitage is another example. He tries too hard to be nonracist, bringing up his love for Obama every chance he can get. His saccharine manner is condescending and fake. He is a man with something to hide.
When people lard you with their friendly manner like Dean does, they are afflicting you with toxic positivity.
Then there is Jeremy, Rose’s brother, who says to Chris, “With your genetic makeup, you could be a great fighter.”
Four. Gaslighting is a cause of The Sunken Place:
“Don’t trust your senses. I’ll tell you what the reality is.”
Gaslighting is when the bully makes the victim feel like the culprit by turning reality upside down. The gaslighter is so incessant in his gaslighting that he wears down his victim through sheer fatigue.
In Get Out, we see examples of Gaslighting when Chris is worried that Rose’s white parents will be uncomfortable that she is bringing a black boyfriend to their house.
“Do they know I’m black?” he asks.
But Rose repeatedly dismisses his concern as a non-issue. He’s crazy for being so worried even when his past experiences tell him otherwise.
Five. Cultural Appropriation is a cause of The Sunken Place:
When people of the dominant or privileged culture steal the culture of the less privileged for their own desires, they are committing what is called cultural appropriation.
In Get Out, the stealing of black bodies is a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs in which you address the possible criticism that Get Out, like the Amazon Prime series Them, is making a spectacle of black suffering, helplessness, and victimization for consumer entertainment and as such displaying this racism in such a flagrant form is exploitive. Do the journeys of Chris Washington and his friend Rod Williams have enough dignity, self-agency, courage, mental toughness, and resistance to avoid the same charges exacted upon the TV series Them? Explain.
In paragraph 7, you might summarize the criticism exacted upon the Amazon Prime series Them.
In paragraph 8, you might then argue whether or not Jordan Peele’s Get Out falls into the same pitfalls as Them.
Paragraph 9: Your conclusion is a short dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Works Cited with a minimum of 5 sources in MLA format follow on the last page.
Since paragraphs are the building blocks of our essays, we should ask ourselves: What makes a strong, effective paragraph?
Salience
First, a paragraph should be salient, meaning the writer is addressing a topic that is remarkable, meaningful, relevant, and timely. When writers are salient and relevant by addressing the needs of the time, they achieve the principle of Kairos, meaning that you are impressing your reader with ideas that are timely and are relevant to “the times we live in”--zeitgeist.
Main Idea or Topic Sentence
Second, a paragraph must have a single topic, often stated in a topic sentence but sometimes states through implication or suggestion. Whether or not there is a topic sentence, the paragraph will be governed by a controlling idea or what is called the main idea.
Unity
Third, a paragraph must achieve unity by consisting of supporting details that all point to the topic sentence or main topic.
Coherence
Fourth, a paragraph must have coherence, the state of being clear from the logical flow of one sentence to the other, often enhanced by appropriate transitions.
To summarize, paragraphs must have salience, a controlling idea, unity, and coherence.
Example #1 An argument in a thesis paragraph
The proposal to make community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a salient example of good intentions ushering us into the bowels of hell. The misguided plan to make parking lots into a homeless sanctuary will curdle into chaos, stench, and criminality. For one, colleges cannot afford enough law enforcement officers to patrol a vast area rife with assault, thievery, and other criminality, resulting in bankrupting the college with lawsuits. Second, the college cannot afford enough bathrooms to accommodate the thousands of people, which will in turn make the college a giant sewer that contaminates the entire community with infectious diseases. Third, the majority of people will look at the college as a cesspool of criminality and disease and avoid attending this lame excuse for a college, resulting in enrollment numbers so low that the college will soon cease to exist.
Example #2: A rebuttal to an argument
The above rebuttal against the proposal to turn community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a classic use of the slippery slope fallacy in which someone cries Chicken Little and all worst-case scenarios while assuming the parking lot plan won’t have any specific contingencies designed to prevent the panic-based emotionally-charged scenarios that have been hysterically described above. The above hysterics are in truth a smokescreen designed to make a selfish excuse for ignoring those students for whom horrible life circumstances beyond their control have put them in a homeless situation. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s contention that there will be criminality in the parking lot, obviously colleges will have a maximum occupancy at the level of which its law enforcement feels comfortable creating a secure place for the students. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s claim the college will “become a giant sewer,” obviously campus engineers will put enough bathrooms on the premises in proportion to the maximum occupancy allowed. Regarding the fear tactic that non-homeless students won’t enroll in the college, this is a paranoid scenario based on the irrational premise that the college won’t have any limits on the amount of homeless people it accommodates and under what restrictions those accommodations will be based. Let us, therefore, address the needs of our homeless population and leave the selfish Chicken Little arguments in the argumentative dustbin where they deserve.
Example #3: An argument with a topic sentence
Sure, Universal Basic Income sucks. It’s hardly enough money to create economic justice. It’s surely a pacifier for the masses who are getting punk-fed the bare minimum to live a half-decent existence. I’m also certain that UBI will relegate most of us to some sweaty, dank room where we’ll intoxicate ourselves with a myriad of unsavory substances while looking on with bloodshot eyes at some entertainment or other on YouTube or Netflix. We will grow fat, complacent, brain-dead. We’ll become less than human. We’ll become more like zombies, slogging through life without an ounce of pride or dignity as we live a sedentary life without individual goals, responsibility, or life purpose. We will be soulless pods hooked up to our private entertainment centers while the 1%, the real people, pull the strings, create technology that advances civilization and enjoy the spoils of their efforts as full human beings flourishing in some opulent environment while the rest of us poor UBI-receiving bots live like crammed sardines in shared housing with our equally depressed, brain-dead zombie roommates. So am I arguing against UBI? Hell no. Even if our lives are as crappy as the one I described above, the life without UBI as we head for the Great Unemployment Age presents an even greater hellish existence, one with starvation, a lack of basic medical supplies and treatment, and abject homelessness. Yeah, UBI sucks, but not getting UBI sucks even more. Don’t count on the government to share the 1%’s wealth with the rest of us. The 1% will only share as much as they have to, and they have calculated that giving us just enough UBI so that we don’t become a raging, lawless mob is worth the 4-trillion UBI annual price tag. We should just admit we lost the class war. We are now in the unenviable position where we can either take our UBI pittance, which sucks, or not take our UBI table scraps, which sucks even more. That is our dilemma. We must take this painful truth on the chin and move on with our crappy lives. The alternative is certain death.
Example #4: A counterargument with a topic sentence
The above argument, which essentially paints us as starving dogs that should be grateful for the table scraps of UBI is so full of grotesque logical fallacies that the person who wrote this specious argument should be thrown into Logical Fallacy Prison. For one, the writer gives us a false dilemma of only two choices: A crappy life with UBI or an even crappier life without UBI. There are other possibilities that the writer does not address because those possibilities present an inconvenience to his argument. For example, some people will continue to work and use UBI to supplement their income. Others will use UBI to fund their higher education, but the above writer is too busy enjoying his despair to consider these possibilities. Secondly, the writer presents a pessimism that is unfounded on evidence. He seems to think dehumanization from UBI is inevitable, yet he presents no facts to back up his claim. Rather, he indulges in his personal crapulent attitude and wishes to impose it on the rest of us, as if he’s doing us a favor by lavishing us with some universal truth, yet he is not. He is merely a Minister of Darkness contaminating us with his gospel of despair. Finally, he assumes the worst-case scenario of UBI and paints a broad brush over the human reaction to receiving guaranteed income to fulfill our basic life needs without addressing the complexities and unknowable, tentative outcomes. In short, the above writer is a grotesque nihilist who is hell-bent on infecting us with his anguish and despair. For the truth about UBI, I suggest we look elsewhere.
Example #5: A personal narrative with a topic sentence
We need stories to explain to us our ever-changing role in this world. Otherwise, we are doomed to be forever infantile. As an example, when I was a toddler, I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket, a white silken prized possession that became inseparable to me like one of my appendages. Tattered and mottled with yellowish spots, Geekee was my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me everywhere I went. At night, I rubbed the blanket’s corners on my cheek, the pleasant tickling sensation lulling me to sleep. To my consternation, my parents were not as enamored with Geekee as I was. They complained that Geekee smelled. It was threadbare. It had visible stains that I paraded to the public who must have believed that my parents were too cheap to buy me a new blanket. At four years of age I had outgrown Geekee, they said, and it was time Geekee and I part ways, a suggestion that sent me into a rage. This battle between my parents and me continued until one day, as we were moving across the country from Florida to California my father slyly opened his window and told me to look out the window opposite his, for he said there was a baby alligator on the side of the road. As I looked in vain to spot the alligator, my father ripped Geekee from my hands and threw it out his open window. It all happened so fast that I didn’t know my father had grabbed my blanket. Instead, I believed his lie that the powerful wind had sucked Geekee from my grasp and had flung the blanket out of the window. I told my father to stop the car at once. We had to retrieve Geekee. But my father said we had to keep on going. Besides, he said, Geekee was now keeping the baby alligator warm. With no mother to fend for him, the little reptile needed the blanket’s warmth far more than I did. Imagining the baby alligator swathed in my blanket helped me part ways with Geekee, for I was now convinced that there was a creature on this planet who needed Geekee more than I did. When I was 15, I worked out at Walt’s Gym with a 25-year old bodybuilder, Bull, who had his own Geekee--Gilligan’s Island. When the local station took his favorite TV show off the air, he was so overcome with rage that he kicked his mother’s TV screen with his combat boots. He remained inconsolable, and I was sad that I could not share a story with him that might wean himself off Gilligan’s Island forever.
Example #6 Personal narrative with a topic sentence
As a thirteen-year-old in 1974, I had reached the conclusion that adult life was a loathsome existence and therefore not for me. I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Quite at home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up.
Example #7: Brief Movie Critique with a lack of unity due to some rambling:
White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a documentary currently running on Netflix about a clothing company that sold its clothes by hyping chiseled bodies and “exclusive” beauty status in the late 90s to early 2000s before its collapse, is a decent, not great, documentary, but it’s worth watching for the pleasure of watching such an immoral business fall flat on its butt. It gives you a taste of the pre-social media zeitgeist and makes you wonder if all those chiseled “hot bods” might get lost in the mix in the age of Instagram and social influencers. My favorite line from the documentary is when a culture critic says the genius of Abercrombie & Fitch is not in delivering consumer goods to what the market dictates, but rather telling the consumers what they wanted, essentially implanting desires in their heads that they never had had before. Now that’s genius. On a personal note, I’ve never been inside an Abercrombie & Fitch store, but I have had students over the years tell me how cheap the clothing is, how they’ll find tears in the armpit of their shirts and loose threads within just a few days. The company was all smoke and mirrors, selling the chimera of exclusive beauty and status. It did so in part by exploiting racist mythology. Good riddance to its demise.
Example #8: Thesis paragraph
In Jordan Peele's masterpiece Get Out, the hero Chris Washington must survive and resist The Sunken Place, which is evident through Chris' pressure to code-switch at the Armitage home, his confrontation of numerous microaggressions, which erode his psyche and question his humanity; Rose's gaslighting of Chris, which makes him not only question his reality but his sanity; and the stealing of black bodies, which is a metaphor for cultural appropriation and exploitation of African-Americans in a rigged system.
If McMahon Were Writing Essay 4, This Would be His Outline:
Paragraph 1, define The Sunken Place
Paragraph 2, Thesis: Argue that The Sunken Place is a critique, not of Southern Jim Crow racism, but of white liberal racism in the form of pressuring black people to code-switch, afflicting black people with microaggressions, and inflicting economic racism on the black community.
Paragraph 3: Show The Sunken Place of code-switching by comparing Chris to Aaron in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 9.
Paragraphs 4 and 5: Compare the microaggressions Chris experiences to Loquarreous in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 1, "Three Slaps."
Paragraph 5: Compare microaggression Chris experiences to those shown in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 7, "Trini 2 De Bone."
Paragraph 6: Show that neoliberal America has done little to improve the economic landscape for African-Americans by examining the issues in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 4, "The Big Pay Back."
Paragraphs 7 and 8: Explain why Get Out succeeds while Them fails as a critique of racism.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis
Building Block #1 Worth 25 points and due on May 25
Writing Your Introduction Paragraph as an Extended Definition of the Sunken Place
Purpose of Formative Assessment: To build your Essay 4 with your introductory paragraph.
Objectives:
Write an introductory paragraph with a single-sentence definition followed by an extended definition to show a clear understanding of The Sunken Place.
Two. Use appropriate signal phrases and in-text citations.
Three. Use this paragraph as a building block for your Get Out essay.
Building Block #1
Assignment Description
Writing Your Introduction Paragraph as an Extended Definition of The Sunken Place
In your introductory paragraph, define The Sunken Place from the provided research materials above.
Give a one-sentence definition of The Sunken Place and expound on your definition by giving distinguishing characteristics examples from the sources given on the previous modules. Your distinguishing characteristics will be gathered by quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing major points.
The Purpose of this Assignment
All of my assignments are “building blocks” toward your finished essay, which in online education circles is referred to as your Summative Assessment. By fulfilling the requirements of this assignment, you will have a first paragraph completed toward your essay.
In a previous module, I broke down some of the key ingredients of The Sunken Place. Here is a review:
One, it is a state of hypnosis in which we lose our sense of free will and self-agency as we feel we are succumbing to overwhelming forces that strip us of all control and dignity.
Two, this hypnosis comes from a force that bullies and gaslights us, persuades us that there is no hope for a better life, that the “best thing to do” is to surrender to make the process of losing our freedom as painless as possible.
Three, The Sunken Place suppresses our scream for help. As observed in Ross A. Lincoln’s “‘Get Out’ Director Jordan Peele Explains ‘The Sunken Place,’” Peele discussed The Sunken Place on Twitter as a state of hopelessness and despair: “We’re all marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.” The Sunken Place is to be marginalized by systemic racism and injustice and to have one’s cries ignored and silenced over and over until one is despondent.
Four, The Sunken Place is the result of a raw power play. When Missy Armitage hypnotizes Chris Washington, she lets him know that she has complete power over him by gloating, “You cannot move.” This power play is both psychological and physical.
Five, The Sunken Place is powerful because in part the victim internalizes helplessness. Such internalization is called learned helplessness in which the victim, even if given options to go free, stays imprisoned because the victim has been brainwashed to believe that helplessness is indefinite and therefore there is no such thing as hope. Even if freedom exists, the person who internalizes learned helplessness does not know what to do with freedom. Therefore, freedom becomes useless.
Six, The Sunken Place triggers a fight-flight response. Triggered by terror, people get a spike in adrenaline, rapid heart rate, dilation of pupils, shaking and trembling, and paralysis. We see this fight-flight response at the end of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video.
Seven, The Sunken Place is to be humiliated and abused yet to be told that you’re the one who’s crazy because the perpetrator of your humiliation is innocent. As Jake Skubish writes in his article “Get Out, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the stories we tell ourselves,” the movie Get Out is about narratives that exalt whiteness and marginalize black people. Whites are part of a grand narrative that “weaponizes the lie of white innocence.” Blacks, on the other hand, are not part of the narrative. Pushed aside, they’re pawns and spectators, told to watch the white narrative obediently from their Sunken Place.
Eight, the source of The Sunken Place is not red-state white America. No, it's white liberal America with its patronization, microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and gaslighting, which create a rabbit hole that is easy to sink in.
Remember, our hero Chris Washington visits his girlfriend's house, curated as a white liberal enclave.
The movie is a critique of neoliberal white America and the way the system exploits black people and puts them in The Sunken Place as seen in Season 3 Episode 1 of Atlanta, "Three Slaps."
Writing Your Extended Definition Requires Knowing the 3 Elements of an Extended Definition
Remember that when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things:
single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining
the class or category that the term belongs to
the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Instructions:
Step One. Begin Paragraph 1 with a single-sentence definition of The Sunken Place.
For an extended definition, begin with a single-sentence definition. By doing this, you are helping the reader understand the meaning of The Sunken Place.
As we discussed earlier, when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things: a single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining, the class that the term belongs to, and the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Some of you may be asking, what class does The Sunken Place belong to?
While there is no single right answer, here some suggestions:
Altered state of mind
State of learned helplessness
Primordial fear
Helping your reader have a clear grasp of a central term in your essay makes your writing more clear and effective. The Purdue Writing Lab has an effective description of extended definitions with the link here.
Step Two. Expand your definition with distinguishing characteristics and examples of The Sunken Place.
See the above breakdown for the different characteristics and flesh those out in your paragraph.
Step Three: Use signal phrases for your summary, paraphrase, and quoted content.
It is important that you show your ability to summarize, paraphrase, and quote your source material by using signal phrases, which are short phrases you use to introduce quotes, paraphrased, or summarized content. Here are 6 important components to consider when writing signal phrases:
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
You must include an extended definition of The Sunken Place for your introductory paragraph.
Your distinguishing characteristics of Jim Crow will come from the provided sources in these Modules
As you quote, paraphrase, and summarize major points about The Sunken Place, you will use signal phrases.
In addition to signal phrases, you will use in-text citations. The Purdue Owl MLA in-text citations is helpful.
The length of your paragraph should be between 150-200 words.
You must upload an attachment of your paragraph to Canvas.
How I Break Down Your Grade for This Assignment of 25 Points
Clarity and usefulness of your single-sentence definition of The Sunken Place, 5 points.
Clarity and usefulness of examples you use to flesh out your definition of The Sunken Place: 5 points.
Use of signal phrases and in-text citations to transition from your explanation of The Sunken Place to your quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material: 5 points.
The authenticity of your writing and the degree of meaning you give your subject matter. A writer never wants to just “go through the motions,” that is to say, deliver a perfunctory effort. Deliver the degree of authenticity and meaning this subject deserves: 10 points.
Building Block #2
Building Block Assignment #2: Does Get Out avoid the pitfalls of excessive victimization?
Worth 25 points and due on June 3
Building Block #2 is two paragraphs, which will be used in your essay before your conclusion paragraph.
In your first building block paragraph, you will summarize the criticism exacted against the TV series Them, which has been accused of using excessive victimization and “trauma porn” for entertainment purposes.
For this source material, you will use the following:
In your second building block paragraph, you’ll answer the question: Does Get Out avoid the pitfalls and artistic flaws that are charged against Them? Explain in a paragraph.
Essay Outline for The Sunken Place in Get Out
Defining The Sunken Place in Get Out and Making an Essay Outline
We can break down The Sunken Place in Get Out by understanding the following terms:
Paragraph 1: Defining the Sunken Place as Learned Helplessness
Learned Helplessness
When people are brainwashed into believing that they have no free will or free agency to assert effective action against a problem, they become apathetic, feel helpless, and create a self-fulfilling prophecy by which their negative outcomes reinforce their sense of helplessness so that they are trapped in a feedback loop.
There is a point in the movie where Chris stops believing in his senses, and he develops a helpless passivity to Rose’s gaslighting, but when he sees the evil that is around him, he rejects Rose and he begins to fight for his life, using cotton to plug his ears, and deer antlers to destroy his enemy.
Jim Hudson is about to steal Chris’ body and he says, “You’ll live as a passenger, an audience, in The Sunken Place. I’ll control the functions.”
Thesis Structure Example:
Sample #1
In Get Out, the psychological state known as The Sunken Place is effectively illustrated by Chris’ hellish journey, which consists of ___________________, ________________, __________________, _____________________, and _____________________.
Sample #2
Get Out is a microcosm of systemic racism in America that shows racism from a black man’s perspective and how that racism creates a traumatic state of mind known as The Sunken Place evidenced by ______________, _______________, ________________, ____________________, and ________________________.
Sample #3
In the masterpiece Get Out, the protagonist Chris Washington goes deep into the bowels of white liberal America where he descends into The Sunken Place characterized by _________________, __________________, __________________, _______________, and ___________________________.
Body Paragraphs
Two. Code-Switching is a cause and symptom of The Sunken Place:
When black people try to make white people more comfortable or try to pass as white, black people will code-switch, assuming the body language, vocal intonations, and mannerisms associated with whiteness.
The implicit message in code-switching is “White is good. Black is bad. I will try to win you over by being white.”
The motivation for code-switching is shame, self-rejection, and self-apology.
Code-switching teaches us that racism is not merely a bias against people of color; it is a bias against the culture of black people.
There is a cruel irony to code-switching: A lot of people want to act black, be cool, and be down, so they’ll appropriate black mannerisms and speech as their whims dictate; however, these same white people will expect black people to code-switch white to make them more comfortable.
Some other examples of code-switching are in the movie Sorry to Bother You and in the Atlanta episode 9 of season 3.
Three. Microaggressions are a cause of The Sunken Place:
Microaggressions are “small racist acts or comments” done in a spirit of ignorance, condescending patronization, discomfort, or all of the above.
Microaggressions are caused by the following personality traits:
bull-headed ignorance
arrogance
insensitivity
presumptuousness
crassness (social nincompoop who blunders in human relations)
laziness
narcissistic entitlement
Buzzfeed has a good list to get acquainted with some common examples.
Get Out is full of microaggressions with white people trying to hard to ingratiate themselves, using excessive flattery toward Chris, talking about the great physical wonders that Chris must possess.
Jeremy says that with Chris’ “genetic makeup,” he’d be a great MMA fighter.
Microaggressions can also be expressed as unintentional racism from the privilege of systemic racism. This, too, is a cause of The Sunken Place.
In Get Out, we see intentional racism, a willful attempt to steal black bodies as a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
But we also see unintentional racism. For example, when the cop asks for Chris’ driver's license, Rose becomes self-righteous and hostile, acting like she is sticking up for Chris when her white privilege fails to see she is putting Chris in even more danger.
Dean Armitage is another example. He tries too hard to be nonracist, bringing up his love for Obama every chance he can get. His saccharine manner is condescending and fake. He is a man with something to hide.
When people lard you with their friendly manner like Dean does, they are afflicting you with toxic positivity.
Then there is Jeremy, Rose’s brother, who says to Chris, “With your genetic makeup, you could be a great fighter.”
Four. Gaslighting is a cause of The Sunken Place:
“Don’t trust your senses. I’ll tell you what the reality is.”
Gaslighting is when the bully makes the victim feel like the culprit by turning reality upside down. The gaslighter is so incessant in his gaslighting that he wears down his victim through sheer fatigue.
In Get Out, we see examples of Gaslighting when Chris is worried that Rose’s white parents will be uncomfortable that she is bringing a black boyfriend to their house.
“Do they know I’m black?” he asks.
But Rose repeatedly dismisses his concern as a non-issue. He’s crazy for being so worried even when his past experiences tell him otherwise.
Five. Cultural Appropriation is a cause of The Sunken Place:
When people of the dominant or privileged culture steal the culture of the less privileged for their own desires, they are committing what is called cultural appropriation.
In Get Out, the stealing of black bodies is a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs in which you address the possible criticism that Get Out, like the Amazon Prime series Them, is making a spectacle of black suffering, helplessness, and victimization for consumer entertainment and as such displaying this racism in such a flagrant form is exploitive. Do the journeys of Chris Washington and his friend Rod Williams have enough dignity, self-agency, courage, mental toughness, and resistance to avoid the same charges exacted upon the TV series Them? Explain.
In paragraph 7, you might summarize the criticism exacted upon the Amazon Prime series Them.
In paragraph 8, you might then argue whether or not Jordan Peele’s Get Out falls into the same pitfalls as Them.
Paragraph 9: Your conclusion is a short dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Works Cited with a minimum of 5 sources in MLA format follow on the last page.
Since paragraphs are the building blocks of our essays, we should ask ourselves: What makes a strong, effective paragraph?
Salience
First, a paragraph should be salient, meaning the writer is addressing a topic that is remarkable, meaningful, relevant, and timely. When writers are salient and relevant by addressing the needs of the time, they achieve the principle of Kairos, meaning that you are impressing your reader with ideas that are timely and are relevant to “the times we live in”--zeitgeist.
Main Idea or Topic Sentence
Second, a paragraph must have a single topic, often stated in a topic sentence but sometimes states through implication or suggestion. Whether or not there is a topic sentence, the paragraph will be governed by a controlling idea or what is called the main idea.
Unity
Third, a paragraph must achieve unity by consisting of supporting details that all point to the topic sentence or main topic.
Coherence
Fourth, a paragraph must have coherence, the state of being clear from the logical flow of one sentence to the other, often enhanced by appropriate transitions.
To summarize, paragraphs must have salience, a controlling idea, unity, and coherence.
Example #1 An argument in a thesis paragraph
The proposal to make community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a salient example of good intentions ushering us into the bowels of hell. The misguided plan to make parking lots into a homeless sanctuary will curdle into chaos, stench, and criminality. For one, colleges cannot afford enough law enforcement officers to patrol a vast area rife with assault, thievery, and other criminality, resulting in bankrupting the college with lawsuits. Second, the college cannot afford enough bathrooms to accommodate the thousands of people, which will in turn make the college a giant sewer that contaminates the entire community with infectious diseases. Third, the majority of people will look at the college as a cesspool of criminality and disease and avoid attending this lame excuse for a college, resulting in enrollment numbers so low that the college will soon cease to exist.
Example #2: A rebuttal to an argument
The above rebuttal against the proposal to turn community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a classic use of the slippery slope fallacy in which someone cries Chicken Little and all worst-case scenarios while assuming the parking lot plan won’t have any specific contingencies designed to prevent the panic-based emotionally-charged scenarios that have been hysterically described above. The above hysterics are in truth a smokescreen designed to make a selfish excuse for ignoring those students for whom horrible life circumstances beyond their control have put them in a homeless situation. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s contention that there will be criminality in the parking lot, obviously colleges will have a maximum occupancy at the level of which its law enforcement feels comfortable creating a secure place for the students. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s claim the college will “become a giant sewer,” obviously campus engineers will put enough bathrooms on the premises in proportion to the maximum occupancy allowed. Regarding the fear tactic that non-homeless students won’t enroll in the college, this is a paranoid scenario based on the irrational premise that the college won’t have any limits on the amount of homeless people it accommodates and under what restrictions those accommodations will be based. Let us, therefore, address the needs of our homeless population and leave the selfish Chicken Little arguments in the argumentative dustbin where they deserve.
