Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
Composition and Critical Thinking professor Mike Manderlin was in Prospect College’s faculty bathroom stall. Sucking greedily on a sugarless lemon-honey-flavored throat lozenge, his pants coiled around his ankles, reading his wife’s text: “You might want to check out this YMCA workshop for compulsive overeating,” with a link for registration. When he sensed the presence of Mary Beauregard, one of his students, standing just outside the stall’s locked door. How did he know it was her? Was it her familiar breathing, rasping and emphysemic from her chain smoking? Was it her familiar smell of mothballs and cloying talcum powder wafting from her green nicotine-stained skin? Actually, the tipoff was her signature neon pink luggage cart with her matching tote bag and backpack, which he could see beneath the partitioned stall.
“Mary, I know it’s you. You need to leave. Now.”
“Professor Manderlin, I need to talk to you about my grade.”
“What you’re doing is illegal. I could have campus police arrest you. Now I suggest you leave at once.”
“No, not until you explain why I got a C.”
“We can talk about your grade in my office,” he said. “This is not the place.”
“You didn’t even read my essay about my party catering service, did you.”
“Actually, I did read it. You can make one hundred smoked salmon canapés in a half hour. Very impressive. Did you not read my comments?”
“You said you liked my story of becoming one of the industry’s leading catering services, but that my essay was ‘larded’ with grammar errors. Why do you have to use the word ‘larded’? It’s such a demeaning word, and it hurts my self-esteem.”
“We can talk about this later.”
“I don’t think so.”
Mary’s track record was well known. A forty-year-old student. She had been attending the college for more than a decade and had filed so many grievances against the school that she was known as “Scary Mary.” But Mike never imagined she would break into the faculty bathroom and corner an instructor while he was doing his business.
“Mary, you need to leave the men’s room this very instant, before this goes on your record.”
“Not until you give me more feedback.”
She was now gripping the top of the stall’s partition so he could see her thick, stubby fingers. Stacking her tote bag and backpack on top of her luggage cart to make a precarious stepping stool. She had elevated her 250-pound body so that her head was peeking over the stall. Her tight curly jaundiced hair was wet with sweat. She glowered at her instructor behind her black cat eye glasses and blinked her eyes repeatedly. While crinkling her pointy nose.
“You need to help me,” she said, barely able to catch her breath. “I can’t afford to flunk this class again.”
“Get out of here, Mary, before I have you arrested.”
“No. Not until you explain my grade.”
“You want me to explain your grade? Okay. Your fifth-grade-level incoherent chicken scratch is so bad I stay up at night wondering if the college’s mission to educate the masses is a fool’s errand. Your writing is so conspicuously absent of basic critical thinking skills that it makes me want to ram an icepick through my forehead. There. Is that enough explanation for you?”
“You’re a terrible person unworthy of a calling as noble as higher education. I can see you’re incapable of helping me. I’ll leave now.”
“Good idea. And, Mary, I need you to drop my class immediately. If you don’t, I’ll report this incident to campus police and have a restraining order issued against you. Am I clear?”
“I will gladly drop your class. But you should know you have no empathy for your marginal, at-risk students such as myself. I’m going to do some research on Rate My Professor and find someone with more compassion and understanding as I work on completing my education.”
Satisfied with the way she put her professor in his place. She attempted to descend from her makeshift ladder, but she lost her balance and all 250 pounds of her crashed to the ground. Writhing on the tile floor, she shouted that she feared she might have broken several bones and may require a stretcher.
Out of the stall now, Mike looked down at Mary and told her she was going to be fine, but that may need to ice her injuries to reduce possible inflammation.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Help me up.”
“I’m not touching you, Mary. And besides, I’m late for class.”
After his encounter with Mary Beauregard. Mike rushed to his 6 p.m. Critical Thinking class. His students, many of them commuting from a long day at work, were starving at the dinner hour. Because he had a lot of empathy where hunger was concerned, he was lax about the campus-wide no-eating-in-class rules. Sitting at the desks, students were feasting on giant burritos that looked like fluffy pillows. Mike happily imagined sleeping with his head on such a soft burrito, waking up periodically, taking a bite out of his chipotle-infused cushion, resuming sleep, and starting the whole process all over again.
Other students were eating platters of chicken katsu over heaps of white rice drowning in thick brown curry gravy. The spicy curry was so alluring Mike had to muster all his strength not to hover over their plates and scoop mounds of curry into his ravenous mouth.
Some students were gobbling protein bars and washing them down with ice-cold mocha coffee beverages. Topped with white clouds of whipped cream, chocolate chips, rainbow sprinkles, and maraschino cherries.
One resourceful student brought a jar of peanut butter to class and spooned giant gobs of peanut butter on bananas and apple slices.
Another student was eating an oversized hot pastrami sandwich with melted Swiss cheese, mustard, and pickles.
The only thing that stopped Mike from stealing his students’ food with his bare hands and devouring it in front of their terrified faces was the fear that a student would video his piggish spectacle and post the disgusting display on YouTube.
The classroom was so redolent of spices, smoked meats, and vinegar that Mike felt a sharp tingling sensation in his nostrils, and his mouth watered. He look down to make sure there was no drool on his Dacron sport shirt.
In spite of the apples, carrots, and smoked almonds he had wolfed down during his office hour. He was so dizzy with hunger that it was all he could do to not cancel class, run across the street to the Middle Eastern restaurant, and inhale several skewers of chicken kabob dipped in their signature smoked paprika hummus.
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paul Bloom's Claim That Empathy Has Deficits
One. Empathy is a poor moral guide because it's biased and often looks-based.
Two. Empathy blinds us from utilitarian approaches to policy in favor of feelings approaches.
Three. Empathy is inferior to compassion. The latter desires to help others in the absence of feelings or empathy.
Four. Excessive empathy or "hyper empathy" can be bullying and controlling over others.
Five. Excessive empathy can lead to excessive self-denial and self-abnegation.
Six. Empathy can be selfish, indulgent, unpleasant, and inappropriate when the person is reacting to someone who is suffering (drowning example).
Seven. Empathy leads to emotional burnout.
Eight. Empathy is a liability for doctors who need calm, not empathy, to make their patients feel better.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
One. In the context of Caleb Crain's "The Case Against Democracy" and Ilya Somin's "Democracy vs. Epistocracy" support, defend, or complicate the argument that an uninformed public lacking adequate critical thinking skills cannot support a democracy as we tend to idealize democracies but rather, at best, maintains a democracy so flawed many would argue that it cannot be called a democracy at all, but rather some grotesque sub-version of a democracy.
Paragraph 1: Summarize the problem of an uninformed populace, also known as "hobbits," and misinformed public, known as "hooligans." Or you might define the terms "hobbits," "hooligans," and "Vulcans," and give examples.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 Your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis
Paragraph 1: Explain the alleged deficits resulting from social media use. Or you could summarize Tristan Harris' comparison of social media to religious cults.
Paragraph 2: Write a thesis that agrees or disagrees with the claim that "social media mode" maladapts you to meaningful, fulfilling tasks. Social media is "Cap'n Crunch," a form of binge eating that never leaves you satisfied.
Paragraphs 3-6 would be your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal:
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, restatement of your thesis in a more emotionally powerful form to achieve pathos.
Four. In the context of Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," defend, refute, or complicate that America is morally obligated to exact qualified African-Americans reparations for America's crime of an ongoing kleptocracy, which includes slavery, Jim Crow, and their ongoing legacy today.
Paragraph 1: Summarize the debate on both sides.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 would be your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion.
Five. Develop an analytical thesis that shows how Jordan Peeles' movie Get Out builds on Ta-Nehisi Coates' notion of American kleptocracy.
Six. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that recycling is a liberal white middle class religion that speaks more to Kool-Aid-drinking tribalism than it does improving the Earth. Consult John Tierney's "The Reign of Recycling," Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism is a Religion," and Stephen Asma's "Green Guilt."
Seven. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income. Consult the following:
Paragraph 1: What is UBI and why is it so relevant right now?
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Is UBI viable? Is it realistic? Is it an appropriate response to 47% of jobs being lost in the next 10-20 years?
Paragraphs 3-6 will be your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal
Paragraph 8: Conclusion
Arguments Against Universal Basic Income (UBI)
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is.
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable.
Modify for students who don't wish to see the documentary:
Option "X":
Develop a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that climate deniers are using logical fallacies and fake science to support their claim that "we don't really know if humans are causing climate change."
Paragraph 1: What is the scientific claim of climate change?
Paragraph 2: Do you agree that logical fallacies and manipulations are being used to deny climate change?
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting arguments.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Eight. Develop a thesis that in the context of the documentary Merchants of Doubt addresses the question: Should we have faith that "reason and faith can defeat propaganda and falsehoods." Or is such a message optimistic bias rooted in delusion?
Nine: Develop an analytical thesis that in the context of Merchants of Doubt explains the fallacies behind spin and how these fallacies can be constructed to effectively cause doubt and confusion over the legitimate claims of science.
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income.
Three. UBI would eliminate need for minimum wage. Lower minimum wage would encourage more hiring.
Four. Because UBI doesn't give more money for children, UBI doesn't reward one lifestyle over another.
Five. Citizens would have more time and resources to train and get educated for more career options presuming they used their time and money wisely.
Six. Most stay-at-home parents are women who have not been justly paid for their domestic work over the centuries. UBI would help remedy that injustice.
Seven. UBI gives citizens an escape valve from an abusive job or relationship. Having guaranteed money makes it easier to bail when you have to. "This is jacked up, man. I've got to bail."
Eight. 13K a year isn't so much that you would be content to retire in your house. Most people would want at the very least to supplement their meager income with part-time or full-time work. More enterprising citizens would use their free time and money for education and job re-training.
Nine. UBI would eliminate welfare abuses and welfare fraud because UBI spells the death of welfare as we know it.
Ten. Providing for the citizens with UBI would lessen the risk of the kind of discontent that leads to nationalist nativism, a racist political movement that makes one ethnic tribe hate on immigrants as scapegoats for the country's woes.
Eleven. Addressing the counterargument that not having to work would make us lazy depressed slobs, some would argue that technology is forcing us to change and adapt. Just as coal workers are inevitably going to become extinct in the next century, we must adapt to a new employment landscape. We must either adapt or die. We must not be chained to our "Calvinism hangover," the deeply American notion that work is salvation and unemployment is a sign of sin and depravity.
Twelve. The rich know they have to share their wealth because the throng with torches and pitch forks will be knocking on their doors. In other words, UBI is much needed pacifier, a form of social control that augments the safety of the rich.
Thirteen. The open debate about UBI--the biggest debate--is the philosophical question about the nature of work. Some say UBI will kill work and that without work people will descend into depression and pathology. Others say we will adapt to this new economic landscape. One argument in favor of UBI is that even if we don't know the answer to this question definitively, we HAVE NO CHOICE but to adapt to a world where close to 50% of jobs will be lost.
Fourteen. Technology will change the human animal on a chemical level and we will be able to adapt to the new work environment as evidenced by Elon Musk's exploration into his new neural lace company. Such technologies will make us smarter and more adaptive as human beings.
Fifteen. Even if we concede that not working will turn us into lazy bums, that is the lesser evil of the economic injustice social chaos resulting from not having UBI.
