Essay #1 (1,000 words)
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Choice A
Read Tad Friend’s New Yorker online article “Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?” and look at two opposing camps on the role of alternative protein sources as a viable replacement for meat. One camp says we face too many obstacles to accept non-animal alternative proteins: evolution, taste, and cost, to name several. An opposing camp says we have the technology and the proven product in Impossible Foods and other non-meat proteins to replace animal protein. Assessing these two opposing camps in the context of Tad Friend’s essay, develop an argumentative thesis addresses the question: How viable is the push for tech companies to help climate change by replacing animals with alternative proteins?
Choice B
Read Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” and defend, refute, or complicate the author’s claim that non-religious societies offer a superior moral framework for human evolution than religious societies.
Choice C
In the context of the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, develop an argument about how Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution exposes human vulnerability to mass manipulation, deceit, and Groupthink.
Choice D
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
February 18 Introduction; Homework #1 is to read Tad Friend’s New Yorker online article “Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?” and in 200 words explain the difficulties of replacing animals with alternative proteins.
February 20 Alternative protein debate; Homework #2 is to read Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” and explain in 200 words how she supports her claim that non-religious societies are morally superior to religious societies.
February 25 Cover morality debate; Homework #3 is to read Sapiens up to page 60 and in 200 words explain how “limited liability companies” and “imagined realities” are part of the Cognitive Revolution.
February 27 Cover Cognitive Revolution in the context of the documentary Fyre. Homework #4 for next class: Read Sapiens, up to page 132 and in 200 words explain how Harari makes the claim that the Agricultural Revolution is history’s “biggest fraud.”
March 3 Cover the Agricultural Revolution. Homework #5: Read Sapiens to page 159 and in 200 words explain how “imagined orders and hierarchies” resulted in “unfair discrimination.”
March 5 Logical Fallacies and Signal Phrase review; Go over Sapiens to page 159.
March 10 Chromebook In-Class Objective: Write first half of the essay.
March 12 Chromebook In-Class Objective: Write second half of the essay.
March 17 Essay 1 Due on turnitin
Choice C
In the context of the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, develop an argument about how Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution exposes human vulnerability to mass manipulation, deceit, and Groupthink.
Use Netflix documentary Fyre
Develop a thesis about the power of manipulation and deception of Harari's notion of Imagined Reality by addressing the fraud evident in the Netflix documentary Fyre (Links to an external site.).
Paragraph 1: We will define cognitive revolution according YNH.
Paragraph 2: We will write a thesis similar to this: The Netflix documentary Fyre shows how the Cognitive Revolution creates imagined realities that work in the service of hucksters, hacks, sociopaths, and mountebanks who can spin an imagined reality or narrative resulting in mass manipulation, self-deception, a quest for status, and _______________________.
Your body paragraphs will support the above thesis mapping components.
Another Sample Thesis for Choice B (Netflix documentary Fyre)
The colossal ****show so splendidly rendered in the Netflix documentary Fyre is largely the result of Groupthink evidenced by _______________, ______________, ______________________, and ___________________.
Choice D
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
Sample Thesis
While I largely agree with Harari's critique of the Agricultural Revolution, his implication that we were better off as hunters and gatherers is fallacious when we consider _________________, __________________, _________________, and _________________________.
Be sure to have a counterargument section (1 or 2 paragraphs) before you reach your conclusion.
Your conclusion is a dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Lesson One Study Questions
One. That Sapiens is an exclusive species today emerging from several species of great apes is both “peculiar and incriminating.” Explain.
Evolution,the idea of human progression, may be a myth. We may grow in fits and bursts with episodes of regression.
Evolution Assumption Fallacy
Harari wants us to question common assumptions about Sapiens?
Why? In part because critical thinking is about questioning mindless assumptions.
For example, we assume humans are marching on an arc of progress toward justice and reason. Such an assumption may not be in concert with reality.
