Homework #5 for March 6:
Read “Winter Dreams” online PDF by F. Scott Fitzgerald https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl494/winterdreams.pdf; Write a 350-word, 3-paragraph essay that analyzes how Dexter Green allowed Judy Jones to ruin his life. Use at least 3 signal phrases citing the short story.
Homework #6 for March 8:
Read LA Times online article: “Can epistocracy, or knowledge-based voting, fix democracy? by Jason Brennan http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-brennan-epistocracy-20160828-snap-story.html; homework #6: write a 350-word, 3-paragraph essay that submits 3 counterarguments to Brennan’s proposal. Use at least 3 signal phrases citing Brennan’s essay.
Essay #2 Options Due March 20 (3 Sources Needed)
Option One. Defend, refute, or complicate Mark Bittman’s assertion that we should tax “bad food” to subsidize vegetables (“Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables” 59).
Option Two. Analyze how Dexter Green, consciously and unconsciously, allowed Judy Jones to squander and ruin his life as rendered in the online PDF short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams.”
Option Three. Defend or refute Crito’s claim that Socrates should try to escape rather than face death in Plato’s Crito on page 234.
Option Four. Defend, refute, or complicate Jason Brennan’s claim that traditional American democracy should be replaced by an epistocracy. The texts for this option are online. You can refer to John Oliver video on Alex Jones.
Brennan critique from Notre Dame
Brennan review from Washington Post
Option Five. Address the claim that David Brooks’ essay “How We Are Ruining America” uses deception and logical fallacies to arrive at an erroneous conclusion.
Consider the real reason for educational inequality is not a lack of tests, a smokescreen to the real problem, but the privileges of the top economic tier discussed in David Brooks' essay "How We Are Ruining America."
Slate critique of Brooks' essay.
Slate's Osita Nwanevu writes "David Brooks Almost Gets It" as a response to Brooks' infamous essay.
“It’s Not the Fault of the Sandwich Shop: Readers Debate”
Option Six (recently added, not on syllabus):
See the movie Black Panther and in an argumentative essay, with a counterargument-rebuttal section, address the question: Is Erik Killmonger a villain or a hero?
Resources for Works Cited:
See: Argument about Erik Killmonger
See: Boston Review
See:"Black Panther and the Invention of Africa" by Jelani Cobb
See Guardian
See Washington Post
See Forbes
See The Ringer
Option Seven: (recently added, not on syllabus)
Watch the movie Black Panther and address the argument that the mythical city of Wakanda is a metaphor for the need of African history that has been corrupted and "white-washed" over the centuries by racist, white historians who have painted an inaccurate history of Africa.
Sources:
"Black Panther and the Real Lost Wakandas" by Clive Irving
"Black Panther and the Invention of Africa" by Jelani Cobb
"Black Panther: A Conversation about Real African History" by Melvin Lars
"Black Panther is a gorgeous, groundbreaking celebration of black culture" by Tre Johnson
"The Real History Behind the Black Panther" by Ryan Mattimore
"Searching for Wakanda: The African Roots of the Black Panther Story" by Thomas F. McDrew
Option Eight: (recently added, not on syllabus)
Watch the movie Black Panther and develop a thesis about how the film sheds light on the tensions between Africans and black Americans.
Sources:
"Black Panther: Why the relationship between Africans and black Americans is so messed up" by Larry Madowo and Karen Attiah
"Black Panther and the Invention of Africa" by Jelani Cobb
"Black Panther Forces Africans and Black Americans to Reconcile the Past" by Kovie Biakolo
Study Questions for "Winter Dreams"
One. How does the story introduce social class anxieties into Dexter’s personality?
Dexter’s dad is “second best,” the owner of a second best grocery store, evidencing working class roots.
Dexter works as a caddie, a servant to the upper classes, and he finds this humiliating.
He reads the bleak weather as an omen of his doom while living in the underclass, working as a servile caddy for professional players and tastemakers, people who matter.
He feels irrelevant and irrelevance stirs resentment and depression in his veins.
He sees life as extremes, those who have and those who have not; the dreary Northern spring and the gorgeous fall.
All or Nothing Universe of Perpetual Adolescent
He creates this false binary universe: We call this the All or Nothing Fallacy.
After the depression of spring, October brings him hope and November brings him “ecstatic triumph.”
We see Dexter’s vaulting ambition to get away from the lowly caddy job. He’s “too old” for it, he thinks, at 14.
