Pronoun Agreement Review
A Professor Who's Against Personal Pronouns Like "I" and "We"
Example:
We must now look at why Masson compares meat-eaters to Nazis, for several reasons, not the least of which . . .
Part One. Lexicon
A Professor Who's Against Personal Pronouns Like "I" and "We"
Example:
We must now look at why Masson compares meat-eaters to Nazis, for several reasons, not the least of which . . .
Part One. Lexicon
1. taboo of bringing pecuniary offering to a home celebration: bringing money to a celebration instead of a gift is taboo, a forbidden act, a violation. You make people feel cheap and degrade the sacred component of a social event. Never mix sacred time with profane time. There is the sacred over here and the profane, money interests, over there. Never mix them. If you do, you will be sure to offend someone.
Regrettably, the separation of these two worlds has eroded over the last decade. It used to be a taboo to bring wine or some other gift with the price affixed to it, but now we give people gift cards and include receipts in gift boxes so people can return gifts if need be. The sacred act of gift-giving has been degraded to a business transaction and reflects the loss of the sacred in our culture.
The solution? Stop giving gifts to people.
2. Social norm is the understanding that we are helpful to others with the assumption that people will treat us with the same kindness and we shun treating others badly so that others do not treat us badly or maliciously. We can call this the principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity keeps the moral center in this world; without reciprocity we use people's bathrooms, take their prescription medications; use their toothbrushes, etc.
3. Market norm is the understanding that your work or money will be exchanged for satisfactory compensation based on comparing the transaction to other ones. Market norms NEVER mix with social norms.
4. Reciprocity is the idea that there is mutual benefit based on give and take or “I scratch your back and you scratch mine.” Reciprocity is built into social norms.
5. Obfuscating financial terms with gifts to create a harmonious social norm. To obfuscate means to obscure or distract from the truth. See page 112.
6. Inverse relationship between arousal and reason. The higher the arousal, the lower the reason. The BMW M3 creates arousal but a lease payment of $600 a month, $500 a month insurance, and high-maintenance costs, for me, kill the arousal, but too often arousal wins. Another example: An inverse relationship between love and appetite. The greater the love or infatuation for another person, the lesser the appetite for food. Once you're in love at this level, you've gone crazy. Society glorifies this kind of crazy love in all its pop songs, but I say it's dangerous and unrealistic. It's an adolescent fantasy of perpetual infatuation, a narcissistic dream propped up as "true love," complete B.S.
A culture, like ours, that is based on arousal is doomed to destruction. We become a binge and purge culture. We have Internet Booms followed by Crashes; we have housing booms followed by crashes.
7. Dichotomous, is an adjective referring to something that can be defined as containing opposites. For example, Ariely on page 121 refers to Berkeley as a “dichotomous place,” full of rabid radicals, on one hand, and middle class conformists, on the other.
8. Super ego state: when your “adult” squashes your arousal and desire and takes control through reason. It’s difficult to get into the super ego state because according to some, “Life is 80% emotions and 20% intellect.”
9. Id, the component of desire disconnected from reason. Homer Simpson is funny because he represents the distilled Id, unencumbered by maturity and reason.
Part Two. Questions
One. What is the conflict between social and market norms? Why don’t they mix?
See page 76. We can motivate people to do the same tasks for free if their actions are looked at as “communal” more than we can motivate for a pittance of money, which is perceived as an insult.
Cogent Example:
Daycare tardy fee backfired so that when school charged the fee, the parents were MORE late. The social norm of not being late turned into consumer entitlement.
Another Example
If we buy our mother-in-law a bottle of $200 wine or champagne for Thanksgiving feast as a gift, she is flattered by our offering. On the other hand, if we give her $200 cash, she is insulted and slaps our face, figuratively or not.
Two. What is self-interested altruism discussed on page 79 and 97?
People are motivated to do helpful tasks without pay. In fact, if you pay them, especially a low amount, they tend to feel insulted and will resist doing the task.