Social media is part of the Great Dumbing Down and is evidence that we are devolving or degenerating:
For example, social media may be causing us to reverse in two major ways: We're becoming infantile as we feature ourselves in narcissistic fashion, curators of our phony self.
We're giving up our private data to social media. This is stupid, not a sign of evolution.
We're reading and sharing weaponized fake news in the service of destroying democracy.
Other mindless assumptions:
Or we may assume that if we go to college and play by the rules, we'll find a good job, good real estate, a long, healthy life, and vibrant love to reward us for our toil.
Or we may assume that if we lose a big chunk of body weight and get lean and attractive, all our problems will be solved, the world will love us, and our newfound popularity will create a huge tidal wave that will carry us to the land of Milk and Honey.
Mindless Assumptions in Sapiens
Now let's look at a mindless assumption in the context of Sapiens:
Mindless Assumption #1
Humans are a dominant species with an indefinite shelf life. We like to think we, as humans, have an indefinite stay in the world's VIP room. We are here to stay. It's our birthright. But we're grossly mistaken.
We may be at the end. Think of global warming.
Reality
Humans are a fragile species that owing to their penchant for self-destruction have a tenuous shelf life.
The window of history of a dominant, exclusive species called Sapiens is rather small. Harari speculates that we won't last long relative to other species.
Humans are hard-wired to be violent and look for systems to exploit masses of people.
Further, it appears that as a species we tend to kill other species. Killing our competition appears to be part of our nature. Our tendency toward violence seems to contradict our self-aggrandizing name “homo sapien,” which means “wise man.”
Yuval Noah Harari's critics accuse him of being a misanthrope, someone who scorns the human race.
Three revolutions define Sapiens as the dominant species:
Cognitive Revolution from 70,000 years ago.
Agricultural Revolution from 12,000 years ago.
Scientific Revolution from 500 years ago.
Two. What are defining characteristics of Sapiens?
We have big brains relative to other mammals that suck 25% of our body’s energy.
We walk upright on two legs, freeing our hands for fine motor skills, playing musical instruments, painting caves, and performing other forms of advanced communication.
We are born underdeveloped and as babies require a lot of nurture and protection. Without our parents, we'll be carried away by a giant pterodactyl and fed to the baby pterodactyls.
We have advanced rapidly from the middle of the food chain to the top of the food chain resulting in disrupting the ecosystem and killing other species, often to the point of extinction.
At the top of the food chain, we are shown to have ravenous appetites and brutally violent tendencies without proper checks to insure the world's safety and our own.
Unlike other mammals, we learned to use fire to alter our environment and to cook food that otherwise could not be digested efficiently.
Because we are insecure in our Top Dog Food Chain position, we are like “Banana Republic dictators” full of fear and anxiety over our apex role, and as a result we inflict cruelty, havoc, and destruction everywhere we reign. In other words, we are warmongers. Peaceful existence is the exception, not the rule (11).
Barbarian Throng
Reading Sapiens reinforces the Hobbesian notion of the “barbarian throng,” which can only be controlled by fear and rule of law.
The problem with seeing humans as barbarians is the tendency to ditch democracy for totalitarianism and the latter has a history of brutality, severed human rights, and genocide.
Critics of Harari, such as Rod Dreher, accuse him of being a hedonist, a materialist, and a misanthrope who sees human race improving through genetic editing.
Three. What two competing theories explain the emergence of Sapiens as the exclusive species?
One is Interbreeding Theory, which states that Sapiens and Neanderthals mated and evolved into the Sapiens we are today.
The second is Replacement Theory, which states that Sapiens committed genocide against other species, including the Neanderthals. If this theory is true, all of us can be traced back to East Africa from 70,000 years ago. If Replacement Theory is correct, we have some seriously violent hard-wiring in our DNA.
Most Sapiens have a religious-based belief that they are exclusive to the animal kingdom, superior and apart, but Harari claims humans are deluded; in fact, humans were related to other species, which they wiped out:
Soloensis and Denisova were wiped out 50,000 years ago.
Neanderthals were wiped out 30,000 years ago.