Arguments Against Universal Basic Income (UBI)
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society. Dependence, in other words, leads to laziness.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society. The dependent will drag down the producers.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. Once you take a government handout, you become vulnerable to the government's control over every part of your life. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is. Why stick to your family, when you don't rely on them?
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable. Our identity and sense of wellbeing is tied to having a job.
Six. There is no increment for children. Why not? Because you're not encouraged to have children to get more. Some find this a form of lifestyle control. Others like it.
Seven. The estimated 13K a year isn't enough though some say that still puts people in the top 12% of all global earners.
Eight. Unless all countries had equal UBI, the more desirable UBI countries would be a magnet for people of other countries who'd swarm into "healthy UBI" countries to bilk their system.
Nine. UBI is giving 15% of average national income. This would require tax revenue of 15% of national income. That is too much tax, some say, for such a small income.
Washington Post article that argues UBI won't make America great again.
Challenging the American Work Ethic
There is a notion in America, from the beginning of its European history, that being a hard worker means being noble, virtuous, and successful.
The contrary is also assumed: If you're poor and unemployed, your life is evidence that you are a member of the damned. You are morally depraved and bankrupt.
This notion comes from a form of Protestantism called Calvinism. John Calvin said evidence of being a member of God's elect was being a hard worker. German philosopher Max Weber said this became the "Protestant Work Ethic," the fuel of American capitalism.
Perhaps the American Work Ethic is Based on Unexamined Opinions
Inherited opinions: These are opinions that are imprinted on us during our childhood. Robert Atwan writes they come from “family, culture, traditions, customs, regions, social institutions, or religion.”
Involuntary opinions: These are the opinions that result from direct indoctrination and inculcation (learning through repetition). If we grow up in a family that teaches us that eating pork is evil, then we won’t eat at other people’s homes that serve that porcine dish.
Considered opinions. Atwan writes, “These are opinions we have formed as a result of firsthand experience, reading, discussion and debate, or independent thinking and reasoning. These opinions are formed from direct knowledge and often from exposure and considering other opinions.”
Some questions to consider about the work ethic for your UBI paper:
Should we really have a work ethic for menial, repetitive jobs that reduce us to human routers?
Don't jobs prevent us from spending time on our real interests and passions?
Have we been brainwashed by the Protestant Work Ethic so that we are contented "rabbit workers" for our employers?
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paul Bloom's Claim That Empathy Has Deficits
One. Empathy is a poor moral guide because it's biased and often looks-based.
Two. Empathy blinds us from utilitarian approaches to policy in favor of feelings approaches.
Three. Empathy is inferior to compassion. The latter desires to help others in the absence of feelings or empathy.
Four. Excessive empathy or "hyper empathy" can be bullying and controlling over others.
Five. Excessive empathy can lead to excessive self-denial and self-abnegation.
Six. Empathy can be selfish, indulgent, unpleasant, and inappropriate when the person is reacting to someone who is suffering (drowning example).
Seven. Empathy leads to emotional burnout.
Eight. Empathy is a liability for doctors who need calm, not empathy, to make their patients feel better.
Two. He accuses PB of wanting us to feel others' pain less: Straw Man Fallacy.
Three. He accuses PB of saying one thing and doing another: Semantic and Splitting Hairs Fallacy.
Four. He accuses PB of wanting to be "more significant than he is." False Motivation Fallacy.
Five. Complexity Fallacy. If the argument isn't simple enough, accuse the writer of being unclear and dishonest.
Six. "Fudging and circumlocution": Wordy Refutation Fallacy: Hide behind big words to sound convincing.
Seven. "He provokes audience and makes a bold statement" and then he is "hedging and qualifying": Stipulation Fallacy. Essayists use stipulations all the time. They are part of sophisticated analysis, not trickery.
Eight. "fundamental human belief": Tradition and Emotional Fallacy.
Nine. We need more, not less, empathy: More Is Better Fallacy.
Ten. "No one said a doctor needs to feel depressed": Red Herring Fallacy.
Eleven. "He sets himself up as a tough-minded truth teller." False Representation Fallacy.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)
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.
Comma Rule 6: Use commas to set off interrupters or interjections between sentences.
Keith Manderlin, a close friend of mine, went on the buttermilk fried chicken diet and lost 45 pounds.
I looked down at my thumb, a flat grape in the aftermath of me hitting it with a hammer, and realized I had better have my wife drive me to the emergency room.
Green tea, which is believed to be rich in anti-oxidants, varies in quality depending on your supplier.
I sat down and wrote a song on the piano, a lugubrious homage to my angst-ridden adolescent years, which became my all-time selling hit single.
Peanut butter, known to contain significant amounts of rat and cockroach parts, continues to be a brisk seller in spite of its reputation for containing impurities.
When Zombies Became a Worldwide Pestilence, Circa 2012
I’ve been teaching college composition and critical thinking for thirty years. If I had to pick a year that defined a radical change in my students I’d have to point to 2012. That was the year things started to go downhill. It was the year when smartphone users in the United States topped 100 million. It was the year a growing number of Americans and people worldwide began to see the smartphone as a necessity more important than having a toothbrush or wearing underwear. The smartphone became an external organ an external amygdala with Wi-Fi.
More than a human appendage, the smartphone became an opium-drip machine that you carried around with you 24/7. You could enjoy validation and dopamine all day long, until your brain dulled and short-circuited rendering you a mindless zombie falling down a rabbit hole of anxiety and depression.
Depression made people turn to their little opium gadgets with even greater intensity as if the very source of their mental disease might save them and put them into states of euphoria the gadget had once provided them.
I talk about the smartphone-induced zombie state with my students all the time. I talk about how this zombie state will make them “bottom feeders” in the new economy. Their time and energy wasted on their opium machine will make them lose their competitive edge to those who have the strength of mind to keep their smartphones in their proper place.
Having a competitive edge has never been more urgent in this age of merciless economic stratification where everything is tiered including our educational caste system. I remind the class that 8000 students walk through the Humanities Building every week and of those students only 3% will pass our college’s Critical Thinking courses which puts my students in the 97 percentile. A staggering 90% of the remedial students won’t even make it to freshman composition.
It’s bad enough to struggle at the bottom of the educational ladder with the odds set against you. But it’s far worse to voluntarily keep a smartphone attached to you constantly because now you’re aiding and abetting in your own demise by allowing this insidious contraption to turn you into a dysfunctional zombie.
I tell my students that this zombie state was prophesied in the 1999 film The Matrix in which we see we have a choice to take the Red Pill of knowledge or the Blue Pill of ignorance. Most people in the film’s future dystopia choose ignorance. The Blue Pill prophecy was fulfilled I tell my students in 2012 when everyone in the world believed erroneously they not only did they need a smartphone; they needed to constantly address the smartphone’s voracious appetites.
All of my students have horror stories of friends and family members whose lives have been ruined by smartphone addiction. They’ve traded ambition and caring for being numbed and depressed by their little dopamine device. They talk of older brothers and sisters unemployed college dropouts who malnourished and corpse-like languish in dank, dimly-lit basements where they are shackled to their smartphones day and night.
My students speak of their own battles with social media-induced anxiety and depression. Listening to my vitriolic rants against social media many of them have deleted their Facebook accounts. They all feel better for it. I’ve had students announce to the class that they deleted their Facebook account and it was followed by applause as if they were announcing their many days of sobriety at an A.A. meeting.
I confess to my students that while I rarely use my five-year-old smartphone a dinosaur by today’s standards I have wasted tens of thousands of hours mindlessly relaxing in front of the Internet since the late 1990s when I was deluded like millions of others into believing surfing the Net gave me infinite possibilities and a giddy sense of omnipotence. But thousands of hours wasted on skimming news articles, consuming entertainment, and conducting product research was time I could have spent practicing writing and playing piano. Rather than honing those skills I’ve remained a dilettante.
I too am in need of an intervention I confess to my students. I too am a casualty of the false utopian promises of technology. Looking at twenty years and tens of thousands of hours wasted wallowing in the malaise of the Internet's mind-numbing seductions I must now redeem myself before it's too late.
I make an announcement to my class. I am going to write a book about critical thinking as the antidote to the zombie state, which became a worldwide pestilence in 2012. The process must be reversed. The Red Pill must replace the Blue Pill. I will call my book Critical Thinking for the Zombie Apocalypse.
This sound like futility.
This sounds like a fool’s errand.
This sounds like the desperate play of a washed-up nonentity straining for relevance.
But my quest to save the students in my critical thinking class is like religion when you think about it. Religion tells you the world is a place of darkness and that to surrender to the world results in death—you navigate the Earth like a mindless zombie unaware that you slog across the planet in darkness.
I can shrug my shoulders and say the hell with it. Why fight the current? Why fight this tsunami of social media and smartphone addiction that is eviscerating our brains? Because complete surrender is nihilism the belief that nothing matters.
I cannot be a Priest of Despair and Hedonism.
I cannot tell my twin daughters now in the first grade that life is a meaningless joke.
If George Carlin is right that when you’re born you’re given a free front-row ticket to the freak show then you should know why it’s a freak show. And you should learn to tell the difference between a freak show and a non-freak show.
Knowing the difference means a lot to me.
But George Carlin was only half right.
The world is a freak show to be sure but only part of the world is. A freak show by definition means something deformed, grotesque, askew, out of whack. But these conditions are degraded versions of something better.
An informed opinion is a rare thing and it is a good thing to have.
An uninformed opinion one that is held out of habit and reflex more than anything else is a degraded version of the informed opinion. Mobs of people with uniformed opinions wreak hell and havoc on the world.
Eight. Develop a thesis that in the context of the documentary Merchants of Doubt addresses the question: Should we have faith that "reason and faith can defeat propaganda and falsehoods." Or is such a message optimistic bias rooted in delusion?
Nine: Develop an analytical thesis that in the context of Merchants of Doubt explains the fallacies behind spin and how these fallacies can be constructed to effectively cause doubt and confusion over the legitimate claims of science.
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Find fragments and comma splices in the following:
I’ve been teaching college composition and critical thinking for thirty years. If I had to pick a year that defined a radical change in my students, I’d have to point to 2012, that was the year things started to go downhill, it was the year when smartphone users in the United States topped 100 million. It was the year a growing number of Americans, and people worldwide, began to see the smartphone as a necessity. More important than having a toothbrush or wearing underwear. The smartphone became an external organ, a kidney with Wi-Fi.
More than a human appendage, the smartphone became an opium-drip machine that you carried around with you 24/7. You could enjoy validation and dopamine all day long. Until the mindless zombie state took over and depression set in.
Depression made people turn to their little opium gadgets with even greater intensity. As if the very source of their mental disease might save them and put them into states of euphoria the gadget had once provided them.
I talk about the smartphone-induced zombie state with my students all the time, I talk about how this zombie state will make them “bottom feeders” in the new economy. Their time and energy wasted on their opium machine will make them lose their competitive edge to those who have the strength of mind to keep their smartphones in their proper place.
I tell my students that this zombie state was prophesied in the 1999 film The Matrix. In which we see we have a choice to take the red pill of knowledge or the blue pill of ignorance. Most people in the film’s future dystopia choose ignorance. The blue pill prophecy was fulfilled, I tell my students, in 2012 when everyone in the world believed, erroneously, they not only did they need a smartphone; they needed to constantly address the smartphone’s voracious appetites.