Example #3: An argument with a topic sentence
Sure, Universal Basic Income sucks. It’s hardly enough money to create economic justice. It’s surely a pacifier for the masses who are getting punk-fed the bare minimum to live a half-decent existence. I’m also certain that UBI will relegate most of us to some sweaty, dank room where we’ll intoxicate ourselves with a myriad of unsavory substances while looking on with bloodshot eyes at some entertainment or other on YouTube or Netflix. We will grow fat, complacent, brain-dead. We’ll become less than human. We’ll become more like zombies, slogging through life without an ounce of pride or dignity as we live a sedentary life without individual goals, responsibility, or life purpose. We will be soulless pods hooked up to our private entertainment centers while the 1%, the real people, pull the strings, create technology that advances civilization and enjoy the spoils of their efforts as full human beings flourishing in some opulent environment while the rest of us poor UBI-receiving bots live like crammed sardines in shared housing with our equally depressed, brain-dead zombie roommates. So am I arguing against UBI? Hell no. Even if our lives are as crappy as the one I described above, the life without UBI as we head for the Great Unemployment Age presents an even greater hellish existence, one with starvation, a lack of basic medical supplies and treatment, and abject homelessness. Yeah, UBI sucks, but not getting UBI sucks even more. Don’t count on the government to share the 1%’s wealth with the rest of us. The 1% will only share as much as they have to, and they have calculated that giving us just enough UBI so that we don’t become a raging, lawless mob is worth the 4-trillion UBI annual price tag. We should just admit we lost the class war. We are now in the unenviable position where we can either take our UBI pittance, which sucks, or not take our UBI table scraps, which sucks even more. That is our dilemma. We must take this painful truth on the chin and move on with our crappy lives. The alternative is certain death.
Example #4: A counterargument with a topic sentence
The above argument, which essentially paints us as starving dogs that should be grateful for the table scraps of UBI is so full of grotesque logical fallacies that the person who wrote this specious argument should be thrown into Logical Fallacy Prison. For one, the writer gives us a false dilemma of only two choices: A crappy life with UBI or an even crappier life without UBI. There are other possibilities that the writer does not address because those possibilities present an inconvenience to his argument. For example, some people will continue to work and use UBI to supplement their income. Others will use UBI to fund their higher education, but the above writer is too busy enjoying his despair to consider these possibilities. Secondly, the writer presents a pessimism that is unfounded on evidence. He seems to think dehumanization from UBI is inevitable, yet he presents no facts to back up his claim. Rather, he indulges in his personal crapulent attitude and wishes to impose it on the rest of us, as if he’s doing us a favor by lavishing us with some universal truth, yet he is not. He is merely a Minister of Darkness contaminating us with his gospel of despair. Finally, he assumes the worst-case scenario of UBI and paints a broad brush over the human reaction to receiving guaranteed income to fulfill our basic life needs without addressing the complexities and unknowable, tentative outcomes. In short, the above writer is a grotesque nihilist who is hell-bent on infecting us with his anguish and despair. For the truth about UBI, I suggest we look elsewhere.
Example #5: A personal narrative with a topic sentence
We need stories to explain to us our ever-changing role in this world. Otherwise, we are doomed to be forever infantile. As an example, when I was a toddler, I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket, a white silken prized possession that became inseparable to me like one of my appendages. Tattered and mottled with yellowish spots, Geekee was my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me everywhere I went. At night, I rubbed the blanket’s corners on my cheek, the pleasant tickling sensation lulling me to sleep. To my consternation, my parents were not as enamored with Geekee as I was. They complained that Geekee smelled. It was threadbare. It had visible stains that I paraded to the public who must have believed that my parents were too cheap to buy me a new blanket. At four years of age I had outgrown Geekee, they said, and it was time Geekee and I part ways, a suggestion that sent me into a rage. This battle between my parents and me continued until one day, as we were moving across the country from Florida to California my father slyly opened his window and told me to look out the window opposite his, for he said there was a baby alligator on the side of the road. As I looked in vain to spot the alligator, my father ripped Geekee from my hands and threw it out his open window. It all happened so fast that I didn’t know my father had grabbed my blanket. Instead, I believed his lie that the powerful wind had sucked Geekee from my grasp and had flung the blanket out of the window. I told my father to stop the car at once. We had to retrieve Geekee. But my father said we had to keep on going. Besides, he said, Geekee was now keeping the baby alligator warm. With no mother to fend for him, the little reptile needed the blanket’s warmth far more than I did. Imagining the baby alligator swathed in my blanket helped me part ways with Geekee, for I was now convinced that there was a creature on this planet who needed Geekee more than I did. When I was 15, I worked out at Walt’s Gym with a 25-year old bodybuilder, Bull, who had his own Geekee--Gilligan’s Island. When the local station took his favorite TV show off the air, he was so overcome with rage that he kicked his mother’s TV screen with his combat boots. He remained inconsolable, and I was sad that I could not share a story with him that might wean himself off Gilligan’s Island forever.
Example #6 Personal narrative with a topic sentence
As a thirteen-year-old in 1974, I had reached the conclusion that adult life was a loathsome existence and therefore not for me. I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Quite at home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up.
Example #7: Brief Movie Critique with a lack of unity due to some rambling:
White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a documentary currently running on Netflix about a clothing company that sold its clothes by hyping chiseled bodies and “exclusive” beauty status in the late 90s to early 2000s before its collapse, is a decent, not great, documentary, but it’s worth watching for the pleasure of watching such an immoral business fall flat on its butt. It gives you a taste of the pre-social media zeitgeist and makes you wonder if all those chiseled “hot bods” might get lost in the mix in the age of Instagram and social influencers. My favorite line from the documentary is when a culture critic says the genius of Abercrombie & Fitch is not in delivering consumer goods to what the market dictates, but rather telling the consumers what they wanted, essentially implanting desires in their heads that they never had had before. Now that’s genius. On a personal note, I’ve never been inside an Abercrombie & Fitch store, but I have had students over the years tell me how cheap the clothing is, how they’ll find tears in the armpit of their shirts and loose threads within just a few days. The company was all smoke and mirrors, selling the chimera of exclusive beauty and status. It did so in part by exploiting racist mythology. Good riddance to its demise.
Example #8: Thesis paragraph
In Jordan Peele's masterpiece Get Out, the hero Chris Washington must survive and resist The Sunken Place, which is evident through Chris' pressure to code-switch at the Armitage home, his confrontation of numerous microaggressions, which erode his psyche and question his humanity; Rose's gaslighting of Chris, which makes him not only question his reality but his sanity; and the stealing of black bodies, which is a metaphor for cultural appropriation and exploitation of African-Americans in a rigged system.
Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
McMahon writes, "Jeff Henderson's life out of prison was harder than life in prison."
"Jeff Henderson's life out of prison," McMahon observes, "was harder out of prison than in it."
"Jeff Henderson's life was harder out of prison," McMahon claims.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided byPurdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
Essay #4: The Sunken Place in Get Out (200 points; due June 10)
Essay is in two parts; Part 1 is 4 pages and Part 2 is about a page.
First Part of Your Essay (about 4 pages)
Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the claim that Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out uses the horror movie genre to create a realistic horrific state of mind for victims of racism called “The Sunken Place.” Consider that this “Sunken Place” is the result of racist gaslighting, which can be defined as someone in power bullying, confusing, bewildering, and discombobulating the innocent victim, such as Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and attempting to make the victim feel confused and guilty when in fact the bully is the culprit.
As you consider the notion of gaslighting and systemic racism in the movie Get Out, you will want to watch the 15-minute YouTube video that addresses this theme, “The Philosophy of Get Out--Wisecrack Edition.”
The brilliant video “The Philosophy of Get Out” analyzes several causes of “The Sunken Place”:
How white liberalism and the romanticization of blackness perpetuate systemic racism in America
How so-called “post-racial liberalism,” a form of white self-congratulation during the Obama years, was a hoax, a thin veneer that could barely conceal a racist agenda
How white liberals going out of their way to be “not racist” make people of color feel weird and alienated
How the romanticization of blackness by white people, elevating black people to being cool and super chic, is a way of both “lionizing and demonizing” people of color so that they never enjoy the feeling of just being normal
How white people exploit the black body and use black people to satisfy white fantasies
How white people are so intent on culturally appropriating blackness that they actually want to be black such as the case of Rachel Dolezal who is referenced in the video.
Last Part of Your Essay (Counterargument, about 1 or 2 paragraphs or a half a page before your conclusion paragraph)
In the last part of your essay, address the criticism that showered on the Amazon Prime TV series Them. This show is accused of creating a horror genre about American racism inspired by Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, but whereas Get Out is largely praised as a successful work of art, Them is accused of making a spectacle of black suffering and victimization for entertainment purposes. In contrast, Get Out is looked at as a movie that depicts racism in a way that defends the dignity of people of color. Does Get Out succeed in this regard? Does the resistance of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) with the help of his friend Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery) give a sense of dignity, hope, and triumph for them and in turn give people of color who watch Get Out a relatable, inspiring experience? Answer this question in the last page of your essay.
You will need a minimum of 5 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Building Block #1 for Essay 4
Worth 25 points and due on May 25
Writing Your Introduction Paragraph as an Extended Definition of the Sunken Place
Purpose of Formative Assessment: To build your Essay 4 with your introductory paragraph.
Objectives:
Write an introductory paragraph with a single-sentence definition followed by an extended definition to show a clear understanding of The Sunken Place.
Two. Use appropriate signal phrases and in-text citations.
Three. Use this paragraph as a building block for your Get Out essay.
Building Block #1
Assignment Description
Writing Your Introduction Paragraph as an Extended Definition of The Sunken Place
In your introductory paragraph, define The Sunken Place from the provided research materials above.
Give a one-sentence definition of The Sunken Place and expound on your definition by giving distinguishing characteristics examples from the sources given on the previous modules. Your distinguishing characteristics will be gathered by quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing major points.
The Purpose of this Assignment
All of my assignments are “building blocks” toward your finished essay, which in online education circles is referred to as your Summative Assessment. By fulfilling the requirements of this assignment, you will have a first paragraph completed toward your essay.
In a previous module, I broke down some of the key ingredients of The Sunken Place. Here is a review:
One, it is a state of hypnosis in which we lose our sense of free will and self-agency as we feel we are succumbing to overwhelming forces that strip us of all control and dignity.
Two, this hypnosis comes from a force that bullies and gaslights us, persuades us that there is no hope for a better life, that the “best thing to do” is to surrender to make the process of losing our freedom as painless as possible.
Three, The Sunken Place suppresses our scream for help. As observed in Ross A. Lincoln’s “‘Get Out’ Director Jordan Peele Explains ‘The Sunken Place,’” Peele discussed The Sunken Place on Twitter as a state of hopelessness and despair: “We’re all marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.” The Sunken Place is to be marginalized by systemic racism and injustice and to have one’s cries ignored and silenced over and over until one is despondent.
Four, The Sunken Place is the result of a raw power play. When Missy Armitage hypnotizes Chris Washington, she lets him know that she has complete power over him by gloating, “You cannot move.” This power play is both psychological and physical.
Five, The Sunken Place is powerful because in part the victim internalizes helplessness. Such internalization is called learned helplessness in which the victim, even if given options to go free, stays imprisoned because the victim has been brainwashed to believe that helplessness is indefinite and therefore there is no such thing as hope. Even if freedom exists, the person who internalizes learned helplessness does not know what to do with freedom. Therefore, freedom becomes useless.
Six, The Sunken Place triggers a fight-flight response. Triggered by terror, people get a spike in adrenaline, rapid heart rate, dilation of pupils, shaking and trembling, and paralysis. We see this fight-flight response at the end of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video.
Seven, The Sunken Place is to be humiliated and abused yet to be told that you’re the one who’s crazy because the perpetrator of your humiliation is innocent. As Jake Skubish writes in his article “Get Out, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the stories we tell ourselves,” the movie Get Out is about narratives that exalt whiteness and marginalize black people. Whites are part of a grand narrative that “weaponizes the lie of white innocence.” Blacks, on the other hand, are not part of the narrative. Pushed aside, they’re pawns and spectators, told to watch the white narrative obediently from their Sunken Place.
Writing Your Extended Definition Requires Knowing the 3 Elements of an Extended Definition
Remember that when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things:
single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining
the class or category that the term belongs to
the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Instructions:
Step One. Begin Paragraph 1 with a single-sentence definition of The Sunken Place.
For an extended definition, begin with a single-sentence definition. By doing this, you are helping the reader understand the meaning of The Sunken Place.
As we discussed earlier, when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things: a single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining, the class that the term belongs to, and the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Some of you may be asking, what class does The Sunken Place belong to?
While there is no single right answer, here some suggestions:
Altered state of mind
State of learned helplessness
Primordial fear
Helping your reader have a clear grasp of a central term in your essay makes your writing more clear and effective. The Purdue Writing Lab has an effective description of extended definitions with the link here.
Step Two. Expand your definition with distinguishing characteristics and examples of The Sunken Place.
See the above breakdown for the different characteristics and flesh those out in your paragraph.
Step Three: Use signal phrases for your summary, paraphrase, and quoted content.
It is important that you show your ability to summarize, paraphrase, and quote your source material by using signal phrases, which are short phrases you use to introduce quotes, paraphrased, or summarized content. Here are 6 important components to consider when writing signal phrases:
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Building Block Assignment #2: Does Get Out avoid the pitfalls of excessive victimization?
Worth 25 points and due on June 3
Building Block #2 is two paragraphs, which will be used in your essay before your conclusion paragraph.
In your first building block paragraph, you will summarize the criticism exacted against the TV series Them, which has been accused of using excessive victimization and “trauma porn” for entertainment purposes.
For this source material, you will use the following:
In your second building block paragraph, you’ll answer the question: Does Get Out avoid the pitfalls and artistic flaws that are charged against Them? Explain in a paragraph.
Essay Outline for The Sunken Place in Get Out
Defining The Sunken Place in Get Out and Making an Essay Outline
We can break down The Sunken Place in Get Out by understanding the following terms:
Paragraph 1:Defining the Sunken Place as Learned Helplessness
Learned Helplessness
When people are brainwashed into believing that they have no free will or free agency to assert effective action against a problem, they become apathetic, feel helpless, and create a self-fulfilling prophecy by which their negative outcomes reinforce their sense of helplessness so that they are trapped in a feedback loop.
There is a point in the movie where Chris stops believing in his senses, and he develops a helpless passivity to Rose’s gaslighting, but when he sees the evil that is around him, he rejects Rose and he begins to fight for his life, using cotton to plug his ears, and deer antlers to destroy his enemy.
Jim Hudson is about to steal Chris’ body and he says, “You’ll live as a passenger, an audience, in The Sunken Place. I’ll control the functions.”
Thesis Structure Example:
Sample #1
In Get Out, the psychological state known as The Sunken Place is effectively illustrated by Chris’ hellish journey, which consists of ___________________, ________________, __________________, _____________________, and _____________________.
Sample #2
Get Out is a microcosm of systemic racism in America that shows racism from a black man’s perspective and how that racism creates a traumatic state of mind known as The Sunken Place evidenced by ______________, _______________, ________________, ____________________, and ________________________.
Sample #3
In the masterpiece Get Out, the protagonist Chris Washington goes deep into the bowels of white liberal America where he descends into The Sunken Place characterized by _________________, __________________, __________________, _______________, and ___________________________.
Body Paragraphs
Two. Code-Switching is a cause and symptom of The Sunken Place:
When black people try to make white people more comfortable or try to pass as white, black people will code-switch, assuming the body language, vocal intonations, and mannerisms associated with whiteness.
The implicit message in code-switching is “White is good. Black is bad. I will try to win you over by being white.”
The motivation for code-switching is shame, self-rejection, and self-apology.
Code-switching teaches us that racism is not merely a bias against people of color; it is a bias against the culture of black people.
There is a cruel irony to code-switching: A lot of people want to act black, be cool, and be down, so they’ll appropriate black mannerisms and speech as their whims dictate; however, these same white people will expect black people to code-switch white to make them more comfortable.
Some other examples of code-switching are in the movie Sorry to Bother You and in the Atlanta episode 9 of season 3.
Three. Microaggressions are a cause of The Sunken Place:
Microaggressions are “small racist acts or comments” done in a spirit of ignorance, condescending patronization, discomfort, or all of the above.
Buzzfeed has a good list to get acquainted with some common examples.
Get Out is full of microaggressions with white people trying to hard to ingratiate themselves, using excessive flattery toward Chris, talking about the great physical wonders that Chris must possess.
Jeremy says that with Chris’ “genetic makeup,” he’d be a great MMA fighter.
Microaggressions can also be expressed as unintentional racism from the privilege of systemic racism. This, too, is a cause of The Sunken Place.
In Get Out, we see intentional racism, a willful attempt to steal black bodies as a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
But we also see unintentional racism. For example, when the cop asks for Chris’ driver's license, Rose becomes self-righteous and hostile, acting like she is sticking up for Chris when her white privilege fails to see she is putting Chris in even more danger.
Dean Armitage is another example. He tries too hard to be nonracist, bringing up his love for Obama every chance he can get. His saccharine manner is condescending and fake. He is a man with something to hide.
When people lard you with their friendly manner like Dean does, they are afflicting you with toxic positivity.
Then there is Jeremy, Rose’s brother, who says to Chris, “With your genetic makeup, you could be a great fighter.”
Four. Gaslighting is a cause of The Sunken Place:
“Don’t trust your senses. I’ll tell you what the reality is.”
Gaslighting is when the bully makes the victim feel like the culprit by turning reality upside down. The gaslighter is so incessant in his gaslighting that he wears down his victim through sheer fatigue.
In Get Out, we see examples of Gaslighting when Chris is worried that Rose’s white parents will be uncomfortable that she is bringing a black boyfriend to their house.
“Do they know I’m black?” he asks.
But Rose repeatedly dismisses his concern as a non-issue. He’s crazy for being so worried even when his past experiences tell him otherwise.
Five. Cultural Appropriation is a cause of The Sunken Place:
When people of the dominant or privileged culture steal the culture of the less privileged for their own desires, they are committing what is called cultural appropriation.
In Get Out, the stealing of black bodies is a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs in which you address the possible criticism that Get Out, like the Amazon Prime series Them, is making a spectacle of black suffering, helplessness, and victimization for consumer entertainment and as such displaying this racism in such a flagrant form is exploitive. Do the journeys of Chris Washington and his friend Rod Williams have enough dignity, self-agency, courage, mental toughness, and resistance to avoid the same charges exacted upon the TV series Them? Explain.
In paragraph 7, you might summarize the criticism exacted upon the Amazon Prime series Them.
In paragraph 8, you might then argue whether or not Jordan Peele’s Get Out falls into the same pitfalls as Them.
Paragraph 9: Your conclusion is a short dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Works Cited with a minimum of 5 sources in MLA format follow on the last page.
Since paragraphs are the building blocks of our essays, we should ask ourselves: What makes a strong, effective paragraph?
Salience
First, a paragraph should be salient, meaning the writer is addressing a topic that is remarkable, meaningful, relevant, and timely. When writers are salient and relevant by addressing the needs of the time, they achieve the principle of Kairos, meaning that you are impressing your reader with ideas that are timely and are relevant to “the times we live in”--zeitgeist.
Main Idea or Topic Sentence
Second, a paragraph must have a single topic, often stated in a topic sentence but sometimes states through implication or suggestion. Whether or not there is a topic sentence, the paragraph will be governed by a controlling idea or what is called the main idea.
Unity
Third, a paragraph must achieve unity by consisting of supporting details that all point to the topic sentence or main topic.
Coherence
Fourth, a paragraph must have coherence, the state of being clear from the logical flow of one sentence to the other, often enhanced by appropriate transitions.
To summarize, paragraphs must have salience, a controlling idea, unity, and coherence.
Example #1 An argument in a thesis paragraph
The proposal to make community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a salient example of good intentions ushering us into the bowels of hell. The misguided plan to make parking lots into a homeless sanctuary will curdle into chaos, stench, and criminality. For one, colleges cannot afford enough law enforcement officers to patrol a vast area rife with assault, thievery, and other criminality, resulting in bankrupting the college with lawsuits. Second, the college cannot afford enough bathrooms to accommodate the thousands of people, which will in turn make the college a giant sewer that contaminates the entire community with infectious diseases. Third, the majority of people will look at the college as a cesspool of criminality and disease and avoid attending this lame excuse for a college, resulting in enrollment numbers so low that the college will soon cease to exist.
Example #2: A rebuttal to an argument
The above rebuttal against the proposal to turn community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a classic use of the slippery slope fallacy in which someone cries Chicken Little and all worst-case scenarios while assuming the parking lot plan won’t have any specific contingencies designed to prevent the panic-based emotionally-charged scenarios that have been hysterically described above. The above hysterics are in truth a smokescreen designed to make a selfish excuse for ignoring those students for whom horrible life circumstances beyond their control have put them in a homeless situation. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s contention that there will be criminality in the parking lot, obviously colleges will have a maximum occupancy at the level of which its law enforcement feels comfortable creating a secure place for the students. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s claim the college will “become a giant sewer,” obviously campus engineers will put enough bathrooms on the premises in proportion to the maximum occupancy allowed. Regarding the fear tactic that non-homeless students won’t enroll in the college, this is a paranoid scenario based on the irrational premise that the college won’t have any limits on the amount of homeless people it accommodates and under what restrictions those accommodations will be based. Let us, therefore, address the needs of our homeless population and leave the selfish Chicken Little arguments in the argumentative dustbin where they deserve.
Example #3: An argument with a topic sentence
Sure, Universal Basic Income sucks. It’s hardly enough money to create economic justice. It’s surely a pacifier for the masses who are getting punk-fed the bare minimum to live a half-decent existence. I’m also certain that UBI will relegate most of us to some sweaty, dank room where we’ll intoxicate ourselves with a myriad of unsavory substances while looking on with bloodshot eyes at some entertainment or other on YouTube or Netflix. We will grow fat, complacent, brain-dead. We’ll become less than human. We’ll become more like zombies, slogging through life without an ounce of pride or dignity as we live a sedentary life without individual goals, responsibility, or life purpose. We will be soulless pods hooked up to our private entertainment centers while the 1%, the real people, pull the strings, create technology that advances civilization and enjoy the spoils of their efforts as full human beings flourishing in some opulent environment while the rest of us poor UBI-receiving bots live like crammed sardines in shared housing with our equally depressed, brain-dead zombie roommates. So am I arguing against UBI? Hell no. Even if our lives are as crappy as the one I described above, the life without UBI as we head for the Great Unemployment Age presents an even greater hellish existence, one with starvation, a lack of basic medical supplies and treatment, and abject homelessness. Yeah, UBI sucks, but not getting UBI sucks even more. Don’t count on the government to share the 1%’s wealth with the rest of us. The 1% will only share as much as they have to, and they have calculated that giving us just enough UBI so that we don’t become a raging, lawless mob is worth the 4-trillion UBI annual price tag. We should just admit we lost the class war. We are now in the unenviable position where we can either take our UBI pittance, which sucks, or not take our UBI table scraps, which sucks even more. That is our dilemma. We must take this painful truth on the chin and move on with our crappy lives. The alternative is certain death.
Example #4: A counterargument with a topic sentence
The above argument, which essentially paints us as starving dogs that should be grateful for the table scraps of UBI is so full of grotesque logical fallacies that the person who wrote this specious argument should be thrown into Logical Fallacy Prison. For one, the writer gives us a false dilemma of only two choices: A crappy life with UBI or an even crappier life without UBI. There are other possibilities that the writer does not address because those possibilities present an inconvenience to his argument. For example, some people will continue to work and use UBI to supplement their income. Others will use UBI to fund their higher education, but the above writer is too busy enjoying his despair to consider these possibilities. Secondly, the writer presents a pessimism that is unfounded on evidence. He seems to think dehumanization from UBI is inevitable, yet he presents no facts to back up his claim. Rather, he indulges in his personal crapulent attitude and wishes to impose it on the rest of us, as if he’s doing us a favor by lavishing us with some universal truth, yet he is not. He is merely a Minister of Darkness contaminating us with his gospel of despair. Finally, he assumes the worst-case scenario of UBI and paints a broad brush over the human reaction to receiving guaranteed income to fulfill our basic life needs without addressing the complexities and unknowable, tentative outcomes. In short, the above writer is a grotesque nihilist who is hell-bent on infecting us with his anguish and despair. For the truth about UBI, I suggest we look elsewhere.
Example #5: A personal narrative with a topic sentence
We need stories to explain to us our ever-changing role in this world. Otherwise, we are doomed to be forever infantile. As an example, when I was a toddler, I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket, a white silken prized possession that became inseparable to me like one of my appendages. Tattered and mottled with yellowish spots, Geekee was my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me everywhere I went. At night, I rubbed the blanket’s corners on my cheek, the pleasant tickling sensation lulling me to sleep. To my consternation, my parents were not as enamored with Geekee as I was. They complained that Geekee smelled. It was threadbare. It had visible stains that I paraded to the public who must have believed that my parents were too cheap to buy me a new blanket. At four years of age I had outgrown Geekee, they said, and it was time Geekee and I part ways, a suggestion that sent me into a rage. This battle between my parents and me continued until one day, as we were moving across the country from Florida to California my father slyly opened his window and told me to look out the window opposite his, for he said there was a baby alligator on the side of the road. As I looked in vain to spot the alligator, my father ripped Geekee from my hands and threw it out his open window. It all happened so fast that I didn’t know my father had grabbed my blanket. Instead, I believed his lie that the powerful wind had sucked Geekee from my grasp and had flung the blanket out of the window. I told my father to stop the car at once. We had to retrieve Geekee. But my father said we had to keep on going. Besides, he said, Geekee was now keeping the baby alligator warm. With no mother to fend for him, the little reptile needed the blanket’s warmth far more than I did. Imagining the baby alligator swathed in my blanket helped me part ways with Geekee, for I was now convinced that there was a creature on this planet who needed Geekee more than I did. When I was 15, I worked out at Walt’s Gym with a 25-year old bodybuilder, Bull, who had his own Geekee--Gilligan’s Island. When the local station took his favorite TV show off the air, he was so overcome with rage that he kicked his mother’s TV screen with his combat boots. He remained inconsolable, and I was sad that I could not share a story with him that might wean himself off Gilligan’s Island forever.