Two. What compelled Dexter to hurry away from his caddy job?
An 11-year-old girl, Miss Jones, described as “beautifully ugly” and “who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men.”
Indeed, beauty can unhinge men and dislocate men from reality, as we shall see in the story.
But not just beauty—beauty combined with the aura of upper class money: This is the noxious cocktail that will undermine Dexter Green.
Dexter Unhinged by Beauty as a Symbol of Old Money and Privilege
The girl addressed Dexter as “boy,” a sign of his lowly servitude, and this has an emasculating effect on him.
His sense of emasculating is further reinforced when the caddy-master shows up and says to Dexter, “What you standing there like a dummy for? Go pick up the young lady’s clubs.”
He quits from compulsion: “The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite caddy, and the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer were not to be made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received a strong emotional shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet.”
His perturbation is the great anxiety that makes him compulsive and unhinges him. He’s high-strung and compulsive.
We read a warning of his compulsive nature: “As so frequently would be the case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated by his winter dreams.”
Three. We read a famous passage: "But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings on the rich, that there was anything shoddy in the boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people -- he wanted the glittering things themselves.” What does this passage mean?
Dexter believes he can, through hard work, embody “glitter,” that is to say the apotheosis of success. America is not a country; it’s a dream. America is “Winter Dreams,” the idea that we find personal fulfillment, meaning, and higher purpose through the attainment of “glitter.” It is this very sick idolatry that will undermine Dexter Green.
We also read that while he become successful in business, he suffered certain “denials,” and that the story is about one of those denials, and that would be the denial of acquiring Judy Jones, who for Dexter is the highest example (apotheosis) of “glitter,” of Dexter’s “Winter Dreams.”
The Draw of Glitter
Everyone wants to live on the coast. Fly over the landlocked region of USA and you'll see large stretches of uninhabited land full of wheat, corn, and cow.
Between Los Angeles and San Francisco is California's sparsely populated central valley with its smells of hay, alfalfa, soybeans, cow dung, and crushed dreams.
Four. As we read about Dexter’s rise in the laundry industry and the rich patrons who frequent his establishments, we learn what about old and new money?
Old money has a certain aura, a certain “heritage,” and a snobbery attached to it. On the other hand, new money, the rags to riches story such as Dexter’s, has humble beginnings and class insecurity attached to it even as the person of new wealth amasses riches because in part he will always feel a bit like a fish out of water and he will always have memories of his poor beginnings. Moreover, he may not know all the codes and linguistic tics that the old rich use in their arsenal of being smugly rich. He may have some of his old caddy behaviors, which he thinks about when he returns to play golf at his old course—not as a caddy but as a man who’s “made it.”
We can surmise perhaps that Dexter is not just desperate to be rich but is desperate to have an identity of being rich, of not being looked down upon by those with old money, and his delusion is that winning the affections of old-money Judy Jones with all her intoxicating beauty is his ticket to happiness.
Old Money Vs. Nouveau Riche
Old Money has cachet and is considered superior to nouveau riche, also called arrivestes, parvenus, and vulgarian small potatoes.
But much of his quest is in his own imagination. Therefore, his quest is an illusion or a chimera, and it is this chimera that will unhinge him.
Five. One of the brilliant things in this story is the way Fitzgerald quickly exposes Judy Jones’ personality at the golf course where she hits a golf ball into Mr. T.A. Hedrick’s abdomen. What do we learn about her in such a brief passage?
Judy Jones is self-centered, entitled, and used to not being accountable for anything. In other words, she is somewhat of a cipher and wastrel. She makes messes and expects others to clean them up. She can hurt others, but feel no empathy for her actions. In other words, she’s an empty-headed, repellant narcissist.
And here lies the story’s tragedy: Dexter Green has hinged is whole notion of happiness on going on a Love Quest for Judy Jones, a Narcissistic Cipher. His “winter dreams” are futile, delusional, and empty. They will bring him nothing but a handful of ashes and dust.
Another important observation from this scene is that Dexter watches the old-money golf players gawk and admire Judy Jones’ beauty, doing so with a certain misogyny and lasciviousness.
Their remarks make her all the more a compelling “trophy.” Dexter is diseased by the need to create an image through the amassing of trophies, what in Latin is called the libido ostentando. Dexter’s lust for ostentatiousness will blind him from the fundamental emptiness that defines his existence.