All of my students have horror stories of friends and family members whose lives have been ruined by smartphone addiction. They’ve traded ambition and caring for being numbed and depressed by their little dopamine device. They talk of older brothers and sisters, unemployed college dropouts, who, malnourished and corpse-like, languish in dank, dimly-lit basements where they are shackled to their smartphones all day and night.
My students speak of their own battles with social media-induced depression. Many of them have deleted their Facebook accounts, they all feel better for it. I’ve had students announce to the class that they deleted their Facebook account and it was followed by applause as if they were announcing their many days of sobriety at an A.A. meeting.
I confess to my students that while I rarely use my five-year-old smartphone, a dinosaur by today’s standards, I have wasted much time relaxing in front of the Internet since the late 1990s when I was deluded, like millions of others, into believing surfing the Net gave me infinite possibilities and a giddy sense of omnipotence. But thousands of hours wasted on entertainment and consumer research was time I could have spent practicing writing and playing piano. Rather than honing those skills, I’ve remained a dilettante.
I, too, am in need of an intervention, I confess to my students. I, too, am a casualty of the false utopian promises of technology. Looking at twenty years and tens of thousands of hours wasted wallowing in the malaise of the Internet's languid seductions, I must now redeem myself. Before it's too late.
Essay #4 Options Due May 16
Writing Assignment Option #1
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Study Questions
One. What is the role of Dionysian ecstasy in the story?
The "clamor of bells," dancing, and celebration is about being grateful, but to surrender to one's praise of happiness one must forget about the dark side, the tiger's claw beneath the velvet carpet.
To be happy requires compartmentalization, having your happy "pocket" and keeping your sad "pocket" hidden.
American slave owners committed heinous acts against their slaves before coming home to pray with their families, read bedtime stories to their children, and smile piously to Jesus before sleeping with a saint-like grin, only to wake up in the morning and start their acts of abomination all over again.
These slave owners are compartmentalizing. Their left hand commits evil and their right hand, unaware of what the left hand is doing, prays with piety to its white Jesus.
We cannot be happy in heaven if were conscious of those suffering in hell.
How do we enjoy our juicy medium-rare steak when we know that the cow whose butchered cuts we're savoring trembled with terror, cried out, and let out explosive diarrhea before being cut into hundreds of pieces?
How do we enjoy an expensive dinner at a fancy restaurant when we know every 5 seconds a baby somewhere in the world dies of starvation?
How do we enjoy our recently purchased clothes when we know they were made from child slaves?
Speaking of slaves, the American economy boomed when slavery in the south was at its peak. The cotton industry fed the American economic machine, causing white Americans to shout with joy, "Cotton is king!" All the while, every sort of abomination was committed against the slaves. How could the white people be so happy when they knew another group of people was suffering with such unspeakable torment?
The short answer: compartmentalization.
And this leads us to one of the story's major themes: Compartmentalization is a moral abomination.
The collective joy in the opening paragraph is the joy resulting from a collective delusion, a shared psychosis. To partake in such a psychosis destroys the moral order.
Two. What kind of society is Omelas?
We know they are not simple. They are smart.
They do not own slaves.
They are not ruled by a monarchy.
They were happy yet intelligent.
However, they had succumbed to the "banality of evil," the notion that evil exists in our every day lives without drama or spectacle. Rather, evil exists insidiously and we become numb and inured (accustomed) to it.
We pen up livestock, torture and abuse millions of pigs, cows, and chickens, and gnash our teeth into these slaughtered meats while laughing and slapping our thighs in chicken wing bars.
This society exhibits other moral failures with its "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em" philosophy. They are conformists. Everyone tows the line and does their share. Conformity to an evil order makes us evil. But we haven't seen the evil in the story yet.
We also know that they have kept their desires (concupiscence) in check. They are neither peasants nor technophiles always wanting the newest smartphone. They are in the middle. They want comfort and luxury, but not in excess.
Omelas is a society that has mastered compartmentalization to the point that they have eradicated guilt.
They take a dreamy drug called drooz that gives them "dreamy languor." We are assured that it is not habit forming.
Three. What is the allegory of the boy locked up in a cellar?
Or the service industry serving the expensive appetites of the booming tech industry in San Francisco as explored in "Dinner, Disrupted" by Daniel Duane.
I am reminded of girls in India who are forced by their families to be surrogate mothers for a few thousand dollars.
I am reminded of the babies sold in the surrogacy industry who are later victims of human trafficking.
The people of Omelas have made peace with the suffering boy as a bargain for their happiness. They have sold their souls to the devil, so to speak. They live in a dystopia, a sort of hell on earth.
The children initially disgusted by seeing the suffering child begin to accept its suffering. They see the child as subhuman and incapable of achieving happiness anyway. This reminds me of academics who speak of "the underclass," so well articulated in Bell Hooks' essay.
A "good" white person (living in accordance with the laws of the land regardless of how racist) during times of slavery would not want to live in a nice house, attend a nice school, attend beautiful cultural events, and enjoy the progress of technology if all these things were built on the blood, sweat, and tears of slavery.
Morality cannot exist with compartmentalization. To have morality is to be spiritual and to be spiritual begins with seeing the human race as a unified whole.
We are only as good as we treat the least fortunate and most exploited among us.
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
Study Questions
One. What is the role of Dionysian ecstasy in the story?
The "clamor of bells," dancing, and celebration is about being grateful, but to surrender to one's praise of happiness one must forget about the dark side, the tiger's claw beneath the velvet carpet.
To be happy requires compartmentalization, having your happy "pocket" and keeping your sad "pocket" hidden.
American slave owners committed heinous acts against their slaves before coming home to pray with their families, read bedtime stories to their children, and smile piously to Jesus before sleeping with a saint-like grin, only to wake up in the morning and start their acts of abomination all over again.
These slave owners are compartmentalizing. Their left hand commits evil and their right hand, unaware of what the left hand is doing, prays with piety to its white Jesus.
We cannot be happy in heaven if were conscious of those suffering in hell.
How do we enjoy our juicy medium-rare steak when we know that the cow whose butchered cuts we're savoring trembled with terror, cried out, and let out explosive diarrhea before being cut into hundreds of pieces?
How do we enjoy an expensive dinner at a fancy restaurant when we know every 5 seconds a baby somewhere in the world dies of starvation?
How do we enjoy our recently purchased clothes when we know they were made from child slaves?
Speaking of slaves, the American economy boomed when slavery in the south was at its peak. The cotton industry fed the American economic machine, causing white Americans to shout with joy, "Cotton is king!" All the while, every sort of abomination was committed against the slaves. How could the white people be so happy when they knew another group of people was suffering with such unspeakable torment?
The short answer: compartmentalization.
And this leads us to one of the story's major themes: Compartmentalization is a moral abomination.
The collective joy in the opening paragraph is the joy resulting from a collective delusion, a shared psychosis. To partake in such a psychosis destroys the moral order.
Two. What kind of society is Omelas?
We know they are not simple. They are smart.
They do not own slaves.
They are not ruled by a monarchy.
They were happy yet intelligent.
However, they had succumbed to the "banality of evil," the notion that evil exists in our every day lives without drama or spectacle. Rather, evil exists insidiously and we become numb and inured (accustomed) to it.
We pen up livestock, torture and abuse millions of pigs, cows, and chickens, and gnash our teeth into these slaughtered meats while laughing and slapping our thighs in chicken wing bars.
This society exhibits other moral failures with its "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em" philosophy. They are conformists. Everyone tows the line and does their share. Conformity to an evil order makes us evil. But we haven't seen the evil in the story yet.
We also know that they have kept their desires (concupiscence) in check. They are neither peasants nor technophiles always wanting the newest smartphone. They are in the middle. They want comfort and luxury, but not in excess.
Omelas is a society that has mastered compartmentalization to the point that they have eradicated guilt.
They take a dreamy drug called drooz that gives them "dreamy languor." We are assured that it is not habit forming.
Three. What is the allegory of the boy locked up in a cellar?
Or the service industry serving the expensive appetites of the booming tech industry in San Francisco as explored in "Dinner, Disrupted" by Daniel Duane.
I am reminded of girls in India who are forced by their families to be surrogate mothers for a few thousand dollars.
I am reminded of the babies sold in the surrogacy industry who are later victims of human trafficking.
The people of Omelas have made peace with the suffering boy as a bargain for their happiness. They have sold their souls to the devil, so to speak. They live in a dystopia, a sort of hell on earth.
The children initially disgusted by seeing the suffering child begin to accept its suffering. They see the child as subhuman and incapable of achieving happiness anyway. This reminds me of academics who speak of "the underclass," so well articulated in Bell Hooks' essay.
A "good" white person (living in accordance with the laws of the land regardless of how racist) during times of slavery would not want to live in a nice house, attend a nice school, attend beautiful cultural events, and enjoy the progress of technology if all these things were built on the blood, sweat, and tears of slavery.
Morality cannot exist with compartmentalization. To have morality is to be spiritual and to be spiritual begins with seeing the human race as a unified whole.
We are only as good as we treat the least fortunate and most exploited among us.
The story is about how evil flourishes in false utopias where people are encouraged to feel good about themselves.
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)
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.
Essay #5: Final Capstone Essay for 200 Points: Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Gogol’s “The Overcoat”:
Option One. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the quest for identity in Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat." Consider maladaptation and the chimera as traps resulting from the search for identity.
Option Two. A wise man once said, having a chimera will kill you, but not having a chimera will also kill you. Develop an argumentative thesis that shows how this saying applies to Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat."
Option Three. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the theme of self-destructive chimera, American Dream facade, and deformed masculinity as they are evident in Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life and the 1999 film American Beauty.
Chimera of Never Leaving the Security Blanket
As an infant I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket. Tattered and pee-stained, Geekee was my prize possession, my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me every where I went for my first four years on this planet. 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. Every time they suggested getting rid of it, I would go into a rage that would not subside until they dropped the business of me losing Geekee. 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 consoled me somewhat. At least Geekee had not gone to waste. While losing Geekee had caused a minor trauma, I got over the loss in a day or two.
Everyone has had some form of a Geekee or other, something that comforts us because of the familiarity and the attachment we have formed with it. But security blankets such as a child’s literal blanket are easy to identify. As Gogol's "The Overcoat" shows us, there are other security blankets, far more insidious, that often confine or cripple us without our knowing it so that our dependence on them becomes in essence a Faustian Bargain. To better understand these types of security blankets, we should break them down into four categories. First, there is “the tiger’s claw beneath the velvet carpet,” the comfortable sanctuary that is killing us even as we coast along our stagnant existence without any apparent suffering and therefore have no motivation for change. Second, there is the power symbol, which becomes so important to our sense of status and identity that we coddle it at the expense of respecting others. Third, there are props we rely on because these props, we believe, flatter us and make us more appealing to others. These props could include a particular wardrobe, a mustache, spiked hair or anything we believe gives us a “special look” that flatters us. These props may have increased our cachet at one time, but over time those who are dependent on their props eventually become pathetic parodies of themselves. Fourth, there are those who are so oblivious to their dependence on security blankets that their entire existence can be defined by a vast network of security blankets from which these dependent souls are forever entangled.
Better, More Specific Chimera Examples
1. Becoming Number One at chess, Internet poker, some computer game or other
2. Botox or some kind of plastic surgery, nose reduction, etc.
3. Achieving your ideal weight
4. A position of power that you abused
5. Carmex lip balm: moisturize and bring youth to your lips; you actually dry them out.
6. All these fruit drinks with edenic trees, birds, and fruits and the words natural; in reality, their high fructose corn syrup causes liver damage and diabetes.
