Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state?
By "demonic" I mean several things:
They go mad.
They become irrational.
They become obsessed.
They lose contact with reality.
They become blind to their own self-destruction.
They lose sight of their meaningful connections and as a result they lose those connections.
They chase a pipe dream or a chimera and obliterate themselves in the process.
They become bitter at their wasted life and realize they've squandered their existence on a "crap dream." They're overcome, as a result, with self-hatred and remorse.
Consider, their madness as the result of the Faustian Bargain, settling, the dream of eternal adolescence, and the chimera for a comparison essay that includes at least 3 stories, "The Half Sister," "The Natural Order," and "Peter Khan's Third Wife." Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Weak thesis statements are a statement of fact:
Lasdun's characters reach the demonic state because they lack a rational orientation to the world.
Lasdun's characters reach the demonic state because they lack a moral center.
Lasdun's male characters are mired in the demonic because they are imprisoned by misogyny, blind ambition, and craven lasciviousness.
Improved thesis that focuses on a debatable claim:
While we are tempted to scold Lasdun's characters for their moral failings and the resulting demonic state that afflicts them, a close look at Lasdun's world gives us a compelling case for determinism, which is to say we are incapable of moral choices because of ______________, ______________, ____________, and _________________.
Option Two
Analyze the dream of eternal adolescence and its corruption of the soul by comparing this dream to "An Anxious Man," "The Natural Order" or "The Half Sister" and Joseph Epstein's essay "Perpetual Adolescence."
By perpetual adolescence, we meaning the following:
Chasing Eros instead of maturing.
Chasing the ego's needs instead of maturing.
Adulating or worshipping the culture of youth while shunning wisdom.
Chasing the compulsivity of youth and never learning the self-control of maturity.
Chasing the hedonism of youth instead of finding connection and meaning.
Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Weak statement of fact makes a weak thesis:
Lasdun's characters are perpetual adolescents.
Stronger thesis is a debatable claim:
Lasdun's characters, like most people, embrace the common metrics of success in our society, which are based on perpetual adolescence evidenced by _____________, ____________, ____________, and _______________.
Option Three
Analyze the corruption of fatherly love in "Cleanness" or "Caterpillars" (or both) with Erich Fromm's notion of the Authoritarian Personality. Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Weak thesis based on a statement of fact:
The patriarchs in Lasdun's stories evidence the corruption of fatherly love.
Stronger thesis based on debatable claim:
The patriarchs in Lasdun's stories show that the traditional roles that define fatherhood are based on the disease of false authority evidenced by __________, __________, _________, and ______________.
Option Four
Compare the theme of the chimera (idealized love) and its resulting futility as it occurs in the "Peter Kahn's Third Wife" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams." Observe that both stories follow the Faustian Bargain motif. Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources. Here's another link to "Winter Dreams."
Weak thesis based on statement of fact:
Lasdun's characters are afflicted with the chimera.
Stronger thesis based on debatable claim:
While McMahon is correct to point out the chimeras that fill the imaginations of Lasdun's characters, he errors in pointing to the chimera as the cause of the characters' despair. To the contrary, having a chimera is a natural way to give humans the drive and will to live. The real problem is that Lasdun's characters pursue a chimera that is soaked with the toxicity of perpetual adolescence evidenced by ___________, ___________, _____________, and ______________.
Option Five
In a 1,000-word essay, compare the Faustian Bargain in "The Half Sister" to the H.G. Wells short story, "The Country of the Blind."
“The Half Sister” (page 64)
Be sure your Works Cited page has no fewer than 2 sources.
Weak thesis based on weak statement of fact:
The characters suffer because they make a deal with the devil.
Stronger thesis based on a debatable claim:
As humans we are driven by comfort, safety, and security, but as "The Half Sister" and "The Country of the Blind" show, the hunger for comfort, safety, and security too often backfire and result in a Faustian Bargain evidenced by ___________, __________, ____________, and ______________.
Option Six
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks.
Weak thesis based on statement of fact:
Joseph Nagel is the "anxious man" because he has made a deal with the devil.
Stronger thesis based on a debatable claim:
While Joseph Nagel is tormented by the anxieties resulting from his Faustian Bargain, he would even be more miserable had he not made the Bargain because ____________, _________, __________, and _____________.
Option Seven Applies to "The Incalculable Life Gesture"
Analyze at least two stories as examples of the "emotional car crash" the characters have become because they either have no metacognition or the misapplication of metacognition.
Weak thesis based on a statement of fact:
Lasdun's characters inevitably suffer an emotional car crash because of their lack of metacognition.
Stronger thesis based on debatable claim:
McMahon errors when he talks about Lasdun's characters suffering from an absence of metacognition. In fact, to argue, wrongly, that the characters lack metacognition is to push for an immoral worldview because ___________, ____________, ___________, and _____________.
1. Anecdote: You might write about how a guy lost his temper at the drive-thru.
2. Personal narrative: You might right about a time in your life you hit rock bottom and how this despair was followed by an epiphany.
3. Illustration:
You might illustrate the steps a car salesman uses to cheat a customer.
4. Vivid description:
You might describe a high school in Finland, which is more of an education palace.
You might describe a 90-year-old bodybuilder at a Las Vegas swimming pool.
5. Startling fact: There are more black men in prison today than there were black slaves at the peak of American slavery.
6. Rhetorical question that introduces the topic from which your thesis is based:
Why do we incarcerate drug offenders rather than submit them to rehab when rehab is cheaper and cuts down on crime?
Are we hard-wired to be miserable?
7. Cogent quotation: There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.Nigel Marsh
8. Piece of dialogue you heard or read
“The Incalculable Life Gesture” (50)
Richard’s moral flaw:
Self-righteous indignation rooted in part that life is supposed to be fair and just and that we shouldn’t let narcissistic parasites (such as Richard’s sister) have their way.
We learn in examining Richard's moral flaw--the self-destructive resentment he harbors against his sister who he rightly sees as a cipher--that the more we rationalize our flaws the more we become irrational; the more we are technically right about an issue, the more we can be morally and spiritually wrong and as such we live an irrational life and evidence The Irrational Mind, a person whose irrational impulses have taken over metacognition. The result: The person becomes a dumpster fire, a car crash.
Another Theme of the Irrational Mind: When We're Right But We're Even MORE Wrong
Categories of Being Right But Being More Wrong
One. We see the trees but not the forest: some law or doctrine that causes destruction even as we obey it.
Two. We make a bad situation worse: We report a bully who's beating our child and the bully retaliates.
Three. We hurt people's feelings by telling the truth. Not all situations merit the truth. White lies are permissible when we have to preserve feelings or the safety of people.
Four. We choose victory over humanity. Study group keeps dead weight and loses the contest.
Five. We rationalize our selfish behavior by saying, "we're right." The guy on the bus who won't give up his seat to old lady because "I was first" is selfish.
Six. We lie to give hope and spare feelings.
Seven. We have bad intentions. A teacher says, "It's your obligation to come to class prepared" even as he humiliates a student.
Eight. Not knowing whole story. You get a waitress fired from her job because of her horrible service, but you don’t know she’s a single mother whose boss harassed her in the back office and her three children are sick and she can’t afford a babysitter.
Nine. Gloating. "I told you so."
Ten. You bring up a truth but you don't have a purpose or an end game. A guy tells his girlfriend for example that she doesn't love him, that she uses him for all the presents he gives her and her response is, "Yes, so what do you plan to do about it?" The guy is speechless because he doesn’t have an end game.
Questions for “The Incalculable Life Gesture”
One. What’s the psychological profile of Ellen on page 50?
A leech, a cipher, an indulgent, narcissistic ne’er-do-well. She represents the Dionysian spirit, one of chaos, while Richard embodies the Apollonian spirit, one of order. But is Richard any better, wanting his share of a small house when his sister and child need shelter? I find myself siding with Richard. Am I as petty as he is?
Two. How is Ellen unfair to her brother Richard regarding the inheritance of the house and how does Richard respond to this injustice?
He’s in a dilemma: Be a victim or a bully. Like Joseph in "An Anxious Man," he appears to lack convictions or a core self as he worries hiring an attorney to kick his sister out of the house might compromise his appearance with others. See page 51. Further, Richard can't see himself as selfish or petty because he identifies himself, rightly or not, as an intellectual helper of others, a spiritual guide, yet if we're honest Richard seems rather lost in his life.
Further, we could argue that the swelling he has ignored is a metaphor for some spiritual disease that is eating him and this disease may be rooted in Richard's existential vacuum.
Three. How does Ellen pour salt into the wounds she has inflicted upon Richard? See 51.
She has contempt for her brother and doesn’t see her brother’s capitulation to handing over the property to her as a good deed; she’s entitled to it from her point of view. She is the hostile victim who has been wronged from her standpoint.
She is icy that her brother can afford organic groceries while she slogs for food at Walmart.
Four. What bothers Richard about the possibility of death on page 54?
Death makes a mockery of his life but his real death is that he has no place, identity, or belonging in society. That is Richard’s “death.” His personal frustration compels him to find a scapegoat, his sister, for whom to blame all his problems.
Five. Why did Richard decide to become a teacher? See page 57.
He wanted to teach others but also himself, find a way to be his own healer, so to speak, but in the tradition of Lasdun’s fictional characters Richard proves to be little more than a feeble cipher. Rather than have a core identity, he seems vain and at the mercy of others' opinion of him to base his self-image. As we read on page 54, he was worried that a diagnosis of cancer would change his image to others: one a healthy robust man, he would not be seen as a sick, moribund loser.
Six. Is the malady a metaphor for unrealistic expectations regarding justice and charity?Explain.
No, the malady is the disease that is Richard’s unrealized existence, his absence of meaning and core identity. Frustrated, he uses his hatred for his sister as his escape; therefore, he “needs” to hate her.
Seven. How does Richard’s self-image as a life-priest alienate him from modern life? See 57 and 58.
We see Richard is so vain that he never committed to any real vocation or calling for all the choices he considered in the end lacked "radiance" worthy of his exceptional being. Perhaps he is simply vain and slothful and lacking the rigor to take on a true profession lives in the delusion that he is of a rarefied breed, an "educator."
Eight. What does the story’s acrimonious ending seem to be telling us about empathy?
That empathy does not exist in self-centered, narcissistic ciphers like Richard, those waifs who are too full of self-regard to notice the struggles of others. See page 62 in which Richard wants his sister to share his glee for not having cancer when in fact his sister doesn't have time: She has pressing errands to run.
Nine. What is Richard's delusion or moral flaw?
That he has the right to fume and stew over his sister's injustice when in fact his resentment is killing him more than the injustice itself. His resentment is a cancer that is growing like the tumor on his face.
Option Seven Applies to "The Incalculable Life Gesture"
Analyze at least two stories as examples of the "emotional car crash" the characters have become because they either have no metacognition or the misapplication of metacognition.
Principles of an Effective Thesis
First, identify the kind of thesis required by the assignment. It could be argumentative, definition, cause and effect, or claim of value.
The above assignment could be formulated into an argumentative thesis, cause and effect thesis, or claim of value thesis.
Abel from “The Natural Order” and Richard from “The Incalculable Life Gesture” are prime specimens of the “emotional car crash” because . . .
Abel from “The Natural Order” and Richard from “The Incalculable Life Gesture” are prime specimens of the “emotional car crash” evidenced by . . .
The moral lesson we learn from “The Natural Order” and “The Incalculable Life Gesture” is that our lives are emotional car crashes if we don’t become someone, by which I mean . . .
The Steps to Drafting a Thesis Statement
After deciding on which assignment option interests you the most, you need to brainstorm a topic list (or use a wheel).
Today’s assignment option: Analyze at least two stories as examples of the "emotional car crash" the characters have become because they either have no metacognition or the misapplication of metacognition.
Topic Brainstorm
Emotional car crash, having the bottom drop from you, the panic and anxiety of a free fall, looking for an escape through delusion or scapegoating.
Abel’s free fall has him questioning the legitimacy of his marriage and marriage in general. His bizarre thinking has him deciding that NOT having an affair would be an act of self-betrayal.
Richard’s free fall has him obsessing over his loser sister while diverting himself from his own failures: his disconnection with his family, his personal finances, and his weak identity.
Both Abel and Richard feel like outsiders, men who’ve followed society’s rules but have nothing to show for it. Their anger, however, is directed outward when they should not blame society but take responsibility for their own personal change.
Both Abel and Richard see themselves as victims of forces they cannot control. As a result, both are desperate. Desperate people do reckless things, which make their situation worse.
Try to Narrow Your Thesis
Too general and too easy: Abel and Richard are both self-destructive because they give in to their irrational impulses.
Revised, more specific, more challenging: McMahon is eager to label Abel and Richard “ciphers” but a close examination of these characters reveals that McMahon is in error, that in fact Abel and Richard are substantive, intellectuals who suffer from the various mental diseases resulting from a lack of meaning. These diseases include _____________, ________________, __________________, and _____________________.
Another revised example: The problem with Lasdun’s characters, Abel and Joseph, isn’t that they’re ciphers, as McMahon likes to call them, but that they live a cipher-like existence resulting from their blind embrace of perpetual adolescence evidenced by _____________, _________________, _________________, and ___________________.
Another revised example, almost the same as above: The problem with Lasdun’s characters, Joseph and Richard, isn’t that they’re “ciphers,” as McMahon likes to call them, but that they live a cipher-like existence resulting from their blind embrace of consumer culture evidenced by _____________, _________________, _________________, and ___________________.
Another revised example: Many of the characters in James Lasdun's short story collection go down the path of destruction because they find something that they are partly right about and use that "being right" as an excuse to be in denial about the bigger picture in which are more importantly wrong. This form of denial is evidenced in many ways, including ___________, __________, __________, and ______________.
Another Method for Arriving at an Effective Thesis—Ask an Important Question That Addresses the Essay Prompt
A good thesis is often the answer to a compelling question.
Why have so many millions of people been suckered into eating fake, barely edible food at places like Appleby’s, Olive Garden, TGI-Fridays, and other odious establishments?
These disgusting restaurants spend a small fraction of their budget making good food; rather, they spend most of their money on marketing and advertising that prey’s on the public’s gullibility evidenced by _______________, ____________, ______________, and ____________________.
Apply this principle to one of the essay prompts
Option One
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state?
Thesis that is too easy
Abel, Claire, and Martin are three characters who are not so much in love as they are demonically possessed by a chimera: the quest for greed (Martin), lust (Abel), and respite from abuse and boredom (Claire).
Revised by asking a question
If falling in love is equated with pursuing some self-destructive chimera, as McMahon would have us believe, are we to believe that McMahon is warning us to shun love altogether?
McMahon is not interested in telling people if they should love or not. Rather, he is saying that Lasdun’s stories reveal that no good decision can be made unless characters are self-possessed, a quality that is woefully absent in Lasdun’s characters evidenced by ________________, _________________, ________________, and _______________.
To be self-possessed means to have
Metacognition
Maturity, defined as the ability to leave the womb, psychologically speaking, and learn to love and reason as an adult
To identify and avoid symbiotic, clinging relationships that are mutually self-destructive
To identify and avoid the tendency to convert the love quest into a chimera quest born of desperation and false expectations
Another way of improving your thesis—finding an edge
The more general and obvious your thesis, the weaker it is. Find an edge, by being specific and finding something that is more of an argument than a statement of fact.