Flores Island dwarf-like humans were wiped out 12,000 years ago (18).
Cognitive Revolution
Four. How did language cause Sapiens to become more advanced than other species?
From 70,000 to 30,000 years ago, Sapiens embarked upon the Cognitive Revolution (described in Harari's Ted Talk video).
Objective Reality
Animals live exclusively in an objective reality. The zebra, for example, lives near the Nile River and must navigate across past hungry 20-foot crocodiles. The same zebra must be on the lookout for hungry lions and leopards. The zebra survives by paying keen attention to its objective reality.
Legal Fictions
Imaginative Reality or The Shared Imagination
Humans, too, survive by having a clear awareness of their objective reality, their actual physical environment.
But they have imposed another layer of reality over their physical reality. This added layer of reality is in the realm of the imagination, what Harari calls "legal fictions."
This second reality is the main ingredient of the Cognitive Revolution. This ability for humans to have a shared imagination is what separates humans from other animals. Furthermore, this shared imagination allows humans to dominate over the other animals.
Shared Imaginative Reality Leads to Mass Cooperation
No other animal engaged in an imaginary reality that would cause mass cooperation toward a shared goal.
Bees cooperate in the hive, but their cooperation is instinctive and rigid. Any changes in the environment that disrupt the cooperation cannot be met with an adaptive response from the honeybees. They will perish.
Dolphins and chimpanzees are less rigid and more flexible than honeybees in their cooperation. But the flexible cooperation of dolphins and chimps is limited to small numbers: These mammals need an intimate knowledge and trust of one another to be flexible in their cooperation.
Humans take cooperation to a higher level. Humans are both flexible in their cooperation and they can scale it to big numbers. They don't need intimate knowledge of one another. They rely on agreed fictions or collective imaginations to cooperate toward shared goals, values, and aspirations.
Because humans have advanced language skills, they can create these imaginary worlds with vivid detail.
Examples of Shifting Imaginary Worlds
In the Cognitive Revolution, we agree that an imaginary world presents a reality that is in our best interests.
For example, before the 20th Century, marriage was imagined as a family business arrangement in which men owned women as property. This was agreed upon in patriarchal (man-dominated) societies.
The good news is that marriages didn't end in divorce. The bad news is that women were treated like property.
By the 21st Century, patriarchal societies slowly transformed into consumer societies. The advent of photography, cinema, and television produced vectors for powerful consumer images.
The idea of marriage shifted from a business arrangement to one of Romantic Love.
Romantic Love is an imagined reality.
Imagined realities scaled that cooperation.
Harari calls these imagined realities fiction (27). He writes: "Any large-scale human cooperation--whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe--is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination." Belief in Christ or Allah can move millions, even billions, of people to perform the same rituals and adhere to the same behaviors and attitudes.
The love of coastal property can compel many people to work three jobs so they can live by the sea and work so many hours that they have no free time to walk along the beach.
A cadre of lawyers who never met each other can work together to free a man from prison because that prisoner represents the violation of human rights that this team of lawyers all wish to defend.
A business is a fiction.
Harari points to Peugeot SA as an example of a fiction. Peugeot makes cars and has factories, but if these material things did not exist, Peugeot, the brand, would still exist. It could use its money to make new factories, make new cars, and hire new managers.
Harari writes: "In short, Peugeot SA seems to have no essential connection to the physical world. Does it really exist?" He answers by writing the following: "Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a 'legal fiction.' It can't be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity."
Harari goes on to explain that "Peugeot belongs to a particular genre of legal fictions called 'limited liability companies.' The idea behind such companies is among humanity's most ingenious inventions."
Legal liability companies accelerated human innovation.
Property had to shift from family to giant business, called a legal liability company:
Harari explains that a family business could be wiped out by litigation. Families could be sued into extinction, even lose family members to indentured servitude (30).
As a result, people imagined legal liability companies. A legal liability company, like Peugeot, outlives its founder Armand Peugeot, because the enterprise exists as a fiction.
