April 4, 7pm: I'm done marking up this thread. I now invite classmates to comment. Say anything. Attack, defend, ramble on a random inspiration. Don't worry about affecting my grade. As always, I am trying to provoke, if not dispute, dissonance.

BACKGROUND: I wrote my Columbia admissions essay on my dissatisfaction with my undergraduate debate team, which never attempted to explain WHY it was possible to defend any position. This semester I came up with a reason why. I have scattered pieces of that account in comments on other people's Second Essays.

Here, I will

1. provide examples of tolerable narratives or world-views.
   
2. defend strange positions in light of these models.

I will save my less idiosyncratic paper idea for the third exercise, in which the school encourages us to pretend not to be ourselves -- in which, as in sibling rivalries and pissing contests,

Long peers learned to long
To be ranked by uniform
Not in spite of it.

-- AndrewGradman - 31 Mar 2008

2. The "Big Bang" Theory of Western Civilization

• • Young Sigmund: Socrates, why are you attracted to young boys?
  • Socrates: The truth is just the opposite -- I'm satisfying my desires with precisely those people that I find UNATTRACTIVE!
  • Sigmund: Why?
  • Socrates: ... so that I can be SURE that what attracted me to them, was not their great beauty, but their great sense of justice. I'm controlling a variable.
  • Sigmund: Which variable?
  • Socrates: Here's the truth: I'm controlling beauty, in order to figure out justice. Girls are Beautiful and Boys are Just; therefore, justice is a function of the boy I happen to be having a ... dialogue with.
  • Sigmund: Is that a dialogue in your pocket, Socrates?
  • Socrates: Yes, I got it last night while thinking about the Muse. We could read it together, if you'd like ...
  • Sigmund: Help, help! Socrates is corrupting the youth of Athens!

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POSITION: Truth is a symptom of minority status -- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

3. Surgeon : body :: "first do no harm" : organs :::: lawyer : society :: "first do no harm" : bodies

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POSITION: Alan Dershowitz (who defends unpopular plaintiffs and makes their narratives symbolic of social malaise) is the most ethical man among us.

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

4. Rousseau’s lawmaker = every perceived artifact

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POSITION: All observable behavior consists entirely in externalities; all externalities soon become either failed or successful revolutions; Law is the voice that teaches us: (good vs. bad) / (long term vs. short term) / (surveil or don't) / (education, marketing, campaigning, trust, map-writing vs. propaganda, exploitation, enslavement, lies, art).

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

6. Just as we cannot distinguish whether Plato was the ultimate Jayson Blair, or was "merely" a faithful stenographer/journalist/fly on the wall, we also don't know which is the real Plato:

• the bearded old man in white, dreaming/reconstructing a narrative transmitted through hearsay (for, as Plato informs us, Phaedo said to Echecrates, "Plato, if I am not mistaken, was ill"); or
• the young bearded man touching Plato's knee -- who perceived Socrates not as disembodied words, but as a coherent body -- as if that matters.

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POSITION: As scientific progress permits us to further divide labor, disparities in education and training will cause neighbors to look more like magicians, and act more like magicians, and be less and less capable of empathizing with each other's actual needs. For:

• without the bird's eye view, how can we determine when you've left the maze? How can you determine whether your maze can even be exited?
• even with the bird's eye view, how do we know which mazes have vertical shafts? Those mazes too might be unexitable: man cannot reverse certain ancient falls; the problem is we don't know which.

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

7. [salvaged from a failed cover letter:] I believe that the corporation is the best cost structure for marketing and innovating visions of justice. My market research suggests that there is a customer for an antidepressant that relieves anxiety produced when impersonal, publicly traded corporations move into one’s neighborhood: the voter and churchgoer; the unionized employee and her manager; and the senior on Medicare, Columbia law professor, and nostalgic former Marxist (reference available on request). That antidepressant will be consumed ocularly, i.e. as books, essays and editorials. My business plan is to obtain tenure at a university, so that my factory will never be overwhelmed by costs. My challenge is believing that such a product exists. I don’t even know whether publicly traded companies believe in it—whether, for example, pharmaceutical companies agree what degree of external regulation the industry should invite upon itself, in order for its members to maximize their sum and share of short-term and long-term social value. I do not know how much of a socialist my books should portray me as. That is why I want to work for Bristol-Myers Squibb: I trust their opinion, more than I trust the opinion of a private nonprofit with a private agenda, because it is the function of a publicly traded corporation to answer this question correctly.

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Position: Die Gedanken Sind Frei is the name for an antidepressant.

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008

8.
I have a nightmare, that in my lifetime technology will continue to improve. And as the menu of possible breads and circuses grows more complex, Americans will think these are different; and, being Englishmen, they will lose faith in anyone’s ability to provide them the RIGHT bread and circuses. They will call their confusion Pluralism, and their agosticism Science: and they will replace legislatures with bureaucrats, and bureaucracies with corporations; elections with marketing, and monetize all Value; Senates with Boards of Directors, Presidents with CEOs ... The publicly-held corporation will assume the function of the democratic state ... but our language will continue to contrast the two.

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POSITION: I have a dream, that one day CEOs will use those moments when they're not being watched by Boards Directors to increase consumer rather than shareholder value.

That's really my dream. My dream is to someday teach at a business school, and share my nightmares with those people.

-- AndrewGradman - 04 Apr 2008