Ineffective thesis: In “The Natural Order” Abel faces a difficult decision about staying committed to his marriage.
Effective, more specific thesis: Abel’s decision to betray his wife and daughter reveals more about a society that aggrandizes perpetual adolescence in the form of that lascivious satyr Stewart than it speaks about Abel himself.
Ineffective thesis: In “Peter Khan’s Three Wives” Claire seeks to escape her abusive marriage by disappearing into an insane chimera of idealized love.
Effective, more specific, more argumentative thesis: “Peter Khan’s Three Wives” isn’t so much about Claire’s insane chimera quest as it is a feminist perspective on the vulnerability and helplessness of women living in a patriarchal society.
Ineffective thesis: “An Anxious Man” is about a husband who becomes addicted to the stock market.
Effective, more specific, more argumentative thesis: The real horror of Lasdun’s “An Anxious Man” isn’t so much watching Joseph Nagel’s free fall into his stock market addiction but looking at the story as a critique of modern capitalist society that allows the pathologies of stock market to be looked upon as normal and “enterprising.”
Ineffective thesis: Lasdun’s stories consist of a lot of foolish individuals who find themselves destroyed by their personal chimeras.
Effective, more specific, argumentative thesis: McMahon’s unsympathetic portrayal of Lasdun’s characters as “fools and ciphers” falling prey to the chimera fails to address the deeper, richer theme of Lasdun’s short story gems: What Lasdun is really doing is taking more or less normal, intelligent characters and making them fall prey to their chimera to show that the human condition is so insufferable, banal, and empty that even the best of us are compelled to create a parallel universe. Lasdun’s stories therefore are not about losers making bad decisions. They’re about the need to live in an imagined, chimeric universe as a result of _________________, _________________, __________________, and __________________.
The importance of Critical Thinking discussed on Stephen Colbert.
Jeff McMahon’s Summary of Today’s English 1C Class (formatted for website blog on overhead projector, not MLA Word)
Dialectical argument with an emphasis on learning how to argue and use logic, not how to “be right.”
Essay options for James Lasdun’s short story “An Anxious Man”
Applying “An Anxious Man” to Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “Love People, Not Pleasure”
Four types of claims or thesis statements
Review four steps of in-text citations in MLA format
Sample introduction with transition to thesis
If time, an educational video that reviews in-text citations in MLA format
When We Use Aristotelian Dialectical Argument (pitting opposing arguments against one another), Our Objective Isn’t to Declare a “Winner” But to Sharpen Our Logical Argument Skills
Student Who Objects to James Lasdun’s “Cheap Determinism”
Our Professor McMahon, gleefully presenting himself as the Prophet of Doom, has assigned us the dreary, defeatist short stories of James Lasdun, whose jaundiced vision of humankind is saddled with a sad and sour brand of pessimism in which the characters, little more than nebbish waifs and socially inept sycophants, are victims of forces they cannot control.
McMahon is proud to taut Lasdun as a committed determinist, someone who rejects the notion that humans are free agents capable of making choices and taking responsibility for their actions. Rather, humans are, evidenced in Lasdun’s short stories, governed by determinism, which is to say they are helpless before the powers of their unconscious and their environmental upbringing.
I’m disappointed with McMahon’s choice of James Lasdun, for while I find some of Lasdun’s stories engaging and mildly entertaining, I find Lasdun’s brand of determinism cheap, predictable, and clichéd.
Once we realize that all of Lasdun’s characters are ciphers, weak, almost soulless creatures that conform to the whims of society—greed, lasciviousness, perpetual adolescence, Oedipal Complexes—to same some, we find ourselves bored in this noxious morass of predictable, trite, hackneyed short stories that end, predictably, with the character’s woeful, lugubrious demise.
It’s as if Lasdun is so determined to assert his pessimistic view of determinism that he purposely only uses weak characters for his nihilistic fiction. In this sense, his effete, pencil-neck geek characters are empty pawns used to promote Lasdun’s cheap vision.
What could have been provocative short stories about the way responsible, fully realized human beings are tested by temptation become thin fictions promoting clichés about “mankind’s helplessness in the face of forces he cannot control.”
Because McMahon has chosen Lasdun for our reading list, I assume McMahon is to some degree enamored with Lasdun’s cheap deterministic vision. McMahon would be well served to reconsider Lasdun’s collection as being worthy of his reading list and move on to something more challenging for his students. Next assignment, please.
McMahon’s Rebuttal to the Disgruntled Student
While I concede the student’s observation that Lasdun’s characters are “little more than nebbish waifs, socially inept sycophants,” and “pencil-neck geeks,” I reject the notion that Lasdun has contrived a cowardly archetype of the cipher to promote his pessimistic vision, rendering Lasdun’s fiction, we are to infer, fraudulent. In fact, the characters are a reflection of Lasdun’s own genuine neuroses and failings. If Lasdun is guilty of pessimism, it is a pessimism born of Lasdun’s authentic personal struggles, not some glib affectation designed so that Lasdun can brand himself as a cynic or a pessimist. Moreover, I would like to present today’s writing assignments as evidence that there is enough philosophical meat on the bones of Lasdun’s stories to merit their educational worth.
Student’s Counterargument
I’m glad McMahon has conceded that Lasdun’s characters are a reflection of Lasdun’s own neuroses and personal afflictions. And there lies to the rub: Lasdun’s world is too self-contained, too self-centered, and too Lasdun-centered to rise to the level of outstanding fiction worthy of our study. While Lasdun is an exquisite prose stylist, he is too shackled to the inner workings of his neurotic brain to branch out and give us a breadth of diverse characters that might make his pessimistic vision more convincing. Please, McMahon, dish us up something more substantial and less Lasdun-centered for our literary delectation.
McMahon’s Rebuttal
The German poet Ranier Maria Rilke said that all art should “spring from necessity.” Indeed, Lasdun, a man whose fiction is informed by his tormenting demons, writes his fiction from necessity. Our student who finds that Lasdun’s art is too limiting because Lasdun’s characters are all in one way or another reflections of Lasdun’s tormented self might benefit from embracing Rilke’s famous principle before he so quickly dismisses Lasdun’s fiction as a fraud unworthy of our study. In fact, Lasdun’s fiction, born of Lasdun’s demons, is the only kind of art Lasdun could have created and it is the best art form of all—born from the Mother of Necessity.
Essay Options That Pertain to “An Anxious Man”
Option One
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state? (cause and effect thesis)
By "demonic" I mean several things:
They go mad as they become disconnected from others and living inside their head, the condition known as solipsism.
They become irrational so that they are incapable of maturity, which means having the faculties of love and reason.
They have no boundaries with others, so that they are “clingers,” as we discussed last class, people capable of symbiotic relationships, which render both people emotional cripples.
They become blind to their own self-destruction so that they have no self-awareness or metacognition.
They chase a pipe dream or a chimera and obliterate themselves in the process.
They become bitter at their wasted life and realize they've squandered their existence on a cheap dream. They're overcome, as a result, with self-hatred and remorse.
Consider, their madness as the result of the Faustian Bargain, settling, the dream of eternal adolescence, and the chimera for a comparison essay that includes at least 3 stories, "The Half Sister," "An Anxious Man," "The Natural Order," and "Peter Khan's Third Wife." Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Two
Analyze the dream of eternal adolescence and its corruption of the soul by comparing this dream to "An Anxious Man," "The Natural Order" or "The Half Sister" and Joseph Epstein's essay "Perpetual Adolescence." (definition thesis)
By perpetual adolescence, we meaning the following:
Chasing Eros instead of maturing.
Chasing the ego's needs instead of maturing.
Adulating or worshipping the culture of youth while shunning the wisdom of maturity
Chasing the compulsivity of youth and never learning the self-control of maturity.
Chasing the hedonism of youth instead of finding connection and meaning.
Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Six
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. (definition thesis in which you show the distinguishing characteristics of the Faustian Bargain and show how they apply to "An Anxious Man")
Brooks points out that the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure is a drug that masks our misery and by masking our misery it actually prolongs our suffering. Moreover, the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure disconnects us from others and kills our empathy. In Brooks' words, we live, erroneously, by this principle: "Love things, not people." And there lies the Faustian Bargain, that in pursuing fame, wealth, and pleasure we find we cannot love people, including ourselves. We use others and ourselves to achieve fame, wealth, and pleasure. This Faustian Bargain applies to Joseph Nagel, the stock market addict from "An Anxious Man."
Option Seven
Analyze at least two stories as examples of the "emotional car crash" the characters have become because they either have no metacognition or the misapplication of metacognition. (cause and effect thesis)
Brooks introduces his essay by explaining the mostly unhappy life of Abd-Rahman III, emir of Cordoba, Spain, during the 10th Century. One of the richest and most powerful men in the world, feared by his enemies and respected by his allies, he said he was happy only for “fourteen days of his life.”
Brooks is compelled to ask the question: How could the richest, most powerful man in the world make such a discouraging proclamation? Brooks points out that the greater our capacity for happiness, the greater our understanding of its absence. Therefore, the happiest of us have the greatest capacity for unhappiness. Once we’ve tasted the nectar, we are more prone to unhappiness when we know we’re not getting the nectar.
We can conclude that happiness and unhappiness are not mutually exclusive propositions but can feed the other.
Brooks further compares the quest for happiness to addiction:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Brooks is saying that we mask our misery with alcohol, pleasure, materialism, fame, or some other fool’s errand, but in masking our misery we are merely prolonging it and allowing it to fester until it overtakes us.
Brooks then presents a study that shows a link between another fool’s errand, the quest for fame, and how fame results in misery, even insanity:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
It’s clear that those who worship the God of Ambition are disconnected, stressed, and afflicted with physical ailments, yet they stubbornly pursue their false gods, not just in the pursuit of money but for attention and adulation.
It appears that people who go down the rabbit hole of the fame and money quest are blind to their endeavor. Worse, in our social media age there are more and more unsavory opportunities for finding ways to becoming pathologically addicted to fame and attention. As Brooks writes:
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?
This “fake life” described by Brooks becomes, in essence, a drug and an addiction that allows us to prolong our misery. All those “likes” on Facebook spike our dopamine levels and over time we need more and more dopamine and more and more Facebook “likes” to feed it until we hit a wall.
We can infer therefore that the happiest Facebook “friends,” those who post compulsively throughout the day, may not be happy at all but addicts to the process of creating a parallel universe that offers more spice to their own dreary, futile, miserable existence.
In addition to fame, adulation, and attention, there is the craving for money. Brooks points out that the quest for money is more normal than the desire for fame, but that of course in its excessive form, greed, new pathologies are born:
Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too.
For decades, psychologists have been compiling a vast literature on the relationships between different aspirations and well-being. Whether they examine young adults or people of all ages, the bulk of the studies point toward the same important conclusion: People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed and more frequent drug users, and even to have more physical ailments than those who set their sights on more intrinsic values.
No one sums up the moral snares of materialism more famously than St. Paul in his First Letter to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Or as the Dalai Lama pithily suggests, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.
Dismissing fame and money as possible causes of happiness, Brooks then looks at the success rate of the pleasures of sensuality. As he writes:
So fame and money are out. How about pleasures of the flesh? Take the canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust. From Hollywood to college campuses, many assume that sex is always great, and sexual variety is even better. . . .
Wrong. In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.
This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
Brooks is saying, in other words, that we are hard-wired to pursue fame, money, and carnal hedonism. It’s in our DNA to pursue these things as part of our reproductive success. Wanting reproductive success is a normal impulse.
But this drive more often than not overtakes us so that we become pathologically selfish and as a result we burn bridges with others, resulting in our loneliness and isolation. Therefore, we can infer we are hard-wired to be miserable.
Brooks points out that there is yet another ingredient that makes us miserable. He observes we are afflicted with the restless, nagging impulse to find fulfillment “from the beyond.” As Brook writes:
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.
This also requires a condemnation of materialism. This is manifestly not an argument for any specific economic system. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that materialism and selfishness are as bad under collectivism, or worse, as when markets are free. No political ideology is immune to materialism.
Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Abd al-Rahman never got his happiness sums right. He never knew the right formula. Fortunately, we do.
Brooks is asking us to be honest with ourselves, to ask ourselves the question: Do we love things over people? And if we do, how far the rabbit hole of self-destruction have we gone? To give you an example, I had a neighbor, a successful back surgeon, whose wife left him and rather than rebuild his life he obsessed over the cost of the furniture his wife took with her when she left him for another doctor. His obsession over the furniture had rendered him a lifeless automaton.
Connect the above with Essay Option Six:
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. (Definition thesis in which you show the distinguishing characteristics of the Faustian Bargain and show how they apply to "An Anxious Man")
Brief summary of Brooks
Brooks points out that the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure is a drug that masks our misery and by masking our misery it actually prolongs our suffering. Moreover, the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure disconnects us from others and kills our empathy. In Brooks' words, we live, erroneously, by this principle: "Love things, not people." And there lies the Faustian Bargain, that in pursuing fame, wealth, and pleasure we find we cannot love people, including ourselves. We use others and ourselves to achieve fame, wealth, and pleasure. This Faustian Bargain applies to Joseph Nagel, the stock market addict from "An Anxious Man."
Joseph Nagel is anxious about a lot of things, including social class:
One. Why is Joseph Nagel the “Anxious Man” (and by implication the miserable man)?
He’s screaming at his wife in the opening scene because she didn’t sell her stocks soon enough. He’s snapping at his wife Elise like a manic junkie. He lacks self-possession. Clearly, he’s a man governed by his irrational passions.
Money makes him anxious. It “had aroused volatile forces in their household.” Elise’s inheritance, about a quarter of a million dollars, makes Joseph feel entitled. We read that “with the advent of Elise’s inheritance he had felt suddenly awoken into new and urgent responsibilities,” which turned out to mean buying bigger and better stuff and rising in social class.
Joseph worships power. He is a sycophant before power. He behaves obsequiously around the rich such as broker Morton Dowell and the imperious, vulgar socialite Veronica, the mother of the daughter who befriends Joseph’s daughter.
Joseph becomes agitated by his wife and daughter because they pose distractions from his obsession, the vacillations of the stock market. He resents any impediments to his obsession. He loves things, not people. This makes him disconnected and this in turn makes him anxious.
His obsession fills him with hatred and exhaustion, yet he pursues it anyway: “How exhausting it all was. How he hated it! It was as though, in investing money, Elise had unwittingly attached him by invisible filaments to some vast, seething collective psyche that never rested” (7).
He pursues what he hates and therefore he must know deep down he has no control over his life and this must make him loathe himself and this in turn makes him anxious and ashamed.
He knows his stock market obsession, and never knowing when to buy, keep, or sell, makes him miserable in what is perhaps the most delicious passage in the story on page 8:
Whatever you did, it seemed you were bound to regret doing it, or not having done it sooner . . . It was as though some malicious higher power, having inspected the workings of the human mind, had calibrated a torment for it based on precisely the instincts of desire and caution that were supposed to enable it to survive. One could no more help oneself than the chickadee that nested in the lilacs outside their living room could stop attacking its own reflection in the window all day long every spring, however baffling and terrible every headlong slam against the glass must have felt.
He knows he is engaged in a masochistic enterprise rupturing his marriage and ruining his relationships but he feels too feeble to stop. His feelings of helplessness clearly contribute to him being the “anxious man.”