Harari compares this fiction to demons and devils of the church. No one needs to see these demons and devils, but they exist in the imagination and are used to affect and control behavior.
Further, taking Holy Communion is based on a shared belief that exists in the collective imagination.
Harari then returns to the case of Peugeot SA in which the lawyer must follow "all the proper liturgy and rituals," "sacred procedures," and "hocus pocus" to make Peugeot exist as a legal fiction.
Function of these legal fictions:
Harari then asks what is the purpose of these legal fictions? He writes, "much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about god, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees, and lions" (31).
These fictions, such as Peugeot, "accumulate immense power."
We call these "fictions," "social constructs," or "imagined realities," but they are not lies. Unless they are charlatans, they believe in their fictions like wizards believe in their magic spells, demons, and gods.
Some Apple employees who work at the "Genius Bar" believe they are truly geniuses.
These fictions enable humans to cooperate in millions of numbers, and this capacity for mass cooperation allows humans to do good, evil, and destruction on a massive scale.
Review: How did “legal fiction” advance Sapiens to develop cities, political systems, and business enterprises?
We read one of the book’s most important passages: “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths” (26).
Religious, nationalist, and judicial values and beliefs can bind alliances between people who have never met each other. They share a common commitment based on a common value system.
This value system is based on shared beliefs. These beliefs emerge from shared stories.
“Yet none of these things exist outside the stories people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings” (27).
To make a successful business, Harari asserts that we must be “powerful sorcerers” and “tribal shamans.” He uses the example of Peugeot. Like Rolex, Mercedes, and Apple, Peugeot is an entity that does not exist as a person or a group of persons, but as a brand, an idea, a symbol.
Giving value to a symbol or a brand is unique to Sapiens, and this activity has a great influence on human affairs.
Peugeot is a “legal fiction” and a “figment of our collective imagination” (29).
Peugeot is a corporation, a legal entity, an institution that pays taxes. Individuals are not sued, but the corporation Peugeot can be sued.
Peugeot as a legal fiction is what is called a limited liability company. Before Sapiens invented the limited liability company, they were at too much risk to have their own business because they, not the legal fiction, were liable in the event of being sued. Their children could be sold into servitude, they could lose all of their possessions, and they could be put into prison simply because they were liable for any shortcomings or violations their company presented.
Such legal exposure discouraged people from innovation. In the wake of a limited liability company, however, innovation flourished.
Therefore, limited liability companies, the product of legal fiction, are a huge force in accelerating creativity, business, and innovation.
Harari observes a comparison between religion and business: Both require a story and “hocus pocus” to emerge and exist in people’s collective imagination. Religion needs stories to supports its divine claims. Businesses need the legal magic of lawyers to produce paperwork with legal codes to create a fabrication.
These fabrications, or “legal fictions,” propel human lives in large numbers and disrupt the evolution of societies.
“Telling effective stories is not easy,” the author writes, but the successful, compelling stories create immense power for those in are held in authority of these stories because “millions of strangers to cooperate and to work towards common goals” (31).
A college is not a professor, a group of professors, or a bunch of administrators. A college is an idea, a legal fiction that provides a positive narrative to the community. This positive narrative is about upward mobility and personal enrichment. If the story does not corroborate with reality in some compelling way, the legal fiction or the brand is in danger of weakening or being completely upturned into something else.
When we speak of legal fictions, we are not speaking of lies. Harari writes:
“An imagined reality is not a lie.”
Rather, an imagined reality is a shared value or belief system such as “justice for all,” “diversity in education and the workplace,” “overcoming structural inequality,” “individualism over utilitarianism,” “sacrifice to the family and community and public duty over personal pleasure and personal fulfillment” and so on.
The above are imagined realities that millions of people may share and that millions of others may reject in favor of some contradictory belief system.
Sapiens Live in Dual Reality
Because of the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens live in a dual reality: the objective reality of the world around us and the imagined reality of value systems that are sustained by compelling stories (32).