The Chimera of Power and the VIP
When we abuse power in the spirit of inflating our grandiosity, we lose proportion of the situation and bad things happen to us, a sort of curse, or I should say things blow out of proportion. Know your Power Allowance. Don't overplay it (Johnny Depp, oatmeal, pot stickers)
1. The Very Important Person has a chimera; it is power and status. The VIP enjoys the cloak of status, a sort of overcoat, and he has power, but does he know how to use it? We all have Power Allowance and we must know where we stand. The VIP is addicted to a life of facade and grandstanding to hide his personal demons. The greater your facade of grandstanding, the harder you fall. Consider "The Caveman Scream."
2. Before the Very Important Person was a Not Very Important Person; thus he was new to power and this is always dangerous. He is compelled to constantly grandstand and grandstanding always betrays how small and scared we really are. Having a sense of humility and being secure of one's social rank is part of the Iranian idea behind Taarof.
3. One of the story’s themes is the importance of proportion. Akaky lacks it and so does the Very Important Person. You must have a sense of proportion to be successful in life. The VIP is engorged with power and grandiosity, like the Capos in Man’s Search for Meaning. Power without proportion is solipsism and madness. The VIP’s over reaction to Akaky makes his own friend uncomfortable and perhaps embarrassed for the VIP.
A professor was arrrested for intimidating students because he got so drunk on his power.
4. The Language of Power has several signs: making people wait, creating ostentatious theatrics and more. Create a list of 10 or so.
5. The VIP’s rebuke mortifies Akaky to death.
6. Tell the story of the man who dreams of vindicating himself to his former girlfriend before his mother wakes him up. Dreams of grandiosity always betray our smallness and personal failings.
An Example about the Abuse of Power as a Chimera
Twenty years ago, a colleague shared with me a story about a professor he knew who became enraged whenever a student in class expressed disagreement with him. He was one of those professors who didn't like independent thinking but rather used the class to massage his narcissitic ego. He’d puff himself up and blurt, “Who’s got the PhD!” as a way of shutting up the contrary student.
Over time this bellicose professor became crazier, opting for an even more intimidating method to silence his students. He’d bring a hand gun, nestled inside the top compartment of his briefcase, which he put flat on the front of his desk. Whenever a student disagreed with him, the professor would slowly open the briefcase so that the students could see the butt of the gun. "What did you say?" he'd ask. "Nothing," the frightened student would respond. "That's what I thought you said," the professor said, ending the disagreement and closing the briefcase.
Soon after this practice the professor was arrested and no doubt fired from the university.
Clearly, this professor had become deranged by the chimera of power, an intoxicant that poisons the Very Important Person in Gogol's masterpiece, "The Overcoat." Both the professor and the VIP evidence the death blows of the chimera of power evidenced by _______________, ______________, _________________, and ____________________.
Qualities of a Chimera
Chasing an unrealistic dream:
genetic perfection, a "super race" of people
flying to another galaxy
shrinking to the size of ant
living 500 years, 1,000 years
forever; people who freeze their bodies so they can be "de-freezed" sometime later; conquering all diseases
taking growth hormones to enjoy "eternal youth"
finding personal transformation through consumerism
time travel
finding a way to become invisible
cure or panacea that will wipe away all disease as we know it
perfect love
the perfect relationship
Mrs. Right
Mr. Right
Having a Sense of Proportion . . . Or Not
One of the salient features of a chimera is that it is something that we have blown out of proportion.
As we surrender to our obsession, we also surrender to our irrational impulses. We go "off the grid," so to speak, we have a "free fall," and there is no bottom.
A woman goes to Walmart on Black Friday and uses pepper spray on the other shoppers.
Cubs fans almost killed a guy who caught a foul ball.
A man has a relationship with his car, waxing and kissing it.
A man, fearing the end of the world, spends his life in an underground bunker.
A woman bathes in bleach to "conquer germs."
A man asked me to deliver flowers to his girlfriend's apartment to see if another man was there.
A man "commits the sin of fornication" and is so overcome by shame he hides in a nearby forest and lives a life of contrite solitude for 5 years before he re-enters society.
A man fills his spare room with toilet paper because he's afraid he will find himself "empty handed in a tough situation."
Akaky obsesses over a coat as if he were searching for the Holy Grail, starving himself and engaging in other huge sacrifices to buy a garment.
All these instances show people blowing things out of proportion.
The psychological causes behind this phenomenon of blowing things out of proportion are several which include the following:
One. Mob mentality. We succumb to the mob and unleash our irrational beast, wanting to kill a fan for catching a baseball that may have been the final out of an inning.
Two. Too much alone time. When we're alone, we tend to think too much. More thinking isn't necessarily better thinking. It can simply be more bad thinking.
And when we're alone, our thoughts aren't challenged by others so that often our solitary thoughts become distorted, exaggerated, and paranoid.
Three. Loneliness compels us to obsess over something, a chimera, to compensate for our sense of disconnection. The obsession is an attempt to connect with something and overcome the fear and dread of loneliness.
Four. Faulty memory, turning the past into something more than it was, causes us to inflate the importance of something. We call this exaggerated, romanticized memory nostalgia. Nostalgia is often a chimera.
Five. Impoverishment Through Substitution. When we lack basic human needs--belonging, distinction, flourishing, love, meaningful work--we substitute with inferior things, that is chimeras, meant to fill the void.
Six. Not living in the present causes us to live in a distorted future and/or past. These distortions can become chimeras.
Seven. We often chase self-destructive chimeras because we crave extreme drama to fill the emptiness in our lives. As such, cravings for extreme drama compel us to blow things out of proportion.
Eight. When we're desperate for approval and validation of others, we tend to look for some mighty token of our greatness and we misplace this need in some chimera or other.
Nine. Self-pity by its very nature is exaggerated and blown out of proportion because it is a narcissistic impulse and thus results in overblown self-regard.
Ten. Projection. The unconscious projection of our inner selves on outward things makes us see things as being greater than they really are.
The Ghost Story in "The Overcoat" Gets Blown Out of Proportion
One. The ghost story becomes a myth, a narrative that grows over time and expresses meaning, fears, wishes, collective values of the people, similar to the way biblical narratives are developed and explained by some authors you read.
As a story grows and grows within a community, it evolves and takes on a life of its own. This life explains people’s deepest longings and their sense of the way life is. As such, these stories become myths and in an ironic way they become a deeper part of our reality that stories that are literally true. Mark Twain said that rumors and lies spread faster than truth.
For example, there is a story about me beating up Jamie Barnes in high school when in fact I did not, but the fictional story became more appealing, more juicy, than the truth, and it continues to evolve and become festooned with embellishments to this day.
Jamie hit my hand with his hairbrush in the high school corridor. I told him to "get back."
One story I rip my shirt off.
Another story I do a flying kick.
Another story I push him through a wall and he crashes into a chemistry class, causing the mixture and eventual explosion of dangerous chemicals.
Every year, my brother, who plays basketball at the community center, hears new mutations of the story, which is believed as "gospel truth."
Two. A ghost is a metaphor for a haunted, guilty conscience, the hunger for revenge, and the hunger for justice.
Three. People with nice coats become the victims of thievery and mugging and they come up with the ghost explanation but the deeper truth is that nice things act like a drug on society, create a certain mania and the owners of coveted things become targets. I’m reminded of the ring and Mordor.
Four. We see that the VIP in the aftermath of AA’s death is overcome with remorse. He is a doubt-ridden sensitive man who played his power cards all wrong and now he must pay the price. I’m reminded of Randy Moss who yelled at a catering service before the Vikings released him. In his state of remorse, he sees a paramour and commits adultery. Having a paramour, an illicit lover is “in style,” according to the VIP; hence he is a man committed to image over substance; being an adulterer is part of his overcoat, his mask.
Five. We see that VIP’s rank was a mask, like an overcoat, that prevented him from revealing his true self. The chimera is a facade that prevents us from seeing the abyss, the existential vacuum that torments us.
Six. The narrator makes a mockery of the VIP’s braggadocio in the face of his seeing the ghost of AA who looks like a homunculus.
The VIP is so haunted that he returns home chastened and without his overcoat, a metaphor for being stripped of his facades, stripped to his bare existence, as Viktor Frankl would say, and he becomes averse to using games of power over people. He is more thoughtful and less rash.
Student Example of A-Level Chimera Introduction, Transition, and Thesis
I married Janet even though I didn't love her. I loved Janet's sister Abbey. I figured marrying Janet was the next best thing.
I had been in love with Abbey since the fifth grade and knew, even then, that winning her affections was a complete impossibility. When I tried to hold her books during walks to school, she screamed for the police. When I sat next to her in the cafeteria, she cried until one of the cafeteria monitors issued me a detention slip. When I asked her to the high school Senior Ball, her boyfriend jumped out of nowhere and slugged me on the side of the head. Minutes later, I woke up in a daze and, perhaps acting under the influence of a damaged brain, I was convinced that the only thing I could do was to marry Janet, Abbey’s plain-looking sister. To call her “plain-looking” is a bit generous and in fact sometimes in the depths of my heart I referred to her as “The Ugly Sister,” even after we had started dating and had become, officially, boyfriend and girlfriend.
My ulterior motives in becoming Janet’s “steady” were clear: Janet had a room next the Beautiful Sister, Abbey, and this gave me close access to my true love, a condition that both gave me great excitement and seething dyspepsia.
In order to maintain my cover, I exercised the utmost decency and kindness to Janet who, grateful for my attentions, continued to see me through high school and college until marriage became inevitable. Of course, I had misgivings after the marriage and was so overcome by “the tragedy of it all” that I spent our Hawaiian honeymoon in a deep depression, cooped up in the hotel bathroom reading self-help books.
Over time, the depression became less extreme as I convinced myself that I was in fact in love with Janet and even though I knew that to be a lie, I also knew that by telling a lie over and over, the truth could get buried underground and, while not disappearing completely, it could be subjugated into a slight unpleasant background noise, like elevator Muzak.
After Janet and I got married and settled in our new home, Abbey was both grateful that someone married her sister (for Janet was known amongst her family as “the less pretty one”) and also relieved that I was, now presumably in love with Janet, no threat to her so that Abbey began to open up to me as a “friend.” Naturally, Abbey’s familiar, intimate manner with me inflamed my passions so that I would often come home from family events and cry miserably. When my wife questioned my tears, I explained they were tears of gratitude, for I never believed I would find, in my wife, a love so perfect.
I feared that my life would go on in this manner indefinitely, pitying myself and lying to my wife. However, as years passed, I began to realize that Abbey, divorced twice and always in and out of volatile relationships, had a rather fussy and what some might say “hellish” personality and I saw that I was fortunate to have been spared her imperious ways.
Lacking any real passion for my own wife, I was pleased to find that our arrangement was absent of strife and acrimony but that unfortunately I had more energy to focus on the flaming desires I felt for her sister. At the same time, I was now wise enough, or so I believed, to know that those desires would never be fulfilled. I was therefore resigned to enduring this constant tension of living in relative nuptial harmony, absent the passion, for the one sister, while living in torment, because of the unquenched desire, for the other. But on balance I saw that this arrangement was the best of all possibilities and I accepted my fate with grace and equanimity.