Example #6 Personal narrative with a topic sentence
As a thirteen-year-old in 1974, I had reached the conclusion that adult life was a loathsome existence and therefore not for me. I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Quite at home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up.
Example #7: Brief Movie Critique with a lack of unity due to some rambling:
White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a documentary currently running on Netflix about a clothing company that sold its clothes by hyping chiseled bodies and “exclusive” beauty status in the late 90s to early 2000s before its collapse, is a decent, not great, documentary, but it’s worth watching for the pleasure of watching such an immoral business fall flat on its butt. It gives you a taste of the pre-social media zeitgeist and makes you wonder if all those chiseled “hot bods” might get lost in the mix in the age of Instagram and social influencers. My favorite line from the documentary is when a culture critic says the genius of Abercrombie & Fitch is not in delivering consumer goods to what the market dictates, but rather telling the consumers what they wanted, essentially implanting desires in their heads that they never had had before. Now that’s genius. On a personal note, I’ve never been inside an Abercrombie & Fitch store, but I have had students over the years tell me how cheap the clothing is, how they’ll find tears in the armpit of their shirts and loose threads within just a few days. The company was all smoke and mirrors, selling the chimera of exclusive beauty and status. It did so in part by exploiting racist mythology. Good riddance to its demise.
Essay #4: The Sunken Place in Get Out (200 points; due June 10)
Essay is in two parts; Part 1 is 4 pages and Part 2 is about a page.
First Part of Your Essay (about 4 pages)
Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the claim that Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out uses the horror movie genre to create a realistic horrific state of mind for victims of racism called “The Sunken Place.” Consider that this “Sunken Place” is the result of racist gaslighting, which can be defined as someone in power bullying, confusing, bewildering, and discombobulating the innocent victim, such as Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and attempting to make the victim feel confused and guilty when in fact the bully is the culprit.
As you consider the notion of gaslighting and systemic racism in the movie Get Out, you will want to watch the 15-minute YouTube video that addresses this theme, “The Philosophy of Get Out--Wisecrack Edition.”
The brilliant video “The Philosophy of Get Out” analyzes several causes of “The Sunken Place”:
How white liberalism and the romanticization of blackness perpetuate systemic racism in America
How so-called “post-racial liberalism,” a form of white self-congratulation during the Obama years, was a hoax, a thin veneer that could barely conceal a racist agenda
How white liberals going out of their way to be “not racist” make people of color feel weird and alienated
How the romanticization of blackness by white people, elevating black people to being cool and super chic, is a way of both “lionizing and demonizing” people of color so that they never enjoy the feeling of just being normal
How white people exploit the black body and use black people to satisfy white fantasies
How white people are so intent on culturally appropriating blackness that they actually want to be black such as the case of Rachel Dolezal who is referenced in the video.
Last Part of Your Essay (Counterargument, about 1 or 2 paragraphs or a half a page before your conclusion paragraph)
In the last part of your essay, address the criticism that showered on the Amazon Prime TV series Them. This show is accused of creating a horror genre about American racism inspired by Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, but whereas Get Out is largely praised as a successful work of art, Them is accused of making a spectacle of black suffering and victimization for entertainment purposes. In contrast, Get Out is looked at as a movie that depicts racism in a way that defends the dignity of people of color. Does Get Out succeed in this regard? Does the resistance of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) with the help of his friend Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery) give a sense of dignity, hope, and triumph for them and in turn give people of color who watch Get Out a relatable, inspiring experience? Answer this question in the last page of your essay.
You will need a minimum of 5 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Essay Outline for The Sunken Place in Get Out
Defining The Sunken Place in Get Out and Making an Essay Outline
We can break down The Sunken Place in Get Out by understanding the following terms:
Paragraph 1:Defining the Sunken Place as Learned Helplessness
Learned Helplessness
When people are brainwashed into believing that they have no free will or free agency to assert effective action against a problem, they become apathetic, feel helpless, and create a self-fulfilling prophecy by which their negative outcomes reinforce their sense of helplessness so that they are trapped in a feedback loop.
There is a point in the movie where Chris stops believing in his senses, and he develops a helpless passivity to Rose’s gaslighting, but when he sees the evil that is around him, he rejects Rose and he begins to fight for his life, using cotton to plug his ears, and deer antlers to destroy his enemy.
Jim Hudson is about to steal Chris’ body and he says, “You’ll live as a passenger, an audience, in The Sunken Place. I’ll control the functions.”
Thesis Structure Example:
Sample #1
In Get Out, the psychological state known as The Sunken Place is effectively illustrated by Chris’ hellish journey, which consists of ___________________, ________________, __________________, _____________________, and _____________________.
Sample #2
Get Out is a microcosm of systemic racism in America that shows racism from a black man’s perspective and how that racism creates a traumatic state of mind known as The Sunken Place evidenced by ______________, _______________, ________________, ____________________, and ________________________.
Sample #3
In the masterpiece Get Out, the protagonist Chris Washington goes deep into the bowels of white liberal America where he descends into The Sunken Place characterized by _________________, __________________, __________________, _______________, and ___________________________.
Body Paragraphs
Two. Code-Switching is a cause and symptom of The Sunken Place:
When black people try to make white people more comfortable or try to pass as white, black people will code-switch, assuming the body language, vocal intonations, and mannerisms associated with whiteness.
The implicit message in code-switching is “White is good. Black is bad. I will try to win you over by being white.”
The motivation for code-switching is shame, self-rejection, and self-apology.
Code-switching teaches us that racism is not merely a bias against people of color; it is a bias against the culture of black people.
There is a cruel irony to code-switching: A lot of people want to act black, be cool, and be down, so they’ll appropriate black mannerisms and speech as their whims dictate; however, these same white people will expect black people to code-switch white to make them more comfortable.
Some other examples of code-switching are in the movie Sorry to Bother You and in the Atlanta episode 9 of season 3.
Three. Microaggressions are a cause of The Sunken Place:
Microaggressions are “small racist acts or comments” done in a spirit of ignorance, condescending patronization, discomfort, or all of the above.
Buzzfeed has a good list to get acquainted with some common examples.
Get Out is full of microaggressions with white people trying to hard to ingratiate themselves, using excessive flattery toward Chris, talking about the great physical wonders that Chris must possess.
Jeremy says that with Chris’ “genetic makeup,” he’d be a great MMA fighter.
Microaggressions can also be expressed as unintentional racism from the privilege of systemic racism. This, too, is a cause of The Sunken Place.
In Get Out, we see intentional racism, a willful attempt to steal black bodies as a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
But we also see unintentional racism. For example, when the cop asks for Chris’ driver's license, Rose becomes self-righteous and hostile, acting like she is sticking up for Chris when her white privilege fails to see she is putting Chris in even more danger.
Dean Armitage is another example. He tries too hard to be nonracist, bringing up his love for Obama every chance he can get. His saccharine manner is condescending and fake. He is a man with something to hide.
When people lard you with their friendly manner like Dean does, they are afflicting you with toxic positivity.
Then there is Jeremy, Rose’s brother, who says to Chris, “With your genetic makeup, you could be a great fighter.”
Four. Gaslighting is a cause of The Sunken Place:
“Don’t trust your senses. I’ll tell you what the reality is.”
Gaslighting is when the bully makes the victim feel like the culprit by turning reality upside down. The gaslighter is so incessant in his gaslighting that he wears down his victim through sheer fatigue.
In Get Out, we see examples of Gaslighting when Chris is worried that Rose’s white parents will be uncomfortable that she is bringing a black boyfriend to their house.
“Do they know I’m black?” he asks.
But Rose repeatedly dismisses his concern as a non-issue. He’s crazy for being so worried even when his past experiences tell him otherwise.
Five. Cultural Appropriation is a cause of The Sunken Place:
When people of the dominant or privileged culture steal the culture of the less privileged for their own desires, they are committing what is called cultural appropriation.
In Get Out, the stealing of black bodies is a metaphor for cultural appropriation.
Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs in which you address the possible criticism that Get Out, like the Amazon Prime series Them, is making a spectacle of black suffering, helplessness, and victimization for consumer entertainment and as such displaying this racism in such a flagrant form is exploitive. Do the journeys of Chris Washington and his friend Rod Williams have enough dignity, self-agency, courage, mental toughness, and resistance to avoid the same charges exacted upon the TV series Them? Explain.
In paragraph 7, you might summarize the criticism exacted upon the Amazon Prime series Them.
In paragraph 8, you might then argue whether or not Jordan Peele’s Get Out falls into the same pitfalls as Them.
Paragraph 9: Your conclusion is a short dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Works Cited with a minimum of 5 sources in MLA format follow on the last page.
You don’t have to use the following. It is merely a suggested outline:
Paragraph 1: Define the term “The Sunken Place” as it occurs in the Jordan Peele film Get Out. You might want to address the role of gaslighting as it pertains to sending Chris Washington into the dreaded “Sunken Place.”
Paragraph 2, your thesis or claim: Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the claim that Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out uses the horror movie genre to create a realistic horrific state of mind for victims of racism called “The Sunken Place.”
Body Paragraphs 3-6 might address some or more of the following:
How white liberalism and the romanticization of blackness perpetuate systemic racism in America
How so-called “post-racial liberalism,” a form of white self-congratulation during the Obama years, was a hoax, a thin veneer that could barely conceal a racist agenda and systemic racism evidenced in mass incarceration, police violence, and unequal income distribution
How white liberals going out of their way to be “not racist” make people of color feel weird and alienated
How the romanticization of blackness by white people, elevating black people to being cool and super chic, is a way of both “lionizing and demonizing” people of color so that they never enjoy the feeling of just being normal
How white people exploit the black body and use black people to satisfy white fantasies
How white people are so intent on culturally appropriating blackness that they actually want to be black such as the case of Rachel Dolezal who is referenced in the video.
Paragraphs 7 and 8: Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs in which you address the possible criticism that Get Out, like the Amazon Prime series Them, is making a spectacle of black suffering, helplessness, and victimization for consumer entertainment and as such displaying this racism in such a flagrant form is exploitive. Do the journeys of Chris Washington and his friend Rod Williams have enough dignity, self-agency, courage, mental toughness, and resistance to avoid the same charges exacted upon the TV series Them? Explain.
For paragraph 7, you might summarize the criticism exacted upon the Amazon Prime series Them.
For paragraph 8, you might then argue whether or not Jordan Peele’s Get Out falls into the same pitfalls as Them.
Paragraph 9: Your conclusion is a short dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Works Cited with a minimum of 5 sources in MLA format follows on the last page.
The Requirements for Your Essay
To fulfill the English 1A Student Learning Outcomes, your essay cannot get full credit unless you have the following:
Your essay must be approximately 1,200 words.
Your essay must demonstrate a clear grasp of the subject evidenced by a strong authorial presence or writing voice that carries your exposition.
Your Works Cited must have a minimum of 5 citations.
Your essay must be presented as a whole in MLA format with 12 font in Times New Roman format.
Key element of The Sunken Place: Code-Switching
Code-Switching, passing as white, is a form of self-abnegation (rejection).
In the movie Get Out, a strange white couple, Philomena and her aging husband Logan King have a dilemma: What should they do about Logan's ill health? As members of the Order of Coagula, they have a solution: Steal the black body of jazz musician Andre Hayworth and have Logan live inside Andre's body.
The above horror situation is a metaphor for code-switching. Andre "becomes white" in manners and body language, and in doing so, Andre sinks into The Sunken Place where he is no longer in possession of his soul.
Building Block #1 for Essay 4
Worth 25 points and due on May 25
Writing Your Introduction Paragraph as an Extended Definition of the Sunken Place
Purpose of Formative Assessment: To build your Essay 4 with your introductory paragraph.
Objectives:
Write an introductory paragraph with a single-sentence definition followed by an extended definition to show a clear understanding of The Sunken Place.
Two. Use appropriate signal phrases and in-text citations.
Three. Use this paragraph as a building block for your Get Out essay.
Building Block #1
Assignment Description
Writing Your Introduction Paragraph as an Extended Definition of The Sunken Place
In your introductory paragraph, define The Sunken Place from the provided research materials above.
Give a one-sentence definition of The Sunken Place and expound on your definition by giving distinguishing characteristics examples from the sources given on the previous modules. Your distinguishing characteristics will be gathered by quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing major points.
The Purpose of this Assignment
All of my assignments are “building blocks” toward your finished essay, which in online education circles is referred to as your Summative Assessment. By fulfilling the requirements of this assignment, you will have a first paragraph completed toward your essay.
In a previous module, I broke down some of the key ingredients of The Sunken Place. Here is a review:
One, it is a state of hypnosis in which we lose our sense of free will and self-agency as we feel we are succumbing to overwhelming forces that strip us of all control and dignity.
Two, this hypnosis comes from a force that bullies and gaslights us, persuades us that there is no hope for a better life, that the “best thing to do” is to surrender to make the process of losing our freedom as painless as possible.
Three, The Sunken Place suppresses our scream for help. As observed in Ross A. Lincoln’s “‘Get Out’ Director Jordan Peele Explains ‘The Sunken Place,’” Peele discussed The Sunken Place on Twitter as a state of hopelessness and despair: “We’re all marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.” The Sunken Place is to be marginalized by systemic racism and injustice and to have one’s cries ignored and silenced over and over until one is despondent.
Four, The Sunken Place is the result of a raw power play. When Missy Armitage hypnotizes Chris Washington, she lets him know that she has complete power over him by gloating, “You cannot move.” This power play is both psychological and physical.
Five, The Sunken Place is powerful because in part the victim internalizes helplessness. Such internalization is called learned helplessness in which the victim, even if given options to go free, stays imprisoned because the victim has been brainwashed to believe that helplessness is indefinite and therefore there is no such thing as hope. Even if freedom exists, the person who internalizes learned helplessness does not know what to do with freedom. Therefore, freedom becomes useless.
Six, The Sunken Place triggers a fight-flight response. Triggered by terror, people get a spike in adrenaline, rapid heart rate, dilation of pupils, shaking and trembling, and paralysis. We see this fight-flight response at the end of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video.
Seven, The Sunken Place is to be humiliated and abused yet to be told that you’re the one who’s crazy because the perpetrator of your humiliation is innocent. As Jake Skubish writes in his article “Get Out, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the stories we tell ourselves,” the movie Get Out is about narratives that exalt whiteness and marginalize black people. Whites are part of a grand narrative that “weaponizes the lie of white innocence.” Blacks, on the other hand, are not part of the narrative. Pushed aside, they’re pawns and spectators, told to watch the white narrative obediently from their Sunken Place.
Writing Your Extended Definition Requires Knowing the 3 Elements of an Extended Definition
Remember that when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things:
single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining
the class or category that the term belongs to
the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Instructions:
Step One. Begin Paragraph 1 with a single-sentence definition of The Sunken Place.
For an extended definition, begin with a single-sentence definition. By doing this, you are helping the reader understand the meaning of The Sunken Place.
As we discussed earlier, when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things: a single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining, the class that the term belongs to, and the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Some of you may be asking, what class does The Sunken Place belong to?
While there is no single right answer, here some suggestions:
Altered state of mind
State of learned helplessness
Primordial fear
Helping your reader have a clear grasp of a central term in your essay makes your writing more clear and effective. The Purdue Writing Lab has an effective description of extended definitions with the link here.
Step Two. Expand your definition with distinguishing characteristics and examples of The Sunken Place.
See the above breakdown for the different characteristics and flesh those out in your paragraph.
Step Three: Use signal phrases for your summary, paraphrase, and quoted content.
It is important that you show your ability to summarize, paraphrase, and quote your source material by using signal phrases, which are short phrases you use to introduce quotes, paraphrased, or summarized content. Here are 6 important components to consider when writing signal phrases:
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
You must include an extended definition of The Sunken Place for your introductory paragraph.
Your distinguishing characteristics of Jim Crow will come from the provided sources in these Modules
As you quote, paraphrase, and summarize major points about The Sunken Place, you will use signal phrases.
In addition to signal phrases, you will use in-text citations. The Purdue Owl MLA in-text citations is helpful.
The length of your paragraph should be between 150-200 words.
You must upload an attachment of your paragraph to Canvas.
How I Break Down Your Grade for This Assignment of 25 Points
Clarity and usefulness of your single-sentence definition of The Sunken Place, 5 points.
Clarity and usefulness of examples you use to flesh out your definition of The Sunken Place: 5 points.
Use of signal phrases and in-text citations to transition from your explanation of The Sunken Place to your quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material: 5 points.
The authenticity of your writing and the degree of meaning you give your subject matter. A writer never wants to just “go through the motions,” that is to say, deliver a perfunctory effort. Deliver the degree of authenticity and meaning this subject deserves: 10 points.
Building Block #2
Building Block Assignment #2: Does Get Out avoid the pitfalls of excessive victimization?
Worth 25 points and due on June 3
Building Block #2 is two paragraphs, which will be used in your essay before your conclusion paragraph.
In your first building block paragraph, you will summarize the criticism exacted against the TV series Them, which has been accused of using excessive victimization and “trauma porn” for entertainment purposes.
For this source material, you will use the following:
In your second building block paragraph, you’ll answer the question: Does Get Out avoid the pitfalls and artistic flaws that are charged against Them? Explain in a paragraph.
How I Grade Building Block #2 for 25 Points
A well-developed paragraph that addresses the criticisms levied against the Amazon TV series Them that uses appropriate signal phrases and in-text citations: 10 points.
A well-developed paragraph that argues whether or not the movie Get Out contains the same pitfalls and artistic flaws as Them: 10 points.
Using clear sentences and correct grammar and punctuation: 5 points.
Breaking Down the Movie into Its Parts
Microaggressions: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Gaslighting: “Don’t trust your senses. I’ll tell you what the reality is.”
Learned Helplessness
What does it mean to be grounded? (The Grounded Place)
Brain stealing is a metaphor for cultural appropriation
Metaphors and Easter Eggs
Resistance Vs. Victimization
Writing Effective Paragraphs
Since paragraphs are the building blocks of our essays, we should ask ourselves: What makes a strong, effective paragraph?
First, a paragraph should be salient, meaning the writer is addressing a topic that is remarkable, meaningful, relevant, and timely. When writers are salient and relevant by addressing the needs of the time, they achieve the principle of Kairos, meaning that you are impressing your reader with ideas that are timely and are relevant to “the times we live in”--zeitgeist.
Second, a paragraph must have a single topic, often stated in a topic sentence but sometimes states through implication or suggestion. Whether or not there is a topic sentence, the paragraph will be governed by a controlling idea or what is called the main idea.
Third, a paragraph must achieve unity by consisting of supporting details that all point to the topic sentence or main topic.
Fourth, a paragraph must have coherence, the state of being clear from the logical flow of one sentence to the other, often enhanced by appropriate transitions.
To summarize, paragraphs must have salience, a controlling idea, unity, and coherence.
Example #1 An argument in a thesis paragraph
The proposal to make community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a salient example of good intentions ushering us into the bowels of hell. The misguided plan to make parking lots into a homeless sanctuary will curdle into chaos, stench, and criminality. For one, colleges cannot afford enough law enforcement officers to patrol a vast area rife with assault, thievery, and other criminality, resulting in bankrupting the college with lawsuits. Second, the college cannot afford enough bathrooms to accommodate the thousands of people, which will in turn make the college a giant sewer that contaminates the entire community with infectious diseases. Third, the majority of people will look at the college as a cesspool of criminality and disease and avoid attending this lame excuse for a college, resulting in enrollment numbers so low that the college will soon cease to exist.
Example #2: A rebuttal to an argument
The above rebuttal against the proposal to turn community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a classic use of the slippery slope fallacy in which someone cries Chicken Little and all worst-case scenarios while assuming the parking lot plan won’t have any specific contingencies designed to prevent the panic-based emotionally-charged scenarios that have been hysterically described above. The above hysterics are in truth a smokescreen designed to make a selfish excuse for ignoring those students for whom horrible life circumstances beyond their control have put them in a homeless situation. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s contention that there will be criminality in the parking lot, obviously colleges will have a maximum occupancy at the level of which its law enforcement feels comfortable creating a secure place for the students. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s claim the college will “become a giant sewer,” obviously campus engineers will put enough bathrooms on the premises in proportion to the maximum occupancy allowed. Regarding the fear tactic that non-homeless students won’t enroll in the college, this is a paranoid scenario based on the irrational premise that the college won’t have any limits on the amount of homeless people it accommodates and under what restrictions those accommodations will be based. Let us, therefore, address the needs of our homeless population and leave the selfish Chicken Little arguments in the argumentative dustbin where they deserve.
Example #3: An argument with a topic sentence
Sure, Universal Basic Income sucks. It’s hardly enough money to create economic justice. It’s surely a pacifier for the masses who are getting punk-fed the bare minimum to live a half-decent existence. I’m also certain that UBI will relegate most of us to some sweaty, dank room where we’ll intoxicate ourselves with a myriad of unsavory substances while looking on with bloodshot eyes at some entertainment or other on YouTube or Netflix. We will grow fat, complacent, brain-dead. We’ll become less than human. We’ll become more like zombies, slogging through life without an ounce of pride or dignity as we live a sedentary life without individual goals, responsibility, or life purpose. We will be soulless pods hooked up to our private entertainment centers while the 1%, the real people, pull the strings, create technology that advances civilization and enjoy the spoils of their efforts as full human beings flourishing in some opulent environment while the rest of us poor UBI-receiving bots live like crammed sardines in shared housing with our equally depressed, brain-dead zombie roommates. So am I arguing against UBI? Hell no. Even if our lives are as crappy as the one I described above, the life without UBI as we head for the Great Unemployment Age presents an even greater hellish existence, one with starvation, a lack of basic medical supplies and treatment, and abject homelessness. Yeah, UBI sucks, but not getting UBI sucks even more. Don’t count on the government to share the 1%’s wealth with the rest of us. The 1% will only share as much as they have to, and they have calculated that giving us just enough UBI so that we don’t become a raging, lawless mob is worth the 4-trillion UBI annual price tag. We should just admit we lost the class war. We are now in the unenviable position where we can either take our UBI pittance, which sucks, or not take our UBI table scraps, which sucks even more. That is our dilemma. We must take this painful truth on the chin and move on with our crappy lives. The alternative is certain death.
Example #4: A counterargument with a topic sentence
The above argument, which essentially paints us as starving dogs that should be grateful for the table scraps of UBI is so full of grotesque logical fallacies that the person who wrote this specious argument should be thrown into Logical Fallacy Prison. For one, the writer gives us a false dilemma of only two choices: A crappy life with UBI or an even crappier life without UBI. There are other possibilities that the writer does not address because those possibilities present an inconvenience to his argument. For example, some people will continue to work and use UBI to supplement their income. Others will use UBI to fund their higher education, but the above writer is too busy enjoying his despair to consider these possibilities. Secondly, the writer presents a pessimism that is unfounded on evidence. He seems to think dehumanization from UBI is inevitable, yet he presents no facts to back up his claim. Rather, he indulges in his personal crapulent attitude and wishes to impose it on the rest of us, as if he’s doing us a favor by lavishing us with some universal truth, yet he is not. He is merely a Minister of Darkness contaminating us with his gospel of despair. Finally, he assumes the worst-case scenario of UBI and paints a broad brush over the human reaction to receiving guaranteed income to fulfill our basic life needs without addressing the complexities and unknowable, tentative outcomes. In short, the above writer is a grotesque nihilist who is hell-bent on infecting us with his anguish and despair. For the truth about UBI, I suggest we look elsewhere.
Example #5: A personal narrative with a topic sentence
We need stories to explain to us our ever-changing role in this world. Otherwise, we are doomed to be forever infantile. As an example, when I was a toddler, I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket, a white silken prized possession that became inseparable to me like one of my appendages. Tattered and mottled with yellowish spots, Geekee was my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me everywhere I went. At night, I rubbed the blanket’s corners on my cheek, the pleasant tickling sensation lulling me to sleep. To my consternation, my parents were not as enamored with Geekee as I was. They complained that Geekee smelled. It was threadbare. It had visible stains that I paraded to the public who must have believed that my parents were too cheap to buy me a new blanket. At four years of age I had outgrown Geekee, they said, and it was time Geekee and I part ways, a suggestion that sent me into a rage. This battle between my parents and me continued until one day, as we were moving across the country from Florida to California my father slyly opened his window and told me to look out the window opposite his, for he said there was a baby alligator on the side of the road. As I looked in vain to spot the alligator, my father ripped Geekee from my hands and threw it out his open window. It all happened so fast that I didn’t know my father had grabbed my blanket. Instead, I believed his lie that the powerful wind had sucked Geekee from my grasp and had flung the blanket out of the window. I told my father to stop the car at once. We had to retrieve Geekee. But my father said we had to keep on going. Besides, he said, Geekee was now keeping the baby alligator warm. With no mother to fend for him, the little reptile needed the blanket’s warmth far more than I did. Imagining the baby alligator swathed in my blanket helped me part ways with Geekee, for I was now convinced that there was a creature on this planet who needed Geekee more than I did. When I was 15, I worked out at Walt’s Gym with a 25-year old bodybuilder, Bull, who had his own Geekee--Gilligan’s Island. When the local station took his favorite TV show off the air, he was so overcome with rage that he kicked his mother’s TV screen with his combat boots. He remained inconsolable, and I was sad that I could not share a story with him that might wean himself off Gilligan’s Island forever.
Example #6 Personal narrative with a topic sentence
As a thirteen-year-old in 1974, I had reached the conclusion that adult life was a loathsome existence and therefore not for me. I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Quite at home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up.
Example #7: Brief Movie Critique with a lack of unity due to some rambling:
White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a documentary currently running on Netflix about a clothing company that sold its clothes by hyping chiseled bodies and “exclusive” beauty status in the late 90s to early 2000s before its collapse, is a decent, not great, documentary, but it’s worth watching for the pleasure of watching such an immoral business fall flat on its butt. It gives you a taste of the pre-social media zeitgeist and makes you wonder if all those chiseled “hot bods” might get lost in the mix in the age of Instagram and social influencers. My favorite line from the documentary is when a culture critic says the genius of Abercrombie & Fitch is not in delivering consumer goods to what the market dictates, but rather telling the consumers what they wanted, essentially implanting desires in their heads that they never had had before. Now that’s genius. On a personal note, I’ve never been inside an Abercrombie & Fitch store, but I have had students over the years tell me how cheap the clothing is, how they’ll find tears in the armpit of their shirts and loose threads within just a few days. The company was all smoke and mirrors, selling the chimera of exclusive beauty and status. It did so in part by exploiting racist mythology. Good riddance to its demise.