Competing myths or stories can radically alter our value systems. For example, the author observes France in 1789 when myths supporting “divine right of kings” were supplanted by myths supporting “sovereignty of the people.”
In the United States with structural inequality getting worse and worse, American Millennials are not as friendly toward stories about American democracy and equality and therefore are not necessarily supportive of democratic ideals. Millennials may in fact reject stories that support notions of democratic ideals and equality.
Shared stories or “imagined realities” make humans cooperate toward common goals and have the effect of making Sapiens dominate all other species on the planet.
This is why we cannot overestimate the effects of “legal fictions” or “imagined realities” on the Apex Predator status of Sapiens.
One of the biggest effects of legal fictions is trade. We trade objects based on the object’s value, and the value is based on some story.
Apple computer is a story about creativity, hipster coolness, and innovation.
Rolex and Mercedes are stories about achieving the ultimate in success of “making it.”
Such stories existed tens of thousands of years ago for jewels, spices, fabrics, precious metals, etc.
Trade established the need for trust and trade stimulated world travel, further propelling Sapiens toward world domination (36).
Shared imagined realities also created culture. In fact, culture is defined as a shared imagined reality and the ways this shared imagined reality manifests itself.
Before the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens were defined by biology but after the Cognitive Revolution Sapiens were defined by imagined realities, which comprised of their culture.
The story of Romantic Love as a consumerist idea is this:
Women can buy soaps, hair products, cosmetics and engage in activities that will bring them to the apotheosis of pulchritude (physical beauty) and they can exact high demands on men in courtship. By doing these two things: achieving maximum beauty and physical attraction while demanding that a man "step up his game" in courtship, a woman transforms man, a disgusting beast unworthy of love, into a noble savage slavishly devoted to monogamy in the pursuit of his True Love.
That the divorce rate, between 50-70% depending on what part of the country you survey, contradicts this narrative, doesn't matter.
The consumer imagined reality of Romantic Love persists in our collective consciousness.
In Smithsonian interview, Harari elaborates on imagined realities in society and how they stabilize and bond societies:
Humanity's greatest invention is religion, which does not mean necessarily mean belief in gods. Rather, religion is any system of norms and values that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws. Some religions, such as Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, believe that these superhuman laws were created by the gods. Other religions, such as Buddhism, Communism and Nazism believed that these superhuman laws are natural laws. Thus Buddhists believe in the natural laws of karma, Nazis argued that their ideology reflected the laws of natural selection, and Communists believe that they follow the natural laws of economics.
No matter whether they believe in divine laws or in natural laws, all religions have exactly the same function: to give stability to human institutions. Without some kind of religion, it is simply impossible to maintain social order. During the modern era religions that believe in divine laws went into eclipse. But religions that believe in natural laws became ever more powerful. In the future, they are likely to become more powerful yet. Silicon Valley, for example, is today a hot-house of new techno-religions, which promise us paradise on earth with the help of new technologies. From a religious perspective, Silicon Valley is the most interesting place in the world.
Imagined Realities Translate into Distinct Societies
Autocratic Despot
Ethno-Nationalism
Theocracy
Democracy: human rights, equality, justice, freedom, individuality
The latter is the most appealing to most humans who will flee to those societies, which will enjoy technological and general innovation.
Language, Gossip, and Shared Values
Unlike other animals, humans can use language to gossip, to pain pictures of other humans that either detestable or enviable. We avoid certain behaviors so we don't become of the object of gossip about the detestable human being and as a result are shunned in the realm of reproduction. We are drawn to other behaviors that would generate gossip so that we could be the topic of conversation that paints us in a venerable and admirable light so that we would be desirable in terms of reproductive success. In this regard, we share common values.
Cooperating within the tribe would win us "Brownie Points." Not cooperating would paint us as pariahs. Therefore, most of us were motivated to cooperate and show reciprocity within the tribe.
Gossip allowed us to separate decent people from cheats. Apes could not gossip. We developed social networks far more advanced than apes because largely in part of our capacity for gossip.