In contrast, Abbey, divorced yet again and observing the stable domestic life Janet and I had created, divulged to me one day that I was a “great catch” after all and she despised herself for having been so blind as to repel my solicitations so that her adult years were now full of undying anguish as she longed for me while she saw her sister live in relative happiness and contentment.
I wish I could say here that I rejected Abbey’s affections and her appeals to “get to know me better,” but sadly I found that when confronted with my lifelong burning chimera that I could not repel her and that, consequently, a dalliance ensued. I must also report that Abbey’s and my behavior became less and less prudent and that, inevitably, Janet discovered us in an compromising position and that this discovery resulted in our divorce. To reconcile with her sister, Abbey virulently rejected me, and accused me of being the “instigator” when in fact this was not so. Therefore, in the aftermath of my divorce, I was not in a position to marry the sister I had wanted all along but in fact was doomed to be despised by her because by her despising me Abbey could sublimate her guilt for having betrayed her sister and she could appease Janet who saw Abbey’s hatred of me as proof of her sister’s loyalty.
I suppose the divorce afforded me some relief, largely from the fact that my marriage had been a complete sham and that I was an impostor, unworthy of making the one sister long for me and unworthy of making the other happy. And yet there was a certain point in that fraudulent marriage in which I had done both, and in spite of my shame for being the fraud that I was, I also gloated with a surge of pride for having “pulled it off.”
Of course, now the gloating was over. Now my life was a long, tedious moral hangover, an intractable perdition for which I saw no escape even as my therapist implored me to “let go” of my guilt and to “let go” of a past for which I could not change.
Student "A" Paper Analysis of Akaky's Reaction to the Loss of His Overcoat
Michelle Borden
Jeff McMahon
English 1A
May 23, 2012
Cat Panic and Out
Many people have died or become ill as the result of a broken heart, a job loss, or a nasty divorce. I just got over a bad inner ear infection after we moved to a new house. Last time my in-laws visited, I broke out into a rash all over my chest. Scientifically, when we experience stress, our bodies go into cat-in-water mode. When in-laws visit, our adrenal glands begin to produce epinephrine (adrenalin), norepinephrine and cortisol to give us the extra energy we need to fight off a constant stream of passive-aggressive remarks like a cat when you try to put it in water. Afterwards, our bodies want to recover and to sit back, lick our fur, and stare hatefully at our oppressors. If there is no time to recover, if the stress continues, the brain simply stays in cat-in-water mode and leaves the rest of the body with no real defense against disease. This is the crux of how "stress kills" from a scientific standpoint. I think it goes deeper than that. What if our bodies are just doing us a favor? Who truly wants to exist in a stressful, meaningless world?
We might say we would rather be alive and stressed than dead and relaxed (fully), but perhaps we don't know any better. When there is "no way out," our bodies might find their own way, sans suicide, to escape extreme duress. Akakiy Akakiavitch lived an undemanding, low-stress existence before he was presented with the problem of the overcoat. A tormented person would not allow food scraps to land upon them without flinching and remarking on the terrible life they have to endure. A stressed-out person would act like a cat in water. Every crappy groundhoggishday was the same for Akakiy, and that was how he planned on continuing with his life. I find nothing really wrong with that. Outside of the time that he was asked to perform a task outside of copy, he lived in a tao-like state... action through non-action. His stress levels only began to elevate the closer he came to getting the overcoat. The overcoat awakened his mind in a way that allowed life, the one that you feel, to come in.
When a simple man's life is turned upside down, it is tremendously more stressful for him to overcome as opposed to a complex individual's reaction to change. The simple man sees change as unneccessary and insurmountable. If he does gain the courage to actually make changes, he has now swam out into hostile waters and is subjected to new complications that change can evoke. Akikay Akakiavitch was ill prepared for anything other than an uncomplicated life. If the tailor had just patched up his worn-out coat, he would have continued to play in complacency with the cards he had been dealt. But the tailor and the weather forced change upon his life and he dealt with it by cutting out things that most of us would consider necessity. When we cut something out in our lives, we feel it, but Akikay didn't feel it like we do. He was still living life free from cat panic. The overcoat came, showering him with unfamiliar attention and circumstances that he had to cope with on another level. Even though Akikay seemed to like the attention, he had never received it before in his life and wasn't really sure it was the kind of life he wanted to live. The evening's party didn't bring him joy; just a few smiles here and there. He didn't relish the excessive food after starving himself for months to afford the overcoat. He didn't let loose because Akakiy Akakiavitch isn't the type to do such a thing. It's not in his nature. Akakiy was programmed to feel insignificant. On his way home, he realizes how far from "home" he truly feels right before his overcoat is taken from him. Had Akakiy's old coat been stolen, he would not have reacted in such a way. But this was the awakened Akakiy, the one who felt like might just owe him something other than ordinary. He misses work for the first time and goes to talk to the prominent personage about his overcoat being stolen. The old Akakiy would never do something so rash. But the new Akakiy was filled with cat panic and he did something out of character to fix the problem. When the prominent personage put Akakiy in his place and made him feel like the insignificant person that he actually was, it was too much for Akakiy to bear. The changes that had befallen him were too great for the simple man whose former life required so little to sustain. So his body said, "screw this life," and abandoned him for death, a place where he could have as many overcoats as he pleased.
Essay #5: Final Capstone Essay for 200 Points: Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Gogol’s “The Overcoat”:
Option One. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the quest for identity in Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat." Consider maladaptation and the chimera as traps resulting from the search for identity.
Option Two. A wise man once said, having a chimera will kill you, but not having a chimera will also kill you. Develop an argumentative thesis that shows how this saying applies to Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat."
Option Three. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the theme of self-destructive chimera, American Dream facade, and deformed masculinity as they are evident in Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life and the 1999 film American Beauty.
Chimera Definition Review
There's a huge disconnect between the idea of something and its actuality.
However, sometimes a chimera becomes something Larger Than Life that transforms you in both a good and a bad way. Therefore, the chimera can be full of contradictions, too complex to be demonized or venerated (admired).
One thing for sure, having a chimera will destroy us; and not having a chimera will destroy us.
The More Common Your Approach to the Chimera Example, The Worse Your Essay Will Be
Some Common chimeras
cars
clothes
weight loss, diets, training, getting your body toned a certain way
money
a love interest
UCLA
America
Some Lesson Common, Successful Chimera Examples I Have Received from Student Essays
The Past, Nostalgia (old flames on Facebook)
Therapy
Growing up too quickly
Recapturing your youth (making a comeback)
Bigorexia ("I need to weigh 300")
helplessly drawn to the world of the paranormal, ghosts, for example
you think you're "down" or cool, but then you see someone behaving like you and realize you are a helpless nincompoop.
a social circle that you long to belong to but its people have will have nothing to do with you; in fact, the people scorn and mock you even as you repeatedly attempt to gain entrance inside the group.
You want to leave an indelible print on people's memories by virtue of being larger than life, an exemplar of excellent; in other words, you want to become a chimera for others.
You value being part of a large family; however, as you witness your siblings getting married and having in-law problems, you see "the family" as a cespool of hurt feelings, acrimony, and dysfunction.
Being razzle-dazzled by someone you met on a social media site only to find out that the person is a rank avatar, a charlatan, a mountebank, an impostor.
You know someone who explicitly expresses that he is a modest, humble person, yet you always see him bragging about his superior intellectual powers, boasting about how easy he gets A grades in various math and chemistry classes and delighting in your struggle to do half as well as he does.
I love nature. I am socially responsible. I see myself as a "green" person; however, I am too damn lazy to recycle.
My chimera is my superior power to transform my body in the snap of a finger. I can, if need be, lose 12 pounds in a week because of my efficient metabolism and rigorous discipline. In fact, I am deluded and stuck in a malaise of weight gain that compromises my self-image.
Being blunt with people. He thought he was pursuing honesty but he was driven by egotism and anger.
The pride of having sons (and not daughters)
Imagining using reciprocity with kind friends but not acting.
One of my students doesn't have a chimera, but her family has made her into a chimera, the Perfect Princess.
A countercultural tattoo artist mentor who turned out to be just another self-interested, conventional businessman.
A girl who ignores the nice man and only pursues the "Bad Boy."
I once saw myself as someone who someday would be a successful novelist, but now 30 years later and still unpublished I'm reduced to tweeting about my quest for efficient digestion.
Chimera Is a Mixed Bag. It's Destructive, But Also Transforming in a Good Way
1. You haven't really lived unless you've found a Higher Purpose that motivates you to commit extreme sacrifices. Akaky’s transformation: he wakes up from his slumber, his Jahiliyyah, and becomes fully human.
Additionally, he learns how to sacrifice in the most extreme ways: he gives up tea, candles, walking on his socks, reduces his laundry to cut down on laundry expenses and to make his clothes last longer.
He doesn't sacrifice with misery. To the contrary, he enjoys this new state of sacrifice and living for something LARGER THAN HIMSELF.
One of the story's major themes:
All of us are lost in the Jahiliyyah until we find something larger than our vain, self-centered preoccupations.
Here we've arrived at the human condition: We are miserable, restless, anxious, self-involved, selfish, and bereft until we find Something Larger Than Ourselves to live for. This is the message of religion, philosophy, humanism, creativity, etc. We must be awakened from the Jahiliyyah, the protracted period of darkness and ignorance which defines Akaky's life.
But some might argue that the overcoat is simply another Jahiliyya, a chimera come to make a fool of Akaky.
The dream of the overcoat--either a delusion or a Higher Purpose, feeds Akaky's imagination, gives him hope, and makes his life more full. He feels like a married man with more a sharp focus. “He’s livelier, stronger, a man who’s made up his mind and established a goal.”
His body language changes and his eyes burn with fire. There is no hesitation or wavering in his expressions, just conviction and passion. He is born again, either spiritually or like a guy in a Lexus commercial.
The story is too ambiguous for one interpretation. He has a new charisma that inspires his boss to give him an extra Christmas bonus.
When we have a purpose in life, we are more than glad to make sacrifices. But when life is empty and is simply a monotony, then we can barely get out of bed. This is why we need chimera. A chimera gives us purpose, a reason to live, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
But be warned: A chimera can also kill us.
2. The overcoat has magical powers; it puts Akaky on a bipolar crazy ride. It makes him happy; he doesn’t care where he walks; he suddenly finds himself at the doorstep of his department. His life is like a giddy dream, the promise of so many ads. The Chanel No. 5 Moment has come.
A brutal truth about superficial reality, materialism, and consumerism is that these things go deep into us and change who we are at our very core.
Let us repeat this: Material objects change us on the outside but they also change us on the inside. They are like placebos and we change on the inside when people treat us differently.
People treat us differently because they are reacting to our new self-confidence: Whether the confidence is born from reality or delusion, it does not matter.
3. After AA acquires the overcoat, people become obsequious sycophants and treat him like a celebrity. When people fawn over us, we turn into the image they worship and we inevitably go insane because we lose sight of ourselves. We become the image that is worshipped. Be careful of what you wish for. Discuss the Paul McCartney case and use his looks as an example of an overcoat that results in insanity.
4. Why does Akaky laugh at the picture of the woman baring her leg while a whiskered man espies her? It appears the ad is a reflection of the attention Akaky is enjoying. For the first time in AA's life, he is getting his ego tickled and massaged.
