Write a research paper about the genuine meaning of the American dream.In Essay #2, we will try to answer two questions:
1) How do you know when a story/idea/”fact” is true and when it isn’t, and
2) Why do people sometimes insist on believing things that are (provably, rationally) not true?
For the first part, I’d like you to think about how both false and true information circulate in our culture and society today. Why are these ideas or stories appealing?
When you come across an idea or concept, even a meme, that seems at all questionable, do you check it out? Should you? How?
What about the ones you already agree with? Do you check those to be sure, or do you just trust or hope that they are true/honest/not misleading?
Note: You don’t have to answer these questions directly in your essay. They are a place to begin thinking and freewriting about our topic generally.
To center this essay, I’d like you to choose a story/idea/belief/”fact” that people cling to in spite of reasonable, rational, and/or scientific evidence to the contrary. Some examples might be the beliefs of the anti-vaxxer movement, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, the QAnon conspiracy theory believers, or climate change deniers.
Or, if that’s not appealing, you could also think about this issue from another perspective: the criminal justice system. Much of criminal law is about stories: who is lying, who is telling the truth, and how can you tell? Why is eye-witness testimony so powerful in court when we know it is also extremely unreliable? If you take this approach, you could look at a case or a series of cases that illustrate the harm done when a false story is believed and try to discover why that story prevailed over the truth.
A third possible way to approach this essay that might be interesting is to consider the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, which are also not always true. Do we always realize it when we’ve altered reality to make it fit a narrative that benefits us? If not, why no? If so, should we try to stop doing that? How do we find objective truth about ourselves — and how do we then live with those stories, rather than stories that might perhaps be more comforting/comfortable?
You need a fourth option? What about the stories our nation tells itself? Manifest Destiny, the American Dream, White Nationalism. . .
And there’s no need to limit yourself to these suggestions: there are many more possibilities out there (perhaps unfortunately).
Choose something that you find particularly intriguing. Run it by me if you feel unsure.
Note: In this description, above, I am setting up the topic/focus for the paper but not the structure of your paper. You can organize in any way that works best for you and your ideas; you do not have to separate your work a into part one and part two. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.
The final draft of this paper will be 5-7 pages, and your Works Cited page will have a minimum of three credible/scholarly sources — more is better. Edit the paper for american dream I already started it just fix it and whatever I put that dosent make sense remove