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
McMahon writes, "Jeff Henderson's life out of prison was harder than life in prison."
"Jeff Henderson's life out of prison," McMahon observes, "was harder out of prison than in it."
"Jeff Henderson's life was harder out of prison," McMahon claims.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided byPurdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
We will try to finish Essay 3 in the Computer Lab H103.
Why Do We Study the Redemption of Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson? To Escape Our Mental Straight Jackets
In my college writing class as we were studying the redemptive character arc of Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, one of my thoughtful, hard-working students raised her hand and in candor asked, “Why do we have to learn this kind of stuff?” Eager to defend the assignment and the kind of assignments instructors in the Humanities tend to make, I made a lengthy argument about education being more than learning a vocation. It’s about growing and “becoming someone” and having the language, the historical context, and the philosophical background to understand why we can say that someone like Phil Connors from Groundhog Day is a “redeemed character” and why someone like Howard Ratner from Uncut Gems is an unhinged, morally dissolute character, and finally why a Humanities instructor would want to educate his or her students to encourage them to become more like the final version of Phil Connors than the irreversibly broken version of Howard Ratner. After being proud of my defense of the assignment, I paused and said, “But I have no illusions about your life after college. You’ll be ten times more busy than you are now and you may never ponder redemptive and morally broken characters ever again. Not because you’re not thoughtful, but just because you’ll be too busy to have the luxury of having such thoughts.” My students were quick to agree with me on that point.
But this is not all I have to say on this subject. I shared this story with my friend and colleague Shane and he had this to say:
We often have similar discussions like this in my class and I like to frame it this way: we are sharpening your tools to create a society that is not so confined to these "mental straight jackets" that capitalism forces upon us. These are the questions we all should be asking! Why not watch these two great movies (I would love this class) and ask these super important questions? I think the larger question is why do these thoughts or explorations have to be commodified or intrinsically valued only when they produce (I assume with them being "busy"). I don't see these thoughts as a luxury, but a necessity when this new generation fights for a better world.
I agree with Shane. We go to college to escape our Mental Straight Jackets, not to get inside of them.
Best regards,
Jeff McMahon
Sample Thesis Statements for Essay 3
Sample #1
Trapped in a recurring cycle of hedonism and nihilism, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson have to “clean their room,” which entails taking an unflinching moral inventory, letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
Sample #2
Mired in their morally abhorrent egotism, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson come to close to perishing until they experience the shame of their moral bankruptcy and spiritual ignorance, find their former self repellant and worthy of change, embrace the humility of hard work and fortitude, and experience the meaningful connection that results from being accountable to others.
Sample #3
Alienating themselves from others with their repellant self-aggrandizement that compels them to use and manipulate others, our two anti-heroes, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson, must experience the humiliation of a Day of Reckoning in which their repugnant deeds and sordid beings are exposed to fresh daylight. Only after this humbling debasement do these two miscreants embark on a Redemption Journey, which entails letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
Sample #4
Excessively pleased with their repellant egotism and rakish pleasure-seeking, the smarmy Phil Connors and the “businessman” Jeff Henderson have a moral reckoning in which their moral debauchery is exposed to daylight and they are shamed into a Redemption Journey, which entails letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
Sample #5
Trapped in a cycle of moral failure and the resulting monotony of their futile existence, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson have a similar Fall and Redemption Story, characterized by a recognition that their grandiosity was a False Ascent, that they must overcome their denial, that they must "clean their room," that they must embrace a work ethic, and that they have a moral duty to society and themselves.
Outline:
Paragraph 1: Summarize the movie.
Paragraph 2: Summarize the memoir.
Paragraph 3: Thesis: Trapped in a cycle of moral failure and the resulting monotony of their futile existence, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson have a similar Fall and Redemption Story, characterized by a recognition that their grandiosity was a False Ascent, they must overcome their denial, they must "clean their room," that they must embrace a work ethic, and that they have a moral duty to society and themselves.
Paragraph 4: They must recognize that their grandiosity was a False Ascent
Paragraph 5: They must overcome their denial
Paragraph 6: They must "clean their room."
Paragraph 7: They must embrace a work ethic, that of the Craftsman Mindset.
Paragraph 8: They have a moral duty to society and themselves and must learn to "love people, not things."
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, powerful restatement of thesis
Final page: Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format
Centrifugal Movement: Evil gets more evil.
We see evil simply growing into more evil in Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Ozark.
Centripetal Movement: Weakness and evil turn to strength and goodness
Today we will look at the second part of the Redemption Journey: Perdition, which means suffering punishment for one’s crimes or misdeeds.
Reality sets in: crime and punishment or perdition
1. Jeff Henderson gets arrested and realizes he won’t have access to women the way he used to. This is a shock to his psyche.
2. He suffers another shock to his psyche. Once a powerful man who called the shots, he finds in prison that he is now powerless, beholden to guards like Big Bubba on page 79.
3. In prison, he has time to think about his life in ways he didn't before. For example, he wanted to be like T whom he worshipped as a sort of god. Ironically, he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison that he had become BIGGER than T and that being SO BIG put him on the feds’ radar screen and that was his downfall. 81
4. All Jeff’s life he’s been inculcated with the belief in the Homie or Gang Banger Code of Silence as if it were religious truth. But in prison, he discovers the No-Snitch Code has no real value because a homie will rat you out when it’s to his advantage. See page 151.
5. Jeff thought he was invincible but discovers a painful fact: The Feds had been watching him, not for several months, but for several years. He was digging his own grave for a long, long time. 87
6. Why me? Jeff is not a victim but he cries to Jesus and feels sorry for himself. In a state of perdition, he is helpless, beholden to the caprices of prison life.
7. He realizes a painful fact: Prison may have saved his life. One of the Twins, his supplier, got killed shortly after Jeff’s imprisonment. 89
8. Too late in the game, he discovers another painful fact: Anyone can get convicted who doesn’t get caught with drugs or money. 94
9. His perdition takes on palpable pain when he is given legal accountability for his crimes: 19.5 years. See page 100.
10. Only after he’s arrested does he discover another painful fact: There is no loyalty in the streets. It’s a myth. See page 152 after his homies steal all his stuff after he’s arrested.
What is Jeff’s attitude at the beginning of his prison sentence? Contrast his attitude at the end of it (centripetal vs. centrifugal development)
1. Self-pity, victimization
2. Nihilism 110
3. Getting over, coast in life, do the minimum.
4. Universe of One 113. On page 192, he says “in prison everything is about you.”
5. No passion for marriage 114
6. He fluctuates between complacency and despair.
Future Goal and Redemption
We all have the drive for redemption; if this drive is frustrated, the drive does not remain dormant and neutral inside of us; to the contrary, this drive goes inward and poisons us.
Changing Our Definition of Success
When Jeff is able to redirect his energy from being a drug dealer to a chef, he finds redemption. All of us have a “life energy” that can be directed toward concupiscence, revenge, victimization or growth, maturity, and independence as is explained by Erich Fromm in this passage from Escape from Freedom:
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this, we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.
In other words, Fromm is saying that we must flourish in a passion in order to direct our energy toward growth rather than re-direct that energy toward self-destruction such as concupiscent pursuits.
It’s only in prison that Jeff is forced to being the journey to redemption.
Redemption and Flourishing
Flourishing is the opposite of concupiscence flourishing, from the Greek word eudaimonia: means to blossom, to become who we were meant to be.
When Jeff Henderson becomes an illegal “businessman” being followed by the feds, rationalizing his illegal activities, and living on easy money, he’s not the person he was meant to be. He is rather a grotesque variation. We see his misshapen character in prison when he becomes the enraged, nihilistic, disaffected victim.
Only when he learns a passion and accepts his responsibilities as an adult, does he begin to flourish and he becomes happier than he was as a concupiscent drug dealer.
Taking a Close Look at Fortitude: The strength and tenacity to push forward in the presence of ever surmounting obstacles. What are Jeff Henderson’s obstacles to starting over?
1. Jeff Henderson discovers that the world is full of “haters and dream crushers” (crabs in a bucket). These are the haters who don’t want people with good intentions to be afforded a clean, fresh start because they want everyone to share in their failure and misery.
2. Others don’t trust us. Nor do they forgive us for our past deeds.
3. Often we have an inability to forgive ourselves for our past deeds creates baggage
4. Often we lack confidence: We fear that we may backslide into our old ways.
5. Often a past label like “convicted felon” creates a stigma that is extremely difficult to erase. We see the felon. We don’t see the husband trying to support his wife and two kids.
6. Jeff Henderson has to tone down his “stroll” and his muscles with baggy clothes to remove the hard gangsta look. See page 2
7. Jeff Henderson has to remain gracious and poised when he gets pooh-poohed by Caesar’s Palace, the very place that was happy to take his money when he was a dealer “back in the day.” Now Caesar’s is playing all high and mighty.
Centrifugal Motion or JH's Transformation
1. He sees he’s been blind and willfully ignorant about the consequences of his selling drugs. 115
2. He develops intellectual curiosity, reading eclectic material, various intellectual and religious doctrines. He doesn’t embrace one but rather picks and chooses as he sees fit. 124
3. He becomes engaged with others vs. being disaffected. 124
4. He finds a passion, cooking, that utilizes his talents.
5. He learns the humility of starting at the bottom and not getting things “easy” like when he was a dealer.
6. He learns a hard work ethic. It’s almost impossible to acclimate from easy money to hard work with low pay. But Jeff was always a hard worker.
7. Jeff found a mentor in Big Roy and later in Las Vegas a cook named Friendly. And then Robert at the Gadsby’s.
8. Jeff experiences contrition and regrets on page 146: He is among the dregs of the world, exactly where he belongs, in the lowest rung of society: hell.
9. You must have a vision of a different life. See page 147.
10. He begins to take pride in his work. 147: Speed, taste, and presentation. 188
11. He undoes his wrong by talking to teens in Vegas. 165
Example of an Essay That Never Uses First, Second, Third, Fourth, Etc., for Transitions, But Relies on "Paragraph Links"
Stupid Reasons for Getting Married
People should get married because they are ready to do so, meaning they're mature and truly love one another, and most importantly are prepared to make the compromises and sacrifices a healthy marriage entails. However, most people get married for the wrong reasons, that is, for stupid, lame, and asinine reasons.
Alas, needy narcissists, hardly candidates for a successful marriage, glom onto the most disastrous reasons for getting married and those reasons make it certain that their marriage will quickly terminate or waddle precariously along in an interminable domestic hell.
A common and compelling reason that fuels the needy into a misguided marriage is when these fragmented souls see that everyone their age has already married—their friends, brothers, sisters, and, yes, even their enemies. Overcome by what is known today as "FOMO," they feel compelled to “get with the program" so that they may not miss out on the lavish gifts bestowed upon the bride and groom. Thus, the needy are rankled by envy and greed and allow their base impulses to be the driving motivation behind their marriage.
When greed is not impelling them to tie the knot, they are also chafed by a sense of being short-changed when they see their recently-married dunce of a co-worker promoted above them for presumably the added credibility that marriage afforded them. As singles, they know they will never be taken seriously at work.
If it's not a lame stab at credibility that's motivating them to get married, it's the fear that as the years tick by they are becoming less and less attractive and their looks will no longer obscure their woeful character deficiencies as age scrunches them up into little pinch-faced, leathery imps.
A more egregious reason for marrying is to end the tormented, off-on again-off-on again relationship, which needs the official imprimatur of marriage, followed by divorce, to officially terminate the relationship. I spoke to a marriage counselor once who told me that some couples were so desperate to break up for good that they actually got married, then divorced, for this purpose.
Other pathological reasons to marry are to find a loathsome spouse in order to spite one’s parents or to set a wedding date in order to hire a personal trainer and finally lose those thirty pounds one has been carrying for too long.
Envy, avarice, spite, and vanity fuel both needy men and women alike. However, there is a certain type of needy man, whom we'll call the Man-Child, who finds that it is easier to marry his girlfriend than it is to have to listen to her constant nagging about their need to get married. His girlfriend’s constant harping about the fact their relationship hasn’t taken the “next logical step” presents a burden so great that marriage in comparison seems benign. Even if the Man-Child has not developed the maturity to marry, even if he isn’t sure if he’s truly in love, even if he is still inextricably linked to some former girlfriend that his current girlfriend does not know about, even if he knows in his heart of hearts that he is not hard-wired for marriage, even if he harbors a secret defect that renders him a liability to any woman, he will dismiss all of these factors and rush into a marriage in order to alleviate his current source of anxiety and suffering, which is the incessant barrage of his girlfriend’s grievances about them not being married.
Indeed, some of the needy man’s worst decisions have been made in order to quell a discontented woman. The Man-Child's eagerness to quiet a woman’s discontent points to a larger defect, namely, his spinelessness, which, if left unchecked, turns him into the Go-With-the-Flow-Guy. As the name suggests, this type of man offers no resistance, even in large-scale decisions that affect his destiny. Put this man in a situation where his girlfriend, his friends, and his family are all telling him that “it’s time to get married,” and he will, as his name suggests, simply “go with the flow.” He will allow everyone else to make the wedding plans, he’ll let someone fit him for a wedding suit, he’ll allow his mother to pick out the ring, he’ll allow his fiancé to pick out the look and flavor of the wedding cake and then on the day of the wedding, he simply “shows up” with all the passion of a turnip.
The Man-Child's turnip-like passivity and his aversion to argument ensure marital longevity. However, there are drawbacks. Most notably, he will over time become so silent that his wife won’t even be able to get a word out of him. Over the course of their fifty-year marriage, he’ll go with her to restaurants with a newspaper and read it, ignoring her. His impassivity is so great that she could tell him about the “other man” she is seeing and he wouldn’t blink an eye. At home he is equally reticent, watching TV or reading with an inexpressive, dull-eyed demeanor suggestive of a half-dead lizard.
Whatever this reptilian man lacks as a social animal is made up by the fact that he is docile and is therefore non-threatening, a condition that everyone, including his wife, prefers to the passionate male beast whose strong, irreverent opinions will invariably rock the boat and deem that individual a troublemaker. The Go-With-the-Flow-Guy, on the other hand, is reliably safe and as such makes for controlling women a very good catch in spite of his tendency to be as charismatic and flavorful as a cardboard wafer.
A desperate marriage motivation exclusively owned by needy, immature men is the belief that since they have pissed off just about every other woman on the planet, they need to find refuge by marrying the only woman whom they haven’t yet thoroughly alienated—their current girlfriend. According to sportswriter Rick Reilly, baseball slugger Barry Bonds’ short-lived reality show was a disgrace in part because for Reilly the reality show is “the last bastion of the scoundrel.” Likewise, for many men who have offended over 99% of the female race with their pestilent existence, marriage is the last sanctuary for the despised male who has stepped on so many women’s toes that he is, understandably, a marked man.
Therefore, these men aren’t so much getting married as much as they are enlisting in a “witness protection program.” They are after all despised and targeted by their past female enemies for all their lies and betrayals and running out of allies they see that marriage makes a good cover as they try to blend in with mainstream society and take on a role that is antithetical to their single days as lying, predatory scoundrels.
The analogy between marriage and a witness protection program is further developed when we see that for many men marriage is their final stab at earning public respectability because they are, as married men, proclaiming to the world that they have voluntarily shackled themselves with the chains of domesticity in order that they may be spared greater punishments, the bulk of which will be exacted upon by the women whom they used and manipulated for so many years.
Because it is assumed that their wives will keep them in check, their wives become, in a way, equivalent to the ankle bracelet transmitters worn by parolees who are only allowed to travel within certain parameters. Marriage anchors man close to the home and, combined with the wife’s reliable issuing of house chores and other domestic duties, the shackled man is rendered safely tethered to his “home base” where his wife can observe him sharply to make sure he doesn’t backslide into the abhorrent behavior of his past single life.
Many men will see the above analysis of marriage as proof that their fear of marriage as a prison was right all along, but what they should learn from the analogy between marriage and prison is that they are more productive, more socialized, more softened around his hard edges, and more protected, both from the outside world and from themselves by being shackled to their domestic duties. With these improvements in their lives, they have actually, within limits, attained a freedom they could never find in single life.
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
McMahon writes, "Jeff Henderson's life out of prison was harder than life in prison."
"Jeff Henderson's life out of prison," McMahon observes, "was harder out of prison than in it."
"Jeff Henderson's life was harder out of prison," McMahon claims.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided byPurdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
That a life of power and money can afford you pleasures that will result in happiness. Brooks looks at the most powerful, wealthy people chronicled in history, and even they are miserable 99% of the time.
Part of this misery is due to the "hedonic treadmill," the idea that we acclimate to pleasure so that whatever it is we're addicted to for a spike in endorphins, we become numb to it to the point that we crash and sink into a depression.
All pleasures start out with a spike in dopamine, which becomes addictive, but eventually we need more and more stimulation to experience pleasure and we inevitably burn out.
Jeff Henderson becomes wealthier and wealthier and lives a more and more reckless lifestyle, accumulating cars, flying to Las Vegas with his posse, and his extravagant lifestyle attracts the attention from law enforcement, the feds.
My wife's friend has a cousin who poses with her boyfriend for Instagram photographs, and she has hundreds of thousands of followers. This model can never get enough "likes" and followers. She's addicted to social media attention, she's a slave to posing with her boyfriend for attention, and she is progressively getting more and more miserable. But she can't see her misery. She is in denial.
Like the Instagram model, Jeff Henderson is operating under the fallacy that unbridled pleasure is the key to happiness, and in the process he fails to develop real connections with people.
Two. The Unhappiness Fallacy:
Actually, we're dealing with two fallacies: That unhappiness is a bad thing and that unhappiness excludes happiness.
Unhappiness is not bad. Unhappiness is normal. Life is full of evil and conflict, so a certain degree of unhappiness is a normal thing.
In fact, addressing evil and engaging with conflict gives life meaning, so we must not avoid unhappiness. Rather, we must struggle against the things that make us unhappy.
Also, unhappiness is a state of hard work that leads to positive outcome. Imagine the piano player who is unhappy playing tedious scales and arpeggios on the piano, but all in the service of improving on the piano.
In life, we are miserable if we don't progress and improve towards a meaningful goal, and this type of progress requires focus, isolation, sacrifice, and hard work, the kind that is not associated with happiness and pleasure.
Every semester, I will have about two or three "star students" in a class. These are hard-working perfectionists who take so much pride in their work that if I were a CEO of a company I would hire those 3 students out of a class of 30. I said such to an employer who called me about a former student, and based on my testimony the student got the job.
Such students are not enamored by short-term pleasure. Such students embrace sacrifice, hard work (not hanging out with their buddies at night so they can study), and see a certain amount of drudgery and unhappiness as essential to achieving their goals.
The second fallacy is that unhappiness excludes happiness. Actually, according to Arthur C. Brooks, the most happy people can simultaneously experience unhappiness.
As Brooks observes:
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
Three. Misguided Attempts at Happiness Backfire
We can look to all sorts of addicts to see how their addiction, an attempt to escape misery and find pleasure, backfires and results in misery. Of course, there is drug addiction, but there are many others: social media attention, Swiss timepieces, shoes, cars, getting ripped muscles, etc. But the drug eventually becomes the poison. As Brooks explains:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Four. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Happiness
Intrinsic happiness refers to character building, the state of our soul, defined by the connections we make with others, creative pursuits, our contributions to society, and our ability to find meaning in suffering.
Extrinsic happiness refers to the materialistic script society hands us: Go to college, get a job so you can make money to buy lots of stuff, show off your stuff to family and friends to win their approval, curate your "amazing existence" on Facebook, etc. Then die and have hundreds of people weep at your funeral.
According to Brooks, intrinsic happiness is the way to go. He writes:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
Five. Jeff Henderson's memoir Cooked is largely about a man who transitions from an extrinsic quest for happiness to an intrinsic quest.
Henderson is miserable and suffering from soul rot during his obsession with finding extrinsic notions of happiness, but his soul finds redemption and he becomes a happier man when he helps the community and his family through an intrinsic search for happiness.
Six. Extrinsic Happiness Is Born from Our Inner Reptile
Our Inner Reptile desires dominance and reproductive success by showing signs of power. Therefore, our instincts are to get as rich, famous, and powerful as we can. But Brooks observes that these unbridled instincts can backfire.
As Brooks observes:
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
Seven. Extrinsic Happiness Makes Us Users of People
Brooks writes:
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
Jeff Henderson up to about page 100 or so of his memoir, loves things and he uses people.
Eight. Most of us sleepwalk through life in our quest for pleasure
Brooks observes that our default setting is to seek pleasure and use people, and that most of us aren't even aware of this fact because we are "sleepwalking." As he writes:
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Only because Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom and had his "butt handed to him on a stick" did he wake up from his sleepwalking ways and go on a heroic journey to find redemption for his soul. He learned to love people and use things.
Trapped in a recurring cycle of hedonism and nihilism, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson have to “clean their room,” which entails taking an unflinching moral inventory, letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
Sample #2
Mired in their morally abhorrent egotism, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson come to close to perishing until they experience the shame of their moral bankruptcy and spiritual ignorance, find their former self repellant and worthy of change, embrace the humility of hard work and fortitude, and experience the meaningful connection that results from being accountable to others.
Sample #3
Alienating themselves from others with their repellant self-aggrandizement that compels them to use and manipulate others, our two anti-heroes, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson, must experience the humiliation of a Day of Reckoning in which their repugnant deeds and sordid beings are exposed to fresh daylight. Only after this humbling debasement do these two miscreants embark on a Redemption Journey, which entails letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
Sample #4
Excessively pleased with their repellant egotism and rakish pleasure-seeking, the smarmy Phil Connors and the “businessman” Jeff Henderson have a moral reckoning in which their moral debauchery is exposed to daylight and they are shamed into a Redemption Journey, which entails letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
Sample #5
Trapped in a cycle of moral failure and the resulting monotony of their futile existence, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson have a similar Fall and Redemption Story, characterized by a recognition that their grandiosity was a False Ascent, they must overcome their denial, they must "clean their room," that they must embrace a work ethic, and that they have a moral duty to society and themselves.
Outline:
Paragraph 1: Summarize the movie.
Paragraph 2: Summarize the memoir.
Paragraph 3: Thesis: Trapped in a cycle of moral failure and the resulting monotony of their futile existence, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson have a similar Fall and Redemption Story, characterized by a recognition that their grandiosity was a False Ascent, they must overcome their denial, they must "clean their room," that they must embrace a work ethic, and that they have a moral duty to society and themselves.
Paragraph 4: They must recognize that their grandiosity was a False Ascent
Paragraph 5: They must overcome their denial
Paragraph 6: They must "clean their room."
Paragraph 7: They must embrace a work ethic, that of the Craftsman Mindset.
Paragraph 8: They have a moral duty to society and themselves and must learn to "love people, not things."
Paragraph 4: Grandiosity and the False Ascent
False sense of grandiosity and the idea of falling:
The rising-falling paradox can be explained by a close examination of human nature.
False rising: We are delusional so our perception of "rising" may be a false perception. The narcissist always thinks he's rising when in fact he's falling.
The misguided "mountain climber" dates evil women to prove he's "number one." We could call this the drive for dominance.
False rising: We see what we want to see so there is a disparity between our self-image and who we really are. Again, this disparity evidences narcissism.
False rising: We become intoxicated or drugged by false ideas of success. Americans too often chase the mirage or chimera of fame and want their own "reality" TV show.
False rising: Success makes us feel invincible.We begin to believe in the lies of the sycophants.
False rising: When we feel invincible, we allow our behavior to become more and more reckless.
False rising: When we feel more invincible, we experience hubris, a form of arrogance that blinds us from our flaws.
Fale rising could be based on arrogance and power giving us a false sense of invincibility while we become disconnected from others.
False rising could have a downside: being blind to portents of danger and obnoxious behavior as we become full of braggadocio.
False rising could result in a disconnect from values and morals and even our true self.
False rising could result in inflated self-esteem, narcissism, and a loss of proportion in regards to what's important in the world.
False rising could be the misguided use of creativity and talent: used for the purposes of evil, concupiscence, greed, self-destruction when it should be used to blossom or to flourish.
False rising results in popularity and when we're popular we get surrounded by a popularity bubble in which sycophants praise us even when we don't deserve it so we think we're being smart and funny when we're not.
False rising: The illusion of rising is often from misguided genius or talent in which we use our power for evil rather than good but willfully blind to this fact, we pat ourselves on the back for our evil deeds.
Rising is also based on human nature and the nature of struggling, flourishing, and character-building.
Falling could be a good thing: a purging lesson in humility and fortitude. Sometimes the best that could happen to you is to have "your butt handed to you on a stick," to quote Marc Maron. For example, when I was 14, I picked a fight with an 18-year-old state wrestling champion, Sammy Choa, and I had "my butt handed to me on a stick," the best thing that ever happened to me because the experience taught me to keep my mouth shut.
Falling could be a test over what's really important in this world.
Falling could be an opportunity to live and learn wisdom.
Falling could be the experience of rejection from others so that later we have empathy for those who are being rejected or scorned.
Falling could result in a struggle that develops our fortitude (strength to endure).
Falling makes us lose our "friends" and popularity so that we have to define ourselves in a new way, without the superficial definition we had when we gained our self-esteem from the approval of others.
Falling slaps our face and makes us see the truth, the truth that we have been denying. We often deny the truth about who we really are until we "hit rock bottom" and say to ourselves, "Whatever the hell it is I'm doing, it isn't working. I need a new plan."
To me, the topic demands a two-part essay. The first part is about false rising rooted in
self-delusion
denial
intoxication of false success
The second half is about real rising rooted in
hitting a wall so that we finally see our self-destructive ways and take accountability for our actions
perdition, suffering and humility as part of the re-building process
developing empathy as we reinvent ourselves in a new, much wiser way.
Paragraph 5: They must overcome their denial.