Another factor that contributes to Joseph being the “anxious man” is that he lacks any conviction. As we read on page 11: “How wearying, how humiliating it was to have so little faith in anything, to be so abjectly at the mercy of every tremor of fear in one’s mind . . . Unballasted by any definite convictions of his own (convictions, he liked to joke, were for convicts), he appeared to have gone adrift in a realm of pure superstition.”
Without any conviction, Joseph lacks a core identity and without a core identity, Joseph must feel like a cipher and this feeling gives him shame. He masks the shame and misery by becoming a stock market addict and this addiction prolongs his shame and misery, just as we read in Brooks’ essay.
Let’s take another look at the assignment:
Connect the above with Essay Option Six:
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. (Definition thesis in which you show the distinguishing characteristics of the Faustian Bargain and show how they apply to "An Anxious Man")
Brooks points out that the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure is a drug that masks our misery and by masking our misery it actually prolongs our suffering. Moreover, the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure disconnects us from others and kills our empathy. In Brooks' words, we live, erroneously, by this principle: "Love things, not people." And there lies the Faustian Bargain, that in pursuing fame, wealth, and pleasure we find we cannot love people, including ourselves. We use others and ourselves to achieve fame, wealth, and pleasure. This Faustian Bargain applies to Joseph Nagel, the stock market addict from "An Anxious Man."
Which thesis type do we use for this assignment?
Know the Four Types of Thesis and Know Which One Is Appropriate for Your Chosen Essay Assignment
Cause and Effect Thesis:
Joseph Nagel is insuring his own misery by obeying the debilitating principle that he loves things, not people. The causes of his misery quest embody the pathologies described in Brooks’ essay evidenced by _______________, ______________, ________________, and __________________.
Argumentative Thesis
Spineless, emotionally unstable ciphers like Joseph Nagel should avoid the Stock Market the way the alcoholic should avoid liquor because inevitably they will succumb to ______, ________, __________, and _________.
Definition Thesis
The more Joseph Nagel becomes enmeshed in the Stock Market, the more he becomes a victim of learned helplessness, evidenced by __________, ___________, ____________, and ____________.
Joseph Nagel embodies the kind of Faustian Bargain described in Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “Love People, Not Pleasure” evidenced by _________________, _________________, __________________, and _______________________.
Claims of Worth Thesis
The most valuable lesson we learn by applying Brooks’ essay to Joseph Nagel is that even the most decent human beings can be manipulated by corrupt environments so that they abandon their family and friends to pursue the false gods of money, pleasure, and societal adulation.
Which Type of Claim Do You Identify in the Following Thesis Templates for Option Six (connecting Joseph Nagel to Arthur C. Brooks’ essay, “Love People, Not Pleasure)?
Joseph Nagel, our whimpering anti-hero from “An Anxious Man,” embodies all the pathologies described in Arthur C. Brooks’ essay evidenced by _________________, __________________, ___________________, and ____________________.
A close reading of “An Anxious Man” shows that the Stock Market is a diabolical conception designed to pray on the weaknesses of the Joseph Nagels of the world. This becomes evident when we see that Nagel’s personality is comprised of _______________, ______________, ________________, and _______________.
Joseph Nagel’s relationship with the Stock Market is a masochistic and self-destructive evidenced by _____________, _____________, ________________, and _____________________.
Arthur C. Brooks’ essay fails to address Joseph Nagel’s true pathologies, which are, contrary to “Love People, Not Pleasure,” the result of ________________, _______________, _________________, and ______________________.
Review the 4 Steps of MLA In-Text Citations
You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.
Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase. Use the templates:
Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.
Verbs in Signal Phrases
According to . . . (very common)
Ha Jin writes . . . (very common)
Panbin laments . . . Dan rages . . .
Dan seethes . . .
Signal Phrase Templates
In the words of researchers Redelmeier and Tibshirani, “…”
As Matt Sundeen has noted, “…”
Patti Pena, mother of a child killed by a driver distracted by a cell phone, points out that “…”
“…” writes Christine Haughney, “…”
“…” claims wireless spokesperson Annette Jacobs.
Radio hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi offer a persuasive counterargument: “…”
Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.
Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material.
Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).
In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).
Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.
Sample A Introduction and Thesis
I used to gleefully ridicule the gluttons who would eat countless platters of inedible slop at HomeTown Buffet, gorging until their bellies were so full their brains were drained of all nutritious blood supply rendering these overeaters brainless zombies.
But my mockery of these incontinent eaters was stopped in its tracks in the summer of 2003. My wife Carrie and I were walking back from the brunch buffet at the Sheraton Inn in Kauai where I had just ingested a 5,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes slathered with thick maple syrup, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar, pecan-raisin cinnamon rolls, all washed down with several tall pitchers of freshly-squeezed orange juice.
With a self-complacent belch, I staggered up from the buffet and stumbled outside orienting myself to the sunlight. As I slogged my 259-pounds outside the buffet room and past a hotel window, I saw the reflection of a portly, unsightly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This disheveled, unattractive man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of a fat, shameless, overfed American.
I walked closer toward the bloated image of shame and disgust and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but was in fact me. I was that bloated apparition, the type of person that I had mocked and scorned all of my life.
This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” a sudden realization of one’s self-delusions that often results in a radical life transformation.
Indeed, the characters in Lasdun's fiction suffer similar self-delusions, evidenced by their denial of their shortcomings; their overwhelming passions that render them out of control; their gulf between who they think they are and who they really are; and their intractable fixation on “perpetual adolescence.”
We learn from Richard's moral flaw--the self-destructive resentment he harbors against his sister who he rightly sees as a cipher--that the more we rationalize the more we are irrational; the more we are technically right about an issue, the more we can be morally and spiritually wrong and as such we live an irrational life and evidence The Irrational Mind.
Another Theme of the Irrational Mind: When We're Right But We're Even MORE Wrong
Categories of Being Right But Being More Wrong
One. We see the trees but not the forest: some law or doctrine that causes destruction even as we obey it.
Two. We make a bad situation worse: We report a bully who's beating our child and the bully retaliates.
Three. We hurt people's feelings by telling the truth.
Four. We choose victory over humanity. Study group keeps dead weight and loses the contest.
Five. We rationalize our selfish behavior by saying, "we're right." The guy on the bus who won't give up his seat to old lady because "I was first" is selfish.
Six. We lie to give hope and spare feelings.
Seven. We have bad intentions. A teacher says, "It's your obligation to come to class prepared" even as he humiliates a student.
Eight. Not knowing whole story. You get a waitress fired from her job because of her horrible service.
Nine. Gloating. "I told you so."
Ten. You bring up a truth but you don't have a purpose or an end game. A guy tells his girlfriend for example that she doesn't love him, that she uses him for all the presents he gives her and her response is, "Yes, so what do you plan to do about it?"
Sample Thesis
Many of the characters in James Lasdun's short story collection go down the path of destruction because they find something that they are partly right about and use that "being right" as an excuse to be in denial about the bigger picture in which are are more importantly wrong. This form of denial is evidenced in many ways, including ___________, __________, __________, and ______________.
Anger and selfishness and spite fueling self-righteousness in "The Incalculable Life Gesture."
Lust fueling the rationalization of adultery (because I deserve a more exciting life, an escape from my imprisoned existence) in "The Natural Order."
Greed fueling risk-taking and ambition and the quest for a better life in "An Anxious Man."
A lack of confidence fueling the "sure thing" in "The Half Sister."
What’s the psychological profile of Ellen on page 50? A leech, a cipher, an indulgent, narcissistic ne’er-do-well. But is Richard any better, wanting his share of a small house when his sister and child need shelter? I find myself siding with Richard. Am I as petty as he is?
How is Ellen unfair to her brother Richard regarding the inheritance of the house and how does Richard respond to this injustice? He’s in a dilemma: Be a victim or a bully. See page 51.
How does Ellen pour salt into the wounds she has inflicted upon Richard? See 51.
What bothers Richard about the possibility of death on page 54?
Why did Richard decide to become a teacher? See page 57.
Is the malady a metaphor for unrealistic expectations regarding justice and charity? Explain.
How does Richard’s self-image as a life-priest alienate him from modern life? See 57 and 58.
What does the story’s acrimonious ending seem to be telling us about empathy?
What is Richard's delusion or moral flaw? That he has the right to fume and stew over his sister's injustice when in fact his resentment is killing him more than the injustice itself. His resentment is a cancer that is growing like the tumor on his face.
What evidences Joseph’s lack of control in the opening scene? What are at the root of his compulsive behavior? Is he perhaps addicted to the rush of high stakes, like a gambling addiction? Does he thrive on the drama to compensate for something that’s lacking in his life?He is the fool who stakes his happiness on the whims of Lady Fortuna as described by Boethius. Possible explanations for Joseph's stock market addiction include: he's running away from ennui; he's running away from his own emptiness; he has defined himself as someone who needs to be a certain financial level; otherwise he will be suffering from an affliction. But he has made himself too vulnerable and he is not what he needs to be a successful person: He is not self-possessed.
How does page 4 set up Joseph’s sense of entitlement and discontent that never existed before? What does it mean to confuse necessity with desire? (see top of page 5) Studies show that wealth and a concern with money encourage privilege and degrade our powers of empathy.
How might some describe Morton Dowell, described on page 5, as a Trickster or a Devil, a figure who stirs the malignancies within Joseph’s soul? Good salesmen never sell; they give us “opportunities.”He is a sort of pimp or drug dealer who entices by escorting us through the various levels of human emotion.
What dichotomy of existence do we see in the story: Adrenaline World and Civilian World. The former eats the latter. In choosing the former, we embrace misery, panic, and anxiety because we prefer drama and its power to distract us from death and vapidity. See page 7 and 8. Does it not seem Joseph knows he’s made a deal with the devil yet can do nothing to stop himself? What does this say about free will? Once we get the wheels in motion, we can accelerate toward our demise with no opportunity to veer away from the danger.
Explain how regret is the defining emotion of stock market investment. See page 8. You never invest enough; you never sell quickly enough; you sell too soon; your life is one of second-guessing yourself and regret and anger. You become bitter but you keep coming back for more and more of the stuff that poisons you.The irony is that this despair becomes an addiction.
What does it mean to be “grounded”? What evidence is there that Joseph is not grounded? See page 18 among others. To be grounded means that we have the Third Eye, self-control, humility to learn from our mistakes, and developing strategies as solutions to problems rather than wallowing in the drama of our problems. All of the qualities come from a moral sense, so that when we say we are grounded we mean we have a moral center that directs our thoughts and actions.
“The Old Man”
What several similarities does the story have with “The Half Sister”? You have a man in a state of stagnation who is preyed upon by a devilish character who needs a sort of sacrifice to continue her operations smoothly.
What evidence is there that Conrad will be the next Mirek?
The story’s last page is similar to the conclusion in “The Half Sister.” Explain in terms of the theme of free will.
Sample Thesis Statements
The tragedy of the Faustian Bargain is that once we are seduced by a false paradise, we submit our will to that sacrifice resulting in the Irrational Mind evidenced by _____________, ____________, _______________, and _______________.
Ennui and a lack of life purpose make us vulnerable to the Faustian Bargain in four ways, not the least of which is ____________, _______________, _____________, and ________________.
The characters in Lasdun's short story collection are woefully lacking in free will and are therefore slaves to the irrational mind evidenced by ________________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Class Activity
In a brief paragraph, describe a Trickster or Chimera you once knew (or currently know) and what made this Trickster/Chimera so powerful and seductive?
To avoid monotony, vary the signal phrases you use to integrate quotations, as in these examples:
In the words of author and essayist Samuel Johnson, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
As Divakaruni has noted, “Looking down from the heights of Maslow's pyramid, it seems inconceivable to us that someone could actually prefer bread to freedom.”
Arthur Hardy, a renowned expert on New Orleans Carnival traditions, points out that “Mardi Gras came to North America from Paris, where it had been celebrated since the Middle Ages.”
Racial profiling “makes a mockery of the rights to which people in this country are entitled,” claims columnist Colbert I. King.
Sir Winston Churchill offers this wise advice: "If you are going through hell, keep going."
Sheffield answers her critics by conceding, “The proposal did not account sufficiently for the economic downturn.”
Signal phrases and attributors may come anywhere within your sentence—at the beginning, to introduce a quotation; in the middle of a quotation; or at the end, after the quotation has been given.
For example:
“We have a crime problem in this country,” writes Barry Goldwater, “not a gun problem.”
“We have a crime problem in this country, not a gun problem,” asserts the late Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
You don’t always have to use a writer’s name in your signal phrase, for example:
One U.S. Senator has claimed, “We have a crime problem in this country, not a gun problem.”
Many opponents of gun-control regulations would agree that “[w]e have a crime problem in this country, not a gun problem.”
Vary the signal verbs you use to introduce quotations, and choose them with care.
Use the verb that most closely captures how your source is presenting the idea. Is the author you are quoting merely saying something? Or would it be more accurate to write that the source is arguing a point, making an observation, reporting facts, drawing a conclusion, refuting an argument, or stating a belief? Choose the verb that makes the author’s stance clear. There are many available to use, including these:
acknowledges
comments
describes
maintains
reports
adds
compares
disputes
notes
responds
admits
concedes
emphasizes
observes
shows
agrees
confirms
endorses
points out
states
argues
contends
illustrates
reasons
suggests
asserts
declares
implies
refutes
summarizes
claims
denies
insists
rejects
writes
A reminder about grammar: A quotation must be made to fit the syntax and grammar of your sentence, so take care as you experiment with signal phrases to introduce quotations. Make sure the result is a grammatically correct sentence. Do not use signal phrase such as “he writes” to introduce a quotation that is not a complete sentence, such as in the following example:
Incorrect: Brown writes, “My childhood, which was happy and carefree, but passed by too fast.”
Correct: Brown writes, “My childhood . . . was happy and carefree, but passed by too fast.”
Also correct: Brown describes her childhood as “happy and carefree,” but she laments that it “passed by too fast.”
As in the examples above, you may need to use ellipses marks and brackets to modify a quotation for the sake of sentence grammar, but never distort the original meaning of the quotation as you do so.
A reminder about punctuation: Quotations may be introduced by two--and only two--marks of punctuation, the comma and the colon. Never introduce a quotation with a semicolon.
A reminder about source citation: None of the examples above use citations to attribute the quotation to its source. Be aware that whenever you use a quotation in your paper, you should cite it using the citation style specified by your professor, such as MLA style for papers in the humanities, APA style for papers in psychology, Chicago or Turabian style for papers in history.
Analyze the corruption of fatherly love in "Cleanness" or "Caterpillars" (or both) with Erich Fromm's notion of the Authoritarian Personality. Be sure your essay is 1,200 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
The characters in Lasdun's fiction are saddled by perpetual adolescence, which is the result of _______________, ______________, ________________, and __________________.
Argumentative Thesis
Abel has made the right decision to end his marriage because of the superior freedom afforded by the bachelor Stewart evidenced by ______, ________, __________, and _________.
Definition Thesis
What appears to be insurmountable obstacles in the characters' lives are really problems that can be solved if the characters free themselves from their learned helplessness, which is evidenced by __________, ___________, ____________, and ____________.
