Your 1A: Due Date May 13
Lecture Dates:
April 20, 27, May 4, May 11
1A Essay 3 (Essay Worth 200 Points): What Is Causing the Mass Erosion of Critical Thinking Skills?
Due as an upload on May 13.
The Assignment:
For a 1,200-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the forces that cause a societal intellectual and emotional disintegration analyzed in Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”
For research, you must draw from Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, “You’re Being Manipulated”
by Peter Wehner, and, optionally, various works by Tristan Harris.
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph 1: Using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase the major points of Jonathan Haidt's essay "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid."
Paragraph 2: Develop an argumentative thesis in which you support, refute, or complicate Haidt's claim.
Paragraphs 3-7: Your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8: Your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Your last page is the Works Cited page with no fewer than 4 sources in MLA format.
***
English 1C has 3 presentations for Essay 3: April 19, 26, and May 3.
Your 1C: Due May 6
Essay 3: Worth 200 Points
The Assignment:
In the context of the Netflix comedy special Homecoming King, the HBO documentary 38 at the Garden, and the Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercombie & Fitch, develop an extended definition of the chimera as a racist stereotype that hijacks people’s brains. You might address how these negative stereotypes hijack the brain and become internalized, resulting in a sense of shame and a desire for self-abnegation and the only cure is reconnecting to one’s genuine pride, identity, and hope for new possibilities. Your essay should be about 1,200 words with a Works Cited page and a minimum of 4 sources.
What is a chimera?
In short, a chimera is a brain hijack in which we become obsessed with bad ideas that consume us and compel us down a road of self-destruction. Sometimes these chimeras are like tempting mirages, enticing us to pool all of our energy and resources into a fool’s errand. Other times, they possess us in a way that gives us abnormal beliefs, which over time we come to believe to be normal.
To understand the chimera in more detail, here are some of its distinguishing characteristics:
- The chimera gets deep inside our heads and becomes an obsession.
- The chimera has a drug-like effect on us, intoxicating us and making us forget the real world.
- The chimera is addictive. We will use other people to get our fix, so to speak.
- The chimera never delivers, so we’re always disappointed. In this regard, riding a chimera is a hellish bipolar trip with high highs and low lows.
- The chimera often becomes a substitute for basic human needs we have that aren’t being met such as power, love, belonging, purpose, meaning, creative distinction, success. In the case of Howard Ratner, he suffers from wounded masculinity and he seeks power in the black opal.
- The more the chimera grows inside us, the more unhinged from reality we become.
Further Explanation of the Chimera:
Let us look at 15 characteristics:
- A chimera is a seductive mirage that gets inside our heads and feels so real to us that we love it more than life itself.
- As we pursue this chimera with greater and greater intensity, we at the same time reject the people around us. In this regard, we are like drug addicts who prefer our drug to people.
- A chimera is never real. It is always a mythical creature that fills our minds, yet it becomes for the person harboring the chimera the Ultimate Reality that casts all other considerations aside.
- Sometimes we can be afflicted with a chimera and know it, want to be cured of it, but feel helpless to do anything about it. In this regard, we are dealing with the realm of an incurable obsession.
- As our obsession with the chimera progresses, we deteriorate: We retreat into solipsism
- Links to an external site.
- . For a short definition of solipsism, let us say we are afflicted with solipsism when the delusions of our imaginary self cut us off from reality.
- When our brains are hijacked by a chimera, we follow an addiction cycle as acute as any narcotics addict in which we have highs and lows, ascents and crashes, a sort of bipolar life journey.
- Some people pursue the chimera with no self-awareness, what is sometimes called metacognition. An absence of self-awareness or metacognition makes free will or free agency impossible.
- Sometimes a chimera hijacks our brains without warning. It’s an unexpected obsession that hijacks the brains of even productive, sane human beings.
- The chimera is often a substitute for some unfulfilled basic human need like love, companionship, meaning, connection, belonging, maturity, independence, freedom, creativity, etc. A chimera is always a cheap substitute for the real thing. For example, the excitement some people have when they attend a YouTube Mukbang is the substitute for human connection, belonging, and intimacy which is painfully lacking in their lives.
- As the chimera grows over time, the person’s original sense of self fragments, decomposes, and becomes smaller and smaller as a new persona grows, typically an angry persona that resents not getting what he or she wants.
- When people do acquire a chimera, they find they are not only disappointed but confused because the actuality of the acquisition pales compared to the obsession-fantasy of their imagination.
- Often people replace one chimera with another, over and over as their lives are defined by cycles of self-destruction without any self-awareness. The motivation for constantly seeking a chimera is probably an empty life, a life without meaning, or what Viktor Frankl calls in his book Man’s Search for Meaning “the existential vacuum.” The chimera is a feeble attempt to fill that vacuum.
- The chimera is an inflamed passion that grows like a weed inside our brains and strangles our powers of reason. The endgame of a chimera is insanity.
- Some people are freed from the bondage of their chimera only after long-term excruciating suffering that creates a crisis of such intensity that these people are forced to exorcise the chimera demon from their brain and start their lives from scratch and create a sound foundation that won’t allow for the invasions of subsequent chimeras.
- Many people live disconnected from reality and navigate their lives inside a hall of many mirror-like chimeras, which define their existence as a perpetual illusion and somehow they muster a facade of being productive members of society even as their souls rot deep inside.
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