Jeff Henderson's Fall Results in Too Much Denial
Some Denial Is Necessary for Sanity, But Too Much Denial Leads to Insanity and Moral Dissolution
We need a certain amount of denial to be sane. For example, we should not face the raw, bald reality of our most egregious personal defects and weaknesses.
Otherwise, we'll be bogged down in the paralysis of self-obsession and self-loathing and we would be worthless. Let's say we're not as kind as we'd like to be.
We can't go around muttering to ourselves, "I lack the milk of human kindness" over and over. Otherwise, we'll go insane.
Another example is ugly photographs of you. I'm talking about photographs that make you look so ugly you cringe and wince with disbelief.
Photographers say most of us are more photogenic on our left side.
THROW THOSE UGLY PHOTOS AWAY NOW! Before people put them on the internet.
If you walk around life with an image of yourself based on the ugliest photographs ever taken of you, you'll never leave the house; you'll never get a date; you'll die lonely.
Try to focus on the more flattering photographs of yourself.
Is this a form of delusion? Maybe. But it's a good delusion, one that preserves your sanity.
A personal example: I hate the sound of my voice when someone plays it back on a tape recorder.
Solution?
I DON'T LISTEN TO MY RECORDED VOICE.
Otherwise, I'll reel in self-disgust.
Take peanut butter as another example. It's full of cockroach parts, but we eat it without thinking about that disgusting fact.
Or when we eat meat. Few of us contemplate the agony the animals suffered to become meat on our plate.
Or cheap clothing. It's cheap because underage children are making it in third-world country at slave wages. Still enjoying your Gap T-shirt?
To a certain degree, self-delusions are necessary. Otherwise, we don't do much. We'll criticize every move we make.
Fly to a green summit on how to reduce the world's carbon footprint and the private jet you take is blowing carbons into the atmosphere.
Another example is natural disasters. Even though an earthquake, a tsunami or some other disaster can destroy us in the blink of an eye, we have to live our lives as if we have a good shot of living a full, healthy life. Otherwise, we'll be paralyzed by fear.
So we all engage in some denial to some degree.
Taking Denial Too Far
But there is a point where denial no longer preserves our sanity, that denial goes too far and plummets us into the depths of illusion completely disconnected to reality.
We see people on American Idol who think they have the talent to be superstar singers.
Such is the fate of successful drug dealer Jeff Henderson who believes, one, he's invincible and, two, he isn't doing anything wrong: He's just a businessman.
Paragraph 6: They must clean their room.
Both Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom, despair, and are tempted by nihilism, the belief that there is no meaning to life.
There are 5 ways to respond to this crisis of moral bankruptcy, nihilism, and despair.
One. You can retreat into childlike ignorance and pretend that evil and stupidity don’t exist.
Two. You can pursue mindless pleasures and hope to erase the pain of existence through sheer oblivion.
Three. You can grit your teeth and bear the misery of life like a stoic.
Four. You can end your life and be gone from this miserable place.
Thankfully, there is a fifth response.
Five. You can clean your room.
I mean this literally and metaphorically.
Here’s an example:
I remember when I was ten, I went out to the front of the house where my dad was changing the oil on his 1967 Chrysler Newport. I said, “Dad, I’m not happy. I’m bored.”
My dad was a military man, and he always spoke in a loud voice. He said, “Of course you’re unhappy. Have you looked at your room lately? It looks like a pigsty. What are you, a professional slob? Go clean your room. You’ll feel better afterward.”
I cleaned my room and told my father I felt a lot better.
“Of course you feel better,” he said. “Did you think being a professional slob was going to make you happy?”
Jordan Peterson is also talking about cleaning our room in the spiritual, moral, and psychological sense.
We clean our room in the moral sense in 3 ways.
Number One: Cleaning your room means you stop doing what you know is wrong.
You could be spending too much time on your screen.
You could be hanging out with losers unworthy of your friendship who are dragging you down.
You could spend your money in irresponsible ways.
You could be eating in irresponsible ways.
You could be disrespectful to the people you care about most.
You could be driving too aggressively, especially when there are children in the car.
You could be whining about your kids on social media when you should get off social media and do something about your kids.
You might not brush your teeth and your breath is so bad you could breathe on an elephant and it would collapse and die from anaphylactic shock. Stop telling me how depressed you are, and brush your teeth.
Cleaning up these behaviors is like cleaning your room. It’s a good step toward feeling less miserable about your existence.
Number Two.Cleaning up your life means taking stock of your bad behaviors rather than blaming the world.
It’s easy to blame external forces for our misery when too often 95% of our misery results from our own self-destructive behavior. Scapegoats are convenient because they give us an excuse to let ourselves off the hook.
Number Three. Don’t expect all of life's answers to be presented to you at once. Be comforted by one piece of helpful wisdom at a time.
I had a student from Taiwan who shared a story with the class about a story his father told him about a young man who refused to live his life until God gave him all the answers.
Paragraph 7: They must develop a work ethic and enjoy the self-confidence that results from living an honest life that connects them with others.
Paragraph 8: They recognize that they have a moral duty to connect with society and themselves so they "give back" to the community.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, a powerful restatement of the thesis
Last Page: Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format
Review Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Paragraphs 4-8 are the key to success.
Example of an Essay That Never Uses First, Second, Third, Fourth, Etc., for Transitions, But Relies on "Paragraph Links"
Stupid Reasons for Getting Married
People should get married because they are ready to do so, meaning they're mature and truly love one another, and most importantly are prepared to make the compromises and sacrifices a healthy marriage entails. However, most people get married for the wrong reasons, that is, for stupid, lame, and asinine reasons.
Alas, needy narcissists, hardly candidates for successful marriage, glom onto the most disastrous reasons for getting married and those reasons make it certain that their marriage will quickly terminate or waddle precariously along in an interminable domestic hell.
A common and compelling reason that fuels the needy into a misguided marriage is when these fragmented souls see that everyone their age has already married—their friends, brothers, sisters, and, yes, even their enemies. Overcome by what is known today as "FOMO," they feel compelled to “get with the program" so that they may not miss out on the lavish gifts bestowed upon bride and groom. Thus, the needy are rankled by envy and greed and allow their base impulses to be the driving motivation behind their marriage.
When greed is not impelling them to tie the knot, they are also chafed by a sense of being short-changed when they see their recently-married dunce of a co-worker promoted above them for presumably the added credibility that marriage afforded them. As singles, they know they will never be taken seriously at work.
If it's not a lame stab at credibility that's motivating them to get married, it's the fear that they as the years tick by they are becoming less and less attractive and their looks will no longer obscure their woeful character deficiencies as age scrunches them up into little pinch-faced, leathery imps.
A more egregious reason for marrying is to end the tormented, off-on again-off-on again relationship, which needs the official imprimatur of marriage, followed by divorce, to officially terminate the relationship. I spoke to a marriage counselor once who told me that some couples were so desperate to break-up for good that they actually got married, then divorced, for this purpose.
Other pathological reasons to marry are to find a loathsome spouse in order to spite one’s parents or to set a wedding date in order to hire a personal trainer and finally lose those thirty pounds one has been carrying for too long.
Envy, avarice, spite, and vanity fuel both needy men and women alike. However, there is a certain type of needy man, whom we'll call the Man-Child, who finds that it is easier to marry his girlfriend than it is to have to listen to her constant nagging about their need to get married. His girlfriend’s constant harping about the fact their relationship hasn’t taken the “next logical step” presents a burden so great that marriage in comparison seems benign. Even if the Man-Child has not developed the maturity to marry, even if he isn’t sure if he’s truly in love, even if he is still inextricably linked to some former girlfriend that his current girlfriend does not know about, even if he knows in his heart of hearts that he is not hard-wired for marriage, even if he harbors a secret defect that renders him a liability to any woman, he will dismiss all of these factors and rush into a marriage in order to alleviate his current source of anxiety and suffering, which is the incessant barrage of his girlfriend’s grievances about them not being married.
Indeed, some of needy man’s worst decisions have been made in order to quell a discontented woman. The Man-Child's eagerness to quiet a woman’s discontent points to a larger defect, namely, his spinelessness, which, if left unchecked, turns him into the Go-With-the-Flow-Guy. As the name suggests, this type of man offers no resistance, even in large-scale decisions that affect his destiny. Put this man in a situation where his girlfriend, his friends, and his family are all telling him that “it’s time to get married,” and he will, as his name suggests, simply “go with the flow.” He will allow everyone else to make the wedding plans, he’ll let someone fit him for a wedding suit, he’ll allow his mother to pick out the ring, he’ll allow his fiancé to pick out the look and flavor of the wedding cake and then on the day of the wedding, he simply “shows up” with all the passion of a turnip.
The Man-Child's turnip-like passivity and his aversion to argument ensure marital longevity. However, there are drawbacks. Most notably, he will over time become so silent that his wife won’t even be able to get a word out of him. Over the course of their fifty-year marriage, he’ll go with her to restaurants with a newspaper and read it, ignoring her. His impassivity is so great that she could tell him about the “other man” she is seeing and he wouldn’t blink an eye. At home he is equally reticent, watching TV or reading with an inexpressive, dull-eyed demeanor suggestive of a half-dead lizard.
Whatever this reptilian man lacks as a social animal is made up by the fact that he is docile and is therefore non-threatening, a condition that everyone, including his wife, prefers to the passionate male beast whose strong, irreverent opinions will invariably rock the boat and deem that individual a troublemaker. The Go-With-the-Flow-Guy, on the other hand, is reliably safe and as such makes for controlling women a very good catch in spite of his tendency to be as charismatic and flavorful as a cardboard wafer.
A desperate marriage motivation exclusively owned by needy, immature men is the belief that since they have pissed off just about every other woman on the planet, they need to find refuge by marrying the only woman whom they haven’t yet thoroughly alienated—their current girlfriend. According to sportswriter Rick Reilly, baseball slugger Barry Bonds’ short-lived reality show was a disgrace in part because for Reilly the reality show is “the last bastion of the scoundrel.” Likewise, for many men who have offended over 99% of the female race with their pestilent existence, marriage is the last sanctuary for the despised male who has stepped on so many women’s toes that he is, understandably, a marked man.
Therefore, these men aren’t so much getting married as much as they are enlisting in a “witness protection program.” They are after all despised and targeted by their past female enemies for all their lies and betrayals and running out of allies they see that marriage makes a good cover as they try to blend in with mainstream society and take on a role that is antithetical to their single days as lying, predatory scoundrels.
The analogy between marriage and a witness protection program is further developed when we see that for many men marriage is their final stab at earning public respectability because they are, as married men, proclaiming to the world that they have voluntarily shackled themselves with the chains of domesticity in order that they may be spared greater punishments, the bulk of which will be exacted upon by the women whom they used and manipulated for so many years.
Because it is assumed that their wives will keep them in check, their wives become, in a way, equivalent to the ankle bracelet transmitters worn by parolees who are only allowed to travel within certain parameters. Marriage anchors man close to the home and, combined with the wife’s reliable issuing of house chores and other domestic duties, the shackled man is rendered safely tethered to his “home base” where his wife can observe him sharply to make sure he doesn’t backslide into the abhorrent behavior of his past single life.
Many men will see the above analysis of marriage as proof that their fear of marriage as a prison was right all along, but what they should learn from the analogy between marriage and prison is that they are more productive, more socialized, more softened around his hard edges, and more protected, both from the outside world and from themselves by being shackled to their domestic duties. With these improvements in their lives, they have actually, within limits, attained a freedom they could never find in single life.
Today we will look at the second part of the Redemption Journey: Perdition, which means suffering punishment for one’s crimes or misdeeds.
Reality sets in: crime and punishment or perdition
1. Jeff Henderson gets arrested and realizes he won’t have access to women the way he used to. This is a shock to his psyche.
2. He suffers another shock to his psyche. Once a powerful man who called the shots, he finds in prison that he is now powerless, beholden to guards like Big Bubba on page 79.
3. In prison, he has time to think about his life in ways he didn't before. For example, he wanted to be like T whom he worshipped as a sort of god. Ironically, he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison that he had become BIGGER that T and that being SO BIG put him on the feds’ radar screen and that was his downfall. 81
4. All Jeff’s life he’s been inculcated with the belief in the Homie or Gang Banger Code of Silence as if it were religious truth. But in prison, he discovers the No-Snitch Code has no real value because a homie will rat you out when it’s to his advantage. See page 151.
5. Jeff thought he was invincible but discovers a painful fact: The Feds had been watching him, not for several months, but for several years. He was digging his own grave for a long, long time. 87
6. Why me? Jeff is not a victim but he cries to Jesus and feels sorry for himself. In a state of perdition, he his helpless, beholden to the caprices of prison life.
7. He realizes a painful fact: Prison may have saved his life. One of the Twins, his supplier, got killed shortly after Jeff’s imprisonment. 89
8. Too late in the game, he discovers another painful fact: Anyone can get convicted who doesn’t get caught with drugs or money. 94
9. His perdition takes on palpable pain when he is given legal accountability for his crimes: 19.5 years. See page 100.
10. Only after he’s arrested does he discover another painful fact: There is no loyalty in the streets. It’s a myth. See page 152 after his homies steal all his stuff after he’s arrested.
What is Jeff’s attitude at the beginning of his prison sentence? Contrast with his attitude at the end of it (centripetal vs. centrifugal development)
1. Self-pity, victimization
2. Nihilism 110
3. Getting over, coast in life, do the minimum.
4. Universe of One 113. On page 192, he says “in prison everything is about you.”
5. No passion for marriage 114
6. He fluctuates between complacency and despair.
Future Goal and Redemption
We all have the drive for redemption; if this drive is frustrated, the drive does not remain dormant and neutral inside of us; to the contrary, this drive goes inward and poisons us.
Changing Our Definition of Success
When Jeff is able to redirect his energy from being a drug dealer to a chef, he finds redemption. All of us have a “life energy” that can be directed toward concupiscence, revenge, victimization or growth, maturity, and independence as is explained by Erich Fromm in this passage from Escape from Freedom:
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this, we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.
In other words, Fromm is saying that we must flourish in a passion in order to direct our energy toward growth rather than re-direct that energy toward self-destruction such as concupiscent pursuits.
It’s only in prison that Jeff is forced to being the journey to redemption.
Redemption and Flourishing
Flourishing is the opposite of concupiscence flourishing, from the Greek word eudaimonia: means to blossom, to become who we were meant to be.
When Jeff Henderson becomes an illegal “business man” being followed by the feds, rationalizing his illegal activities, and living on easy money, he’s not the person he was meant to be. He is rather a grotesque variation. We see his misshapen character in prison when he becomes the enraged, nihilistic, disaffected victim.
Only when he learns a passion and accepts his responsibilities as an adult, does he begin to flourish and he becomes happier than he was as a concupiscent drug dealer.
Taking a Close Look at Fortitude: The strength and tenacity to push forward in the presence of ever surmounting obstacles. What are Jeff Henderson’s obstacles to starting over?
1. Jeff Henderson discovers that the world is full of “haters and dream crushers” (crabs in a bucket). These are the haters who don’t want people with good intentions to be afforded a clean, fresh start because they want everyone to share in their failure and misery.
2. Others don’t trust us. Nor do they forgive us for our past deeds.
3. Often we have an inability to forgive ourselves for our past deeds creates baggage
4. Often we lack confidence: We fear that we may backslide into our old ways.
5. Often a past label like “convicted felon” creates a stigma that is extremely difficult to erase. We see the felon. We don’t see the husband trying to support his wife and two kids.
6. Jeff Henderson has to tone down his “stroll” and his muscles with baggy clothes to remove the hard gangsta look. See page 2
7. Jeff Henderson has to remain gracious and poised when he gets pooh-poohed by Caesar’s Palace, the very place that was happy to take his money when he was a dealer “back in the day.” Now Caesar’s is playing all high and mighty.
Centrifugal Motion or JH's Transformation
1. He sees he’s been blind and willfully ignorant about the consequences of his selling drugs. 115
2. He develops intellectual curiosity, reading eclectic material, various intellectual and religious doctrines. He doesn’t embrace one but rather picks and chooses as he sees fit. 124
3. He becomes engaged with others vs. being disaffected. 124
4. He finds a passion, cooking, that utilizes his talents.
5. He learns the humility of starting at the bottom and not getting things “easy” like when he was a dealer.
6. He learns a hard work ethic. It’s almost impossible to acclimate from easy money to hard work with low pay. But Jeff was always a hard worker.
7. Jeff found a mentor in Big Roy and later in Las Vegas a cook named Friendly. And then Robert at the Gadsby’s.
8. Jeff experiences contrition and regret on page 146: He is among the dregs of the world, exactly where he belongs, in the lowest rung of society: hell.
9. You must have a vision of a different life. See page 147.
10. He begins to take pride in his work. 147: Speed, taste, and presentation. 188
11. He undoes his wrong by talking to teens in Vegas. 165
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided byPurdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
That a life of power and money can afford you pleasures that will result in happiness. Brooks looks at the most powerful, wealthy people chronicled in history, and even they are miserable 99% of the time.
Part of this misery is due to the "hedonic treadmill," the idea that we acclimate to pleasure so that whatever it is we're addicted to for a spike in endorphins, we become numb to it to the point that we crash and sink into a depression.
All pleasures start out with a spike in dopamine, which becomes addictive, but eventually we need more and more stimulation to experience pleasure and we inevitably burn out.
Jeff Henderson becomes wealthier and wealthier and lives a more and more reckless lifestyle, accumulating cars, flying to Las Vegas with his posse, and his extravagant lifestyle attracts the attention from law enforcement, the feds.
My wife's friend has a cousin who poses with her boyfriend for Instagram photographs, and she has hundreds of thousands of followers. This model can never get enough "likes" and followers. She's addicted to social media attention, she's a slave to posing with her boyfriend for attention, and she is progressively getting more and more miserable. But she can't see her misery. She is in denial.
Like the Instagram model, Jeff Henderson is operating under the fallacy that unbridled pleasure is the key to happiness, and in the process he fails to develop real connections with people.
Two. The Unhappiness Fallacy:
Actually, we're dealing with two fallacies: That unhappiness is a bad thing and that unhappiness excludes happiness.
Unhappiness is not bad. Unhappiness is normal. Life is full of evil and conflict, so a certain degree of unhappiness is a normal thing.
In fact, addressing evil and engaging with conflict gives life meaning, so we must not avoid unhappiness. Rather, we must struggle against the things that make us unhappy.
Also, unhappiness is a state of hard work that leads to positive outcome. Imagine the piano player who is unhappy playing tedious scales and arpeggios on the piano, but all in the service of improving on the piano.
In life, we are miserable if we don't progress and improve towards a meaningful goal, and this type of progress requires focus, isolation, sacrifice, and hard work, the kind that is not associated with happiness and pleasure.
Every semester, I will have about two or three "star students" in a class. These are hard-working perfectionists who take so much pride in their work that if I were a CEO of a company I would hire those 3 students out of a class of 30. I said such to an employer who called me about a former student, and based on my testimony the student got the job.
Such students are not enamored by short-term pleasure. Such students embrace sacrifice, hard work (not hanging out with their buddies at night so they can study), and see a certain amount of drudgery and unhappiness as essential to achieving their goals.
The second fallacy is that unhappiness excludes happiness. Actually, according to Arthur C. Brooks, the most happy people can simultaneously experience unhappiness.
As Brooks observes:
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
Three. Misguided Attempts at Happiness Backfire
We can look to all sorts of addicts to see how their addiction, an attempt to escape misery and find pleasure, backfires and results in misery. Of course, there is drug addiction, but there are many others: social media attention, Swiss timepieces, shoes, cars, getting ripped muscles, etc. But the drug eventually becomes the poison. As Brooks explains:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Four. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Happiness
Intrinsic happiness refers to character building, the state of our soul, defined by the connections we make with others, creative pursuits, our contributions to society, and our ability to find meaning in suffering.
Extrinsic happiness refers to the materialistic script society hands us: Go to college, get a job so you can make money to buy lots of stuff, show off your stuff to family and friends to win their approval, curate your "amazing existence" on Facebook, etc. Then die and have hundreds of people weep at your funeral.
According to Brooks, intrinsic happiness is the way to go. He writes:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
Five. Jeff Henderson's memoir Cooked is largely about a man who transitions from an extrinsic quest for happiness to an intrinsic quest.
Henderson is miserable and suffering from soul rot during his obsession with finding extrinsic notions of happiness, but his soul finds redemption and he becomes a happier man when he helps the community and his family through an intrinsic search for happiness.
Six. Extrinsic Happiness Is Born from Our Inner Reptile
Our Inner Reptile desires dominance and reproductive success by showing signs of power. Therefore, our instincts are to get as rich, famous, and powerful as we can. But Brooks observes that these unbridled instincts can backfire.
As Brooks observes:
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
Seven. Extrinsic Happiness Makes Us Users of People
Brooks writes:
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
Jeff Henderson up to about page 100 or so of his memoir, loves things and he uses people.
Eight. Most of us sleepwalk through life in our quest for pleasure
Brooks observes that our default setting is to seek pleasure and use people, and that most of us aren't even aware of this fact because we are "sleepwalking." As he writes:
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Only because Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom and had his "butt handed to him on a stick" did he wake up from his sleepwalking ways and go on a heroic journey to find redemption for his soul. He learned to love people and use things.
To refresh your memory, here is a suggested essay outline:
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Paragraphs 4-8 are the key to success.
In those 4 paragraphs, you could break down the manner in which Connors and Henderson engage with their personal crucibles.
Review: What is the Crucible?
The Crucible is your personal life conflict, a place where opposing forces meet and you are forced to navigate and engage with those forces. The process is excruciating, but the alternative is to retreat and become a weakling disintegrating inside your self-imposed cocoon.
How Do We Engage with the Crucible and How Does This Lead to Redemption?
(Or for the purpose of your essay, how do Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson begin to turn their lives around by engaging in their personal crucibles?)
We have to humbly admit we are finite and not squander our life as if we have infinite time and resources.
We have to accept that life has no consequences, that a life of hedonism and nihilism is a juvenile fantasy that doesn’t square with reality.
We have to accept that life is suffering and conflict and that engaging with this conflict, entering the Crucible, is our only path. Retreat from conflict feeds our Self-Pitying Sloth and makes us weaker and more miserable.
We have to see that engaging with the Crucible is our life meaning and makes transforms us into our Higher Angel.
We have to see that engaging with the Crucible means engaging with other people. Yes, it’s true, as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “That hell is other people,” but living with no people is a greater hell.
Engaging with the Crucible means accepting that life is suffering, but it also means that we understand that not engaging with the Crucible results in even greater suffering.
Engaging with the Crucible means defining our own personal ones. Everyone’s crucible is different. But each crucible imposes its own set of limitations on us. Phil Connors from Groundhog Day and Jeff Henderson from Cooked have certain limitations based on where they live, what their skill level is, and what their past actions have done to their present situation. In other words, you have to define your personal crucible.
Everyone is faced with a Crucible. You have a choice: To enter the Crucible or retreat from it. But either choice has consequences. For example, for the last decade or so, billions of people have been on social media, a platform that is an escape from the Crucible; as a result, we have become more dumb and maladapted as written about with great persuasion and insight in Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”
Death Challenges Phil’s Egotism and Delusion of Infinity
When he learns that the old man died, and is told by the nurse that “it was just his time,” he refuses to accept it and embarks on a new montage—this time trying to hold death off with money, food, warmth, anything he can think of, in a touching parody of the excess of the earlier diner scene, and his own parade of suicides.
Of course none of it works. Phil wants to control life itself, and become the god he claimed to be, but in the end, he’s left in an alley, holding Pops while he dies, and is left to stare into an empty sky, watching Pops’ last breath drift away.
In all of these scenes Pops never changes, never has any lines, no personality of his own, because he is Death. He is the reality of time, and finiteness, that Phil has to accept before he can return to life. It is only after the final death that we see Phil really shift in his attitude toward life, and even winter. Earlier he intones, “It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you the rest of your life,” but now he delivers a truly inspiring speech for Groundhog Day. “Standing here, among the people of Punxatawney, and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”
Humility Causes Us to Reach Out to Others and Dissolve Our Solipsism
We see that Phil has changed by how he spends his day helping the people of Punxatawney. He can’t save Pops, but he can make his last day a little warmer. He can make sure the kid doesn’t break his neck falling out of the tree, that Buster the Groundhog Poo-bah lives to see February 3rd, and that a young Michael Shannon can attend Wrestlemania with his new bride. Winter itself is transformed, because he’s learned to look at it differently, and Phil has become a new person.
In the end, we have a romantic comedy that’s not about whether the boy gets the girl. We have a spiritual movie that never tells us why the hero gains his redemption. We have a vision of small-town America that makes us want to flee back to the loving arms of urban Pittsburgh. (OK, that might just be me…while I’ve come to love the people of Punxsutawney, I don’t think I could handle living there.) We have a time loops movie that doesn’t give us a single clue about its structure. And finally, we have a comedy that hinges on death, but remains so fucking wonderful that people are willing to suffer through multiple exposure to “I Got You Babe” to watch it every year.
A Consequence-Free Life Would Eventually Become Boring (Anhedonic Response)
When Phil first realizes he's living the same day over and over again, he takes advantage of it. . . . Eventually he realizes manipulating people to get exactly what you want all the time isn't that satisfying, and begins to help them instead.
People Make People Better
It isn't money or stuff or careers or fame or superiority that makes you a better person, it's giving yourself to something bigger or other than yourself — a person, a cause, an endeavor. Other people make you better! That's what people are for!
There's been considerable talk about the idea that Phil is actually dead - having perished in the snowstorm that is then perpetually wrapped around Punxsutawney while his time-loop torment traps him. That's why he's unable to kill himself and why he's destined to live the same day over and over again: he's literally trapped in purgatory as his soul has been identified as not wholly bad but he cannot move on to Heaven until he proves his worthiness.
That school of thought basically suggests that all of the challenges that Phil overcomes by the end of the film are trials within purgatory that challenge him to make the most morally wholesome choices in the war for his soul. Either he's already fully dead at this point or he's dying, repeating his final day over and over in his head until he comes to the right resolution that helps him move on when he's ready to die properly.