5. Because he was so needy and desperate, Akaky could not tolerate being separated from the overcoat after it was stolen from him. You cannot let an object, or even another person, be your salvation. You have to be whole first. Once Akaky has tasted human connection, he cannot return to his life of isolation, which he now sees for what it really is: an unbearable hell.
Another lesson from the chimera:
It creates needs and a dependence that did not exist before the chimera existed in our imagination. The chimera is in part about our dependence on obsession and a lot of our obsessions are centered around security, belonging, and admiration.
6. Akaky without his overcoat must face the great monstrosity of the impersonal bureaucracy and this only reinforces his smallness and insignificance.
10 distinguishing characteristics of the bureaucracy.
1. It is a chimera to see the bureacracy as a place of justice. That is not its function: The bureacracy exists to perpetuate itself, NOT to provide competent service.
2. The bureacracy thrives on the status quo and willfully ignores problems that might reveal deep-rooted dysfunctionality within the bureacracy.
3. The bureacracy thrives on petty rules and regulations while failing to provide its general mission.
4. The bureacracy reinforces the authority, those in charge, while belittling those who come to be served by it.
5. The bureacracy is a Giant Beast that consumes everyone associated with it: Its employees and the people is presumably serves.
6. The bureacracy is as slow moving as an ice berg. When it needs to change course, the change is excruciatingly slow, too slow in fact.
7. Certain types of people are drawn to the bureacracy: Small-minded, petty, mediocre, bovine people.
8. The bureacracy is based on paper work. More paper work creates more subdivisions, which in turn create more jobs. A bureacracy can never have enough paper work, forms, photocopies, attachments, annotations, revisions, addendums, etc.
9. Contrary to its high-minded rhetoric about morals and ethics, bureacracies can always be bribed as long as the bribe is implicit and there is an assurance of its essential clandestine nature.
10. Bureacracies embody the Peter Principle: They promote their employees to their maximum level of incompetence.
Conclusion about the Bureacracy As It Pertains to AA:
The Overcoat humanized, uplifted, and elevated AA for the first time in his life. In contrast, the bureacracy, head by the Very Important Person, dehumanized AA to the point of death.
Possible Essay Structure
Paragraph 1. Introduction: Profile someone who enjoyed the glory of an "overcoat" (chimera) followed by his or her demise.
Paragraph 2. Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping statements
Paragraphs 3-9: Elaborate on your mapping statements
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis
Last page: Works Cited with no fewer than 4 sources
Class Exercise
In a paragraph write about a chimera you or someone you know once had.
Example
I used to know a Bakersfield man, a Paul McCartney look-alike, who was fated to live in the shadow of the great celebrity. He had the same nose, mouth, chin, ruddy jowls, sad-shaped eyes, and arched brows. He has the same hair, which he kept groomed the way McCartney did in the 1970s and 1980s, long in the back and feathered in the front.
However, Bakersfield McCartney was a tad shorter, stockier, and most noticeably had acne scars peppered on his cheeks. I first noticed him “trolling” himself at clubs, standing by himself in his black sport jacket, his “Beatles jacket,” and patiently waiting for an attractive woman to approach him and “break the ice” by commenting on how much he looked like Paul McCartney, as thousands of past successes had taught him. At clubs he would wear a stupid half-grin since his brain didn’t really have to be active in any sense as he simply used his resemblance as bait. The whole pick-up sequence must have been a rote, perfunctory affair.
Perhaps his biggest challenge was trying to show that his heart hadn’t become too calloused by this routine and that the woman fawning all over him was one of a few to make the brilliantly observant connection between him and the real Paul McCartney.
I later saw Bakersfield McCartney at my health club, where he had the same dumb half-grin on his face. His expression betrayed a certain expectancy, as if he knew it was only a matter of minutes before an attractive woman approached him and commented on his celebrity resemblance, a precursor to greater pleasures ahead.
Not surprisingly, I later found out that Bakersfield McCartney was a salesman—of cars and cell phones mostly—and that his resemblance worked to his advantage in the sales arena. All he had to do when people gawked over his resemblance to the great Beatles legend was act coy and “Ah-shucks,” and he could remain effective in the realm of sales—whether it be cars, cell phones, or, at the clubs, himself.
You could tell by looking over his life that he had no real challenges other than feigning good-natured surprise when the 99% of people he met commented on his striking resemblance to Paul McCartney. Otherwise, he was content to live in the shadows of the Liverpool crooner. Last I heard, he had never married, had never carried a long relationship, had never really put much effort in anything he did at all. He was a man content to live off a one-note gimmick and he had no shame for being so easily satisfied. Lacking any rigorous struggles to become a real person, he had become somewhat of a cipher, a hollow man with nothing to say about anything. His mind was simply full of the expectations of receiving “goodies”—accolades, sexual attention, strangers’ obsequiousness as they become elated in the presence of a mock celebrity.
His life lost its cheap glory in middle-age when his facial features distorted—bigger ears and nose, a reconfiguration of jowls and chin—so as to significantly obscure his face so that he no longer looked like the Beatles legend. With no more celebrity connection, his posse of friends and lovers abandoned him and his sales dwindled. Sullen and bitter, he moved back with his mother, a widow, where he now resides. I imagine him now introverted and chubby from a sedentary lifestyle, his bedroom cluttered with Beatles souvenirs, as he languishes in his bedroom where he daydreams of his past glory.
Similary, Akaky Akakievich from Gogol's masterpiece "The Overcoat" is a man fated to ruin after bathing in the short-lived glory of his own facade, an almost supernatural overcoat. What we see in the case of the lugubrious lookalike and equally pathetic Akaky is that to be enthralled by a chimera is to go through a journey of madness, which includes ___________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
Lesson #5: Real and Junk Science
Critical thinking is the result of the Scientific Revolution, which has had a radical effect on human thought, culture, industry, technology, and ambition.
Scientific inquiry follows the guidelines of critical thinking.
A sad result is the junk science industry, which spreads false data for corrupt purposes.
Fraud can be difficult to detect if the data appears to come from a legit study. Second, fraud in the scientific community is rare, so people are caught off guard.
In other cases the fraud can be subtle. Levitin writes: “In other cases, an investigator changes a few data points to make the data more closely reflect his or her pet hypotheses.
Sometimes a fraud case in the science world makes international news. For example, Levitin points to Dong-Pyou Han, a biomedical scientist at Iowa State University in Ames, who was guilty of falsifying data about an HIV vaccine. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
The notorious hack Andrew Wakefield falsified data to make millions of people believe—and millions still believe—that measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism.
Deduction and Induction
Levitin writes: “Scientific progress depends on two kinds of reasoning. In deduction, we reason from general to specific, and if we follow the rules of logic, we can be certain of our conclusion. In induction, we take a set of observations or facts, and try to come up with a general principle that can account for them.”
Deduction Syllogism:
Example#1
Major Premise: The smartphone delivers instant dopamine and validation through its social media apps.
Minor Premise: Humans are addicted to instant dopamine and validation.
Conclusion: Therefore, humans are addicted to smartphones.
Example #2
Major Premise: People want to “have their cake and eat it too.”
Minor Premise: The Tesla, which is both sexy and environmentally friendly, allows people to have their cake and eat it too.
Conclusion: There is high demand for the Tesla.
Induction Syllogism:
Example #1
Major Premise: The smartphone delivers instant dopamine and validation through its social media apps.
Minor Premise: Humans are addicted to their smartphones.
Conclusion: Therefore, humans are addicted to instant dopamine and validation.
Example #2
Major Premise: The Tesla, which is both sexy and environmentally friendly, allows people to have their cake and eat it too.
Minor Premise: There is high demand for the Tesla.
Conclusion: People want to “have their cake and eat it too.”
Illusory Correlation
Levitin notes that “The brain is a giant pattern detector, and it seeks to extract order and structure from what often appear to be random configurations. We see Orion the Hunter in the night sky not because the stars were organized that way but because our brains can project patterns onto randomness.”
He uses the example of someone calling you and you think, “Wow, I was just thinking about calling you. What a strange coincidence.” In fact, Levitin points out, the phone call arrived amidst hundreds of random calls. There is nothing special about the timing. It was a random, but you “see” a pattern because you want to.
Astrologists make general predictions and then their followers “see” the behaviors fulfilled, but this is wishful thinking, not objective analysis.
False prophets make “prophecies” and people “see” these prophecies “fulfilled.”
Belief Perseverance
Levitin writes that “once we form a belief or accept a claim, it’s very hard for us to let go, even in the face of overwhelming evidence and scientific proof to the contrary. Research reports say we should eat a low-fat, high-carb diet and so we do. New research undermines the earlier finding—quite convincingly—yet we are reluctant to change our eating habits. Why? Because on acquiring the new information, we tend to build up internal stories to help us assimilate the knowledge.”
If we grow up believing “eating fat makes you fat,” then it’s difficult to embrace new scientific data that contradicts this claim.
Attraction Experiment
Levitin cites a famous experiment in which “participants were shown photos of members of the opposite sex while ostensibly connected to physiological monitoring equipment indicating their arousal levels.” But there was no equipment. This was a lie. Therefore, their “feedback” was false. However, when asked to choose a photo to take home with them, they didn’t choose the most attractive photo. They chose the photo that they first associated with their “feedback arousal,” even though they later learned this “feedback” was completely false.
Logical Fallacies Behind Autism Misinformation
The misinformation that vaccines cause autism is a result of illusory correlation, belief perseverance, persuasion by association, and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (because this happened after that, that must have caused this).
Between 1990 and 2010 the United States has seen a 600% increase in autism. The increase in prevalence can be attributed to three things:
One. Increased awareness of autism
Two. Widened definitions of autism
Three. Increased amount of parents who are having children later in life, which makes autism a higher risk.
Misinformation on the Internet
You will find that autism is caused by the following:
GMOs in food
Refined sugar
Childhood vaccines
Glyphosates (herbicide)
Wi-Fi
Proximity to freeways
No critical thinking or scientific inquiry is used to prove the above explanations. But people want to see a pattern where one does not exist (illusory correlation), once people believe a false explanation they cannot be persuaded by facts (belief perseverance), and people confuse correlation with causation (vaccines are given to children at the same time they are diagnosed with autism).
Essay #5: Final Capstone Essay for 200 Points: Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Gogol’s “The Overcoat”:
Option One. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the quest for identity in Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat." Consider maladaptation and the chimera as traps resulting from the search for identity.
Option Two. A wise man once said, having a chimera will kill you, but not having a chimera will also kill you. Develop an argumentative thesis that shows how this saying applies to Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat."
Option Three. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the theme of self-destructive chimera, American Dream facade, and deformed masculinity as they are evident in Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life and the 1999 film American Beauty.
What Is a Chimera?
Chimera is an obsession that fills your imagination and fuels all your actions often leading to inflated expectations, self-destruction, but sometimes bringing you in touch with your Higher Self.
The chimera is based on loss of proportion and exaggeration.
Often your imagination exaggerates the value of a chimera so that when you finally acquire it--if you should ever acquire it at all--you are left with grave disappointment.
The Chimera as a Positive Force
One student defends the chimera as thus:
"The good news is that chimeras have at least five hidden benefits to them: one, they tend to push people out of their comfort zones; two, they help people explore their potential; three, they help promote creativity; four, they teach extremly painful lessons when the illusion if finally shattered; five, they redirect us to what we're really meant for in a roundabout fashion."