Claims of Worth Thesis
The most valuable lesson we learn from James Lasdun's stories is that metacognition is the number one facility that allows us to undergo a radical transformation, free ourselves of our mindless habits, and conquer the mental disease of narcissism.
Which thesis applies to today's assignment?
Essay Option 3
Analyze the corruption of fatherly love in "Cleanness" or "Caterpillars" (or both) with Erich Fromm's notion of the Authoritarian Personality. Be sure your essay is 1,200 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Erich Fromm's linked passage:
What do we mean by “authoritarian personality”? We usually see a clear difference between the individual who wants to rule, control, or restrain others and the individual who tends to submit, obey, or to be humiliated. To use a somewhat friendlier term, we might talk of the leader and his followers. As natural as the difference between the ruling and the ruled might — in many ways — be, we also have to admit that these two types, or as we can also say, these two forms of authoritarian personality are actually tightly bound together.
What they have in common, what defines the essence of the authoritarian personality is an inability: the inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent, to put it in other words: to endure freedom.
The opposite of the authoritarian character is the mature person: a person who does not need to cling to others because he actively embraces and grasps the world, the people, and the things around him. What does that mean? Children still need to cling. In their mother’s womb they are — in a physical sense — one with their mother. After birth, for several months and in many ways even for years, they remain — in a psychological sense — still a part of their mother. Children could not exist without the mother’s help. However, they grow and develop. They learn to walk, to talk, and find their way around the world which becomes their world. Children possess two skills, inherent to the individual, which they can develop: love and reason.
Love is the bond and the feeling of being one with the world while keeping one’s own independence and integrity. The loving individual is connected with the world. He is not frightened since the world is his home. He can lose himself because he is certain of himself.
Love means recognizing the world as an emotional experience. However, there is also another way of recognizing, understanding with the mind. We call this kind of understanding reason. It is different from Intelligence. Intelligence is using the mind to reach certain practical goals. A chimpanzee demonstrates intelligence when he sees a banana in front of his cage but cannot reach it with either one of the two sticks in his cage, then he joins both sticks and gets the banana. This is the intelligence of the animal, which is the same manipulating intelligence that we usually call understanding when talking of people. Reason is something else. Reason is the activity of the mind which attempts to get through the surface to reach the core of things, to grasp what really lies behind these things, what the forces and drives are that — themselves invisible — operate and determine the manifestations.
I have given this description of the mature, i.e. the loving and reasoning individual to better define the essence of the authoritarian personality. The authoritarian character has not reached maturity; he can neither love nor make use of reason. As a result, he is extremely alone which means that he is gripped by a deeply rooted fear. He needs to feel a bond, which requires neither love nor reason — and he finds it in the symbiotic relationship, in feeling-one with others; not by reserving his own identity, but rather by fusing, by destroying his own identity. The authoritarian character needs another person to fuse with because he cannot endure his own aloneness and fear.
But here we reach the boundaries of what both forms of the authoritarian character — the ruling and the ruled — have in common.
[STOP READING HERE]
The passive-authoritarian, or in other words, the masochistic and submissive character aims — at least subconsciously — to become a part of a larger unit, a pendant, a particle, at least a small one, of this “great” person, this “great” institution, or this “great” idea. The person, institution, or idea may actually be significant, powerful, or just incredibly inflated by the individual believing in them. What is necessary, is that — in a subjective manner — the individual is convinced that “his” leader, party, state, or idea is all-powerful and supreme, that he himself is strong and great, that he is a part of something “greater.” The paradox of this passive form of the authoritarian character is: the individual belittles himself so that he can — as part of something greater — become great himself. The individual wants to receive commands, so that he does not have the necessity to make decisions and carry responsibility. This masochistic individual looking for dependency is in his depth frightened -often only subconsciously — a feeling of inferiority, powerlessness, aloneness. Because of this, he is looking for the “leader,” the great power, to feel safe and protected through participation and to overcome his own inferiority. Subconsciously, he feels his own powerlessness and needs the leader to control this feeling. This masochistic and submissive individual, who fears freedom and escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the authoritarian systems — Nazism and Stalinism — rest.
More difficult than understanding the passive-authoritarian, masochistic character is understanding the active-authoritarian, the sadistic character. To his followers he seems self-confident and powerful but yet he is as frightened and alone as the masochistic character. While the masochist feels strong because he is a small part of something greater, the sadist feels strong because he has incorporated others — if possible many others; he has devoured them, so to speak. The sadistic-authoritarian character is as dependent on the ruled as the masochistic -authoritarian character on the ruler. However the image is misleading. As long as he holds power, the leader appears — to himself and to others — strong and powerful. His powerlessness becomes only apparent when he has lost his power, when he can no longer devour others, when he is on his own.
When I speak of sadism as the active side of the authoritarian personality, many people may be surprised because sadism is usually understood as the tendency to torment and to cause pain. But actually, this is not the point of sadism. The different forms of sadism which we can observe have their root in a striving, which is to master and control another individual, to make him a helpless object of one’s will, to become his ruler, to dispose over him as one sees fit and without limitations. Humiliation and enslavement are just means to this purpose, and the most radical means to this is to make him suffer; as there is no greater power over a person than to make him suffer, to force him to endure pains without resistance.
The fact that both forms of the authoritarian personality can be traced back to one final common point — the symbiotic tendency — demonstrates why one can find both the sadistic and masochistic component in so many authoritarian personalities. Usually, only the objects differ. We all have heard of the family tyrant, who treats his wife and children in an sadistic manner but when he faces his superior in the office he becomes the submissive employee. Or to name a better known example: Hitler. He was driven by the desire to rule all, the German nation and finally the world, to make them powerless objects of his will. And still, this same man was extremely dependent; dependent on the masses’ applause, on his advisers’ approval, and on what he called the higher power of nature, history, and fate. He employed pseudo-religious formulations to express these ideas when for example he said: “the heaven stands above the nation, as one can fortunately mislead man, but not heaven.” However, the power that impressed Hitler more than history, god, or fate was nature. Contrary to the tendency of the last four hundred years to dominate nature, Hitler insisted that one can and should dominate man but never nature. In him, we find this characteristic mixture of sadistic and masochistic tendencies of an authoritarian personality: the nature is the great power which we have to submit to, but the living being is there to be dominated by us.
However, we can hardly close the topic of the authoritarian personality without talking about a problem that is cause for a lot of misunderstandings. When recognition of authority is masochism and its practice sadism, does that mean that all authority contains something pathological? This question fails to make a very significant distinction between rational and irrational authority. Rational authority is the recognition of authority based on critical evaluation of competences. When a student recognizes the teacher’s authority to know more than him, then this a reasonable evaluation of his competence. The same is the case, when I as the passenger of a ship recognize the authority of the captain to make the right and necessary decisions if in danger. Rational authority is not based on excluding my reason and critique but rather assumes it as a prerequisite. This does not make me small and the authority great but allows authority to be superior where and as long it possesses competence.
Irrational authority is different. It is based on emotional submission of my person to another person: I believe in him being right, not because he is, objectively speaking, competent nor because I rationally recognize his competence. In the bonds to the irrational authority, there exists a masochistic submission by making myself small and the authority great. I have to make it great, so that I can — as one of its particles — can also become great. The rational authority tends to negate itself, because the more I understand the smaller the distance to the authority becomes. The irrational authority tends to deepen and to prolong itself. The longer and the more dependent I am the weaker I will become and the more I will need to cling to the irrational authority and submit.
All the great dictatorial movements of our times were (and are) based on irrational authority. Its driving forces were the submissive individual’s feeling of powerlessness, fear, and admiration for the “leader.” All the great and fruitful cultures are founded on the existence of rational authority: on people, who are able to muster the given functions intellectually and socially and have therefore no need to appeal to irrational desires.
But I do not want to close without emphasizing that the individual’s goal must be to become his own authority; i.e. to have a consciousness in moral issues, conviction in questions of intellect, and fidelity in emotional matters. However, the individual can only have such an inner authority if he has matured enough to understand the world with reason and love. The development of these characteristics is the basis for one’s own authority and therefore the basis for political democracy.
Summary and Commentary of the Above Passage
The controller and the controlled share an “inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent . . . to endure freedom.” Take Myron, the 50-something man-child who lives with his mother in Carson. Both mother and son fear freedom. Myron is the controlled; his mother is the controller. Neither are "living the dream."
Both controller and controlled are needy people; they cling to other.
They’re clingers.
Clingers don’t know boundaries. Myron and his mother don't understand boundaries. This lack of boundaries is discussed in a book, The Fantasy Bond. This is a book about people who grew up with no boundaries because their parents didn't teach them any. At work, in the realm of friendship, in the realm of romance, in the realm of consumerism, whatever the case may be, clingers cross boundaries and this crossing of boundaries is both self-destructive and burns bridges with other people. As a result, clingers are lonely people. And the lonelier they are, the more they cling, and the more they cling, the lonelier they become. Thus they agonize in a vicious cycle.
Clingers are unable to love and reason. Clingers are driven by unconscious impulses, the need to overcome their loneliness through grandiosity, braggadocio, conspicuous consumption, and other obnoxious demonstrations, which leave them lonelier than before.
Clingers fail to see the deep irony of their lives: They cling in the universal attempt to connect with the world and other people, but their lives are marked by failed connections.
Disconnected from the world, clingers live inside their head. As a result, they are solipsists.
The authoritarian personality, or controller, has not reached maturity. He cannot love and reason. We can infer that to be able to love and reason is Fromm’s definition of maturity.
Unable to love and connect with others, the authoritarian clings to others by forging symbiotic relationships.
Symbiotic relationships are a sick, dysfunctional, crippling mutual interdependence between controllers and controlled.
The fathers in the two stories "Cleanness" and "Caterpillars" are misanthropes posing as humanitarians. Unable to love and reason, they bully and control others. Disconnected from the world, the two fathers live in fear and hide their fear behind a veneer or facade of supreme authority.
The Opposite of the Authoritarian
The Healthy Personality Undergoes a Maturity Process Called Individuation
We are born with strong ties to our mothers and fathers, according to Fromm, and if our parents love us, they give us the security to leave them emotionally, to become separate from them and forge our own identity. For Fromm, we must leave our parents with the assurance they give us, create a separate identity, and connect with the world. This is Fromm's definition of individuation and for him individuation is synonymous with freedom.
Too many people never leave the womb, the security blanket of mother or the need to appease the demands of the father. Constantly seeking Mother's security and Father's approval, these people remain children and they never achieve individuation. Without a separate identity and lacking the freedom and security to connect with the outside world, these people often seek mechanisms of escape, false paths to power such as authoritarianism, the need to control others as compensation for a lack of individuation.
Reviewing Individuation
1. We must cut our ties with our parents eventually and experience freedom: Part of this freedom is the terror of separateness and aloneness.
2. The solution to our being alone is individuation, connecting with the world without our parents.
3. To fail to achieve individuation is to seek to escape the burden of our freedom.
4. A common escape from freedom is authoritarianism, the need to completeley control another or the need to submit completely to another.
1. No sympathy or empathy for the human race as the AP is absorbed by his ego, a compensation for the fear that results from being disconnected from the world.
2. The AP acts in control but he has never successfully left the womb, the mother; as a result, he bullies others who he makes submit to him and act as a mother figure.
3. The AP feeds off others in symbiotic relationships in which integrity and dignity of the individuals is abolished.
4. The AP cannot bear freedom because he is alone and fearful, having never successfully achieved individuation, the growing up process from leaving the womb.
5. The AP craves complete power to pacify his fear of disconnection but no amount of power is ever enough.
6. The AP is a sadist who craves complete control over the masochist, a willing submissive partner. This is a symbiotic relationship.
Write an introduction in which you provide an anecdote about an authoritarian you knew or once encountered.
Thesis
One of my students described her first grade teacher, a cruel woman, who delighted in insulting her students at every opportunity. One morning she had her students make "ties" out of construction paper and loop the ties around their necks so that the "tie" dangled before their torsos. Whenever the kids answered her questions incorrectly, she'd get out a huge pair of scissors and cut a tip of the "tie" while explaining, "These ties are your brains. Every time I cut off a piece, I'm showing you how small your brains are." The teacher was eventually fired from her job as her authoritarian personality proved to be a malignat force in the classroom.
Indeed, this malignant authoritian personality is demonstrated in James Lasdun's short story collection It's Beginning to Hurt. Roland's father in "Cleanness" and Luke's father Craig in "Caterpillars" embody a specific aspect of the Irrational Mind, the authoritarian personality, evidenced by ___________, _______________, ____________, and ______________.
Review:
The corruption of fatherly love in the two stories "Cleanness" and "Caterpillars" is evidenced by
do-gooder mentality disguising misanthropy
impeding individuation of family members to assert control over them
asserting perfectionist standards over others to maintain control
raging egotism that kills empathy and kindness for the human race
creating symbiotic relationships with family members to assert control over them
Review of Love Is a Demonic Form of Madness Theme in James Lasdun's short stories (Essay Option
Begin with a story of "an insane, demonic love ride" to introduce your topic:
About ten years ago my four friends were driving from their homes in Bakersfield to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers game. As they were riding over the steepest ascent of the Grapevine, they saw on the side of a road a smoldering, overheated vintage Volkswagen van. Standing outside of the van were four giddy, nubile, beautiful women, all Grateful Dead followers, “Dead Heads.” Even though their orange rusted van was near ruin, the sun-darkened hippies were still giddy from partying and they greeted their rescuers by waving their tie-dye bikini tops and spaghetti-strap tank tops in the air like glorious semaphores.
My four friends helped cool off the girls' van’s steaming engine and spent the next hour making the van road-ready. The women were grateful for my friends’ help and invited the young men to accompany them to Santa Barbara for its annual Summer Solstice Festival. These were attractive women, the men told me, earthy goddesses who, abjuring perfume, wafted the natural-producing odors of musk and desire.
But as much as my friends wanted to join these Priestesses of Unbridled Desire, they had already bought their Dodgers tickets and were determined to catch the game, so after profusely thanking the women for their kind offer, the four apologetic men rode off to Los Angeles, leaving the glowing, irrepressible pixies behind.
Years later my friends do not remember the Dodgers game, but they are still haunted by all the “what ifs?” that accompany their stupid refusal to go with the harvest maidens to the Solstice Festival. Whenever they tell the story, they argue with one another over who was at fault for insisting that they go to the Dodgers game. Their demeanors change during these accusations. They become beastly, red-faced, and seem to be foaming at the mouth. Even ten years later, the mere discussion of their lost opportunity with the smoldering temptresses reduces them to snarling, contentious animals. Bitter and resentful, they’re still possessed by all the unfulfilled possibilities that titillate their imagination and prevent them from sleeping in the deep of the night. They complain of insomnia, night flashes, half-conscious visions of splendorous encounters with those Bacchanalian nymphs. Chained to the memory of an unfulfilled opportunity, they can not live in the present and as such they treat their girlfriends, quite attractive in their own right, with flagrant disregard. After all, their hearts are still trapped in a time warp—that fateful day they encountered the van of sun-drenched sirens and repelled their invitation to ecstasy. My four friends cannot forgive themselves for their stupidity. They still hurl accusations toward one another. Each is to blame for declining the invitation and going to some stupid baseball game. In short, my friends are eternally miserable, still unable to live in the here and now because their minds and souls remain fixated on that hot summer day when tie-die bikini tops fluttered in the wind like the undulating gleam of a paradise now forever out of their reach.