But what if it's all a little darker than that? What if the Punxsutawney that Phil constructs in his mind isn't Purgatory but rather full-blooded, burn-your-briskets Hell?
Think about it: when we meet Phil, he's not a nice person. He's self-centred, arrogant, conceited and manipulative. He's not the kind of person who would be going to Heaven, in other words and it would take a SERIOUS attitude adjustment for him to even get to Purgatory. His morality is just that black and white and his idea of Hell is having to care about other people. To truly care, that is.
What worse a Hell could there be for someone so self-involved than being forced to help an entire town full of people? And worse than that, it's a Hell that promises him the ability to help and improve himself without ever letting him realise his moment of epiphany and move on. He can get kids WrestleMania tickets and fix people's backs, but he can't stop an old man from dying, no matter how hard he tries.
And on the surface, it might seem that that is because Phil initially uses the opportunity for self-improvement for the wrong reasons: he does it primarily to impress Rita in order to seduce her. Sure, there's probably an element of boredom that drives some of his behaviour (like learning to flick cards into a hat to expert level), but he's mostly focused on her as his goal until the very end when he is finally rewarded after a day of pure selflessness.
For most people, that would appear to be his defining arc and it's that that allows him to move on. But there might be something more to it. And to pick that apart, you have to consider two things: firstly, why Phil is trapped as he is in the first place and secondly what SPECIFICALLY gets him freed. It's simple enough to say that he's trapped because he's a bad person, but that wouldn't explain the supernatural element of it all and he's hardly the worst person in the world.
More likely is the suggestion that he's trapped in Punxsutawney as a punishment for something he does while he's there. Someone he interacts with who might have that sort of hellish power. How about the devil?
According to one theory that was originally posted on Reddit, he's there under the control of the devil, who we actually meet early on in Groundhog Day. You'd be forgiven for missing him too, because he doesn't come wearing red or bearing horns and a forked tail: instead he's a businessman in a suit selling life insurance.
That's right, Groundhog Day's Devil is, in fact, Ned Ryerson. Needle Nose Ned.
The theory suggests that Phil is trapped in Punxsutawney because he insults Ned and turns down his offer of a contract for life insurance. Or is that a contract for his soul? It's from the point of their first meeting that everything goes wrong for Phil. Literally, the first step he takes after their meeting is a "doozy" that sees him step into an icy puddle, and it's all downhill from there.
Curiously, Phil doesn't even recognise him, almost as if Ned doesn't actually know him and is operating under some pretence in order to get close to Phil. Almost like the Devil saw an opportunity to take a soul personally from someone he KNEW would be in Punxsutawney at that time and who he could probably have some fun with. Someone, mostly, who deserved to be tormented.
That would explain why it takes so long for Phil to "escape" Punxsutawney in the end. By the time he completes his "perfect day" there's no saying how many times he's tried to live purely selflessly (he does tell the kid who falls out of the tree he's saved him a LOT of times without a hint of gratitude), but you'd have to imagine it's a significant amount of time. There are lots of elements after all, but in the end only one matters.
It's not until Phil finally relents to Ned and signs away his soul to him that he's able to move on. That's the key to the ending, not saving anyone or any act of kindness. It's that transaction. Ned was always selling a contract that covered more than life insurance - he was bartering for Phil's soul, driving him to desperation through endless torment. That torment took two forms: first, making him miserable and then making him HAVE to be selfless - which was everything he hated up until his first meeting with Ned. By the end, he's lost sight of who he was and Ned/The Devil is able to absolutely fleece him out of extensive, unnecessary insurance.
Is this him selling his soul to the Devil for his freedom and everything he wants? After all, he wants to be loved by everyone, he wants to be famous, he wants to never suffer the torment of Punxsutawney ever again (which he achieves by learning to love it) and he gets the girl. Doesn't that all sound a little ideal?
So maybe the ending doesn't see Phil completely freed after all. Maybe him being freed from the loop is simply the end of his life as the Devil takes his soul and what we imagine is a happy ending is something far more profoundly sad. After all, just as George Bailey's "revelation" in It's A Wonderful Life isn't about escaping his hell, but rather embracing it, Phil's "happy ending" is simply to come to love everything that he hated and arguably abandoning everything that had made him successful. Doesn't that sound like Hell?
Conclusion:
Social media has become a way of failing to engage in life’s real crucible and as a result many of us are in a state of individual and societal entropy.
Building Block #1 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connors Comparison
Write paragraphs 1 and 2 in which you summarize the Jeff Henderson memoir Cooked in Paragraph 1 and the movie Groundhog Day in Paragraph 2.
Building Block #2 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connor Comparison
Write Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys.
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school, the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school, the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
Jeff Henderson Must Overcome Hedonism, Nihilism and Self-Pity:
Why Bother to Try When Life Feels Like One Big Cruel Joke?
In 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson says there comes a time when we all feel like life is one big cruel joke. We reach the point where we say, like George Carlin, “This place is a freak show. Why even bother?”
Peterson uses Tolstoy as an example of a successful, privileged, wealthy person, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who came to that point at the peak of his powers.
Tolstoy looked at the world, and said, and I paraphrase, “I hate this place. Evil triumphs over good more than not. Stupid people rise to high positions in the bureaucracies and make our lives miserable. And no matter how great our achievements, all those successes will be cancelled by death, so what’s the point? Planet Earth is a joke, man.”
Nihilism
When you’ve reached this point in your life, you’ve arrived at the Door of Nihilism, the belief that nothing matters in this world because there is no meaning. Nihilism tells us there is nothing to live for.
There are 5 ways to respond to this crisis of moral bankruptcy, nihilism, and despair.
One. You can retreat into childlike ignorance and pretend that evil and stupidity don’t exist.
Two. You can pursue mindless pleasures and hope to erase the pain of existence through sheer oblivion.
Three. You can grit your teeth and bear the misery of life like a stoic.
Four. You can end your life and be gone from this miserable place.
Thankfully, there is a fifth response.
Five. You can clean your room.
I mean this literally and metaphorically.
Here’s an example:
I remember when I was ten, I went out to the front of the house where my dad was changing the oil on his 1967 Chrysler Newport. I said, “Dad, I’m not happy. I’m bored.”
My dad was a military man, and he always spoke in a loud voice. He said, “Of course you’re unhappy. Have you looked at your room lately? It looks like a pigsty. What are you, a professional slob? Go clean your room. You’ll feel better afterward.”
I cleaned my room and told my father I felt a lot better.
“Of course you feel better,” he said. “Did you think being a professional slob was going to make you happy?”
Jordan Peterson is also talking about cleaning our room in the spiritual, moral, and psychological sense.
We clean our room in the moral sense in 3 ways.
Number One: Cleaning your room means you stop doing what you know is wrong.
You could be spending too much time on your screen.
You could be hanging out with losers unworthy of your friendship who are dragging you down.
You could spending your money in irresponsible ways.
You could be eating in irresponsible ways.
You could be disrespectful to the people you care about most.
You could be driving too aggressively, especially when there are children in the car.
You could be whining about your kids on social media when you should get off social media and do something about your kids.
You might not brush your teeth and your breath is so bad you could breath on an elephant and it would collapse and die from anaphylactic shock. Stop telling me how depressed you are, and brush your teeth.
Cleaning up these behaviors is like cleaning your room. It’s a good step toward feeling less miserable about your existence.
Number Two.Cleaning up your life means taking stock of your bad behaviors rather than blaming the world.
It’s easy to blame external forces for our misery when too often 95% of our misery results from our own self-destructive behavior. Scapegoats are convenient because they give us an excuse to let ourselves off the hook.
Number Three. Don’t expect all of life answers to be presented to you at once. Be comforted by one piece of helpful wisdom at a time.
I had a student from Taiwan who shared a story with the class about a story his father told him about a young man who refused to live his life until God gave him all the answers.
Sample Thesis Statements for Essay 3
Sample #1
Trapped in a recurring cycle of hedonism and nihilism, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson have to “clean their room,” which entails letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
Sample #2
Mired in their morally abhorrent egotism, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson come to close to perishing until they experience the shame of their moral bankruptcy and spiritual ignorance, find their former self repellant and worthy of change, embrace the humility of hard work and fortitude, and experience the meaningful connection that results from being accountable to others.
Sample #3
Alienating themselves from others with their repellant self-aggrandizement that compels them to use and manipulate others, our two anti-heroes, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson, must experience the humiliation of a Day of Reckoning in which their repugnant deeds and sordid beings are exposed to fresh daylight. Only after this humbling debasement do these two miscreants embark on a Redemption Journey, which entails letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
Sample #4
Excessively pleased with their repellant egotism and rakish pleasure-seeking, the smarmy Phil Connors and the “businessman” Jeff Henderson have a moral reckoning in which their moral debauchery is exposed to daylight and they are shamed into a Redemption Journey, which entails letting go of their egotistical delusions, letting go of their self-pitying nihilism, embracing a work ethic, and making themselves accountable to society and themselves.
The idea of falling:
The rising-falling paradox can be explained by a close examination of human nature.
False rising: We are delusional so our perception of "rising" may be a false perception. The narcissist always thinks he's rising when in fact he's falling.
The misguided "mountain climber" dates evil women to prove he's "number one." We could call this the drive for dominance.
False rising: We see what we want to see so there is a disparity between our self-image and who we really are. Again, this disparity evidences narcissism.
False rising: We become intoxicated or drugged by false ideas of success. Americans too often chase the mirage or chimera of fame and want their own "reality" TV show.
False rising: Success makes us feel invincible.We begin to believe in the lies of the sycophants.
False rising: When we feel invincible, we allow our behavior to become more and more reckless.
False rising: When we feel more invincible, we experience hubris, a form of arrogance that blinds us from our flaws.
Fale rising could be based on arrogance and power giving us a false sense of invincibility while we become disconnected from others.
False rising could have a downside: being blind to portents of danger and obnoxious behavior as we become full of braggadocio.
False rising could result in a disconnect from values and morals and even our true self.
False rising could result in inflated self-esteem, narcissism, and a loss of proportion in regards to what's important in the world.
False rising could be the misguided use of creativity and talent: used for the purposes of evil, concupiscence, greed, self-destruction when it should be used to blossom or to flourish.
False rising results in popularity and when we're popular we get surrounded by a popularity bubble in which sycophants praise us even when we don't deserve it so we think we're being smart and funny when we're not.
False rising: The illusion of rising is often from misguided genius or talent in which we use our power for evil rather than good but willfully blind to this fact, we pat ourselves on the back for our evil deeds.
Rising is also based on human nature and the nature of struggling, flourishing, and character-building.
Falling could be a good thing: a purging lesson in humility and fortitude. Sometimes the best that could happen to you is to have "your butt handed to you on a stick," to quote Marc Maron. For example, when I was 14, I picked a fight with an 18-year-old state wrestling champion, Sammy Choa, and I had "my butt handed to me on a stick," the best thing that ever happened to me because the experience taught me to keep my mouth shut.
Falling could be a test over what's really important in this world.
Falling could be an opportunity to live and learn wisdom.
Falling could be the experience of rejection from others so that later we have empathy for those who are being rejected or scorned.
Falling could result in a struggle that develops our fortitude (strength to endure).
Falling makes us lose our "friends" and popularity so that we have to define ourselves in a new way, without the superficial definition we had when we gained our self-esteem from the approval of others.
Falling slaps our face and makes us see the truth, the truth that we have been denying. We often deny the truth about who we really are until we "hit rock bottom" and say to ourselves, "Whatever the hell it is I'm doing, it isn't working. I need a new plan."
To me, the topic demands a two-part essay. The first part is about false rising rooted in
self-delusion
denial
intoxication of false success
The second half is about real rising rooted in
hitting a wall so that we finally see our self-destructive ways and take accountability for our actions
perdition, suffering and humility as part of the re-building process
developing empathy as we reinvent ourselves in a new, much wiser way.
Example of Signal Phrase, Introduction, and Transition to Thesis
In his brilliant essay "We know junk food makes us sick. Are 'junk values' making us depressed?," journalist Johann Hari observes that our greedy appetites for materialism fail to make us happy, but rather these extrinsic values for seductive objects such as fancy cars, watches, and designer clothes bloat us with us spiritual indigestion. He cogently writes: "Extrinsic values are KFC for the soul. Yet our culture constantly pushes us to live extrinsically." Hari's diagnosis of spiritual crapulence applies to the fall and eventual redemption of Jeff Henderson whose life as a premier crack dealer honed his appetite for extrinsic gratification made him hellbound, and his transformation into a seeker of intrinsic worth altered his trajectory toward heavenly atonement.
Jeff Henderson's Fall Results in Too Much Denial
Some Denial Is Necessary for Sanity, But Too Much Denial Leads to Insanity and Moral Dissolution
We need a certain amount of denial to be sane. For example, we should not face the raw, bald reality of our most egregious personal defects and weaknesses.
Otherwise, we'll be bogged down in the paralysis of self-obsession and self-loathing and we would be worthless. Let's say we're not as kind as we'd like to be.
We can't go around muttering to ourselves, "I lack the milk of human kindness" over and over. Otherwise, we'll go insane.
Another example is ugly photographs of you. I'm talking about photographs that make you look so ugly you cringe and wince with disbelief.
Photographers say most of us are more photogenic on our left side.
THROW THOSE UGLY PHOTOS AWAY NOW! Before people put them on the internet.
If you walk around life with an image of yourself based on the ugliest photographs ever taken of you, you'll never leave the house; you'll never get a date; you'll die lonely.
Try to focus on the more flattering photographs of yourself.
Is this a form of delusion? Maybe. But it's a good delusion, one that preserves your sanity.
A personal example: I hate the sound of my voice when someone plays it back on a tape recorder.
Solution?
I DON'T LISTEN TO MY RECORDED VOICE.
Otherwise, I'll reel in self-disgust.
Take peanut butter as another example. It's full of cockroach parts, but we eat it without thinking about that disgusting fact.
Or when we eat meat. Few of us contemplate the agony the animals suffered to become meat on our plate.
Or cheap clothing. It's cheap because underage children are making it in third-world country at slave wages. Still enjoying your Gap T-shirt?
To a certain degree, self-delusions are necessary. Otherwise, we don't do much. We'll criticize every move we make.
Fly to a green summit on who to reduce the world's carbon footprint and the private jet you take is blowing carbons into the atmosphere.
Another example is natural disasters. Even though an earthquake, a tsunami or some other disaster can destroy us in the blink of an eye, we have to live our lives as if we have a good shot of living a full, healthy life. Otherwise, we'll be paralyzed by fear.
So we all engage in some denial to some degree.
Taking Denial Too Far
But there is a point where denial no longer preserves our sanity, that denial goes too far and plummets us into the depths of illusion completely disconnected to reality.
We see people on American Idol who think they have the talent to be superstar singers.
Such is the fate of successful drug dealer Jeff Henderson who believes, one, he's invincible and, two, he isn't doing anything wrong: He's just a businessman.
Use an example of denial for introduction.
Sometimes When We Think We're "Rising," We're Really in Denial
Examples of Denial
A woman sees gradual warning signs that her boyfriend is jealous and controlling, but she denies it and before she knows it, she is in the chapel about to give her vows, what will be for her a prison sentence of unbearable hell: physical beatings and psychological abuse.
A man is a major drug dealer but minimizes the harm of his actions by telling everyone he is not a drug user, a gang-banger, or a killer. He’s just a “business man.”
A man doesn't believe he has a snoring problem until his wife plays him a tape-recording of his sleep apnea.
A man cheats on his girlfriend, convinces her that he did not cheat and has a hard time “forgiving” his girlfriend for questioning his fidelity.
An El Camino student hangs out with college dropout buddies who never really grew up. Their lives center on “having a good time,” which is the usual fare of male bonding, bragging about their endless series of immature relationships, gossiping about their latest exploits, etc. This student can’t acknowledge that his “buddies” are emotional retards distracting him from his more important goals, such as succeeding in college. Even more disturbing, he fails to admit that his “buddies” are haters who want him to fail because crabs always pinch the top crab straddling the bucket and pull the crab back in before it can escape.
Two. The Causes of Denial
When you lie to yourself enough times, you begin to believe that your lie is a truth. This is the beginning of insanity.
When your whole life becomes a collection of lies that you’ve convinced yourself are truths, you are walking around Planet Earth with your head up your butt.
Denial is also brought upon by the gradual worsening of a situation. You acclimate to gradual developments so that you don’t see what is happening to you or your don’t want to see it. We can call this Suffering Acclimation. The pain is so gradual we can get used to it.
Acclimation allows you to adapt to an extreme situation so that is doesn’t seem extreme to you. Making $100,000 a month in easy money isn’t normal to us, but it was normal to Jeff Henderson during his drug dealing days. In other words, craziness becomes the “new normal.”
Denial is caused by the ego, which says, “These things can’t be happening because of me. I’m essentially a good person. I don’t deserve this.” Such is Jeff Henderson’s position during his initial arrest and imprisonment.
When the ego embraces denial to escape personal accountability, the result is nihilism, the death of morals and meaning. In other words, “you don’t give a damn about anything.” That’s nihilism. See page 110 in which Jeff Henderson says he doesn’t care about anything. He doesn’t want to get his life together. He just wants to lift weights and “kick it” with his homies. That’s nihilism.
When you're surrounded by sycophants, they tell you what you want to hear, not the truth, so you live in a bubble of denial.
Perdition and Redemption
Review:
So far we’ve talked about Jeff Henderson’s Redemption Journey in terms of his Fall, which includes concupiscence, pursuing the good without a moral compass, and denial, the refusal to take accountability for one’s actions by relying on all sorts of rationalizations.
Redemption Reviewed
1. The Fall, misguided quest for goodness often resulting in the following:
concupiscence
we make rationalizations to justify our actions. We eventually believe our rationalizations and this is a form of insanity
denial or willed ignorance; we pretend that we don't know what we're doing.
moral dissolution, numbness
2. Denial of the Fall because of the some of the above reasons
3. Epiphany or revelation in which we realize our accountability for our Fall
4. Contrition: feeling badly for our misdeeds; this is part of perdition, suffering for our misdeeds.
5. reinvention: starting from zero (also part of our perdition) and building fortitude and hard work to create a new self. Reinvention is comprised of the following:
humility, starting at zero
fortitude
perseverance in the face of failure
discerning fruitful failure from futile failure
10,000 Hour Rule
6. Flourishing, blossoming at craft and personal life together
7. giving back, mentoring, other acts of atonement
Today we will look at the second part of the Redemption Journey: Perdition, which means suffering punishment for one’s crimes or misdeeds.
Reality sets in: crime and punishment or perdition
1. Jeff Henderson gets arrested and realizes he won’t have access to women the way he used to. This is a shock to his psyche.
2. He suffers another shock to his psyche. Once a powerful man who called the shots, he finds in prison that he is now powerless, beholden to guards like Big Bubba on page 79.
3. In prison, he has time to think about his life in ways he didn't before. For example, he wanted to be like T whom he worshipped as a sort of god. Ironically, he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison that he had become BIGGER that T and that being SO BIG put him on the feds’ radar screen and that was his downfall. 81
4. All Jeff’s life he’s been inculcated with the belief in the Homie or Gang Banger Code of Silence as if it were religious truth. But in prison, he discovers the No-Snitch Code has no real value because a homie will rat you out when it’s to his advantage. See page 151.
5. Jeff thought he was invincible but discovers a painful fact: The Feds had been watching him, not for several months, but for several years. He was digging his own grave for a long, long time. 87
6. Why me? Jeff is not a victim but he cries to Jesus and feels sorry for himself. In a state of perdition, he his helpless, beholden to the caprices of prison life.
7. He realizes a painful fact: Prison may have saved his life. One of the Twins, his supplier, got killed shortly after Jeff’s imprisonment. 89
8. Too late in the game, he discovers another painful fact: Anyone can get convicted who doesn’t get caught with drugs or money. 94
9. His perdition takes on palpable pain when he is given legal accountability for his crimes: 19.5 years. See page 100.
10. Only after he’s arrested does he discover another painful fact: There is no loyalty in the streets. It’s a myth. See page 152 after his homies steal all his stuff after he’s arrested.
What is Jeff’s attitude at the beginning of his prison sentence? Contrast with his attitude at the end of it (centripetal vs. centrifugal development)
1. Self-pity, victimization
2. Nihilism 110
3. Getting over, coast in life, do the minimum.
4. Universe of One 113. On page 192, he says “in prison everything is about you.”
5. No passion for marriage 114
6. He fluctuates between complacency and despair.
Future Goal and Redemption
We all have the drive for redemption; if this drive is frustrated, the drive does not remain dormant and neutral inside of us; to the contrary, this drive goes inward and poisons us.
Changing Our Definition of Success
When Jeff is able to redirect his energy from being a drug dealer to a chef, he finds redemption. All of us have a “life energy” that can be directed toward concupiscence, revenge, victimization or growth, maturity, and independence as is explained by Erich Fromm in this passage from Escape from Freedom:
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this, we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.
In other words, Fromm is saying that we must flourish in a passion in order to direct our energy toward growth rather than re-direct that energy toward self-destruction such as concupiscent pursuits.
It’s only in prison that Jeff is forced to being the journey to redemption.
Redemption and Flourishing
Flourishing is the opposite of concupiscence flourishing, from the Greek word eudaimonia: means to blossom, to become who we were meant to be.
When Jeff Henderson becomes an illegal “business man” being followed by the feds, rationalizing his illegal activities, and living on easy money, he’s not the person he was meant to be. He is rather a grotesque variation. We see his misshapen character in prison when he becomes the enraged, nihilistic, disaffected victim.
Only when he learns a passion and accepts his responsibilities as an adult, does he begin to flourish and he becomes happier than he was as a concupiscent drug dealer.
Taking a Close Look at Fortitude: The strength and tenacity to push forward in the presence of ever surmounting obstacles. What are Jeff Henderson’s obstacles to starting over?
1. Jeff Henderson discovers that the world is full of “haters and dream crushers” (crabs in a bucket). These are the haters who don’t want people with good intentions to be afforded a clean, fresh start because they want everyone to share in their failure and misery.
2. Others don’t trust us. Nor do they forgive us for our past deeds.
3. Often we have an inability to forgive ourselves for our past deeds creates baggage
4. Often we lack confidence: We fear that we may backslide into our old ways.
5. Often a past label like “convicted felon” creates a stigma that is extremely difficult to erase. We see the felon. We don’t see the husband trying to support his wife and two kids.
6. Jeff Henderson has to tone down his “stroll” and his muscles with baggy clothes to remove the hard gangsta look. See page 2
7. Jeff Henderson has to remain gracious and poised when he gets pooh-poohed by Caesar’s Palace, the very place that was happy to take his money when he was a dealer “back in the day.” Now Caesar’s is playing all high and mighty.
Centrifugal Motion or JH's Transformation
1. He sees he’s been blind and willfully ignorant about the consequences of his selling drugs. 115
2. He develops intellectual curiosity, reading eclectic material, various intellectual and religious doctrines. He doesn’t embrace one but rather picks and chooses as he sees fit. 124
3. He becomes engaged with others vs. being disaffected. 124
4. He finds a passion, cooking, that utilizes his talents.
5. He learns the humility of starting at the bottom and not getting things “easy” like when he was a dealer.
6. He learns a hard work ethic. It’s almost impossible to acclimate from easy money to hard work with low pay. But Jeff was always a hard worker.
7. Jeff found a mentor in Big Roy and later in Las Vegas a cook named Friendly. And then Robert at the Gadsby’s.
8. Jeff experiences contrition and regret on page 146: He is among the dregs of the world, exactly where he belongs, in the lowest rung of society: hell.
9. You must have a vision of a different life. See page 147.
10. He begins to take pride in his work. 147: Speed, taste, and presentation. 188
11. He undoes his wrong by talking to teens in Vegas. 165
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided byPurdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
1A Essay 3 (Essay Worth 200 Points): Can a Genius Redirect His Passions Toward Moral and Professional Excellence?
Due as an upload on May 11.
The Assignment:
From Jeff Henderson’s memoir Cooked and the movie Groundhog Day, compare the purgatory (pain and suffering as a form of spiritual cleansing and growth) and redemption in Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors.
In this comparison, you are analyzing the following similarities between Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors:
Both are beset by the false promise that hedonism and pleasure bring happiness, and this false promise chains them to a lower, more corrupt version of their being that slogs through a miserable existence even as they try to tell themselves the opposite.
Both hit rock bottom from their failed hedonism and are tempted by the great philosophical force of nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, that there is no purpose or sense to life, and that despair is the only reasonable response to a world that is so absurdly lacking in meaning, harmony, and a moral order.
Both undergo a reformation of the soul by developing, as Cal Newport calls it, a Craftsman Mindset, toiling at their craft, developing mastery over their craft bit by bit, and accomplishing a maturity of mind and soul that results in producing beautiful art--gourmet cuisine in the case of Jeff Henderson; piano music in the case of Phil Connors.
Both find the transformation of their soul is accompanied by excruciating and prolonged suffering, a tribulation that could be described as Purgatory.
Both find that their personality transformation bears fruit: They produce great art, they develop character, maturity, humility, and the capacity to love others; and they are unrecognizable from the wretched person they were at the beginning of their journey.
Both bear witness to Viktor Frankl’s famous adage from Man’s Search for Meaning that the search for happiness will always fail and therefore the search for happiness must be abandoned; rather, we must search for a higher purpose and moral goodness, and only then will happiness become the natural byproduct of our purposeful, moral life.
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Comparing the 4 Major Life Stages of Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson
Major Points of Comparison Regarding Phil Connors' and Jeff Henderson's Character Evolution. Both go through 4 Major Life Stages:
Stage 1: The Know-It-All Stage: pride and egotism make them feel invulnerable to life's slings and arrows. They think they have everything figured out, but they're lost and in denial.
Phil is a lonely wretch who offends women, friends, and co-workers alike. He is maladapted to society. He cannot cooperate, be polite, or see the decency in others. He is consumed by self-loathing for knowing deep down he is so weak and ill-adjusted, but rather than fact those facts, he erects a defensive wall to hide his pathologies. He sees himself as a star when he is trapped in a mediocre job. He's waiting for The Next Big Thing and until then he is seething with bitterness. Meanwhile, he puts up the facade of The Talent. He fools no one, especially the object of his love and adoration, Rita.