Self-interested altruism, then, is the motivation to help others because of the knowledge, unconscious or conscious, that we too may need to receive help someday. Thus self-interested altruism creates a society built on reciprocity, which means “I scratch your back and you scratch mine.”
Three. Why are we motivated by self-interested altruism? And why are these motivations in conflict with profit motive?
One. The aforementioned understanding that reciprocity is to our own advantage, the need for mutual helpfulness.
Two. When we our helpful, we feel a sense of belonging, one of our basic needs.
Three. When we our helpful, we create a sense of loyalty and trust among members of our community. Loyalty and trust in turn create a sense of security, another basic human longing.
Four. When we our helpful, we feel needed and thus valuable. Feeling needed increases our self-esteem. Of course, feeling needed is another basic human longing.
Five. The profit motive compromises the authenticity of our basic human longings to feel needed, to feeling belonging, and to feel secure in the community.
Four. How does “free” stimulate social norms? See 126.
The bounty from which the subjects took chocolate or whatever was perceived as a communal offering and thus people felt obligated to curb their excesses and thus save some of the bounty for others. There is a social norm at work here based on reciprocity. If we save for others, the hope is others will save for us.
Five. How does arousal compromise decision making in the realm of sex, eating, and consumerism even for the smartest, rational people? See Chapter 6.
In a state of arousal, Ariely’s study shows, we are stripped of our sophistication, our reason, our logic and we become primitive. We’re not talking about dumb consumers. We’re talking about even the most sound, stable, well educated consumers. All of us our stripped of our free will and become shopping robots under the orders of good marketing. This is what advertisers want to do to us: to make us, by penetrating inside our brains and short-circuiting our logic, spend money on their products. Once our logic is short-circuited, we go into the reptilian stage where our primitive appetites control our actions.
Six. What are the characteristics of the reptilian?
According to Clotaire Rapaille, the reptilian is unconscious behavior. "People have no idea why they're doing what they're doing."
The reptilian is one of the brain's 3 parts.
There is the reptilian primal core. It is the most primitive and the most powerful. It represents appetite, fear, lust, and agression.
Then there is the limbic brain, the emotions.
And finally there is the cortex, which represents higher reason.
We must understand the reptilian hot button, which triggers unspoken, unconscious needs like the need to dominate. Big things like watches, SUVs, diamonds, etc., represent domination.
When humans struggle to act based on inner conflict, the reptile always wins. For example, when you buy a car, your cortex wants to help the environment so you want to buy a Prius, but your reptile wants to dominate, so you end up buying an SUV. The reptile wins.
Consumer items possess codes. As we said before, an SUV might be a code for domination or now, as its sales wane, it might be a code for the "dumb American."
On the other hand, the Prius and Mini Cooper are codes for hipster intellectual.
You must understand that 80% of life is emotion and only 20% is intellect. It's not hard to guess what wins.
Seven. What can we do as human beings if we are helpless to the demands of our Inner Reptile?
We can’t control the process, so all we can do is control the environment. That’s why professional athletes should stay out of strip clubs. Even the strong-minded athletes are vulnerable to fighting and bad decision making.
Eight. Another Way to Understand the Reptilian Is to Examine the Codes in Clotaire Rapaille's The Culture Code: Why People ARound the World Live and Buy as They Do
peanut butter is the code for Mother in America but not other countries
bathroom is a code for independence and retreat established during childhood "potty training" and to this day hotels make the bathroom a retreat with oversized everything, plants, phones, notepads, etc.
Jeep is the code for a horse saving people and bringing Americans back to the pioneer days
For Americans, the code for cars is identity; for Germans the code for cars is engineering, which is why Americans love the PT Cruiser and Germans hate it.
For Americans, the SUV is code for dominating others. Choosing between SUV (dominance in the reptilian part of the brain) and Prius (save the environment, an impulse from the cortex), the Reptile always wins. With any code, the reptilian brain is always the winner.