In similar fashion, the characters in James Lasdun's short story collection It's Beginning to Hurt suffer from demonic, misguided passions that thwart their ability to love. In fact, the "love stories" in the collection are not really love stories at all. Rather they are displays of a demonic acute form of madness rife with ________________, ________________, _______________, and ______________________.
Classroom Activity
In the thesis above, fill in the mapping components.
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state? Consider, the Faustian Bargain, settling, the dream of eternal adolescence, and the chimera for a comparison essay that includes at least 3 stories, "The Half Sister," "The Natural Order," and "Peter Khan's Third Wife." Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Some helpful clues:
Characters feel helpless in a cycle of futility and this sense of helpless desperation makes them reach out for misguided, demonic love.
Characters are stagnant and not part of the natural human narrative of a beginning, middle, and end.
Characters are intoxicated by a false ideal of themselves and seek demonic means to reach their false ideal.
Option 4
Compare the theme of the chimera (idealized love) and its resulting futility as it occurs in the "Peter Kahn's Third Wife" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams." Observe that both stories follow the Faustian Bargain motif. Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources. Here's another link to "Winter Dreams."
Helpful Clues
Both characters lose sense of time.
Both characters live for a glorious future or long for a past ideal while squandering the present
Both characters idealize an unworthy person, either cipher or narcissist or both.
Both characters pursue their chimera dream with the intensity of a drug addict, severing relationships and alienating themselves from others along the way.
The Faustian Bargain or "deal with the devil" could be attributed to the following:
1. Trading our soul and independence of mind for Hakuna Matata, a delusion.
2. Compromising our integrity and intelligence for a velvet trap.
3. Giving up our personal dreams to conform to the family or tribe, resulting in self-abnegation and self-erasure.
Strategies for Writing an Essay Based on Today's Topic
The "love stories" in James Lasdun's collection are really not about love at all but are about the Irrational Mind evidenced by ____________, ______________, _________________, and _________________.
In "Peter Khan's Third Wife" Clare gradually descends deeper and deeper into madness with no self-awareness or Third Eye. She descends into madness. We can conclude that her story is not a love story; it's a story about madness.
What is a love story? A story about the Irrational Mind, Madness, and Insanity.
Rule Number for Writing a Love Story: It's Never About Love. It's About Eros.
It's a story, for sure, but it's never about love. Love is just the packaging and the illusion experienced by the character. We are so sick in our need to package ourselves, and others, as illusions of love that these illusions result in divorce lawsuits.
If not love, then was is a love story pointing to? There are psychological explanations for "falling in love."
1. Unrealistic expectations based on boredom, immaturity, and desperation.
2. Novelty, the craving for something new to eat before spitting it out and going on to some other new thing. This is the mindset of a child.
3. The chimera, a figment of our imagination in which we chase phantoms produced by our unconscious. These phantoms represent our hunger for an Absolute an Escape, a form of Transcendence.
4. We fall in love often to escape a sense of our mortality. Falling in love makes us feel that we've conquered death, that we've transcended death because we've found something eternal. All crappy love songs are about rising above the transitory, shallow world and connecting with something deeper and larger than ourselves and this connection makes us feel like we will never die. We can't emphasize this enough: The hunger for connection saves us but it can also kill us, depending on the manner of the connection. Remember: Connection is a way of overcoming death.
5. We cannot bear to live in boring temporal world; falling in love, we connect with a parallel world to the one we live in. This parallel world feels eternal and makes the temporal world we live in more bearable.
When you fall in love, life is no longer boring. Look what happens to jeans and chewing gum when you fall in love.
Rule Number Two for Writing a Love Story:
Love Always Ends in Madness, Misery, Or Death, Or All of the Above
Because the love story is rooted in the human condition of desperation and because a love story captures a state of ecstasy which by its very nature is short-lived, a love story always has a crash, in which the character falls to earth and either comes out wiser or more often than not is permanently psychologically damaged or even dies.
Rule Three for Writing a Love Story:
There must be intense feeling of love, a form of ecstasy, followed by the curdling of love, which is a fancy way of saying hate and this hate makes us question if we ever found love in the first place. The ecstasy of "love" creates unrealistic expectations (because this bliss cannot be sustained) and because the intensity of love (always touching) must fade and its fading results in resentment and awkwardness.
Rule Four for Writing a Love Story:
We become convinced of our "love experience" to the point of being possessed with moral rectitude and we have contempt for the rest of the world for its incapacity to understand our rarified emotion. Additionally, we become defensive and hostile to anyone who questions the authenticity and superiority of our "love experience." As a result, we pity and condenscend to the world for its inability to taste our paradise. As such we become, by virture of falling in love, borish, pompous, insufferable asses. Happily, or sadly, depending on how we look at it, our "love" vanishes and we are sent back to Planet Earth and join misery with the rest of the human race.
Rule Five for Writing a Love Story:
We always give everything of ourselves for this "love," sacrificing everything "to make it work," but in the end this "love" devours us while giving us nothing in return. As a result, we exit our "love experience" feeling used, abused, exploited and the aftertaste of such an experience is intense bitterness, perhaps even suicide. Often this motif is referred to as the "Vampire Theory of Love" in which one subject gets bigger and stronger while the other gets smaller and weaker.
Rule Six for Writing a Love Story:
Love in a story is never about connection with reality; it is always about retreating into the solipsistic fantasies of self; therefore, a love story is always about a form of insanity. See, for example, "Peter Khan's Third Wife."
Rule Seven for Writing a Love Story
Love in a story is always about the confusion of noble emotions for what "love" really is, capricious, fickle, impulsive behavior. A love story is not about the pursuit of love; it is about the dalliance, the caprice, the fling and aggrandizing something so base and selfish with words like "love."
Rule Eight for Writing a Love Story
Love in a story is often about the sublimation (re-direction) of erotic desire manifest in melancholia, depression, and other poignant emotions associated with the spiritual world. See "The Half Sister." Or see the famous James Joyce short story, "Araby." Unfulfilled erotic love finds expression in acute sadness and defeat.
Rule Nine for Writing a Love Story
The subject is never interested in love; the subject is both bored and frustrated with his low place in life so he "falls in love" to create drama, a distraction from his horrible life. As soon as he no longer feels frustrated, he abandons his love project even if it means breaking the other person's heart. Why? Because a love story at its heart is about selfishness. If love is born from selfishness, fear, and desperation, then it must end badly.
Rule Ten for Writing a Love Story
It must never be about the compatibility of the sexes. It must be about their essential incompatibility. As George Carlin said, "In relationships, women disover that men are stupid and men discover that women are crazy and the reason woman are crazy is because men are stupid."
“Peter Kahn’s Third Wife” 185
What romantic yet sobering thought informs the story? That romantic love overtakes us, defies logic, survives great obstacles, grows from desperate circumstances, and in many ways is unforgiving and self-destructive.
What ambiguity haunts us regarding Clare Keillor’s interactions with Peter Khan? Is the magic real, self-induced? Is Clare chasing a chimera? Is her life wasting away like the man Dexter in “Winter Dreams”? See 186 bottom.
On the bottom of page 186, we see a drugged, opium-like state in which Clare is “glazed off from the everyday world.” It appears that her life is enduring the intervals between one glazed off moment and the next. Is this true of all of us? We wait for grand moments that never come. She models diamonds to be the image of perfection for others when her real life is a huge mess. There is our irony. She finds comfort in her job where she escapes into chimera world.
With love, do we really deal with love or do we live inside our head, lost in a world of solipsism? Explain in the context of the story. Peter Khan seems oblivious to Clare, at least during his first two wives. Her "affair" is in her head.
Could we argue that it should be obvious to Clare that Khan is not worthy of her obsessive love? Explain. Could Clare’s abusive husband impair her judgment? Explain.
There are two worlds in this story: the glassed-in sphere on page 189 and the real world. What is the relationship between these two worlds and Clare?
Why is Clare satisfied to live in a hateful relationship with Neil? See page 192. Perhaps her hate “readies” her for the “love” she must have with Peter Khan, an illusion.
Does Clare really see Khan as a cipher on page 192?
Why does Clare lie to Neil by telling him she had an affair with Khan?
How does the story end?
Introduction:
Write a personal story about someone you know (could be you) in which the narrative is not about love but about madness.
Many years ago my friends were driving from their homes in Bakersfield to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers game. As they were riding over the steepest ascent of the Grapevine, they saw on the side of a road a smoldering, overheated vintage Volkswagen van. Standing outside of the van were four giddy, nubile, beautiful women, all Grateful Dead followers, “Dead Heads.”
Even though their orange rusted van was near ruin, the sun-darkened hippies were still giddy from a Grateful Dead concert and they greeted their rescuers by waving their tie-dye bikini tops and spaghetti-strap tank tops in the air like glorious semaphores. My three mechanically-adroit friends helped cool off their van’s steaming engine and spent the next hour making the van road-ready. The women invited the young men to accompany them to Santa Barbara for its annual Summer Solstice Festival. These were attractive women, the men told me, earthy women who, abjuring perfume, wafted the natural-producing odors of musk and desire.
But my friends had already bought their Dodgers tickets and were determined to catch the game, so after profusely thanking the women for their kind offer, the three apologetic men rode off to Los Angeles, leaving the glowing, irrepressible pixies behind.
Years later my friends do not remember the Dodgers game, but they are still haunted by all the “what ifs?” that accompany their stupid refusal to go with the harvest maidens to the Solstice Festival. Whenever they tell the story, they argue with one another over who was at fault for insisting that they go to the Dodgers game. Their demeanors change during these accusations. They become beastly, red-faced, and seem to be foaming at the mouth.
Even ten years later, the mere discussion of their lost opportunity with the hippy goddesses reduces them to snarling, contentious animals. Bitter and resentful, they’re still possessed by all the unfulfilled possibilities that titillate their imagination and prevent them from sleeping in the deep of the night. They complain of insomnia, night flashes, half-conscious visions of splendorous encounters with those Bacchanalian nymphs.
Chained to the memory of an unfulfilled opportunity, they can not live in the present and as such they treat their girlfriends, quite attractive in their own right, with flagrant disregard. After all, their hearts are still trapped in a time warp—that fateful day they encountered the van of sun-drenched sirens and repelled their invitation to ecstasy.
My three friends cannot forgive themselves for their stupidity. They still hurl accusations toward one another. Each is to blame for declining the invitation and going to some stupid baseball game. In short, my three friends are eternally miserable, still unable to live in the here and now because their minds and souls remain fixated on that hot summer day when tie-die bikini tops fluttered in the wind like the undulating gleam of a paradise now forever out of their reach.
Being fixated on the past is my friends' destructive chimera, which has over-taken them and has made them lose all contact with reality. Indeed, we see a similar destructive chimeric power in the short stories "Peter Kahn's Third Wife" and "Winter Dreams," which show the chimera's deleterious effects, including __________________, _______________, ______________, and _________________.
James Lasdun, “It’s Beginning to Hurt” (209)
One. “Strange, to be lying to her once again.”
The word “strange” is disingenuous since the definition of strange in this context is an unusual occurance, but the story evidences a husband who is a pathological liar. He tells lies as a matter of course. He is wrapped up in lies. We see a marriage in a condition of rupture. The story’s title in this context seems like an ironic understatement.
We read the husband is “thinking about the ceremony he just attended.” Is he rehearsing his lie for his wife? In fact, he did go to a funeral. The lie surrounds the circumstances behind the funeral regarding a woman named Marie.
Two. What chimera informs the husband’s affair with Marie?
They have their affairs in different houses—homes that are listed for sale in the real estate market—and each home is like being transported “into a different world.” This chimera creates an ecstasy, which becomes the husband’s addiction. And he must hide his addiction to his wife with an elaborate labyrinth of lies.
Three. What is the metaphor of the rotting salmon hidden in a basement drawer among beetle and rat traps?
The salmon, a metaphor of fertility and spawning, is dead and rotten. It is the underbelly of what should be a flourishing entity—marriage. Instead, the marriage is a cadaver reeking of stench and death.
McMahon Grammar Exercises: Pronoun Errors
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hold of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
“Oh, Death” 137
How does the story set up the conflict between edenic and secular or temporal time? See 139. “Just somewhere to go . . . “ A man cave. See 140.
What can we glean about Faye in the story’s first few pages?
How is Faye destroying Rick’s life on page 138? The story is about the motif of consummation unto death.
What is the main plot development on page 146?
Explain the narrator’s ambiguity toward Faye on page 148.
What elicits our sympathy toward Faye on pages 149 and 150?
“Lime Pickle” (197)
What is the metaphor of eating Indian food for the first time? The senses are heightened and this is one we’re vulnerable to things like “love” or its illusion.
What is the story’s purpose of juxtaposing the narrator and Anna on one hand and Anna’s father Roland Hamilton and Lesley on the other? The fallibility of love or its volatile, unstable nature becomes apparent. We are especially contemplating love as an indulgence, its sensual manifestation, Eros. See 200.
What evidences Roland’s selfishness? He destroys his daughter’s birthday by divulging an affair, putting it in her face and saying to “bottle things up is bad for digestion.”
What is Roland’s fate? See 206.
How does the story end?
McMahon's Approach to Writing a Thesis Based on Previous Lecture
When we're technically right about something, we often become blind to the related areas in which we're profoundly wrong, thereby maximizing our stupidity and making us submit to the Irrational Mind. In James Lasdun's masterful collection, three stories bear witness to this principle, "The Half Sister," "The Incalculable Life Gesture," and "The Natural Order."
In groups of 2 or 3, explain how the principle applies to the 3 stories.
"Oh, Death," "Peter Khan's Third Wife," and "Lime Pickle" are all love stories. The characters receive epiphanies about the truth behind their love or if they don't receive epiphanies at all, we the readers receive them from a careful reading of the story.
The existential vacuum and ennui (a sense of stagnation and boredom) push us toward a moral crisis or struggle in many ways as we must confront:
self-delusion: our infinite capacity to fool ourselves into believing in fantasies or in our ability to deny reality. (football comeback)
feeling worthless and irrelevant (like a cog in the machine; man comes home and sits in his car drinking while waiting to go inside the house; when he does, everyone in his family ignores him)
The Causes of Self-Delusion (taking us away from metacognition)
1. The unconscious: forces we cannot see that spring from unknown needs and desires and fears. Often these desires and fears project into delusions such as a compulsion to collect brief cases (organization from chaos) or search for the perfect bed (search for lost mother).
Sometimes we suffer from unconscious bias such as recently reported about science professors in their bias against female science majors.
2. Vanity is another cause of our self-delusions based on its very definition: excessive and exaggerated esteem and estimation of our powers, skills, talents, "good looks," etc.
3. Chimera, as we said in the first lesson, is a mirage that we chase because we are in love with the chase, but not the acquisition. We are too often in love with an idea about life but not life itself. Chimeras are always unconsious manifestations. The most common chimera is the "velvet trap"; it appears like paradise from the outside but offers hell within.
Another form of the Velvet Trap is the myth of Hakuna Matata, the land of no worries.
Often a chimera is a symbol of our broken dreams. For example, in the short story "The Half Sister" the lonely Charmian is the Priestess of Broken Dreams, a chimera who draws Martin into her lonely world where his guitar playing will be subsidized by Charmian's rich father.