There Are 4 Major Types of Chimeras
One. The Simplistic Ideal That Blinds Us from Complex Reality of Others
People see me walking my babies and they think I'm a "great father." Really? I'm a good father, not great, in spite of myself. What am I? Petulant, malcontented, self-involved, neurotic, selfish, vain, etc. People see me with my babies and they idealize who I am.
People see my babies who are adorable and these people idealize my babies. One of my daughters, Natalie, almost killed me the other day. While I was changing her diaper, she jabbed me in the eye, pushing my tender orb deep into my brain. I was almost killed. As I screamed, she laughed spittle in my face. In spite of her huge cute factor, she's devious and feral and aggressive.
Two. We Project Exaggerated Grandiosity to Someone Or Something So That We Lose All Sense of Proportion
We buy an Apple product so we'll become more creative or become a member of the cool hipster class. We buy an Audi or a Mini Cooper for the same reason.
We buy a house because a house is a chimera for a sense of home but in making house payments, three times greater than our rent, we ruin our life.
Three. We Chase Something Because We're in Love with the Chase and the Idea of the Thing We're Pursuing, But We Don't Love the Actual Thing. Nor Do We Love Finding It.
Marriage, romance, the perfect soulmate, the perfect body, the ultimate sports car, the perfect watch (my chimera).
What we learn from the chimera is that we are in love with the IDEA of things, not the things themselves.
Four. An Inflated Self-Image That Doesn't Corrospond with the Facts
"I'm a vegetarian, but I do have to make some exceptions. For example, I eat barbecue tri-tip once a month. A gourmet cheeseburger 12 times a year. Buttermilk fried chicken 6 times a year. Barbecued steak 6 times a year at family events. Turkey and mashed potatoes 4 times a year when I'm at my grandmother's. Brisket on Hanukkha if I'm invited to my cousin Sherry's house (her brisket has destroyed the commitment of many vegetarians). And if I'm in North or South Carolina and I'm a guest being served baby back pork ribs, I will eat what's on my plate in order to exercise politeness and decorum. Apart from that, I feel really good about my vegetarian lifestyle. "
Here is a guy who eats meat at least once or twice a week and he calls himself a vegetarian. What he really is: a faketarian.
Studies show that American high school students have high self-esteem about their math skills but score low on math; in contrast, Chinese students have low self-esteem but score high in math.
There are several chimera motivations based on natural human longing:
1. Enchantment: craving the beyond, otherness, mystery, the visions you might enjoy during a serotonin-rich dream. Some people believe in UFOs, unicorns, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, fairies, angels, etc.
2. Ideal of perfection: beauty, a "six-pack," the perfect house, etc.
3. Security blanket, feeling protected by someone, the Earth Mother, Daddy, the Corporation, Steve Jobs Is Your Tech Daddy, Apple, etc.
4. Hakuna Matata, a paradise where there are no worries, a life without responsibility, only pleasure. Hawaii and Tahiti are often assigned Hakuna Matata while people ignore the high alcoholism.
5. fame, the dream of the engorged ego in which the whole world loves you and can't get enough of you. You become a sort of demigod, a cult figure. You become drunk from your own grandiosity and adulation.
6. vindication, proving your doubters that you are good and feeling validated
7. revenge: exacting "justice" on your enemy.
8. Losing yourself, your sense of insignificance, in something larger than yourself and achieving transcendence and a sense of belonging.
Examples
Some of us join religion.
Some of us fall in love.
Some of us sing songs about falling in love.
Some of us write songs about songwriters who write about being in love.
Some of us join the international club.
Some of us buy a Mini Cooper and go to "Mini Cooper events" with other Mini Cooper owners.
Some of us buy Apple computer products and think we're more creative than those who work with PCs.
Some of us buy tres chic designer clothes and we only hang out with other stuck up people who wear similar clothing.
Some of us become sports fanatics for our team. Our bedroom is covered with posters, souvineers, stuffed dolls, figurines, etc. We wear our sports hero's jersey, cap, etc.
Some of us join political movements and we act serious all the time and watch serious movies, usually with subtitles, about the pain of the human condition and we go to cafes with other "intellectuals" who share our political views and we talk about how crappy the world is.
Some of us join book clubs.
Some of us spend 24 hours a day on Facebook.
We become obsessed with something that makes us feel we've lost ourselves in something larger than us and gives us a sense of belonging and identity.
Not All Chimeras Are Equal: Or Some People's Chimeras Are Better Than Others
Our chimera is crucial to determining what path we take.
A crackpot racist ideology is not the same as searching for the perfect six-pack abs or baking the perfect chocolate cake.
For the most part, a chimera is a mirage, an illusion. It is the result of our imagination elevating something boring or stupid or banal to the supernatural because we are desperate to lose ourselves into something supernatural.
It could be said that this something could be a dangerous chimera or a worthy ideal. But even that distinction is often very difficult to make.
Main Components of the Story
1. Lugubrious name: Akaky Akakievich; his clothes have hay and trash sticking on them; he is ugly with wrinkled cheeks and inflamed complexion. He is a sad sack. His image is grotesque and cartoonish, maybe even super natural. A horse sneezes snot on him and he does not notice it. Because he is so lonely, he is vulnerable to falling into the trap of the chimera.
2. Asperger Syndrome or as my Japanese students explain to me, Akaky is an example of "Otaku." He is ritualistic, anti-social; he takes an unnatural pleasure in copying with no varying activities to relieve the pressure. He takes pleasure in his self-induced prison, a place he feels free. He has anxieties when work is not given to him. He takes work home and copies for his own pleasure and relaxation. He eats soup with flies in it. His rituals and his compulsive need to lose himself in his work have created a wall around him that insulates him from his problem, namely, that he has never grown up as an evolved human being. He lives like an embryo, he has a certain innocence about him, but his innocence is based on ignorance and retarded development and is therefore not a virtue. Having a threadbare overcoat, refusing to clothe himself with necessitites, becomes a life of extremes, and a sort of overcoat, a facade to hide himself from his real problems.
3. Anal-retentive: This is part of Akaky's pathology, to live inward, to cling to his habits, to shield himself from the flux; he is very much like the scrivener in the great story "Bartelby the Scrivener," a copier who lives like a slave to his job, but his slavery is self-induced because he does not know how to live or to love; he lives in intractable isolation but knowing nothing better he persuades himself that he is happy.
4. Supernatural in the story like the “unseen force” that stops people from going overboard in their teasing of him at the office. The Northern Cold of St. Petersburg is another super natural force. The wind returns at the end of the story to wreak havoc on the Very Importan Person. The wind accompanies the ghost.
5. Akaky is content with his fate and enjoys ignorant bliss, but he is not truly born as of yet. This leads to philosophical question: Can we be happy and free if we live sequestered in embryonic ignorance?
And at an unconscious level, he has a lot of unresolved anger pertaining to his low station in life. In Korean, there is a word for this: "Hwatbyung," simmering anger that makes us behave in compulsive, self-destructive ways.
6. Akaky is awakened from his ignorant bliss by a blast of cold while walking to work. Is his old overcoat ready to be mended or replaced? His overcoat is mocked and called the peignoir, a woman’s negligee. He is afraid to let go of his old tattered overcoat, which has become a security blanket; he is a man who hates change. For Akaky change is the great enemy, the great fear.
7. Petrovich the tailor is a devil figure with tortoise shell toe nails, ammonia smells; the “one-eyed devil” who drinks vodka. He drinks more alcohol on holy days.
8. Akaky’s encounter with Petrovich is analogous to Adam taking from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. He will be expulsed from his ignorant paradise. Curiosity is the first step in being fully human.
9. Petrovich's argument that Akaky MUST get a NEW overcoat inflames Akaky's imagination and he is never the same again. Hope is a new garment we have never worn; despair is not knowing it. Two lines from Kierkegaard. The word “new” intoxicates Akaky.
10. It seems Akaky’s life of extreme repression feeds the life of extreme euphoria over an opposite, an extravagance. Here we face the Jungian Shadow.
11. The overcoat has many symbolic meanings, all contradictory: chimera, hunger for life; increased consciousness, leaving the womb or the Mother; returning to the womb or the Mother; the libido ostentandi; love; consumer identity, a security blanket, an ideal that is larger than yourself and requires a sacrifice, consumer greed, hope, rebirth, regression; God as the Great Companion Who Never Abandons Us, all the facades and masks we wear. It means all these things.
12. You must write an introduction of your own personal overcoat, your own security blanket, in your case your blanket Geekee, Dashiki, and The Man Who Loved Radios Too Much, Paul McCartney, Caveman Scream. Write one for every lecture.
We all have an overcoat, a lifechanging experience from a chimera or non-chimera that transforms us dramatically.
What was my overcoat?
The Intellect.
In 1980 at the age of 19 I realized I was woefully ignorant and I was convinced that reading books, not ones the professors assigned but the ones I wanted to read, would develop The Intellect, my intellect, and this Intellect was desirable in that it would save me in the same way that Akaky obsessed over his Overcoat.
Was my Intellect a chimera?
Yes and no.
Yes, there were times when I overemphasized The Intellect and elevated it into a panacea so that I believed The Intellect would cure me of all my problems.
But there were other times when the Intellect was simply a good thing, a vehicle from leaving the darkness of ignorance, arrogance, and entropy.
Sometimes I would feed the Intellect too much so that it was an evil Beast rendering me introverted, anti-social and unbalanced.
Other times, the rigorous demands of the Intellect made me a better, more disciplined person.
The Intellect's greatest dangers are pride and arrogance.
The Intellect's greatest assets are humility (the more I know, the more I realized how much I don't know) and metacognition (thinking about thinking about thinking; also called The Third Eye).
Contradictions about the Chimera
It is an evil beast that destroys us.
It is an elevating creature that gives us a purpose and meaning in life.
We can't live with chimeras. We cannot live without them.
But I like to put it this way:
Having a chimera will kill you; not having a chimera will kill you.
One of the Modern Age's Most Common Chimeras: Facebook
Is Facebook a Chimera? Yes and No
Facebook is a great vehicle for finding and meeting old friends and new acquaintences, but the idea of "friendship" can become a dangerous chimera.
The 10 Signs That Facebook Has Become a Self-Destructive Chimera and You Should Probably Delete Your Facebook Account
You start “sharing” increasing gradations of meaningless trivia with your “friends” like what kind of dog food you purchased, what kind of nail polish you’re using before vacationing in Maui, how taking Omega-3 fish oil capsules makes you burp, etc.
You’re spending 18 hours a day “managing” your friends’ comments ("No one has commented on my juicy entry that was posted almost 30 minutes ago. Damn them all!") and losing more perspective on what’s important in your life like getting out of the house, making real friends, and embarking on something truly creative.
You become paranoid as to why a “friend” deleted you from his or her friends list and start losing sleep over why more and more Facebook people are deleting you from their existence.
You become jealous and resentful when you see a “friend” commenting on someone’s “boring” post but that same person ignored your more “interesting” post.
You start competing with your other Facebook “friends” for amassing more and more friends and comments.
You fret when none of your Facebook friends wish you Happy Birthday.
You obsess over the fact that one of your lifelong friends is engaging in more Facebook activity with a new Facebook acquaintance who has demoted your friendship ranking.