Jeff Henderson is a drug dealer spreading disease and mayhem through the community, yet he is so depraved in his greed that he consoles himself with the notion that he is "just a businessman" doing no harm. He thinks he is invulnerable, but his life is in greater and greater danger.
Stage 2: The Pleasure-Seeking or Hedonistic Phase: Both Phil and Jeff try to assuage their broken selves with pleasure, riches, and indulgences. But no amount of cake, pie, alcohol, carousing, jet-setting or car racing can erase their sense of anxiety and wretchedness from being "lost in the woods," traipsing down a false path that cuts them off from humanity.
Stage 3: The Nihilistic Stage: When both get exposed as frauds, charlatans, and criminally neglectful souls, rather than address their deficiencies and moral shortcomings, they succumb to self-pity, despair, and narcissistic victimization ("I've been unfairly castigated. Woe is me!"). They contemplate suicide. They dabble in nihilism, the grotesque belief that life has no meaning, and in essence become their own worst enemies.
Stage 4: The Personal Accountability Stage. Only when both confront the humility of their life finiteness and limitations and embark on building their character through hard work, charity, service to others, engaging in their personal Life Crucible, and finding beauty in the world through cooking, music, and love of mankind do they abandon their grotesque Inner Beast and become their Higher Angel.
Engaging the Crucible
Using the Crucible to Write a Comparison Essay About Groundhog Day and Cooked
How does this post help you with your essay?
I propose that narrowing your focus on Phil Connors’ and Jeff Henderson’s ability to engage with their personal crucible will give you a rigorous, sophisticated approach to your comparison essay.
In this post, therefore, I will break down the crucible, explain what it means, and explain how we, Phil Connors, and Jeff Henderson must learn to stop retreating from the Crucible and engage with it.
What is the Crucible?
The crucible is a life conflict you can’t get out of; it is your place on life’s chessboard, so to speak. You engage with the various conflicts contained within your personal crucible and develop adaptation skills, wisdom, and strength, or you retreat from your personal crucible by escaping into various addictive behaviors (smartphone, social media, YouTube videos, Tik Tok, etc.) and by retreating you become the weaker version of yourself, maladapted to life’s conflicts and challenges, subject to personal entropy, the disintegration of your higher self.
The crucible tests and purifies us. In this regard, the crucible could be called a form of purgatory.
Phil Connor’s personal crucible is having to live the same day over and over and suffer through experimentation the best reaction to his personal crucible. He tries hedonism (pleasure-seeking), self-pity, and suicidal despair, but all these responses to his crucible only lead to personal failure and entropy, thereby prolonging his place in Purgatory.
It is only when Phil Connors accepts his limitations inside his Crucible, the finiteness of life, the manner in which death forces us to choose a life of meaning, and his choice to humbly make his life a service to others that he develops the ability to love the woman of his life, Rita Hanson (played by Andie MacDowell).
Jeff Henderson’s personal crucible actually takes on two forms, his In-Prison Crucible and his Post-Prison Crucible. Each crucible has different characteristics. In many ways, as Henderson explains in his memoir, his Post-Prison Crucible is even more difficult to navigate than his previous one.
It is only when Jeff Henderson accepts accountability for his criminal actions and sees their effect on the community and rebuilds his life in such a way that he contributes to society that he emerges from his crucible as a moral and successful person.
In both cases, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson never escape their crucible because the point of both stories, one fiction and one nonfiction, is that the crucible is neverending; how we react to the ongoing crucible of our lives is the point.
Talking to Married Couples About the Crucible
Marriage is an example of a crucible because you are in a commitment that has built-in conflicts and if you want the marriage to last, you have to learn to engage in the crucible.
Anger and Kind Deeds
Because marriage is such a common crucible in life, I interviewed some couples for this post.
One couple told me that they get angry from time to time but try to mitigate their anger by doing kind deeds for one another.
One man told me that every morning for thirty years, he brings toast and coffee to his wife in bed. “Sometimes I want to throw the hot coffee in her face, but I give her the coffee with a smile,” he said. “And by being kind, my anger diminishes.”
His wife said, “Sometimes I’m so angry with him that when he gives my morning toast and coffee, I want to throw the hot coffee back in his face, but I accept the breakfast with a loving smile and this makes me feel better.”
Failure to Engage in the Crucible of a Marriage
Many years ago, I was the best man at a wedding, and I was helping the priest carry some of his things from his car to the church, he told me that his younger brother was going through a divorce. The priest said, “My brother and his wife never fought or argued; neither committed adultery, and neither were dishonest with their finances. They were basically good people, but over the years they did not grow together. For fifteen years, all they did was watch TV at night, and failing to grow together, their marriage disintegrated.”
Failure to Engage in the Crucible Leads to Entropy
The priest’s brother’s marriage disintegrated or went into a state of entropy because he did not engage with his life crucible, his marriage.
At the beginning of Groundhog Day, Phil Connors won’t acknowledge that his life is a crucible. He seeks escape through cynical egotism, sophomoric smart-assism, and selfishness. He is disintegrating while becoming more and more repellant to others.
For the first hundred pages of Jeff Henderson’s memoir Cooked, he won’t engage in his crucible, to use his brilliance and genius to bring good into the world. Rather, he retreats from his crucible and leads a life of hedonism, crime, and denial. Like Phil Connors, he is spiritually diseased by entropy.
How to Use the Crucible and Entropy in Your Essay
To refresh your memory, here is a suggested essay outline:
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Paragraphs 4-8 are the key to success.
In those 4 paragraphs, you could break down the manner in which Connors and Henderson engage with their personal crucibles.
Review: What is the Crucible?
The Crucible is your personal life conflict, a place where opposing forces meet and you are forced to navigate and engage with those forces. The process is excruciating, but the alternative is to retreat and become a weakling disintegrating inside your self-imposed cocoon.
Many resist the Crucible, but we must accept it.
In Michael Faust’s article published in Philosophy Now, we see that we must accept we are in a Crucible, a Sisphyus journey, and, like Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, we must accept suffering to be liberated from it.
Phil Connors’ monotonous life isn’t his hell; he is his own hell because he is diseased by self-pity and misguided attempts to overcome his self-pity: nihilism and hedonism. In both nihilism and hedonism, the person succumbs to the adolescent fantasy that life has no consequences. Both Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson try to base their lives on this fantasy with self-destructive, deleterious consequences.
We have to learn to Engage the Crucible.
In 1981 as a college student, I had a job loading giant trailers at the UPS hub near the Oakland Airport. I was inundated with thousands of parcels coming at me on a conveyor belt nonstop and had to quickly build stable walls with the parcels, using larger parcels to create a solid foundation below and fill the gaps with smaller parcels. Any laxity on my part would result in me drowning in parcels. I had to be both quick and deft in my wall-building. Being inattentive was not an option because I would drown in chaos. Looking back, this wall-building job at UPS seems like an apt metaphor for the Myth of Sisyphus and how we must engage with life’s crucible. The idea that life has no consequences and that nothing matters is both juvenile and a denial of reality. The parcels keep coming at us.
Second Review: What is your Crucible?
Your Crucible is a severe test, trial, and conflict in which disparate ingredients and forces bang into each other and as a result of this excruciating conflict, something new arises, a strength of character, a new skill, a new life-adapting trait. An experienced parent helps a new parent because the experienced one has been through his or her Crucible.
Not Engaging in the Crucible Leads to Weakness and Failure
Think of the husband who returns home from a long day of work and drinks whiskey from a flask in his car, which is parked outside his home where his wife is dealing with crying babies. The father is afraid to enter the Crucible.
Think of the college student who’s texting and posting nonsense on social media when he should be writing his English 1A essay. He’s avoiding the Crucible and every avoidance leads to a further maladaptation.
The Crucible is Purgatory
Failure to engage with an authentic crucible bores us from the inside out till we become hollow husks, walking brain-dead corpses, the state of Phil Connors at the beginning of the movie, and the spiritual state of Jeff Henderson when he feels unfairly convicted at the beginning of his prison sentence.
Only when both men engage in the real crucible of where this life is in the present moment do they begin the rebuilding process, do they embrace the suffering of their personal purgatory, and undergo a radical transformation of self.
How Do We Engage with the Crucible?
(Or for the purpose of your essay, how do Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson begin to turn their lives around by engaging in their personal crucibles?)
We have to humbly admit we are finite and not squander our life as if we have infinite time and resources.
We have to accept that life has no consequences, that a life of hedonism and nihilism is a juvenile fantasy that doesn’t square with reality.
We have to accept that life is suffering and conflict and that engaging with this conflict, entering the Crucible, is our only path. Retreat from conflict feeds our Self-Pitying Sloth and makes us weaker and more miserable.
We have to see that engaging with the Crucible is our life meaning and makes transforms us into our Higher Angel.
We have to see that engaging with the Crucible means engaging with other people. Yes, it’s true, as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “That hell is other people,” but living with no people is a greater hell.
Engaging with the Crucible means accepting that life is suffering, but it also means that we understand that not engaging with the Crucible results in even greater suffering.
Engaging with the Crucible means defining our own personal ones. Everyone’s crucible is different. But each crucible imposes its own set of limitations on us. Phil Connors from Groundhog Day and Jeff Henderson from Cooked have certain limitations based on where they live, what their skill level is, and what their past actions have done to their present situation. In other words, you have to define your personal crucible.
Everyone is faced with a Crucible. You have a choice: To enter the Crucible or retreat from it. But either choice has consequences. For example, for the last decade or so, billions of people have been on social media, a platform that is an escape from the Crucible; as a result, we have become more dumb and maladapted as written about with great persuasion and insight in Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”
Here are some excerpts from Haidt’s essay:
Isolated in our information silos, we are as a country becoming fragmented, living in separate realities and unable and unwilling to engage with one another:
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
Instead of engaging with people we disagree with to find common ground and to find reasons to cooperate, we treat The Other as an enemy in a life battle that represents a zero-sum game:
There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.
The glue that keeps society together is coming undone:
Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.
The neverending stream is false engagement and keeps us out of a real crucible:
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
Being a good actor honestly engaging with the crucible became replaced with dishonesty, gimmicks, and living to get clicks.
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
Engaging with the crucible of significant challenges was replaced by being mired in the fever swamp of the frivolous.
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?
No longer trusting anything or anyone, we engage in nihilism, whataboutism, and “my truth is as good as your truth” relativism.
It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
We’ve replaced authentic engagement with Twitter darts.
What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
Conclusion:
Social media has become a way of failing to engage in life’s real crucible and as a result many of us are in a state of individual and societal entropy.
Building Block #1 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connors Comparison
Write paragraphs 1 and 2 in which you summarize the Jeff Henderson memoir Cooked in Paragraph 1 and the movie Groundhog Day in Paragraph 2.
Building Block #2 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connor Comparison
Write Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys.
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
Using the Crucible to Write a Comparison Essay About Groundhog Day and Cooked
How does this post help you with your essay?
I propose that narrowing your focus on Phil Connors’ and Jeff Henderson’s ability to engage with their personal crucible will give you a rigorous, sophisticated approach to your comparison essay.
In this post, therefore, I will break down the crucible, explain what it means, and explain how we, Phil Connors, and Jeff Henderson must learn to stop retreating from the Crucible and engage with it.
What is the Crucible?
The crucible is a life conflict you can’t get out of; it is your place on life’s chessboard, so to speak. You engage with the various conflicts contained within your personal crucible and develop adaptation skills, wisdom, and strength, or you retreat from your personal crucible by escaping into various addictive behaviors (smartphone, social media, YouTube videos, Tik Tok, etc.) and by retreating you become the weaker version of yourself, maladapted to life’s conflicts and challenges, subject to personal entropy, the disintegration of your higher self.
The crucible tests and purifies us. In this regard, the crucible could be called a form of purgatory.
Phil Connor’s personal crucible is having to live the same day over and over and to suffer through experimentation the best reaction to his personal crucible. He tries hedonism (pleasure seeking), self-pity, and suicidal despair, but all these responses to his crucible only lead to personal failure and entropy, thereby prolonging his place in Purgatory.
It is only when Phil Connors accepts his limitations inside his Crucible, the finiteness of life, the manner in which death forces us to choose a life of meaning, and his choice to humbly make his life a service to others that he develops the ability to love the woman of his life, Rita Hanson (played by Andie MacDowell).
Jeff Henderson’s personal crucible actually takes on two forms, his In-Prison Crucible and his Post-Prison Crucible. Each crucible has different characteristics. In many ways, as Henderson explains in his memoir, his Post-Prison Crucible is even more difficult to navigate than his previous one.
It is only when Jeff Henderson accepts accountability for his criminal actions and sees their effect on the community and rebuilds his life in such a way that he contributes to society that he emerges from his crucible as a moral and successful person.
In both cases, Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson never escape their crucible because the point of both stories, one fiction and one nonfiction, is that the crucible is neverending; how we react to the ongoing crucible of our lives is the point.
Talking to Married Couples About the Crucible
Marriage is an example of a crucible because you are in a commitment that has built-in conflicts and if you want the marriage to last, you have to learn to engage in the crucible.
Anger and Kind Deeds
Because marriage is such a common crucible in life, I interviewed some couples for this post.
One couple told me that they get angry from time to time but try to mitigate their anger by doing kind deeds for one another.
One man told me that every morning for thirty years, he brings toast and coffee to his wife in bed. “Sometimes I want to throw the hot coffee in her face, but I give her the coffee with a smile,” he said. “And by being kind, my anger diminishes.”
His wife said, “Sometimes I’m so angry with him that when he gives my morning toast and coffee, I want to throw the hot coffee back in his face, but I accept the breakfast with a loving smile and this makes me feel better.”
Failure to Engage in the Crucible of a Marriage
Many years ago, I was a best man at a wedding, and I was helping the priest carry some of his things from his car to the church, he told me that his younger brother was going through a divorce. The priest said, “My brother and his wife never fought or argued; neither committed adultery, and neither were dishonest with their finances. They were basically good people, but over the years they did not grow together. For fifteen years, all they did was watch TV at night and failing to grow together, their marriage disintegrated.”
Failure to Engage in the Crucible Leads to Entropy
The priest’s brother’s marriage disintegrated or went into a state of entropy because he did not engage with his life crucible, his marriage.
At the beginning of Groundhog Day, Phil Connors won’t acknowledge that his life is a crucible. He seeks escape through cynical egotism, sophomoric smart-assism, and selfishness. He is disintegrating while becoming more and more repellant to others.
For the first hundred pages of Jeff Henderson’s memoir Cooked, he won’t engage in his crucible, to use his brilliance and genius to bring good into the world. Rather, he retreats from his crucible and leads a life of hedonism, crime, and denial. Like Phil Connors, he is spiritually diseased by entropy.
How to Use the Crucible and Entropy in Your Essay
To refresh your memory, here is a suggested essay outline:
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Paragraphs 4-8 are the key to success.
In those 4 paragraphs, you could break down the manner in which Connors and Henderson engage with their personal crucibles.
Review: What is the Crucible?
The Crucible is your personal life conflict, a place where opposing forces meet and you are forced to navigate and engage with those forces. The process is excruciating, but the alternative is to retreat and become a weakling disintegrating inside your self-imposed cocoon.
Many resist the Crucible, but we must accept it.
In Michael Faust’s article published in Philosophy Now, we see that we must accept we are in a Crucible, a Sisphyus journey, and, like Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, we must accept suffering to be liberated from it.
Phil Connors’ monotonous life isn’t his hell; he is his own hell because he is diseased by self-pity and misguided attempts to overcome his self-pity: nihilism and hedonism. In both nihilism and hedonism, the person succumbs to the adolescent fantasy that life has no consequences. Both Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson try to base their lives on this fantasy with self-destructive, deleterious consequences.
We have to learn to Engage the Crucible.
In 1981 as a college student, I had a job loading giant trailers at the UPS hub near the Oakland Airport. I was inundated with thousands of parcels coming at me on a conveyor belt nonstop and had to quickly build stable walls with the parcels, using larger parcels to create a solid foundation below and fill the gaps with smaller parcels. Any laxity on my part would result in me drowning in parcels. I had to be both quick and deft in my wall-building. Being inattentive was not an option because I would drown in chaos. Looking back, this wall-building job at UPS seems like an apt metaphor for the Myth of Sisyphus and how we must engage with life’s crucible. The idea that life has no consequences and that nothing matters is both juvenile and a denial of reality. The parcels keep coming at us.
Second Review: What is your Crucible?
Your Crucible is a severe test, trial, and conflict in which disparate ingredients and forces bang into each other and as a result of this excruciating conflict, something new arises, a strength of character, a new skill, a new life-adapting trait. An experienced parent helps a new parent because the experienced one has been through his or her Crucible.
Not Engaging in the Crucible Leads to Weakness and Failure
Think of the husband who returns home from a long day of work and drinks whiskey from a flask in his car, which is parked outside his home where his wife is dealing with crying babies. The father is afraid to enter the Crucible.
Think of the college student who’s texting and posting nonsense on social media when he should be writing his English 1A essay. He’s avoiding the Crucible and every avoidance leads to a further maladaptation.
The Crucible is Purgatory
Failure to engage with an authentic crucible bores us from the inside out till we become hollow husks, walking brain-dead corpses, the state of Phil Connors at the beginning of the movie, and the spiritual state of Jeff Henderson when he feels unfairly convicted at the beginning of his prison sentence.
Only when both men engage in the real crucible of where this life is in the present moment do they begin the rebuilding process, do they embrace the suffering of their personal purgatory, and undergo a radical transformation of self.
How Do We Engage with the Crucible?
(Or for the purpose of your essay, how do Phil Connors and Jeff Henderson begin to turn their lives around by engaging in their personal crucibles?)
We have to humbly admit we are finite and not squander our life as if we have infinite time and resources.
We have to accept that life has no consequences, that a life of hedonism and nihilism is a juvenile fantasy that doesn’t square with reality.
We have to accept that life is suffering and conflict and that engaging with this conflict, entering the Crucible, is our only path. Retreat from conflict feeds our Self-Pitying Sloth and makes us weaker and more miserable.
We have to see that engaging with the Crucible is our life meaning and makes transforms us into our Higher Angel.
We have to see that engaging with the Crucible means engaging with other people. Yes, it’s true, as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “That hell is other people,” but living with no people is a greater hell.
Engaging with the Crucible means accepting that life is suffering, but it also means that we understand that not engaging with the Crucible results in even greater suffering.
Engaging with the Crucible means defining our own personal ones. Everyone’s crucible is different. But each crucible imposes its own set of limitations on us. Phil Connors from Groundhog Day and Jeff Henderson from Cooked have certain limitations based on where they live, what their skill level is, and what their past actions have done to their present situation. In other words, you have to define your personal crucible.
Everyone is faced with a Crucible. You have a choice: To enter the Crucible or retreat from it. But either choice has consequences. For example, for the last decade or so, billions of people have been on social media, a platform that is an escape from the Crucible; as a result, we have become more dumb and maladapted as written about with great persuasion and insight in Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”
Here are some excerpts from Haidt’s essay:
Isolated in our information silos, we are as a country becoming fragmented, living in separate realities and unable and unwilling to engage with one another:
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
Instead of engaging with people we disagree with to find common ground and to find reasons to cooperate, we treat The Other as an enemy in a life battle that represents a zero-sum game:
there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.
The glue that keeps society together is coming undone:
Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.
The neverending stream is false engagement and keeps us out of a real crucible:
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
Being a good actor honestly engaging with the crucible became replaced with dishonesty, gimmicks, and living to get clicks.
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
Engaging with the crucible of significant challenges was replaced by being mired in the fever swamp of the frivolous.
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?
No longer trusting anything or anyone, we engage in nihilism, whataboutism, and “my truth is as good as your truth” relativism.
It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
We’ve replaced authentic engagement with Twitter darts.
What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
Conclusion:
Social media has become a way of failing to engage in life’s real crucible and as a result many of us are in a state of individual and societal entropy.
Building Block #1 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connors Comparison
Write paragraphs 1 and 2 in which you summarize the Jeff Henderson memoir Cooked in Paragraph 1 and the movie Groundhog Day in Paragraph 2.
Building Block #2 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connor Comparison
Write Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys.
When he learns that the old man died, and is told by the nurse that “it was just his time,” he refuses to accept it and embarks on a new montage—this time trying to hold death off with money, food, warmth, anything he can think of, in a touching parody of the excess of the earlier diner scene, and his own parade of suicides.
Of course none of it works. Phil wants to control life itself, and become the god he claimed to be, but in the end, he’s left in an alley, holding Pops while he dies, and is left to stare into an empty sky, watching Pops’ last breath drift away.
In all of these scenes Pops never changes, never has any lines, no personality of his own, because he is Death. He is the reality of time, and finiteness, that Phil has to accept before he can return to life. It is only after the final death that we see Phil really shift in his attitude toward life, and even winter. Earlier he intones, “It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you the rest of your life,” but now he delivers a truly inspiring speech for Groundhog Day. “Standing here, among the people of Punxatawney, and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”
Humility Causes Us to Reach Out to Others and Dissolve Our Solipsism
We see that Phil has changed by how he spends his day helping the people of Punxatawney. He can’t save Pops, but he can make his last day a little warmer. He can make sure the kid doesn’t break his neck falling out of the tree, that Buster the Groundhog Poo-bah lives to see February 3rd, and that a young Michael Shannon can attend Wrestlemania with his new bride. Winter itself is transformed, because he’s learned to look at it differently, and Phil has become a new person.
In the end, we have a romantic comedy that’s not about whether the boy gets the girl. We have a spiritual movie that never tells us why the hero gains his redemption. We have a vision of small-town America that makes us want to flee back to the loving arms of urban Pittsburgh. (OK, that might just be me…while I’ve come to love the people of Punxsutawney, I don’t think I could handle living there.) We have a time loops movie that doesn’t give us a single clue about its structure. And finally, we have a comedy that hinges on death, but remains so fucking wonderful that people are willing to suffer through multiple exposure to “I Got You Babe” to watch it every year.
A Consequence-Free Life Would Eventually Become Boring
When Phil first realizes he's living the same day over and over again, he takes advantage of it. He steals, he lies to get laid, he's lawless. And it gets boring! Eventually he realizes manipulating people to get exactly what you want all the time isn't that satisfying, and begins to help them instead.
People Make People Better
It isn't money or stuff or careers or fame or superiority that makes you a better person, it's giving yourself to something bigger or other than yourself — a person, a cause, an endeavor. Other people make you better! That's what people are for!
There's been considerable talk about the idea that Phil is actually dead - having perished in the snowstorm that is then perpetually wrapped around Punxsutawney while his time-loop torment traps him. That's why he's unable to kill himself and why he's destined to live the same day over and over again: he's literally trapped in purgatory as his soul has been identified as not wholly bad but he cannot move on to Heaven until he proves his worthiness.
That school of thought basically suggests that all of the challenges that Phil overcomes by the end of the film are trials within purgatory that challenge him to make the most morally wholesome choices in the war for his soul. Either he's already fully dead at this point or he's dying, repeating his final day over and over in his head until he comes to the right resolution that helps him move on when he's ready to die properly.
But what if it's all a little darker than that? What if the Punxsutawney that Phil constructs in his mind isn't Purgatory but rather full-blooded, burn-your-briskets Hell?
Think about it: when we meet Phil, he's not a nice person. He's self-centred, arrogant, conceited and manipulative. He's not the kind of person who would be going to Heaven, in other words and it would take a SERIOUS attitude adjustment for him to even get to Purgatory. His morality is just that black and white and his idea of Hell is having to care about other people. To truly care, that is.
What worse a Hell could there be for someone so self-involved than being forced to help an entire town full of people? And worse than that, it's a Hell that promises him the ability to help and improve himself without ever letting him realise his moment of epiphany and move on. He can get kids WrestleMania tickets and fix people's backs, but he can't stop an old man from dying, no matter how hard he tries.
And on the surface, it might seem that that is because Phil initially uses the opportunity for self-improvement for the wrong reasons: he does it primarily to impress Rita in order to seduce her. Sure, there's probably an element of boredom that drives some of his behaviour (like learning to flick cards into a hat to expert level), but he's mostly focused on her as his goal until the very end when he is finally rewarded after a day of pure selflessness.
For most people, that would appear to be his defining arc and it's that that allows him to move on. But there might be something more to it. And to pick that apart, you have to consider two things: firstly, why Phil is trapped as he is in the first place and secondly what SPECIFICALLY gets him freed. It's simple enough to say that he's trapped because he's a bad person, but that wouldn't explain the supernatural element of it all and he's hardly the worst person in the world.
More likely is the suggestion that he's trapped in Punxsutawney as a punishment for something he does while he's there. Someone he interacts with who might have that sort of hellish power. How about the devil?
According to one theory that was originally posted on Reddit, he's there under the control of the devil, who we actually meet early on in Groundhog Day. You'd be forgiven for missing him too, because he doesn't come wearing red or bearing horns and a forked tail: instead he's a businessman in a suit selling life insurance.
That's right, Groundhog Day's Devil is, in fact, Ned Ryerson. Needle Nose Ned.
The theory suggests that Phil is trapped in Punxsutawney because he insults Ned and turns down his offer of a contract for life insurance. Or is that a contract for his soul? It's from the point of their first meeting that everything goes wrong for Phil. Literally, the first step he takes after their meeting is a "doozy" that sees him step into an icy puddle, and it's all downhill from there.
Curiously, Phil doesn't even recognise him, almost as if Ned doesn't actually know him and is operating under some pretence in order to get close to Phil. Almost like the Devil saw an opportunity to take a soul personally from someone he KNEW would be in Punxsutawney at that time and who he could probably have some fun with. Someone, mostly, who deserved to be tormented.
That would explain why it takes so long for Phil to "escape" Punxsutawney in the end. By the time he completes his "perfect day" there's no saying how many times he's tried to live purely selflessly (he does tell the kid who falls out of the tree he's saved him a LOT of times without a hint of gratitude), but you'd have to imagine it's a significant amount of time. There are lots of elements after all, but in the end only one matters.