We have little control over the reptilian part of our brain. Stimulate the arousal buttons in the reptilian and we are usually helpless, even to our powers of reason.
Nine. Class Activity:
Write about a struggle you had between your Inner Reptile and your cortex and the “winner” of this debate.
Example of an Introduction, Transition, and Thesis for Essay
Hi, my name is Jeff and I need a Lexus. I don’t need one because of the many impressive and scintillating Lexus ads I’ve seen on TV, however convincing they may be, but on first-hand knowledge. My Uncle Macy, who resides in Los Angeles, owns an Opaline Pearl Lexus GS 350 and one hot afternoon after finishing our lunch at the Misto Café, sensing my palpable yearning to drive his car, perhaps evinced by my puppy-eyed stare of longing at the glimmering car key he held in his hand, Macy invited me to sit behind the steering wheel. Here we were, four of my relatives and I, our bellies bursting with gorgonzola tortellini, umpteen loaves of buttered French bread, and tiramisu, sitting inside the Lexus at a steep incline on Crenshaw Blvd. From a dead stop I decided to see how Macy’s Lexus could move up the hill burdened with a thousand pounds of human flesh and with the AC on full-blast and I am here to tell you that his Lexus GS 350 with the silver chrome cross-guard automatic shifter didn’t flinch at the daunting task I had given it. It accelerated up the hill with a brassy insouciance that made me feel like I was riding a magic carpet. The car did not grunt, whine, or complain. To the contrary, it seemed to relish in the opportunity to flex its very capable muscles. I had the feeling that, like the Border collie whose instincts compel him to herd sheep, the Lexus was doing precisely the very thing it was designed to be doing and, as such, was fulfilling its purpose in life. The ergonomics of course were flawless. The seat’s lumbar support so exquisite that my chronic sciatica pains were immediately assuaged. The steering, contrary to snobbish BMW-owners who snub the Lexus as being “too soft,” was crisp, precise, and empowering.
But to praise the Lexus’ perfect engineering is to dwell on the mundane and the predictable. There were deeper, more important things taking place, namely, I was enjoying the Lexus experience. Within seconds of pressing the gas pedal, a warm oceanic sensation, not unlike arousal, stirred within me. I don’t know how to explain it but for lack of a better word I was overcome by aLexusation, a delicious tingle that surged up my spine, my neck, and, finally, my brain, filling me with an ecstatic explosion of serotonin neurotransmitters so that, within seconds, I felt I had become one with the car. A missing part of myself had been found. A restlessness that nagged me all my life had ceased as I ascended toward a still diamond-twinkling ocean plane and luxuriated in the Lexus’ Bose eight-speaker system. Like Orpheus, the Lexus had tamed the savage beast.
The effects that the Lexus had on me were noticed by others as well. Most importantly, my brother Brian, who trailed behind us with other relatives in a rental car, said that I looked to be a “perfect fit” for the Lexus and that the GS 350 complemented me, not in the frivolous sense of the word, but on a deeper, more existential level. In other words, my brother revealed that while seeing me drive the car he had an almost mystical vision of me having reached a state of self-actualization. Inside the cockpit, I had an expression, both focused and relaxed, which he had never seen before and there was a brief, startling moment when he said he did not entirely recognize me.
Once I saw the Lexus' transformative powers, I knew I had to get one. Sure, the oppressive $600 monthly payment and $300 monthly insurance payment took a chunk out of my paycheck. With gas and maintenance, I figured the Lexus cost me $15,000 a year, a small price to pay for happiness. But I deserve to be happy. I'm entitled to it.
Sadly, the above monologue captures the deranged state of the aroused consumer as described in Dan Ariely's Predicatbly Irrational, a book that dissects the human's irrational mind into five major pieces, which include ____________, ______________, ____________, ________________, and ___________________.
Comments