Six. After seeing the adult beauty Judy Jones at the golf course, Dexter goes on a night swim and hears piano that he associates with the correct life path he has taken: “The sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what was happening to him now. It was a mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attuned to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again.”
How does the above passage speak to The Trickster as part of Dexter’s Quest to find his Winter Dreams?
“Winter Dreams” is essentially a chimera story: A man quests for his chimera and is crushed by the emptiness of his dream. Therefore, a chimera can be called a Trickster. A Trickster is a character or an idea that carries us through the four levels of emotion: earthly, angelic, mystical, and demonic.
The Trickster must give us hope and promise of finding a land of milk and honey only to throw us down from the heavens and into the inferno of our own making.
Seven. In Part III, how do we see Dexter as a committed student of social class?
While Dexter asserts his superiority over the old-money rich due to his hard work ethic, he wants his children to grow up as old money, and Dexter wants to learn the codes of old money: casual dress, facial expressions (hauteur and superciliousness), and all the consumer secrets the old rich enjoy. The rich have a secret code of conduct that sets them apart from the rest, and Dexter wants to be an expert on this code.
Dexter must “keep to the set patterns” so that his peasant background will never be revealed and thus bring shame to him and his future family.
Further, he lies about his origins, tells the rich he’s from Keeble, not the working-class Black Bear Village.
Eight. Even though Judy Jones is a flirt and a shallow coquette, she inadvertently asks Dexter an existential question during their first dinner: “Who are you, anyhow?” How does her question touch on one of the story’s major themes?
As an American, Dexter believes he can re-invent himself anyway he wants. He is a chameleon, and he is free to dream himself into the kind of person he wants to be. The idea that we can become our dream is uniquely American.
The irony is that in many ways he doesn’t know who he is since his energies have created a façade to others and to himself.
In fact, his answer to Judy’s question is unwittingly true. He says, “I’m nobody. . . . My career is largely a matter of futures.” In fact, he only lives in the future, not the present, and this is part of his unhinged character: to be disconnected and disengaged from the present as he looks to the future when he will finally be worthy of achieving the American Dream. But he will never be worthy. His hope is a chimera that pushes him to constantly look ahead into the future and never in the present moment.
When he assures Judy he is not poor and she kisses him, her kisses arouse a “surfeit that would demand more surfeit.” In other words, his desires will always outrun his capacity to fulfill them, and Judy Jones is the embodiment of his excess desires or concupiscence.
What we have, then, is a mutually self-destructive symbiosis or interdependence. What’s scary is that that unhealthy symbiosis is the very foundation of Dexter’s “Winter Dreams.”
Nine. Much of the story chronicles Dexter’s addiction to Judy Jones like a junkie hooked on drugs. Explain.
We read, “Dexter surrendered himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come into contact.”
The unhinged man is so needy and compulsive that he surrenders his self-interest to an unethical, morally bankrupt force in the name of his carnal and monetary idolatry.
He has no moral combat to save him from pursuing someone as unprincipled as Judy Jones.
We can further explore Dexter’s unhinging with Judy Jones by looking at her as a drug. She is less human to Dexter and more of a substance of his addiction. And in turn Judy Jones is addicted to the power she has over men by her power to intoxicate them. She in turn is addicted to seeing men addicted to her.
We see that Dexter is no needy for Judy Jones that he sacrifices his dignity and self-respect to pursue her. For example, he knows she loves other men in her shallow capricious way and that she sometimes “loves” in the same pathetic, superficial manner, and she even tells him so, but rather than be upset he accepts her imperfect, disloyal love. We read, for example, that after telling him that she was in love with another man earlier the same day as they lie in bed, he finds her words “beautiful and romantic.”
When she lies to him and says she did not kiss a man earlier the same day, Dexter knows she’s lying, but he’s okay with that because he is “glad that she has taken the time to lie to him.”
Because Judy Jones is aware that he has no standards of behavior that she must adhere to, she knows she can get away with anything. Deep down, she can’t love him because he lacks self-respect, but she herself lacks self-respect because if she had it, she would not be in a relationship with someone she doesn’t respect. Both of them are degraded in the relationship, a fact that neither wants to see. Both are unhinged in this manner.
As you read the story, you will see that the narrative has many parallels with drug addiction as it pertains to Dexter Green’s relationship with Judy Jones.
Over and over again, we see that Judy Jones, the consummate Trickster, sends Dexter into hell through neglect and infidelity, but then gives him just enough honey so he’ll come back to her. She does this to many men, not just Dexter. We read, “Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer.”