HomeTown Buffet is a place of Broken Dreams, the dream of getting full. It is a feeding hut where metacognition doesn't exist. All the blood is out of the brain and in the belly.
Patrick Malloy's or some other night club is the Dream of Connection and Eros. Let's put it this way: Do good things happen to people who are in bars drinking at 3 A.M.?
And yet the people at HomeTown Buffet and Patrick Malloy's are emtpy and depressed.
When we pursue the chimera, we commit a Faustian Bargain, a deal with the devil, that demands every fiber of our being but gives little.
4. Lust or concupiscence makes people use other people but the user wants to feel good about himself so he rationalizes his behavior.
5. Stewart from "The Natural Order" represents the chimera of Eternal Youth, Unlimited Possibilities, and Hedonistic Paradise.
Sample Thesis Statements
James Lasdun's stories show us that the tragedy of the Faustian Bargain is that once we are seduced by a false paradise, we submit our will to that sacrifice resulting in _____________, ____________, _______________, and _______________.
Ennui or the existential vacuum makes us vulnerable to the Faustian Bargain in four ways, not the least of which is ____________, _______________, _____________, and ________________.
The characters in Lasdun's short story collection are woefully lacking in free will evidenced by ________________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
“The Natural Order” Lexicon
One. Devil Spreads Seeds of Discontent. See page 24 in which Stewart says a wedding ring announces that a person is someone else's property. Stewert stirs the pang of envy and regret in Abel's heart.
On page 28 we see that Abel feels the need to justify his oppressive existence, that being a married man, a parent, was to choose a "freakish and bizarre approach to life."
He now wondered, on page 29, if his married life was that of a deliberate choice, a good thing, or "passive acquiesence," a bad thing.
Feeling inferior, he begans to dress up and groom, emulating Stewart and we wonder if all the grooming and fashion from the advertising world is to stimulate our Dionysian lusts and impulses.
Abel will wear a crimson disco shirt, which I would call meretricious, cheap and garish in its allure.
Two. Ubridled, Radical Individualism and Masculinity, an untamed beast who is possessed with a "ceaseless and exclusive preoccupation with sex" (25).
Stewart embodies the Dionysian spirit as we read on page 31: "under the man's crassness a fine, bright flame seemed to burn in him. One was almost physically aware of it: a steady incandescence of sexual interest in the world, the lively brightness of which was its own irrefutable argument."
In contrast, Abel feels disabled, like his life is "domestic contentment," not present with joy but absent of pain (31).
See the Satyr's Tool Kit on page 30: jars, tubes, bottles, vials, oils, lotions, etc. (my favorite passage)
At the story's end, when Abel crosses the line and commits adultery, he is full of "unfamiliar savage jubiliation," part of the Dionysian spirit.
In a marriage based on love, not dynasty, as we read in Tim Parks' essay "Adultery," marriage is afflicted with the "collision of sacred and profance, the scenes of domestic bliss undermined by evident allusions to more disturbing emotions: serpents and harpies warning rapturous newly-weds of obscure calamaties to come."
In other words, the marriage of dynasty, business, family, is an older, stronger form of marriage. Marriage of love is a newer type that is more vulnerable to the need for passion and ecstasy.
This hunger for ecstasy comes from the god Dionysus who "loosens and unties," creating chaos. "Dionysus is the river," we read in Parks' essay, "we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away; the one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant." In other words, passion is a tsunami that destroys the nest we've spent years building.
Four. Lies of omission: On page 33, Stewart flirts with a woman and tells her he lives in Connecticut, a truth, but doesn't tell her he's a husband and a father.
Five. Moral Inversion: to justify wrong behavior by turning the tables, as it were. Look on page 36 where Abel says to not have an affair, to not betray his wife would be a sin because he would be wasting a golden opportunity. Life doesn't offer many incredible moments to have great sex with another human being; what a waste to squander such an opportunity, he tells himself. He's BSing himself now.
Six. Like Martin from "The Half Sister," we see that Abel suffers from squandered dreams, lowered expectations, recurring futility, self-pity, and self-loathing (failed playwright) and wants to medicate himself with something: a sexual affair perhaps. See page 37.
Seven. The One-Armed Man. He represents hyper-masculinity (war prisoner and sniper who had his trigger finger smashed and we see him chopping goat; there must be a rich metaphor in there somewhere) on one hand and crippled limitations on the other. Is he an image of Stewart the Satyr?
Eight. Slippery Slope and the Moral Abyss. On page 47 we read "it was impossible to get a sense of the scale of what he was confronting," which is a life of denial, lies, of living an outright, perpetual lie. This is the gorge or the abyss. This is nihilism, the death of meaning.
Stewart, who is hostile to marriage, represents what chimera to Abel? The chimera of unlimited opportunities and possibilities (more tech, more misery); all windows are open (ironically when you try to get through all the windows you fail at passing all of them). In fact, Stewart is a man-child beholden to concupiscence, desires that get worse when we try to feed them.
Most guys are familiar with a Stewart type. We both hate and admire the Stewarts of the world. Women despise them and justifiably so, for should we not hate that which can make us helpless and destroy us? Explain men’s ambivalence toward the Stewart. We want to be like him; at the same time, we know he’s evil and selfish, what we might call a sexual conquistador. We'd never want the Stewarts of the world to date our daughters, our sisters, and our mothers. See page 26. Abel is in shock and anger at Stewart's blunt arrogance and need to show off about his conquests, but he envies Stewart at the same time.
On page 29, we see Abel go down the slippery slope of self-delusion. Explain. We begin by watching Abel emulate Stewart’s dress code, that of a lascivious satyr. Abel claims to reject Stewart’s philandering while wanting to salvage Stewart’s good qualities, but in reality Abel is becoming the very image of the man he despises. And that is the beginning of descending into the abyss. Evil knows no compromise. Once we start down that road . . . In fact, by page 31, we see that Abel admires the flame of robust vitality that roils beneath Stewart’s exterior. He is a man of vitality who embraces life; indeed, Stewart has an appetite for life and lives life fully. He has now been idealized, put on a pedestal. Putting undeserving creatures on a pedestal is very dangerous and self-destructive.
On page 31, what doubt haunts Abel about his marriage? That domestic life was a way of hiding from life, from being a member of the walking dead, a fake life. Abel is a charlatan and an impostor, a sort of eunuch. Stewart in contrast is an adventurous Billy Goat. In Abel’s newfound perverted “wisdom,” having affairs is a sign of moral superiority evidencing a man overflowing with life. Living in a marriage is being a slave inside a prison, a castrated man pretending to be happy. He begins to believe in his own B.S. Very dangerous.
Does Abel cheat on his wife in a state of frenzied intoxication or calm acceptance? Explain. See page 35 top. Worse, than cheating on his wife, he realizes he no longer loves her. Now this happens BEFORE he cheats on her. Abel lives in two parallel universes: The universe he really lives in and the universe he WANTS to live in. That is his chimera.
On page 46, how does the scene evidence that Abel’s cheating temptations are more about vanity than lust?
Explain the metaphor of wilderness and dizzying heights in the story? They are about the loss of a moral foundation and the vertigo and self-loss that results.
Option 2
Analyze the dream of eternal adolescence and its corruption of the soul by comparing this dream to "The Natural Order" or "The Half Sister" and Joseph Epstein's essay "Perpetual Adolescence." Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Some Major Comparison Points
Fashion choices rebel against conformity and age: men choose to dress like teenagers as a sign that they're in denial of their age.
Peter Pan Syndrome: fighting life's natural narrative, what Aristotle called a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Jung's Four Stages of Life Vs. Teenage Stagnation
Athlete
Warrior
Statesperson
Spirit
Teenage stagnation glorified by novels (Catcher in the Rye), music, movies (Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Judd Apatow), sports, cult of self-esteem.
We've become a culture of narcissism under the veil of "staying young."
Concupiscence, infantile desire: Stewart never grows out of the stage (a toddler's stage); Abel regresses to it.
There are toddler foods in America: Hot Pockets, pizza, HomeTown Buffet
What suggests that “free love,” that is infidelity, is just a tiresome, humiliating rigmarole? See page 166. June has to convalesce from her Bacchanalia and retreat into the outskirts.
What stagnation and ennui does June suffer from on page 166?
How does Mrs. Dolfuss represent Apollonian forces warring with Dionysian forces? Her name sounds like “dull “ and “fuss.” Two extremes in the story. Apollonian forces refer to control, restraint, and routine. Dionysian forces refer to chaos, anarchy, self-abandonment, and self-indulgence.
In what ways is Paul Crawford a devil? See the damage done to June on page 178 in which she is shunned by Mrs. Crawford and Mrs. Dolfuss.
How is Paul’s son, Martin, connected to music and how does this connection affect June? See 171.
Explain June’s revenge plot. Do you agree with it? Explain.
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state?
By "demonic" I mean several things:
They go mad.
They become irrational.
They become obsessed.
They lose contact with reality.
They become blind to their own self-destruction.
They lose sight of their meaningful connections and as a result they lose those connections.
They chase a pipe dream or a chimera and obliterate themselves in the process.
They become bitter at their wasted life and realize they've squandered their existence on a "crap dream." They're overcome, as a result, with self-hatred and remorse.
Consider, their madness as the result of the Faustian Bargain, settling, the dream of eternal adolescence, and the chimera for a comparison essay that includes at least 3 stories, "The Half Sister," "The Natural Order," and "Peter Khan's Third Wife." Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Two
Analyze the dream of eternal adolescence and its corruption of the soul by comparing this dream to "An Anxious Man," "The Natural Order" or "The Half Sister" and Joseph Epstein's essay "Perpetual Adolescence."
By perpetual adolescence, we meaning the following:
Chasing Eros instead of maturing.
Chasing the ego's needs instead of maturing.
Adulating or worshipping the culture of youth while shunning wisdom.
Chasing the compulsivity of youth and never learning the self-control of maturity.
Chasing the hedonism of youth instead of finding connection and meaning.
Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Three
Analyze the corruption of fatherly love in "Cleanness" or "Caterpillars" (or both) with Erich Fromm's notion of the Authoritarian Personality. Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Four
Compare the theme of the chimera (idealized love) and its resulting futility as it occurs in the "Peter Kahn's Third Wife" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams." Observe that both stories follow the Faustian Bargain motif. Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources. Here's another link to "Winter Dreams."
Option Five
In a 1,000-word essay, compare the Faustian Bargain in "The Half Sister" to the H.G. Wells short story, "The Country of the Blind."
“The Half Sister” (page 64)
Be sure your Works Cited page has no fewer than 2 sources.
Option Six
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks.
Option Seven
Analyze at least two stories as examples of the "emotional car crash" the characters have become because they either have no metacognition or the misapplication of metacognition.
Lesson on Finding and Evaluating Sources for Your Research Paper (adapted from Practical Argument, Second Edition)
When you use sources for a research paper, the sources supplement your ideas; however, it should be clear the sources do not take over the writing of your essay. Your voice, your knowledge, your deep thinking about the issue are all on center stage of your essay.
Some people say a research paper is 80 percent your words and another 20 percent of quotations, paraphrases, and summary from your research sources. That sounds about right.
Your college library has a Website, containing its online catalog, electronic databases, and reference works.
Evaluating Sources
You must assess six things to determine if a source is worthy of being used for your research paper.
The author’s objectivity or fairness (author is not biased)
The author’s credibility (peer reviewed, read by experts)
The source’s relevance
The source’s currency (source is up-to-date)
The source’s comprehensiveness (source has sufficient depth)
The author’s authority (author’s credentials and experience render him or her an expert in the field)
Warning Signs of a Poor Online Source
Site has advertising
Some company or other sponsors site
A political organization or special interest group sponsors the site.
The site has many links to other biased sites.
Summarizing Sources
“A summary restates the main idea of a passage in concise terms” (314).
A typical summary is one or two sentences.
A summary does not contain your opinions or analysis.
Paraphrasing Sources
A paraphrase, which is longer than a summary, contains more details and examples. Sometimes you need to be more specific than a summary to make sure your reader understands you.
A paraphrase does not include your opinions or analysis.
Quoting Sources
Quoting sources means you are quoting exactly what you are referring to in the text with no modifications, which might twist the author’s meaning.
You should avoid long quotations as much as possible.
Quote only when necessary. Rely on summary and paraphrase before resorting to direct quotes.
A good time to use a specific quote is when it’s an opposing point that you want to refute.
According to Jeff McMahon, the grading rubric in English classes is used in such a way by instructors that soon there will be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” professor. They’ll all be the same.
Jeff McMahon notes that the grading rubric in English classes is used in such a way by instructors that soon there will be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” professor. They’ll all be the same.
The grading rubric in English classes is used in such a way by instructors, Jeff McMahon observes, that soon there will be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” professor.
The grading rubric in English classes is used in such a way by instructors that soon there will be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” professor, Jeff McMahon points out.
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state?
By "demonic" I mean several things:
They go mad.
They become irrational.
They become obsessed.
They lose contact with reality.
They become blind to their own self-destruction.
They lose sight of their meaningful connections and as a result they lose those connections.
They chase a pipe dream or a chimera and obliterate themselves in the process.
They become bitter at their wasted life and realize they've squandered their existence on a "crap dream." They're overcome, as a result, with self-hatred and remorse.
Consider, their madness as the result of the Faustian Bargain, settling, the dream of eternal adolescence, and the chimera for a comparison essay that includes at least 3 stories, "The Half Sister," "The Natural Order," and "Peter Khan's Third Wife." Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Two
Analyze the dream of eternal adolescence and its corruption of the soul by comparing this dream to "The Natural Order" or "The Half Sister" and Joseph Epstein's essay "Perpetual Adolescence."
By perpetual adolescence, we meaning the following:
Chasing Eros instead of maturing.
Chasing the ego's needs instead of maturing.
Adulating or worshipping the culture of youth while shunning wisdom.
Chasing the compulsivity of youth and never learning the self-control of maturity.
Chasing the hedonism of youth instead of finding connection and meaning.
Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Three
Analyze the corruption of fatherly love in "Cleanness" or "Caterpillars" (or both) with Erich Fromm's notion of the Authoritarian Personality. Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Four
Compare the theme of the chimera (idealized love) and its resulting futility as it occurs in the "Peter Kahn's Third Wife" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams." Observe that both stories follow the Faustian Bargain motif. Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources. Here's another link to "Winter Dreams."
Option Five
In a 1,000-word essay, compare the Faustian Bargain in "The Half Sister" to the H.G. Wells short story, "The Country of the Blind."
“The Half Sister” (page 64)
Be sure your Works Cited page has no fewer than 2 sources.
Option Six
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks.
Option Seven
Analyze at least two stories as examples of the "emotional car crash" the characters have become because they either have no metacognition or the misapplication of metacognition.
Lexicon
One. Faustian Bargain, AKA Deal with the Devil: You're enticed to take a "free meal" when in fact it's not free; you lose your soul, your autonomy, your freedom, and become a slave to what appears to be the "easy life." As a slave, you live in the Land of Death.
In any Faustian Bargain, you give away more than you get in return. This is true of any addictionand is evident in this Ted Talk presentation about dopamine response in boys who've grown up with Internet addiction.