To this day, we love gossip. We are obsessed with gossip. We watch "reality TV" that focuses on gossip. When we hang out with friends, our primary activity is gossip. Gossip is in our DNA.
Gossip thrives in the social media age. Twitter is in your face gossip full of "hot takes."
Downside of Gossip
Downside of gossip is that we talk behind people's backs. We are all naturally born back-stabbers. Mark Twain famously said that if we could be the fly on the wall and listen to what our friends said about us when they didn't know we were listening, none of us would have any friends.
Gossip about our reality was only the beginning.
Beyond Gossip, Language Takes an Even More Radical Turn
Harari says our radical departure from other animals is in our capacity to live in an invisible or imagined reality: "Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.
Unlike animals, we live in a shared imagination:
Legends
Myths
gods
religions
religious fables
idea of an afterlife
idea of monogamy and "living happily ever after."
idea of virtue
idea of moral dissolution (disintegration)
politics such as nation states
economics such as money being worth X (this bill is the value of three cheeseburgers)
brands such as Apple, Mini Cooper, Google represent a type of human and a type of lifestyle
laws based on "human rights," something we imagine to exist
We imagine a $10 Casio on a certain type of man and a $20K Rolex on another type of man.
Racism is an imaginary idea that certain people agree upon to base their identity and behavior.
Nationalism is an imaginary idea that affects our identity and behavior.
Tribalism and other "isms" are imagined realities that affect our identity and behavior.
Collective Imagination: Or Shared Fictions
We don't just imagine things. We imagine things collectively.
Gossip limited our social cooperation to groups of about 150 members.
***
How does the pre-agricultural period affect Sapiens today?
Harari observes that “nearly entire history” of Sapiens is pre-agricultural society, also known as foraging society or hunting and gathering society.
This historical period defines who we are today.
After foraging, Sapiens lived for 10,000 years in Agricultural Age: farmers and herders.
For only 200 years, we have lived in Industrial Age: urban laborers and office workers.
Our gorging gene is traced to our need to eat before competing predators could eat our kill and our discovery of sweet fruit. Of course, now we’re maladapted to all the calorie-dense food produced in the Industrial Age.
We may be slighter dumber with slightly smaller brains than foragers because foragers had to have everyday survival skills and know how to work in the environment whereas we can be lazy slobs, turn on a light, turn on a computer, flip a switch, order a pizza, and watch Netflix (49).
Foragers
In many ways, foragers had a “more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle” than industrial Sapiens. In affluent societies today, people work 45 hours a week with little free time and few friends, are full of stress, and overworked to deal with declining real wages. In developing countries, people today may work 80 hours a week and are essentially work bots.
In contrast, foragers had leisure time with one another and worked maybe 3-6 hours a day (50).
Foragers had a more diverse, nutritious diet as opposed to a diet of monocrops, same crops, and same food for farmers. Today, we load up on processed food and sugar.
Of course, Harari points out, foragers often led short, brutish lives, often rife with infanticide and similar atrocities, but on balance their lives could be richer and more affluent than the lifestyles of those in Agricultural and Industrial Periods.
Six. Why is human visitation to Australia one of the “most important events in history”?
We see how destructive Sapiens are to ecosystems living apart from human contact.
We see Sapiens as the “deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth” (64). Within a few thousand years, all of the continent’s giant animals became extinct.
Sapien colonization on any new landfront is a massive disaster. Sapiens leave mass destruction in their wake.
Guidelines:
About 80% of your essay should be written in your voice with your words.
Another 20% of your essay will consist of quotations, paraphrase, and summary from the book Sapiens and credible source of your choice. We call this "cited material."
When you introduce your cited material, you must use signal phrases.
Example Link #1
Example Link #2
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Example Link #1
Example Link #2
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Signal Phrases
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
We include the author's background information to give author credibility or ethos in our argumentation.
After we cite the information, we present our own analysis to show how this material supports our argument.
Examples of a signal phrases:
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
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