She is clearly a sick person and the men who become addicted to her are just as sickly. They live in a demimonde of no-respect and emptiness.
Like a drug addict, Dexter becomes unhinged and cannot be civil to others when she unexpectedly disappears at a social event. He panics and is overcome with anxiety that causes him to lose his polite facade.
We read that Judy Jones is not a self-possessed person in her compulsion to torture men: “Judy made these forays upon the helpless and defeated without malice, indeed half unconscious that there was anything mischievous in anything that she did.”
Even the “strong and the brilliant, “play her game and not their own.” She always has the upper hand.
Her beauty is her power, but as we shall see, using beauty for power and identity is a sure failure because beauty is transitory.
For example, I know a man who used to look like Paul McCartney, but as this celebrity wannabe aged, his face bloated and his distorted features no longer gave him the cachet he enjoyed in his youth. He now lives in his mother’s basement where he traipses around in a robe and eats Hot Pockets while trolling on the Internet.
But while her beauty is in its prime, she is Dexter’s drug, as we read: “The helpless ecstasy of losing himself with in her was opiate rather than tonic.”
When you think about the above line, many of us love the drama of a tormented obsession, and we therefore choose to stay entrapped in our torment because to lose that drama would force us to face the abyss or the existential vacuum that defines our empty existence.
In many ways, the story teaches us that we are our own worst enemy. Sadly, many of us “unhinge” ourselves from reality for lack of anything better to do.
Another way of looking at Dexter’s “Winter Dreams” is that he was feeding off the sick energy of desperation that Judy Jones created between her and her bevy of lovers.
Dexter knows he’s an addict, at least on an unconscious level. This makes him a divided soul: Part of him wants to escape his addiction to Judy Jones. He even gets engaged to another woman as a hopeful “cure” for his disease. Imagine getting engaged to someone you don’t love as a “cure” for a love addiction. That is a cogent sign of being unhinged.
His Judy Jones substitute is Irene Scheerer. Unlike Judy Jones who is described as a refined beauty, we read little of Irene’s physical charms except that she is “a little stout.”
We have to wonder if the world is full of Judy Jones archetypes that enchant men, leave them, and damage the men so that they can never love other women because these damaged men are forever fixated on their own personal “Judy Jones.” Perhaps we can call this the Angelina Jolie Factor: One look into her eyes and you’re permanently damaged, unhinged, and ready to abandon reality as you know it.
Even as he tries to love Irene, he keeps thinking about the manner in which Judy Jones beckons, torments, and insults him, and he is desperate to convince himself that he cannot pursue Judy Jones any longer. But as an unhinged man, as a man possessed by the IDEA of what Judy Jones represents—complete power, ecstasy, and abandonment—he finds his drug addiction incurable, and as such he hates himself and he hates Judy Jones—the very woman he cannot free himself from.
At night, he argues with himself about Judy Jones, going over a laundry list as to why she’d be a horrible wife. But that is the cortex in his brain. The limbic part of his brain, where emotion and reptilian desire reside, continue to rage a protest for acquiring Judy Jones.
He sees Judy Jones at a dance and he realizes that he had long ago been “hardened against jealousy.” He still wants her. He’s twenty-five, he has devoted 14 years to obsessing over Judy Jones, and he is about to marry Irene Scheerer.
About to get married to Irene, he still obsesses over Judy Jones, wondering if she still cares about him, and Irene is nothing but a backdrop to his life, “no more than a curtain spread behind him.” She will be part of a marital façade, but his demonic possession will still rage on.
We All Have to Be Mindful Our Addictions
Controversy of a Famous Story: The Wolf You Feed
It's so ironic that new agers who say "be mindful" as they pass on the wolf story are being mindless and not doing any research on a story that may have become a cheap cliche. Nevertheless, the wolf story resonates with us because it appears to have a lot of psychological truth.
Cherokee Indians have a fable that explains the nature of addiction.
Here is the same story on what appears to be a "self-help" website.
The same story is told in the context of ethnic, cultural, and spiritual appropriation with the explanation that Billy Graham modified the story for his Christian preaching.
Another blog makes the same claim that the Wolf Story is a form of white colonialism.
Another blog explores the story's questionable origins.
Another blog dismisses the story as a fraud with no American Indian origins; rather, it is a fabrication of Billy Graham. Why would a white preacher turn it into an "American Indian" fable?
Here's another blog that claims to have the real story, not the colonized one.