Martin not only wants a "free lunch," he's lost, a man with crushed confidence in his dreams and ambitions. This makes him vulnerable.
The father John Knowles sizes up Martin as easy prey on page 66. The sad sad daughter Charmian represents the malaise of settling for less than we deserve because of our lowered expectations.
Charmian's metaphor as death is further explored on page 69 in which we see she tends a garden: "Everything from potting azaleas to digging bloody great ditches with a bulldozer," as the father says, alludes to a graveyard churning up corpses.
To further Charmian's image as death we see on page 69 that she has a "dead eye" with "light out in its gray iris." Likewise, the light is gone from Martin with his curdled ambitions.
We see that Charmian the half sister keeps looking at Martin with "anguished sympathy" suggesting they are two peas on a pod, two members of the living dead.
In a Faustian Bargain, or Deal with the Devil, we see the following:
1. willed blindness or willed ignorance is asserted in order to settle in what appears to be the Womb Where Struggle Ends.
2. loss of self-possession, autonomy, and independence in order to conform to the Evil Power's ways.
3. a sense of recurring futility, failed dreams and learned helplessness that compel the individual to succumb to "the Bargain." The mentality is "My life is crap. I've got nothing to lose, so I might as well take what I can get."
4. Overwhelming fear and lack of self-confidence that compels the person to seek "rescue" from a force outside his or her self. Of course, this "rescue" is really a trap that further imprisons the person inside his or her protracted period of ignorance, also known as the Jahiliyyah.
5. We are seduced by the bells and whistles of the Trickster who in the end is an ugly monster, a Charmian. We all must steer clear of our own Charmian who is coming to get us. Take a culture that is seduced by the bells and whistles of the Internet and prefers virtual relationships to real relationships. We see this happening with the young generation in Japan.
6. We are most vulnerable to the Faustian Bargain when we've "hit an all-time low," a breakup, a form of rejection, a form of humiliation, a form of failure, etc.
Two. The Myth of the Alpha Male Past on page 64 in which Martin remembers, perhaps with exaggeration, that he was playing the guitar at college while surrounded by "beautiful spellbound women."
Three. The danger of a post-humous existence in the aftermath of failed ambition discussed on page 65. When we compare our present day life, one of banality and boredom, with the myth of past glories, we become depressed and seek a Faustian Bargain.
Four. The garden, which is really Martin's graveyard, is a Trickster, the promise of his youthful dream of playing the guitar and enticing beautiful women. Now it's something else, something very, very ugly. See page 69.
The Trickster in fiction takes us through four levels of emotion over and over and over again: earthly, angelic, mystical, demonic.
Five. Poser or Pretender, someone who lacks substance and lives to create an effect, an impression. See Martin on page 71 who wants to impress a woman at a health food restaurant who he thinks might be impressed with his invitation to Covent Garden opera house. Martin doesn't have the confidence to be real, so he's a poser and we learn a terrible lesson. When we become posers, we become empty shells, also known as ciphers, people with no value or importance.
Six. Futility on page 74 in which we see the futility of Martin's existence; his failure to connect; rather, he has a series of superficial relationships that never take off the ground. The repitition is so god-awful he can already anticipate the futility of a relationship before it happens. "Then all the usual crap would start." (past lovers, fights, falling in and out of love, etc., etc., etc.) In other words, he knows his life is complete BS. Thus is the "pattern of his life" and there's no reason for him to fall in love.
Study Questions
What is the connection between the Knowles’ garden and Martin’s childhood dream of becoming a guitarist and how does this connection inform the story’s theme? We act in ways that affect our lives on a massive scale by being compelled by our unconscious. When we're ruled by our unconscious, we're showing a lack of metacognition.
What evidences stagnation, and even possible mediocrity, in Martin’s guitar career? See top of page 65. Also on page 67, Martin now sees the guitar as a way of “simply paying the rent.” In our misguided calculus we sometimes move from one trap into an even bigger trap. "Don't run from the fox into the mouth of the tiger."
What class differences are evident on page 65? The refinement of the family vs. the crudeness of Martin. Or at least this is how Martin sees it, giving him a sense of inferiority. Ascending to a higher social class is a common chimera rendered well in the original film The Heartbreak Kid (1972).
What garden metaphors, thorns included, suggest a curdled milk of false bounty in the story? See page 65. (sorry for mixing my metaphors) The garden is a sign of the Trickster.
How is John Knowles, like Morton Dowell from “An Anxious Man,” a devilish figure? See page 66. Both are Tricksters taking their victims from the earthly, to the angelic, and to the demonic. Clearly, John is eager to dump his daughter on someone. He feels no parental duty to her, only shame and inconvenience; therefore, he is a devil figure.
What do we make of Charmian based on her description as a strange woman in a shapeless brown dress? Is she the Priestess of Broken Dreams, Mediocrity, Grotesque Complacency, and the Easy Life (which is never easy)? Are we all tempted by some abhorrent variation of a Charmian, some deformed chimera? See page 67 and 68. One of her gray eyes is dead with no light in it. Clearly her “landscaping business” is a ruse; she has mental problems. The family will recluse her on a distant cottage property and need someone to tend to her. That someone is Martin.
What is the story’s theme? When we are stagnant, we descend into a condition of ennui (the soul becomes bored, apathetic, and lethargic) and when we suffer ennui, we are susceptible to the devil’s marketing and packaging of any variation of Charmian.
What is the most perverse aspect of the story? It appears that Martin is physically attracted to Mrs. Knowles and would marry Charmian, a repugnant woman, in order to be close the woman he truly desires.
When we read on page 70, that Martin feels uncomfortable under Charmian’s transparent gaze, what is suggested? That perhaps Martin sees a reflection of his own spiritual death? Could the penetrating eye be the God’s Eye judging and condemning him for his character deformities?
What evidences more character faults in Martin on page 71 and 74? He wants to go to opera to impress Rebecca. He is superficial, vain, and lacking in confidence. Then we see Martin’s fantasy of controlling the submissive Charmian. Then we see that Martin disciplined himself to not fall in love. Why? He’s afraid of losing control, of living life fully? But he’s controlled by his fears. He’s controlled by his need to control. He fails to see the irony.
What does the story’s conclusion say about free will? Martin is no dummy. He know he is being judged as a candidate to take on damaged goods. He is fighting not to go to the opera, the beginning of the end of his life.
Review Faustian Bargain
In a Faustian Bargain, or Deal with the Devil, we see the following:
1. willed blindness or willed ignorance is asserted in order to settle in what appears to be the Womb Where Struggle Ends.
2. loss of self-possession, autonomy, and independence in order to conform to the Evil Power's ways.
3. a sense of recurring futility, failed dreams and learned helplessness that compel the individual to succumb to "the Bargain." The mentality is "My life is crap. I've got nothing to lose, so I might as well take what I can get."
4. Overwhelming fear and lack of self-confidence that compels the person to seek "rescue" from a force outside his or her self. Of course, this "rescue" is really a trap that further imprisons the person inside his or her protracted period of ignorance, also known as the Jahiliyyah.
5. We are seduced by the bells and whistles of the Trickster who in the end is an ugly monster, a Charmian. We all must steer clear of our own Charmian who is coming to get us.
6. We are most vulnerable to the Faustian Bargain when we've "hit an all-time low," a breakup, a form of rejection, a form of humiliation, a form of failure, etc.
Lexicon of The Irrational Mind for "An Anxious Man"
Irrational Principle #1: Pascal's Principle of Trouble
The French philosopher Pascal wrote that all of man's problems stem from his inability to stay quietely in his room.
What he means to suggest is that man is restless and anxious and in this state of anxiety man seeks to quell his restlessness by doing things that dig him deeper and deeper into a hole.
In other words, man is the creator of his own problems. He is his own curse. This is the human condition. We are cursed with not only anxiety but its self-destructive consequences unless we can find a meaningful way to engage and nullify the anxiety: through meaning and connection with others.
Or put it this way: We're only happy when we make a mess of our lives. People dig a hole for themselves because climbing out of the hole is something for them to do and is preferred to boredom. Now that's irrational.
Notice Joseph's life has less and less meaning and connection with others as his stock market addition spikes. Therefore, he is caught in a vicious cycle.
Irrational Principle #2: Basing Our Happiness on Lady Fortuna
She is the Goddess of Good and Bad Luck. People who stake their happiness on her, like Joseph, are doomed to a life of misery and regret. They have no foundation to weather Lady Fortuna's tumultuous storms of highs and lows. They are subject to the whims and carpices of Lady Fortuna.They are subject to gambling addiction and the like.
Some people become addicted to the state of constant anxiety confusing anxiety with "excitement."
Therefore, these addicts must live in a state of heightened anxiety always looking over their shoulder for the "next shoe to drop." In other words, to worship Lady Fortuna, as Joseph does, means to be a slave to constant anxiety and fear, to never be able to let go and live life.
Irrational Principle #3: Acting Out in the Face of Ennui
Viktor Frankl writes that man's most basic and powerful drive is his need to find meaning. Without meaning, life is unbearable. We become haunted by a sense of emptiness and compels us to fill the void with trinkets, trivialities, BS, lies, and other malignancies that spread inside our souls like a cancer devouring us mercilessly.
Even when we find some pleasure that makes us feel "happy," we acclimate to that pleasure (hedonic treadmill) become numb to that pleasure and find ourselves bored and compelled to spike the pleasure: But we can never heighten the pleasure to match our ever-growing acclimation and numbness to it. Therefore, without meaning we are fated to ennui.
Irrational Principle #4: All Or Nothingness Fallacy
In many places throughout the world, including the United States, we are afflicted with the fallacy that we either achieve a high state of wealth and fame or our lives are afflictions worthy of shame, scorn and self-loathing. There is no in-between. Joseph gambles his family's money on the stock market because he believes it's the best way to reach a higher economic status that will bring him and his family dignity and high esteem. However, the opposite is true. His belief in the All Or Nothingness fallacy makes him a groveling, fearful soul with no dignity, courage, integrity, or meaningful human connection.
Irrational Principle #5: Lacking Self-Possession or The Third Eye
Those who are not self-possessed are fated to a life of the irrational. To be self-possessed means to be grounded. To be grounded means that we have the Third Eye (self-awareness and metacognition), self-control, humility to learn from our mistakes, and developing strategies as solutions to problems rather than wallowing in the drama of our problems.
All of the qualities come from a moral sense, so that when we say we are grounded we mean we have a moral center that directs our thoughts and actions.
Joseph is a cursed man because he has no self-possession, but is rather a slave to Lady Fortuna, ennui, and the All Or Nothingness Fallacy.
Irrational Principle #6: Lacking Empathy Pushes Us into the World of the Irrational
Recent studies show that the more wealthy we become, the greater our sense of entitlement and entitlment is the enemy of empathy: the ability to connect, feel, and sympathize with others.
When we don't grow into empathy, we do not grow into mature adults. Instead, we retreat, like Joseph, into solipsism, which is the ultimate form of self-centeredness and narcissism, a form of insanity. One of insanity's key components is that we cannot connect with others and the real world; rather we "live inside our head."
Irrational Principle #7: The Trickster Pushes Us into the Abyss of the Irrational
The Trickster is a well-known literary character who manifests as Morton Dowell in the story. The Trickster takes us from the earthly realm, to the angelic, to the mystical; then he crashes us into the demonic. Just when we're about to give up on the Trickster, he lifts us again, for a brief time, before pushing us off a cliff. We allow the Trickster to do this to us over and over and over.
One of the most common Tricksters is the chimera. The chimera is evident in the story "The Half Sister."What do we make of Charmian based on her description as a strange woman in a shapeless brown dress? Is she the Priestess of Broken Dreams, Mediocrity, Grotesque Complacency, and the Easy Life (which is never easy)? Are we all tempted by some abhorrent variation of a Charmian, some deformed chimera? See page 67 and 68. One of her gray eyes is dead with no light in it. Clearly her “landscaping business” is a ruse; she has mental problems. The family will recluse her on a distant cottage property and need someone to tend to her. That someone is Martin.
Martin is vulnerable to this trap or chimera because he is stagnant. When we are stagnant, we descend into a condition of ennui (the soul becomes bored, apathetic, and lethargic) and when we suffer ennui, we are susceptible to the devil’s marketing and packaging of any variation of Charmian.
When we read on page 70, that Martin feels uncomfortable under Charmian’s transparent gaze, what is suggested? That perhaps Martin sees a reflection of his own spiritual death? Could the penetrating eye be the God’s Eye judging and condemning him for his character deformities?
Irrational Principle #8: Adrenaline World Vs. Civilian World
These two worlds clash in the story "An Anxious Man." The former world of adrenaline eats the latter. In choosing the former, we embrace misery, panic, and anxiety because we prefer drama and its power to distract us from death and vapidity. See page 7 and 8. Does it not seem Joseph knows he’s made a deal with the devil yet can do nothing to stop himself? What does this say about free will? Once we get the wheels in motion, we can accelerate toward our demise with no opportunity to veer away from the danger.
Inevitable Stock Market Fatigue in "An Anxious Man"
See page 8. You never invest enough; you never sell quickly enough; you sell too soon; your life is one of second-guessing yourself and regret and anger. You become bitter but you keep coming back for more and more of the stuff that poisons you.The irony is that this despair becomes an addiction.
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.
Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.
Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.
Lesson on Logic and Logical Fallacies (adapted from Chapter 5 of Practical Argument, Second Edition)
Logic comes from the Greek word logos, meaning, word, thought, principle, or reason. Logic is concerned with the principles of correct reasoning.
Deductive reasoning starts with general premises and ends in specific conclusions. This process is expressed in a syllogism: major premise, minor premise, and conclusion.
Major Premise: All bald men should wear extra sunscreen on their bald head.
Minor Premise: Mr. X is a bald man.
Conclusion: Therefore, Mr. X should apply extra sunscreen.
A sound syllogism, one that is valid and true, must follow logically from the facts and be based on premises that are based on facts.
Major Premise: All state universities must accommodate disabled students.
Minor Premise: UCLA is a state university.
Conclusion: Therefore, UCLA must accommodate disabled students.
A syllogism can be valid without being true as we see in this example from Robert Cormier’s novel The Chocolate War:
Bailey earns straight A’s.
Straight A’s are a sign of perfection.
But only God is perfect.
Can Bailey be God? Of course not.
Therefore, Bailey is a cheater and a liar.
In the above example it’s not true that the perfection of God is equivalent to the perfection of a straight-A student (faulty comparison, a logical fallacy). So while the syllogism is valid, following logically from one point to the next, it’s based on a deception or a falsehood; therefore, it is not true.
Syllogism with an Illogical Middle Term Is Invalid
Flawed logic occurs when the middle term has the same term in the major and minor premise but not in the conclusion.
Major Premise: All dogs are mammals.
Minor Premise: Some mammals are porpoises.
Conclusion: Therefore, some porpoises are dogs.
Syllogism with a Key Term Whose Meaning Shifts Cannot be Valid
Major Premise: Only man is capable of analytical reasoning.
Minor Premise: Anna is not a man.
Conclusion: Therefore, Anna is not capable of analytical reasoning.
The key term shift is “man,” which refers to “mankind,” not the male gender.
Syllogism with a Negative Premise
If either premise in a syllogism is negative, then the conclusion must also be negative. The following syllogism is not valid:
Major Premise: Only the Toyota Prius can go in the fast-track lane.