It's not until Phil finally relents to Ned and signs away his soul to him that he's able to move on. That's the key to the ending, not saving anyone or any act of kindness. It's that transaction. Ned was always selling a contract that covered more than life insurance - he was bartering for Phil's soul, driving him to desperation through endless torment. That torment took two forms: first, making him miserable and then making him HAVE to be selfless - which was everything he hated up until his first meeting with Ned. By the end, he's lost sight of who he was and Ned/The Devil is able to absolutely fleece him out of extensive, unnecessary insurance.
Is this him selling his soul to the Devil for his freedom and everything he wants? After all, he wants to be loved by everyone, he wants to be famous, he wants to never suffer the torment of Punxsutawney ever again (which he achieves by learning to love it) and he gets the girl. Doesn't that all sound a little ideal?
So maybe the ending doesn't see Phil completely freed after all. Maybe him being freed from the loop is simply the end of his life as the Devil takes his soul and what we imagine is a happy ending is something far more profoundly sad. After all, just as George Bailey's "revelation" in It's A Wonderful Life isn't about escaping his hell, but rather embracing it, Phil's "happy ending" is simply to come to love everything that he hated and arguably abandoning everything that had made him successful. Doesn't that sound like Hell?
Building Block #1 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connors Comparison
Write paragraphs 1 and 2 in which you summarize the Jeff Henderson memoir Cooked in Paragraph 1 and the movie Groundhog Day in Paragraph 2.
Building Block #2 for Jeff Henderson/Phil Connor Comparison
Write Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
The Assignment:
From Jeff Henderson’s memoir Cooked and the movie Groundhog Day, compare the purgatory (pain and suffering as a form of spiritual cleansing and growth) and redemption in Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors.
In this comparison, you are analyzing the following similarities between Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors:
Both are beset by the false promise that hedonism and pleasure bring happiness, and this false promise chains them to a lower, more corrupt version of their being that slogs through a miserable existence even as they try to tell themselves the opposite. The quest for hedonism does not create a hedonic response. On the contrary, it creates an anhedonic response or anhedonia.
Both hit rock bottom from their failed hedonism and are tempted by the great philosophical force of nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, that there is no purpose or sense to life, and that despair is the only reasonable response to a world that is so absurdly lacking in meaning, harmony, and moral order.
Both undergo a reformation of the soul by developing, as Cal Newport calls it, a Craftsman Mindset, toiling at their craft, developing mastery over their craft bit by bit, and accomplishing a maturity of mind and soul that results in producing beautiful art--gourmet cuisine in the case of Jeff Henderson; piano music in the case of Phil Connors.
Both find the transformation of their soul is accompanied by excruciating and prolonged suffering, a tribulation that could be described as Purgatory.
Both find that their personality transformation bears fruit: They produce great art, they develop character, maturity, humility, and the capacity to love others; and they are unrecognizable from the wretched person they were at the beginning of their journey.
Both bear witness to Viktor Frankl’s famous adage from Man’s Search for Meaning that the search for happiness will alway fail and therefore the search for happiness must be abandoned; rather, we must search for a higher purpose and moral goodness, and only then will happiness become the natural byproduct of our purposeful, moral life.
Suggested Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Themes to Address in This Comparison
One. Living in the self or the ego leads to solipsism, a prison, and a form of hell where one’s delusions and self-destructive tendencies exist in a state of recalcitrance.
Two. The quest for hedonism puts people on the hedonic treadmill, a state of addiction, which leads to anhedonia, zombie-brain, and nihilism.
Three. We have to toil in life, embrace a work ethic or Cal Newport’s Craftsman Mindset, not in the service of making money so much as in the service of finding meaning, connection, and belonging.
Four. The search for happiness leads to unhappiness. Real happiness is the natural byproduct of a fulfilled and meaningful life. See Viktor Frankl, Oliver Burkeman (The Antidote, Four Thousand Weeks), and Scott Barry Kaufman (Transcend).
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
That a life of power and money can afford you pleasures that will result in happiness. Brooks looks at the most powerful, wealthy people chronicled in history, and even they are miserable 99% of the time.
Part of this misery is due to the "hedonic treadmill," the idea that we acclimate to pleasure so that whatever it is we're addicted to for a spike in endorphins, we become numb to it to the point that we crash and sink into a depression.
All pleasures start out with a spike in dopamine, which becomes addictive, but eventually we need more and more stimulation to experience pleasure and we inevitably burn out.
Jeff Henderson becomes wealthier and wealthier and lives a more and more reckless lifestyle, accumulating cars, flying to Las Vegas with his posse, and his extravagant lifestyle attracts the attention from law enforcement, the feds.
My wife's friend has a cousin who poses with her boyfriend for Instagram photographs, and she has hundreds of thousands of followers. This model can never get enough "likes" and followers. She's addicted to social media attention, she's a slave to posing with her boyfriend for attention, and she is progressively getting more and more miserable. But she can't see her misery. She is in denial.
Like the Instagram model, Jeff Henderson is operating under the fallacy that unbridled pleasure is the key to happiness, and in the process he fails to develop real connections with people.
Two. The Unhappiness Fallacy:
Actually, we're dealing with two fallacies: That unhappiness is a bad thing and that unhappiness excludes happiness.
Unhappiness is not bad. Unhappiness is normal. Life is full of evil and conflict, so a certain degree of unhappiness is a normal thing.
In fact, addressing evil and engaging with conflict gives life meaning, so we must not avoid unhappiness. Rather, we must struggle against the things that make us unhappy.
Also, unhappiness is a state of hard work that leads to positive outcome. Imagine the piano player who is unhappy playing tedious scales and arpeggios on the piano, but all in the service of improving on the piano.
In life, we are miserable if we don't progress and improve towards a meaningful goal, and this type of progress requires focus, isolation, sacrifice, and hard work, the kind that is not associated with happiness and pleasure.
Every semester, I will have about two or three "star students" in a class. These are hard-working perfectionists who take so much pride in their work that if I were a CEO of a company I would hire those 3 students out of a class of 30. I said such to an employer who called me about a former student, and based on my testimony the student got the job.
Such students are not enamored by short-term pleasure. Such students embrace sacrifice, hard work (not hanging out with their buddies at night so they can study), and see a certain amount of drudgery and unhappiness as essential to achieving their goals.
The second fallacy is that unhappiness excludes happiness. Actually, according to Arthur C. Brooks, the most happy people can simultaneously experience unhappiness.
As Brooks observes:
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
Three. Misguided Attempts at Happiness Backfire
We can look to all sorts of addicts to see how their addiction, an attempt to escape misery and find pleasure, backfires and results in misery. Of course, there is drug addiction, but there are many others: social media attention, Swiss timepieces, shoes, cars, getting ripped muscles, etc. But the drug eventually becomes the poison. As Brooks explains:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Four. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Happiness
Intrinsic happiness refers to character building, the state of our soul, defined by the connections we make with others, creative pursuits, our contributions to society, and our ability to find meaning in suffering.
Extrinsic happiness refers to the materialistic script society hands us: Go to college, get a job so you can make money to buy lots of stuff, show off your stuff to family and friends to win their approval, curate your "amazing existence" on Facebook, etc. Then die and have hundreds of people weep at your funeral.
According to Brooks, intrinsic happiness is the way to go. He writes:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
Five. Jeff Henderson's memoir Cooked is largely about a man who transitions from an extrinsic quest for happiness to an intrinsic quest.
Henderson is miserable and suffering from soul rot during his obsession with finding extrinsic notions of happiness, but his soul finds redemption and he becomes a happier man when he helps the community and his family through an intrinsic search for happiness.
Six. Extrinsic Happiness Is Born from Our Inner Reptile
Our Inner Reptile desires dominance and reproductive success by showing signs of power. Therefore, our instincts are to get as rich, famous, and powerful as we can. But Brooks observes that these unbridled instincts can backfire.
As Brooks observes:
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
Seven. Extrinsic Happiness Makes Us Users of People
Brooks writes:
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
Jeff Henderson up to about page 100 or so of his memoir, loves things and he uses people.
Eight. Most of us sleepwalk through life in our quest for pleasure
Brooks observes that our default setting is to seek pleasure and use people, and that most of us aren't even aware of this fact because we are "sleepwalking." As he writes:
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Only because Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom and had his "butt handed to him on a stick" did he wake up from his sleepwalking ways and go on a heroic journey to find redemption for his soul. He learned to love people and use things.
Jeff Henderson Must Overcome Hedonism, Nihilism and Self-Pity:
Why Bother to Try When Life Feels Like One Big Cruel Joke?
In 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson says there comes a time when we all feel like life is one big cruel joke. We reach the point where we say, like George Carlin, “This place is a freak show. Why even bother?”
Peterson uses Tolstoy as an example of a successful, privileged, wealthy person, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who came to that point at the peak of his powers.
Tolstoy looked at the world, and said, and I paraphrase, “I hate this place. Evil triumphs over good more than not. Stupid people rise to high positions in the bureaucracies and make our lives miserable. And no matter how great our achievements, all those successes will be cancelled by death, so what’s the point? Planet Earth is a joke, man.”
Nihilism
When you’ve reached this point in your life, you’ve arrived at the Door of Nihilism, the belief that nothing matters in this world because there is no meaning. Nihilism tells us there is nothing to live for.
There are 5 ways to respond to this crisis of Nihilism.
One. You can retreat into childlike ignorance and pretend that evil and stupidity don’t exist.
Two. You can pursue mindless pleasures and hope to erase the pain of existence through sheer oblivion.
Three. You can grit your teeth and bear the misery of life like a stoic.
Four. You can end your life and be gone from this miserable place.
Thankfully, there is a fifth response.
Five. You can clean your room.
I mean this literally and metaphorically.
Here’s an example:
I remember when I was ten, I went out to the front of he house where my dad was changing the oil on his 1967 Chrysler Newport. I said, “Dad, I’m not happy. I’m bored.”
My dad was a military man, and he always spoke in a loud voice. He said, “Of course you’re unhappy. Have you looked at your room lately? It looks like a pigsty. What are you, a professional slob? Go clean your room. You’ll feel better afterwards.”
I cleaned my room and told my father I felt a lot better.
“Of course you feel better,” he said. “Did you think being a professional slob was going to make you happy?”
Jordan Peterson is also talking about cleaning our room in the spiritual, moral, and psychological sense.
We clean our room in the moral sense in 3 ways.
Number One: Cleaning your room means you stop doing what you know is wrong.
You could be spending too much time on your screen.
You could be hanging out with losers unworthy of your friendship who are dragging you down.
You could spending your money in irresponsible ways.
You could be eating in irresponsible ways.
You could be disrespectful to the people you care about most.
You could be driving too aggressively, especially when there are children in the car.
You could be whining about your kids on social media when you should get off social media and do something about your kids.
You might not brush your teeth and your breath is so bad you could breath on an elephant and it would collapse and die from anaphylactic shock. Stop telling me how depressed you are, and brush your teeth.
Cleaning up these behaviors is like cleaning your room. It’s a good step toward feeling less miserable about your existence.
Number Two.Cleaning up your life means taking stock of your bad behaviors rather than blaming the world.
It’s easy to blame external forces for our misery when too often 95% of our misery results from our own self-destructive behavior. Scapegoats are convenient because they give us an excuse to let ourselves off the hook.
Number Three. Don’t expect all of life answers to be presented to you at once. Be comforted by one piece of helpful wisdom at a time.
I had a student from Taiwan who shared a story with the class about a story his father told him about a young man who refused to live his life until God gave him all the answers.
The idea of falling:
The rising-falling paradox can be explained by a close examination of human nature.
False rising: We are delusional so that our perception of "rising" may be a false perception. The narcissist always thinks he's rising when in fact he's falling.
The misguided "mountain climber" dates evil women to prove he's "number one." We could call this the drive for dominance.
False rising: We see what we want to see so there is a disparity between our self-image and who we really are. Again, this disparity evidences narcissism.
False rising: We become intoxicated or drugged by false ideas of success. Americans too often chase the mirage or chimera of fame and want their own "reality" TV show.
False rising: Success makes us feel invincible.We begin to believe in the lies of the sycophants.
False rising: When we feel invincible, we allow our behavior to become more and more reckless.
False rising: When we feel more invincible, we experience hubris, a form of arrogance that blinds us from our flaws.
Fale rising could be based on arrogance and power giving us a false sense of invincibility while we become disconnected from others.
False rising could have a downside: being blind to portents of danger and obnoxious behavior as we become full of braggadocio.
False rising could result in a disconnect from values and morals and even our true self.
False rising could result in inflated self-esteem, narcissism, and a loss of proportion in regards to what's important in the world.
False rising could be the misguided use of creativity and talent: used for the purposes of evil, concupiscence, greed, self-destruction when it should be used to blossom or to flourish.
False rising results in popularity and when we're popular we get surrounded by a popularity bubble in which sycophants praise us even when we don't deserve it so we think we're being smart and funny when we're not.
False rising: The illusion of rising is often from misguided genius or talent in which we use our power for evil rather than good but willfully blind to this fact, we pat ourselves on the back for our evil deeds.
Rising is also based on human nature and the nature of struggling, flourishing, and character-building.
Falling could be a good thing: a purging lesson in humility and fortitude. Sometimes the best that could happen to you is to have "your butt handed to you on a stick," to quote Marc Maron. For example, when I was 14, I picked a fight with an 18-year-old state wrestling champion, Sammy Choa, and I had "my butt handed to me on a stick," the best thing that ever happened to me because the experience taught me to keep my mouth shut.
Falling could be a test over what's really important in this world.
Falling could be an opportunity to live and learn wisdom.
Falling could be the experience of rejection from others so that later we have empathy for those who are being rejected or scorned.
Falling could result in a struggle that develops our fortitude (strength to endure).
Falling makes us lose our "friends" and popularity so that we have to define ourselves in a new way, without the superficial definition we had when we gained our self-esteem from the approval of others.
Falling slaps our face and makes us see the truth, the truth that we have been denying. We often deny the truth about who we really are until we "hit rock bottom" and say to ourselves, "Whatever the hell it is I'm doing, it isn't working. I need a new plan."
To me, the topic demands a two-part essay. The first part is about false rising rooted in
self-delusion
denial
intoxication of false success
The second half is about real rising rooted in
hitting a wall so that we finally see our self-destructive ways and take accountability for our actions
perdition, suffering and humility as part of the re-building process
developing empathy as we reinvent ourselves in a new, much wiser way.
Example of Signal Phrase, Introduction, and Transition to Thesis
In his brilliant essay "We know junk food makes us sick. Are 'junk values' making us depressed?," journalist Johann Hari observes that our greedy appetites for materialism fail to make us happy, but rather these extrinsic values for seductive objects such as fancy cars, watches, and designer clothes bloat us with us spiritual indigestion. He cogently writes: "Extrinsic values are KFC for the soul. Yet our culture constantly pushes us to live extrinsically." Hari's diagnosis of spiritual crapulence applies to the fall and eventual redemption of Jeff Henderson whose life as a premier crack dealer honed his appetite for extrinsic gratification made him hellbound, and his transformation into a seeker of intrinsic worth altered his trajectory toward heavenly atonement.
Jeff Henderson's Fall Results in Too Much Denial
Some Denial Is Necessary for Sanity, But Too Much Denial Leads to Insanity and Moral Dissolution
We need a certain amount of denial to be sane. For example, we should not face the raw, bald reality of our most egregious personal defects and weaknesses.
Otherwise, we'll be bogged down in the paralysis of self-obsession and self-loathing and we would be worthless. Let's say we're not as kind as we'd like to be.
We can't go around muttering to ourselves, "I lack the milk of human kindness" over and over. Otherwise, we'll go insane.
Another example is ugly photographs of you. I'm talking about photographs that make you look so ugly you cringe and wince with disbelief.
Photographers say most of us are more photogenic on our left side.
THROW THOSE UGLY PHOTOS AWAY NOW! Before people put them on the internet.
If you walk around life with an image of yourself based on the ugliest photographs ever taken of you, you'll never leave the house; you'll never get a date; you'll die lonely.
Try to focus on the more flattering photographs of yourself.
Is this a form of delusion? Maybe. But it's a good delusion, one that preserves your sanity.
A personal example: I hate the sound of my voice when someone plays it back on a taperecorder.
Solution?
I DON'T LISTEN TO MY RECORDED VOICE.
Otherwise, I'll reel in self-disgust.
Take peanut butter as another example. It's full of cockroach parts, but we eat it without thinking about that disgusting fact.
Or when we eat meat. Few of us contemplate the agony the animals suffered to become meat on our plate.
Or cheap clothing. It's cheap because underage children are making it in third-world country at slave wages. Still enjoying your Gap T-shirt?
To a certain degree, self-delusions are necessary. Otherwise, we don't do much. We'll criticize every move we make.
Fly to a green summit on who to reduce the world's carbon footprint and the private jet you take is blowing carbons into the atmosphere.
Another example is natural disasters. Even though an earthquake, a tsunami or some other disaster can destroy us in the blink of an eye, we have to live our lives as if we have a good shot of living a full, healthy life. Otherwise, we'll be paralyzed by fear.
So we all engage in some denial to some degree.
Taking Denial Too Far
But there is a point where denial no longer preserves our sanity, that denial goes too far and plummets us into the depths of illusion completely disconnected to reality.
We see people on American Idol who think they have the talent to be superstar singers.
Such is the fate of successful drug dealer Jeff Henderson who believes, one, he's invincible and, two, he isn't doing anything wrong: He's just a businessman.
Use an example of denial for introduction.
Sometimes When We Think We're "Rising," We're Really in Denial
Examples of Denial
A woman sees gradual warning signs that her boyfriend is jealous and controlling, but she denies it and before she knows it, she is in the chapel about to give her vows, what will be for her a prison sentence of unbearable hell: physical beatings and psychological abuse.
A man is a major drug dealer but minimizes the harm of his actions by telling everyone he is not a drug user, a gang-banger, or a killer. He’s just a “business man.”
A man doesn't believe he has a snoring problem until his wife plays him a tape-recording of his sleep apnea.
A man cheats on his girlfriend, convinces her that he did not cheat and has a hard time “forgiving” his girlfriend for questioning his fidelity.
An El Camino student hangs out with college dropout buddies who never really grew up. Their lives center on “having a good time,” which is the usual fare of male bonding, bragging about their endless series of immature relationships, gossiping about their latest exploits, etc. This student can’t acknowledge that his “buddies” are emotional retards distracting him from his more important goals, such as succeeding in college. Even more disturbing, he fails to admit that his “buddies” are haters who want him to fail because crabs always pinch the top crab straddling the bucket and pull the crab back in before it can escape.
Two. The Causes of Denial
When you lie to yourself enough times, you begin to believe that your lie is a truth. This is the beginning of insanity.
When your whole life becomes a collection of lies that you’ve convinced yourself are truths, you are walking around Planet Earth with your head up your butt.
Denial is also brought upon by the gradual worsening of a situation. You acclimate to gradual developments so that you don’t see what is happening to you or your don’t want to see it. We can call this Suffering Acclimation. The pain is so gradual we can get used to it.
Acclimation allows you to adapt to an extreme situation so that is doesn’t seem extreme to you. Making $100,000 a month in easy money isn’t normal to us, but it was normal to Jeff Henderson during his drug dealing days. In other words, craziness becomes the “new normal.”
Denial is caused by the ego, which says, “These things can’t be happening because of me. I’m essentially a good person. I don’t deserve this.” Such is Jeff Henderson’s position during his initial arrest and imprisonment.
When the ego embraces denial to escape personal accountability, the result is nihilism, the death of morals and meaning. In other words, “you don’t give a damn about anything.” That’s nihilism. See page 110 in which Jeff Henderson says he doesn’t care about anything. He doesn’t want to get his life together. He just wants to lift weights and “kick it” with his homies. That’s nihilism.
When you're surrounded by sycophants, they tell you what you want to hear, not the truth, so you live in a bubble of denial.
Perdition and Redemption
Review:
So far we’ve talked about Jeff Henderson’s Redemption Journey in terms of his Fall, which includes concupiscence, pursuing the good without a moral compass, and denial, the refusal to take accountability for one’s actions by relying on all sorts of rationalizations.
Redemption Reviewed
1. The Fall, misguided quest for goodness often resulting in the following:
concupiscence
we make rationalizations to justify our actions. We eventually believe our rationalizations and this is a form of insanity
denial or willed ignorance; we pretend that we don't know what we're doing.
moral dissolution, numbness
2. Denial of the Fall because of the some of the above reasons
3. Epiphany or revelation in which we realize our accountability for our Fall
4. Contrition: feeling badly for our misdeeds; this is part of perdition, suffering for our misdeeds.
5. reinvention: starting from zero (also part of our perdition) and building fortitude and hard work to create a new self. Reinvention is comprised of the following:
humility, starting at zero
fortitude
perseverance in the face of failure
discerning fruitful failure from futile failure
10,000 Hour Rule
6. Flourishing, blossoming at craft and personal life together
7. giving back, mentoring, other acts of atonement
Today we will look at the second part of the Redemption Journey: Perdition, which means suffering punishment for one’s crimes or misdeeds.
Reality sets in: crime and punishment or perdition
1. Jeff Henderson gets arrested and realizes he won’t have access to women the way he used to. This is a shock to his psyche.
2. He suffers another shock to his psyche. Once a powerful man who called the shots, he finds in prison that he is now powerless, beholden to guards like Big Bubba on page 79.
3. In prison, he has time to think about his life in ways he didn't before. For example, he wanted to be like T whom he worshipped as a sort of god. Ironically, he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison that he had become BIGGER that T and that being SO BIG put him on the feds’ radar screen and that was his downfall. 81
4. All Jeff’s life he’s been inculcated with the belief in the Homie or Gang Banger Code of Silence as if it were religious truth. But in prison, he discovers the No-Snitch Code has no real value because a homie will rat you out when it’s to his advantage. See page 151.
5. Jeff thought he was invincible but discovers a painful fact: The Feds had been watching him, not for several months, but for several years. He was digging his own grave for a long, long time. 87
6. Why me? Jeff is not a victim but he cries to Jesus and feels sorry for himself. In a state of perdition, he his helpless, beholden to the caprices of prison life.
7. He realizes a painful fact: Prison may have saved his life. One of the Twins, his supplier, got killed shortly after Jeff’s imprisonment. 89
8. Too late in the game, he discovers another painful fact: Anyone can get convicted who doesn’t get caught with drugs or money. 94
9. His perdition takes on palpable pain when he is given legal accountability for his crimes: 19.5 years. See page 100.
10. Only after he’s arrested does he discover another painful fact: There is no loyalty in the streets. It’s a myth. See page 152 after his homies steal all his stuff after he’s arrested.
What is Jeff’s attitude at the beginning of his prison sentence? Contrast with his attitude at the end of it (centripetal vs. centrifugal development)
1. Self-pity, victimization
2. Nihilism 110
3. Getting over, coast in life, do the minimum.
4. Universe of One 113. On page 192, he says “in prison everything is about you.”
5. No passion for marriage 114
6. He fluctuates between complacency and despair.
Future Goal and Redemption
We all have the drive for redemption; if this drive is frustrated, the drive does not remain dormant and neutral inside of us; to the contrary, this drive goes inward and poisons us.
Changing Our Definition of Success
When Jeff is able to redirect his energy from being a drug dealer to a chef, he finds redemption. All of us have a “life energy” that can be directed toward concupiscence, revenge, victimization or growth, maturity, and independence as is explained by Erich Fromm in this passage from Escape from Freedom:
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this, we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.
In other words, Fromm is saying that we must flourish in a passion in order to direct our energy toward growth rather than re-direct that energy toward self-destruction such as concupiscent pursuits.
It’s only in prison that Jeff is forced to being the journey to redemption.
Redemption and Flourishing
Flourishing is the opposite of concupiscence flourishing, from the Greek word eudaimonia: means to blossom, to become who we were meant to be.
When Jeff Henderson becomes an illegal “business man” being followed by the feds, rationalizing his illegal activities, and living on easy money, he’s not the person he was meant to be. He is rather a grotesque variation. We see his misshapen character in prison when he becomes the enraged, nihilistic, disaffected victim.
Only when he learns a passion and accepts his responsibilities as an adult, does he begin to flourish and he becomes happier than he was as a concupiscent drug dealer.
Taking a Close Look at Fortitude: The strength and tenacity to push forward in the presence of ever surmounting obstacles. What are Jeff Henderson’s obstacles to starting over?
1. Jeff Henderson discovers that the world is full of “haters and dream crushers” (crabs in a bucket). These are the haters who don’t want people with good intentions to be afforded a clean, fresh start because they want everyone to share in their failure and misery.
2. Others don’t trust us. Nor do they forgive us for our past deeds.
3. Often we have an inability to forgive ourselves for our past deeds creates baggage
4. Often we lack confidence: We fear that we may backslide into our old ways.
5. Often a past label like “convicted felon” creates a stigma that is extremely difficult to erase. We see the felon. We don’t see the husband trying to support his wife and two kids.
6. Jeff Henderson has to tone down his “stroll” and his muscles with baggy clothes to remove the hard gangsta look. See page 2
7. Jeff Henderson has to remain gracious and poised when he gets pooh-poohed by Caesar’s Palace, the very place that was happy to take his money when he was a dealer “back in the day.” Now Caesar’s is playing all high and mighty.
Centrifugal Motion or JH's Transformation
1. He sees he’s been blind and willfully ignorant about the consequences of his selling drugs. 115
2. He develops intellectual curiosity, reading eclectic material, various intellectual and religious doctrines. He doesn’t embrace one but rather picks and chooses as he sees fit. 124
3. He becomes engaged with others vs. being disaffected. 124
4. He finds a passion, cooking, that utilizes his talents.
5. He learns the humility of starting at the bottom and not getting things “easy” like when he was a dealer.
6. He learns a hard work ethic. It’s almost impossible to acclimate from easy money to hard work with low pay. But Jeff was always a hard worker.
7. Jeff found a mentor in Big Roy and later in Las Vegas a cook named Friendly. And then Robert at the Gadsby’s.
8. Jeff experiences contrition and regret on page 146: He is among the dregs of the world, exactly where he belongs, in the lowest rung of society: hell.
9. You must have a vision of a different life. See page 147.
10. He begins to take pride in his work. 147: Speed, taste, and presentation. 188
11. He undoes his wrong by talking to teens in Vegas. 165
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided byPurdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that