Confusing the Matter:
Turns out that yet other people claim the story is truly of authentic Cherokee origin, yet it has been perverted to fit a Christian scheme of good and evil when in fact the story is more complicated.
Part 2:
The Narcissistic Character of Dexter Green:
Dexter Green is empty; he has no self. He only has an idea of what the successful self looks like to others, what Kristin Dombek in her essay "Emptiness" calls "selfiness."
Dexter imitates an image of success at the expense of others whom he uses in the service of his grand performance.
Empty, loveless, and without any real connection to other human beings, Dexter focuses on all he knows: creating a "hologram of the superpowered self" or what elsewhere Dombek calls the "simulacrum of the superpowered self."
In other words, Dexter doesn't work on building a real life for himself. Rather, he becomes a curator of his fake life, which becomes a "reality" to himself and others. In doing this, he fulfills Pascal's insight that most people hate their real life but prefer to create an imaginary life for themselves and for others.
For Dexter Green, people are not people. They are tools to help him hone and chisel his successful image.
As a narcissist, Dexter disregards content, substance, morality, and integrity. He only worships one thing: the "hologram" of the Super Self. That is his "winter dream." He is smart enough to know that the "winter dream" is a destructive illusion, but he does not care, but he has invested too much of his life in this "winter dream" and this dream is all he knows.
Nothing embodies this "winter dream," this "hologram" of superior success, more than Judy Jones. The tragedy and farce of the story is that Judy Jones is a mediocrity, a cipher, a hoax, a complete illusion.
Dexter Green "gets played" by the very illusion that he worships above all else.
Sample Introduction That Transitions to a Thesis
In the age of social media, we curate our own lives. A curator is a guide who controls the message. He is the custodian of his own self-image. Indeed, in the age of social media we curate our own lives, often emphasizing that which makes us look successful and desirable and concealing that which puts us in a less flattering light. The danger of being our own curator is that we begin to believe in our own BS. For the last two decades, I’ve curated myself as an intellectual, one who passionately engages in my three loves, reading, writing, and piano playing, but I’ve recently had an awakening in which I realized that thousands of hours lazily spent on the Internet have compromised my intellectual life rendering me somewhat of a fraud to others and myself. My awakening is partly the result of four books: So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work by Cal Newport, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, and Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter. I am not alone in realizing I’ve squandered thousands of hours engaging in mindless clicking before an Internet screen. My friend, who is far more brilliant than I am, described his wasted existence in the following email:
Like you, I got lost and wasted tens of thousands of hours on the internet. I'm wondering when I reached my 10,000 hours of internet mastery? If I started regular use around 1995, and I averaged at least a few hours a day (which increased over the years to a current and embarrassing 8+/day...my job allows me to spend half or so of the eight-hour shift on the internet, then I'm on a few hours at night), I'm guessing I achieved Internet Mastery by about 2000 or so. I've probably logged 50,000 hours or so by now...which means I could have mastered five different art forms by now. What a tragic waste.
My friend and I both agreed that we’re going to drastically cut down our Internet use and devote ourselves to “deep work,” defined by Cal Newport as prolonged periods of mental discomfort resulting from giving singular concentration to one’s craft. We can only make this change because our self-curated image as “intellectuals” has proven to be a false one in the face of our wasted Internet time. Hopefully, we will change and no longer be curators of a lie.
Sadly, the Great Curator of BS Himself, Dexter Green from "Winter Dreams," is doomed to a life of stagnation and moral decrepitude because he embodies the recalcitrant characteristics of a narcissist evidenced by __________________________, ______________________________, ___________________________, and ____________________________________.
Rule 20
Don’t Feed Your Inner Fat Man
Feeding my Inner Fat Man seemed to be a variation of a story attributed to Native Indian folklore, a story about two wolves with many accountings in New Age musings, spirituality texts, and self-help books addressing addiction. In one account, Williston Barrett, author of the essay “A Lesson in Mindfulness: Don’t Feed the Wolf,” makes reference to Kristin Neff’s book Self-Compassion to tell the tale:
A Native American wisdom story tells of an old Cherokee who is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil--he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good--he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The fight is going on inside of you--and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee replied, “The one that you feed.”