Minor Premise: The BMW 4 series is not a Toyota Prius.
Conclusion: Therefore, the BMW can drive in the fast-track lane.
If both premises are negative, the syllogism cannot have a valid conclusion:
Major Premise: The Toyota Prius cannot be denied entrance into the fast-track lane.
Minor Premise: The BMW 4 series is not a Toyota Prius.
Conclusion: Therefore, the BMW cannot be denied entrance into the fast-track lane.
Enthymemes
An enthymeme is a syllogism with one or two parts of its argument—usually, the major premise—missing.
Robert has lied, so he cannot be trusted.
We’re missing the major premise:
Major Premise: People who lie cannot be trusted.
Minor Premise: Robert has lied.
Conclusion: Therefore, Robert cannot be trusted.
When writers or speakers use enthymemes, they are sometimes trying to hide the flaw of the first premise:
Major Premise: All countries governed by dictators should be invaded.
Minor Premise: North Korea is a country governed by a dictator.
Conclusion: Therefore, North Korea should be invaded.
The premise that all countries governed by dictators should be invaded is a gross generalization and can easily be shot down under close scrutiny.
Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning begins with specific observations or evidence and moves to a general conclusion.
My Volvo was always in the shop. My neighbor’s Mini Cooper and BMW are always in the shop. My other neighbor’s Audi is in the shop.
Now my wife and I own a Honda and Nissan and those cars are never in the shop.
European cars cost more to maintain than Japanese cars and the empirical evidence and data support my claim.
Recognizing Logical Fallacies
Begging the Question
Begging the question assumes that a statement is self-evident when it actually requires proof.
Major Premise: Fulfilling all my major desires is the only way I can be happy.
Minor Premise: I can’t afford when of my greatest desires in life, a Lexus GS350.
Conclusion: Therefore, I can never be happy.
Circular Reasoning
Circular reasoning occurs when we support a statement by restating it in different terms.
Stealing is wrong because it is illegal.
Admitting women into the men’s club is wrong because it’s an invalid policy.
Your essay is woeful because of its egregious construction.
Your boyfriend is hideous because of his heinous characteristics.
I have to sell my car because I’m ready to sell it.
I can’t spend time with my kids because it’s too time consuming.
I need to spend more money on my presents than my family’s presents because I need bigger and better presents.
I’m a great father because I’m the best father my children have ever had.
Weak Analogy or Faulty Comparison
Analogies are never perfect but they can be powerful. The question is do they have a degree of validity to make them worth the effort.
A toxic relationship is like a cancer that gets worse and worse (fine).
Sugar is high-octane fuel to use before your workout (weak because there is nothing high-octane about a substance that causes you to crash and converts into fat and creates other problems)
Free education is a great flame and the masses are moths flying into the flames of destruction. (horribly false analogy)
Ad Hominem Fallacy (Personal Attack)
“Who are you to be a marriage counselor? You’ve been divorced six times?”
A lot of people give great advice and present sound arguments even if they don’t apply their principles to their lives, so we should focus on the argument, not personal attack.
“So you believe in universal health care, do you? I suppose you’re a communist and you hate America as well.”
Making someone you disagree with an American-hating communist is invalid and doesn’t address the actual argument.
“What do you mean you don’t believe in marriage? What are you, a crazed nihilist, an unrepentant anarchist, an immoral misanthrope, a craven miscreant?”
Straw Man Fallacy
You twist and misconstrue your opponent’s argument to make it look weaker than it is when you refute it. Instead of attacking the real issue, you aim for a weaker issue based on your deliberate misinterpretation of your opponent’s argument.
“Those who are against universal health care are heartless. They obviously don’t care if innocent children die.”
Hasty Generalization (Jumping to a Conclusion)
“I’ve had three English instructors who are middle-aged bald men. Therefore, all English instructors are middle-aged bald men.”
“I’ve met three Americans with false British accents and they were all annoying. Therefore, all Americans, such as Madonna, who contrive British accents are annoying.” Perhaps some Americans do so ironically and as a result are more funny than annoying.
Either/Or Fallacy
There are only two choices to an issue is an over simplification and an either/or fallacy.
“Either you be my girlfriend or you don’t like real men.”
“Either you be my boyfriend or you’re not a real American.”
“Either you play football for me or you’re not a real man.”
“Either you’re for us or against us.” (The enemy of our enemy is our friend is every day foreign policy.)
“Either you agree with me about increasing the minimum wage, or you’re okay with letting children starve to death.”
“Either you get a 4.0 and get admitted into USC, or you’re only half a man.”
Equivocation
Equivocation occurs when you deliberately twist the meaning of something in order to justify your position.
“You told me the used car you just sold me was in ‘good working condition.’”
“I said ‘good,’ not perfect.”
The seller is equivocating.
“I told you to be in bed by ten.”
“I thought you meant be home by ten.”
“You told me you were going to pay me the money you owe me on Friday.”
“I didn’t know you meant the whole sum.”
“You told me you were going to take me out on my birthday.”
“Technically speaking, the picnic I made for us in the backyard was a form of ‘going out.’”
Red Herring Fallacy
This fallacy is to throw a distraction in your opponent’s face because you know a distraction may help you win the argument.
“Barack Obama wants us to support him but his father was a Muslim. How can we trust the President on the war against terrorism when he has terrorist ties?”
“You said you were going to pay me my thousand dollars today. Where is it?”
“Dear friend, I’ve been diagnosed with a very serious medical condition. Can we talk about our money issue some other time?”
Slippery Slope Fallacy
We go down a rabbit hole of exaggerated consequences to make our point sound convincing.
“If we allow gay marriage, we’ll have to allow people to marry gorillas.”
“If we allow gay marriage, my marriage to my wife will be disrespected and dishonored.”
Appeal to Authority
Using a celebrity to promote an energy drink doesn’t make this drink effective in increasing performance.
Listening to an actor play a doctor on TV doesn’t make the pharmaceutical he’s promoting safe or effective.
Tradition Fallacy
“We’ve never allowed women into our country club. Why should we start now?”
“Women have always served men. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always should be.”
Misuse of Statistics
Using stats to show causality when it’s a condition of correlation or omitting other facts.
“Ninety-nine percent of people who take this remedy see their cold go away in ten days.” (Colds go away on their own).
“Violent crime from home intruders goes down twenty percent in home equipped with guns.” (more people in those homes die of accidental shootings or suicides)
Post Hoc, Confusing Causality with Correlation
Taking cold medicine makes your cold go away. Really?
The rooster crows and makes the sun go up. Really?
You drink on a Thursday night and on Friday morning you get an A on your calculus exam. Really?
You stop drinking milk and you feel stronger. Really? (or is it placebo effect?)
Non Sequitur (It Does Not Follow)
The conclusion in an argument is not relevant to the premises.
Megan drives a BMW, so she must be rich.
McMahon understands the difference between a phrase and a dependent clause; therefore, he must be a genius.
Whenever I eat chocolate cake, I feel good. Therefore, chocolate cake must be good for me.
Bandwagon Fallacy
Because everyone believes something, it must be right.
“You can steal a little at work. Everyone else does.”
“In Paris, ninety-nine percent of all husbands have a secret mistress. Therefore adultery is not immoral."
Lexicon of The Irrational Mind for "An Anxious Man"
Irrational Principle #1: Pascal's Principle of Trouble
The French philosopher Pascal wrote that all of man's problems stem from his inability to stay quietely in his room.
What he means to suggest is that man is restless and anxious and in this state of anxiety man seeks to quell his restlessness by doing things that dig him deeper and deeper into a hole.
In other words, man is the creator of his own problems. He is his own curse. This is the human condition. We are cursed with not only anxiety but its self-destructive consequences unless we can find a meaningful way to engage and nullify the anxiety: through meaning and connection with others.
Or put it this way: We're only happy when we make a mess of our lives. People dig a hole for themselves because climbing out of the hole is something for them to do and is preferred to boredom. Now that's irrational.
Notice Joseph's life has less and less meaning and connection with others as his stock market addition spikes. Therefore, he is caught in a vicious cycle.
Irrational Principle #2: Basing Our Happiness on Lady Fortuna
She is the Goddess of Good and Bad Luck. People who stake their happiness on her, like Joseph, are doomed to a life of misery and regret. They have no foundation to weather Lady Fortuna's tumultuous storms of highs and lows. They are subject to the whims and carpices of Lady Fortuna.They are subject to gambling addiction and the like.
Some people become addicted to the state of constant anxiety confusing anxiety with "excitement."
Therefore, these addicts must live in a state of heightened anxiety always looking over their shoulder for the "next shoe to drop." In other words, to worship Lady Fortuna, as Joseph does, means to be a slave to constant anxiety and fear, to never be able to let go and live life.
Irrational Principle #3: Acting Out in the Face of Ennui
Viktor Frankl writes that man's most basic and powerful drive is his need to find meaning. Without meaning, life is unbearable. We become haunted by a sense of emptiness and compels us to fill the void with trinkets, trivialities, BS, lies, and other malignancies that spread inside our souls like a cancer devouring us mercilessly.
Even when we find some pleasure that makes us feel "happy," we acclimate to that pleasure (hedonic treadmill) become numb to that pleasure and find ourselves bored and compelled to spike the pleasure: But we can never heighten the pleasure to match our ever-growing acclimation and numbness to it. Therefore, without meaning we are fated to ennui.
Irrational Principle #4: All Or Nothingness Fallacy
In many places throughout the world, including the United States, we are afflicted with the fallacy that we either achieve a high state of wealth and fame or our lives are afflictions worthy of shame, scorn and self-loathing. There is no in-between. Joseph gambles his family's money on the stock market because he believes it's the best way to reach a higher economic status that will bring him and his family dignity and high esteem. However, the opposite is true. His belief in the All Or Nothingness fallacy makes him a groveling, fearful soul with no dignity, courage, integrity, or meaningful human connection.
Irrational Principle #5: Lacking Self-Possession or The Third Eye
Those who are not self-possessed are fated to a life of the irrational. To be self-possessed means to be grounded. To be grounded means that we have the Third Eye (self-awareness and metacognition), self-control, humility to learn from our mistakes, and developing strategies as solutions to problems rather than wallowing in the drama of our problems.
All of the qualities come from a moral sense, so that when we say we are grounded we mean we have a moral center that directs our thoughts and actions.
Joseph is a cursed man because he has no self-possession, but is rather a slave to Lady Fortuna, ennui, and the All Or Nothingness Fallacy.
Irrational Principle #6: Lacking Empathy Pushes Us into the World of the Irrational
Recent studies show that the more wealthy we become, the greater our sense of entitlement and entitlment is the enemy of empathy: the ability to connect, feel, and sympathize with others.
When we don't grow into empathy, we do not grow into mature adults. Instead, we retreat, like Joseph, into solipsism, which is the ultimate form of self-centeredness and narcissism, a form of insanity. One of insanity's key components is that we cannot connect with others and the real world; rather we "live inside our head."
Irrational Principle #7: The Trickster Pushes Us into the Abyss of the Irrational
The Trickster is a well-known literary character who manifests as Morton Dowell in the story. The Trickster takes us from the earthly realm, to the angelic, to the mystical; then he crashes us into the demonic. Just when we're about to give up on the Trickster, he lifts us again, for a brief time, before pushing us off a cliff. We allow the Trickster to do this to us over and over and over.
One of the most common Tricksters is the chimera. The chimera is evident in the story "The Half Sister."What do we make of Charmian based on her description as a strange woman in a shapeless brown dress? Is she the Priestess of Broken Dreams, Mediocrity, Grotesque Complacency, and the Easy Life (which is never easy)? Are we all tempted by some abhorrent variation of a Charmian, some deformed chimera? See page 67 and 68. One of her gray eyes is dead with no light in it. Clearly her “landscaping business” is a ruse; she has mental problems. The family will recluse her on a distant cottage property and need someone to tend to her. That someone is Martin.
Martin is vulnerable to this trap or chimera because he is stagnant. When we are stagnant, we descend into a condition of ennui (the soul becomes bored, apathetic, and lethargic) and when we suffer ennui, we are susceptible to the devil’s marketing and packaging of any variation of Charmian.
When we read on page 70, that Martin feels uncomfortable under Charmian’s transparent gaze, what is suggested? That perhaps Martin sees a reflection of his own spiritual death? Could the penetrating eye be the God’s Eye judging and condemning him for his character deformities?
Irrational Principle #8: Adrenaline World Vs. Civilian World
These two worlds clash in the story "An Anxious Man." The former world of adrenaline eats the latter. In choosing the former, we embrace misery, panic, and anxiety because we prefer drama and its power to distract us from death and vapidity. See page 7 and 8. Does it not seem Joseph knows he’s made a deal with the devil yet can do nothing to stop himself? What does this say about free will? Once we get the wheels in motion, we can accelerate toward our demise with no opportunity to veer away from the danger.
Inevitable Stock Market Fatigue in "An Anxious Man"
See page 8. You never invest enough; you never sell quickly enough; you sell too soon; your life is one of second-guessing yourself and regret and anger. You become bitter but you keep coming back for more and more of the stuff that poisons you.The irony is that this despair becomes an addiction.
“An Anxious Man”
What evidences Joseph’s lack of control in the opening scene? What are at the root of his compulsive behavior? Is he perhaps addicted to the rush of high stakes, like a gambling addiction? Does he thrive on the drama to compensate for something that’s lacking in his life?He is the fool who stakes his happiness on the whims of Lady Fortuna as described by Boethius. Possible explanations for Joseph's stock market addiction include: he's running away from ennui; he's running away from his own emptiness; he has defined himself as someone who needs to be a certain financial level; otherwise he will be suffering from an affliction. But he has made himself too vulnerable and he is not what he needs to be a successful person: He is not self-possessed.
How does page 4 set up Joseph’s sense of entitlement and discontent that never existed before? What does it mean to confuse necessity with desire? (see top of page 5) Studies show that wealth and a concern with money encourage privilege and degrade our powers of empathy.
How might some describe Morton Dowell, described on page 5, as a Trickster or a Devil, a figure who stirs the malignancies within Joseph’s soul? Good salesmen never sell; they give us “opportunities.”He is a sort of pimp or drug dealer who entices by escorting us through the various levels of human emotion.
What dichotomy of existence do we see in the story: Adrenaline World and Civilian World. The former eats the latter. In choosing the former, we embrace misery, panic, and anxiety because we prefer drama and its power to distract us from death and vapidity. See page 7 and 8. Does it not seem Joseph knows he’s made a deal with the devil yet can do nothing to stop himself? What does this say about free will? Once we get the wheels in motion, we can accelerate toward our demise with no opportunity to veer away from the danger.
Explain how regret is the defining emotion of stock market investment. See page 8. You never invest enough; you never sell quickly enough; you sell too soon; your life is one of second-guessing yourself and regret and anger. You become bitter but you keep coming back for more and more of the stuff that poisons you.The irony is that this despair becomes an addiction.
What does it mean to be “grounded”? What evidence is there that Joseph is not grounded? See page 18 among others. To be grounded means that we have the Third Eye, self-control, humility to learn from our mistakes, and developing strategies as solutions to problems rather than wallowing in the drama of our problems. All of the qualities come from a moral sense, so that when we say we are grounded we mean we have a moral center that directs our thoughts and actions.