You lose Facebook friends because you don’t reciprocate their offers to play Bubble Shooter, Pokemon Tower Defense, Trollface Launch, Whack Your Boss, and other games that require too much time for anyone who is gainfully employed.
You become a Facebook elitist only accepting friend invitations from people who have a bare minimum of a Masters Degree, share your political beliefs, and have published or produced a work of art that was reviewed by a major publication.
Example of an Introduction, Transition, and Thesis
Billy and I rode our bicycles around in circles tirelessly on our street, taking breaks only to grab a quick lunch and dinner.
It was July. Without warning, an evening rain hit us. The tropical winds, wet and refreshing, excited Billy and me and we wanted to stay outside on our bikes forever.
Around twilight in our rain-soaked clothes, we noticed something in a distant field, a solitary house or shack with lights beaming from it. Blue and pulsating, the lights blazed through the early evening mist. What could the source of light be? Then one of us—I don’t remember which—realized that the flickering glow could be no other than Christmas lights. Someone had put up Christmas lights in preparation for an early Christmas. We’d circle Venado Court and when we’d look across the field every few minutes or so, one or both of us would scream, “Christmas lights!”
The idea of Christmas in July filled us with longing and a tingle filled my chest and stomach. We ached for Christmas, more so on this wet summer evening than we ever had in December perhaps because it was so implausible that it seemed like a miracle, a divine gift that defied all normal expectations.
Dad came out on the front porch and told me it was too dark and wet to be riding my bike. I ignored him. Billy and I continued to circle the court and shout, “Christmas lights!”
We continued our vigil of the twinkling house in the distant house the with Dad coming out to call me a couple of more times before he lost his patience and walked out to get me. He pulled me off my bike with great force and rolled it home while pinching my ear. All the while, I kept shouting “Christmas lights!”
At night I thought of the magical house in the distant field and cried myself to sleep. I was no more consoled the next morning. For the next several days all Dad heard about was my obsession with the Christmas lights. He was sick of it. Finally, he decided to put an end to all this Christmas light nonsense once and for all, so he told me to get in the car. We were going to confront this imaginary house in the field that had been the source of so much uproar. The damn house with the Christmas lights.
We drove across the field and I discovered that the house was no house at all but a bait and tackle shop. And what I had thought were Christmas lights were actually neon beer signs. Dad stopped the car and told me to go inside. He approached the cold box, picked up a bottle of beer and looked at me. Gloating, he seemed to relish in seeing me lose my illusion, my pathetic little chimera.
Indeed, as we read in Gogol's masterpiece "The Overcoat," the chimera dooms us to disappointment evidenced by its power to ____________, ___________, _______________, and ______________.
Lesson #4 Counterknowledge and Misinformation
Levitin writes: “Counterknowledge, a term coined by the U.K. journalist Damian Thompson, is misinformation packaged to look like fact and that some critical mass of people believe.”
For example, in the South, many believe that the Civil War was not about the human rights violations of slavery but about “Northern aggression” and “state rights.” This is a commonly held belief, and it’s inaccurate, so it’s counterknowledge.
A recent US president-elect, having won the electoral college, made the false claim that he won the popular vote as well. 52% of his supporters believed his claim, so the claim is another example of counterknowledge.
Some claim, falsely, that there never was a Holocaust.
Some claim, falsely, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the American government working with Israel.
Some claim, falsely, that Hillary Clinton, was running a child slave operation in Ping Pong Comet pizzeria, prompting a man to storm the premises with a gun.
Causes of Counterknowledge
One. Political hatred of opponents makes us engage in wishful thinking.
Two. The story is too juicy to be denied because we can’t resist a juicy story.
Three. Our friends are spreading the misinformation on Facebook.
Four. The misinformation is accompanied by impressive graphs and statistics.
Five. The misinformation plants seeds of doubt of what we know to be true.
Six. The misinformation gives us a compelling narrative that is easier to understand than the murky, complicated, hard-to-follow story that is coming in piece by piece and fails to satisfy us.
Seven. The misinformation relies on false science that the non-scientist cannot detect, as was used in the claim that “jet fuel wouldn’t generate enough heat to melt steel” regarding the tumbling buildings of 9/11.
Eight. The misinformation preys on our fears such as the claim that vaccinations cause autism in children. We’re scared because autism is on the rise and we can’t find clear causes.
Nine. The misinformation relies on confusing correlation with causation like the age when children are diagnosed as autistic correlates with the age span they’re given vaccinations.
Ten. The misinformation becomes celebrated by pop culture like an Oliver Stone film on the Kennedy assignation.
Eleven. Conspiracy theorists are sleazy narcissists who need to believe they have “special information” that makes them superior to others, so they are gullible to the claims of misinformation.
Twelve. Conspiracy theorists are lazy ne’er-do-wells who’d rather get their “information” while scanning the Internet and eating a Hot Pocket than doing rigorous research. Thus they prefer misinformation because it “fits their lifestyle.”
Thirteen. “I saw it on TV so it must be true.” Geraldo Rivera propagated the lie in 1987 that America was being taken over by Satanists who were engaging in ritualistic killings on a mass scale. He was in fact sensationalizing a few stories for his own ratings, and in doing so he created counterknowledge.
Fourteen. If there’s a perception of risk, like the Alar chemical scare in the 1980s, when people thought Alar, sprayed on apples, caused cancer, created counterknowledge. Major TV networks and Meryl Streep spread this junk science.
One. In the context of Caleb Crain's "The Case Against Democracy" and Ilya Somin's "Democracy vs. Epistocracy" support, defend, or complicate the argument that an uninformed public lacking adequate critical thinking skills cannot support a democracy as we tend to idealize democracies but rather, at best, maintains a democracy so flawed many would argue that it cannot be called a democracy at all, but rather some grotesque sub-version of a democracy.
Four. In the context of Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," defend, refute, or complicate that America is morally obligated to exact qualified African-Americans reparations for America's crime of an ongoing kleptocracy, which includes slavery, Jim Crow, and their ongoing legacy today.
Five. Develop an analytical thesis that shows how Jordan Peeles' movie Get Out builds on Ta-Nehisi Coates' notion of American kleptocracy.
Six. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that recycling is a liberal white middle class religion that speaks more to Kool-Aid-drinking tribalism than it does improving the Earth. Consult John Tierney's "The Reign of Recycling," Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism is a Religion," and Stephen Asma's "Green Guilt."
Seven. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income. Consult the following:
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is.
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable.
Eight. Develop a thesis that in the context of the documentary Merchants of Doubt addresses the question: Should we have faith that "reason and faith can defeat propaganda and falsehoods." Or is such a message optimistic bias rooted in delusion?
Nine: Develop an analytical thesis that in the context of Merchants of Doubt explains the fallacies behind spin and how these fallacies can be constructed to effectively cause doubt and confusion over the legitimate claims of science.
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income.
Three. UBI would eliminate need for minimum wage. Lower minimum wage would encourage more hiring.
Four. Because UBI doesn't give more money for children, UBI doesn't reward one lifestyle over another.
Five. Citizens would have more time and resources to train and get educated for more career options presuming they used their time and money wisely.
Six. Most stay-at-home parents are women who have not been justly paid for their domestic work over the centuries. UBI would help remedy that injustice.
Seven. UBI gives citizens an escape valve from an abusive job or relationship. Having guaranteed money makes it easier to bail when you have to. "This is jacked up, man. I've got to bail."
Eight. 13K a year isn't so much that you would be content to retire in your house. Most people would want at the very least to supplement their meager income with part-time or full-time work. More enterprising citizens would use their free time and money for education and job re-training.
Nine. UBI would eliminate welfare abuses and welfare fraud because UBI spells the death of welfare as we know it.
Ten. Providing for the citizens with UBI would lessen the risk of the kind of discontent that leads to nationalist nativism, a racist political movement that makes one ethnic tribe hate on immigrants as scapegoats for the country's woes.
Eleven. Addressing the counterargument that not having to work would make us lazy depressed slobs, some would argue that technology is forcing us to change and adapt. Just as coal workers are inevitably going to become extinct in the next century, we must adapt to a new employment landscape. We must either adapt or die. We must not be chained to our "Calvinism hangover," the deeply American notion that work is salvation and unemployment is a sign of sin and depravity.
Twelve. The rich know they have to share their wealth because the throng with torches and pitch forks will be knocking on their doors. In other words, UBI is much needed pacifier, a form of social control that augments the safety of the rich.
Thirteen. The open debate about UBI--the biggest debate--is the philosophical question about the nature of work. Some say UBI will kill work and that without work people will descend into depression and pathology. Others say we will adapt to this new economic landscape. One argument in favor of UBI is that even if we don't know the answer to this question definitively, we HAVE NO CHOICE but to adapt to a world where close to 50% of jobs will be lost.
Fourteen. Technology will change the human animal on a chemical level and we will be able to adapt to the new work environment as evidenced by Elon Musk's exploration into his new neural lace company. Such technologies will make us smarter and more adaptive as human beings.
Fifteen. Even if we concede that not working will turn us into lazy bums, that is the lesser evil of the economic injustice social chaos resulting from not having UBI.
Arguments Against Universal Basic Income (UBI)
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society. Dependence, in other words, leads to laziness.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society. The dependent will drag down the producers.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. Once you take a government handout, you become vulnerable to the government's control over every part of your life. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is. Why stick to your family, when you don't rely on them?
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable. Our identity and sense of wellbeing is tied to having a job.
Six. There is no increment for children. Why not? Because you're not encouraged to have children to get more. Some find this a form of lifestyle control. Others like it.
Seven. The estimated 13K a year isn't enough though some say that still puts people in the top 12% of all global earners.
Eight. Unless all countries had equal UBI, the more desirable UBI countries would be a magnet for people of other countries who'd swarm into "healthy UBI" countries to bilk their system.
Nine. UBI is giving 15% of average national income. This would require tax revenue of 15% of national income. That is too much tax, some say, for such a small income.
Washington Post article that argues UBI won't make America great again.
Challenging the American Work Ethic
There is a notion in America, from the beginning of its European history, that being a hard worker means being noble, virtuous, and successful.
The contrary is also assumed: If you're poor and unemployed, your life is evidence that you are a member of the damned. You are morally depraved and bankrupt.
This notion comes from a form of Protestantism called Calvinism. John Calvin said evidence of being a member of God's elect was being a hard worker. German philosopher Max Weber said this became the "Protestant Work Ethic," the fuel of American capitalism.
Perhaps the American Work Ethic is Based on Unexamined Opinions
Inherited opinions: These are opinions that are imprinted on us during our childhood. Robert Atwan writes they come from “family, culture, traditions, customs, regions, social institutions, or religion.”
Involuntary opinions: These are the opinions that result from direct indoctrination and inculcation (learning through repetition). If we grow up in a family that teaches us that eating pork is evil, then we won’t eat at other people’s homes that serve that porcine dish.
Considered opinions. Atwan writes, “These are opinions we have formed as a result of firsthand experience, reading, discussion and debate, or independent thinking and reasoning. These opinions are formed from direct knowledge and often from exposure and considering other opinions.”
Some questions to consider about the work ethic for your UBI paper:
Should we really have a work ethic for menial, repetitive jobs that reduce us to human routers?
Don't jobs prevent us from spending time on our real interests and passions?
Have we been brainwashed by the Protestant Work Ethic so that we are contented "rabbit workers" for our employers?