This dualistic view appealed to me and seemed to corroborate my own experience with addictive behavior. The more I starved my desires the more they weakened and the more I fed my good qualities the more they strengthened. Another appeal of this wolf story is that it seemed to describe the universal internal struggle between the forces of good and evil. That the story had its origins from the Cherokee tribe made it even more appealing, and seemed to support a universal notion of morality that connected American Indian folklore to the world’s great religions. I felt I had stumbled across a valuable weapon to help starve and perhaps eventually kill my Inner Fat Man with a tale that had the cachet of a feel-good multicultural wisdom fable.
But as I dug deeper, I discovered that truth is messy, complicated, and inconvenient, qualities my Inner Fat Man finds so annoying. But in spite of my lazy self that craves simple platitudes to brighten his day, I continued to dig and found that the wolf tale had two problems. One, it might not be an authentic American Indian story, but a white preacher’s fabrication with racist undertones. Two, the tale might be an authentic American Indian story after all, but the ending had been inaccurately rendered to conform to Christian dualism, which does not necessarily exist in the Cherokee worldview.
I’ll take the problems one at a time. First, the origins of the story are in serious question. Many in fact have attributed the story to Billy Graham in his 1978 book The Holy Spirit: Activating God’s Power in Your Life. The tale by Graham goes like this:
An Eskimo fisherman came to town every Saturday afternoon. He always brought his two dogs with him. One was white and the other was black. He had taught them to fight on command. Every Saturday afternoon in the town square the people would gather and these two dogs would fight and the fisherman would take bets. On one Saturday the black dog would win; another Saturday, the white dog would win – but the fisherman always won! His friends began to ask him how he did it. He said, “I starve one and feed the other. The one I feed always wins because he is stronger.”
The blog White Noise Collective quotes a Metis Indian from her blog apihtawikosisan to expose the Billy Graham “Indian” tale as an example of cultural appropriation that misconstrues and silences authentic Indian voices.
The replacement of real indigenous stories with Christian-influenced, western moral tales is colonialism, no matter how you dress it up in feathers and moccasins. It silences the real voices of native peoples by presenting listeners and readers with something safe and familiar. And because of the wider access non-natives have to sources of media, these kinds of fake stories are literally drowning us out.
Let me be clear. I’m not opposed to the idea of Christian dualism, the battle between the Flesh and the Spirit. I’m opposed to fake stories with false attributions to champion any ideas regardless of the idea’s merits. In the White Noise Collective, the writer exposes this wolf story, which you can find in many forms, including on annoying YouTube videos, as a phony “social media meme”:
Recently at a yoga class in San Francisco, the mostly white students were told the story by a white teacher at the beginning, and at the end, we were instructed to “bow to the white wolf within”. Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has a whole two wolves curriculum, on how to feed the white wolf. In a Psychology Matters article “The story of the two wolves: managing your thoughts, feelings and actions”, the tagline reads: “Knowing which wolf you feed is the first step towards recognizing you have control over your own self.”
There is a cruel irony in making the white wolf the power of good and the black wolf a symbol of evil in a story that appears to be made up by a white man that is now embraced by white people, in yoga classes and elsewhere, as an “authentic” Indian tale.
To complicate the matter further, there are many who say the tale does come from the Cherokee people but that the real version has been drowned out by the fabricated one. The so-called real version is accounted in the blog Awakin with the blog post title “Beyond the Conflict of Inner Forces:
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life:
“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.”It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf will win?”
You might heard the story ends like this: The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
In the Cherokee world, however, the story ends this way:
The old Cherokee simply replied, “If you feed them right, they both win.” and the story goes on:
“You see, if I only choose to feed the white wolf, the black one will be hiding around every corner waiting for me to become distracted or weak and jump to get the attention he craves. He will always be angry and always fighting the white wolf. But if I acknowledge him, he is happy and the white wolf is happy and we all win. For the black wolf has many qualities – tenacity, courage, fearlessness, strong-willed and great strategic thinking – that I have need of at times and that the white wolf lacks. But the white wolf has compassion, caring, strength and the ability to recognize what is in the best interest of all.
"You see, son, the white wolf needs the black wolf at his side. To feed only one would starve the other and they will become uncontrollable. To feed and care for both means they will serve you well and do nothing that is not a part of something greater, something good, something of life. Feed them both and there will be no more internal struggle for your attention. And when there is no battle inside, you can listen to the voices of deeper knowing that will guide you in choosing what is right in every circumstance. Peace, my son, is the Cherokee mission in life. A man or a woman who has peace inside has everything. A man or a woman who is pulled apart by the war inside him or her has nothing.
"How you choose to interact with the opposing forces within you will determine your life. Starve one or the other or guide them both.”
