Kirsten Wethern Ms. Lehmann English 1-1A 4 December 2019 To Survive You Must Be Selfish
Do you believe people must be selfish in order to survive? This is the central question of this essay. Survival does require people to behave selfishly because people can’t count on other people to save them, and people shouldn’t assume they are capable of saving others. Most survival stories prove that people must save themselves; they can’t count on others to save them.
If people do not try to save themselves and wait for others to come save them, they often die. People who waited to be saved during 9-11 died because rescue personnel couldn’t get to them. In Deep Survival,Gonzales wrote “In the World Trade Center disaster, many people who were used to following the rules died because they did what they were told by authority figures." This proves that survival is selfish.One employee of the insurance company died because he was not thinking about himself and his survival; he just did what he was told to do by the security guards. Another example that supports this is Juliane and her plane crash. Juliane survived the plane crash because she left the others and saved herself; she had to look after herself instead of waiting for help. The others who waited for help died. In Deep Survival, Gonzales wrote “She had a task. Meanwhile, the others who had lived through the fall decided to await rescue, which is not necessarily a bad idea either. But expecting someone else to take responsibility for your well-being can be fatal” (Gonzales 326). Juliane, the teenage girl, thought about herself and her own survival; the others expected others to save them, and they died. Not only can people not count on others to save them, but people shouldn’t assume they are capable of saving others; it could cost them their lives.
If people assume that they are capable of saving others, it could cost them their lives. The woman who survived the plane crash would have died had she attempted to save others on the plane. In “Is Survival Selfish”Wallace wrote, “Could she really have saved the others? Probably not, and certainly not from the back of the plane. If she’d tried, she probably would have perished with them” (Wallace 318). The woman was thinking about herself and her own survival; that’s how she survived. If she had tried to save others, and if she was not thinking about herself, then she would have died along with many others. Another piece of evidence is Yates. He had to make the decision to cut his friend loose or they would have both died on the mountain. In “Is Survival Selfish” Wallace writes, “In Yates’ case, he had time to think hard about the odds, and the possibilities he was facing, and to realize that he couldn’t save anyone but himself” (Wallace 319). Yates was thinking about saving himself, that is why he cut the rope and his friend fell.Because Yates was being selfish, him and his friend both survived. If Yates wasn’t being selfish, both would have died on the mountain. Although it’s clear that survival is selfish, some believe that it is not.
Some people believe that you do not have to be selfish in order to survive. They argue that the key to survival is having purpose in a crisis; caring for others gives people purpose. This is incorrect because you could be selfish, and you could be your own purpose. Maybe your purpose is that you don’t want to die. In Night, the Blockalteste and Kapos were very selfish. Their purpose was their own survival. They were killing other Jewish people in order to save themselves, so their purpose was not saving others; it was saving themselves. So, it is obvious that survival is selfish.
Because people can’t count on others to save them and people shouldn’t assume they are capable of saving others, survival is selfish. Juliane survived the plane crash because she left the others and saved herself; she had to look after herself instead of waiting for help. The others who waited for help died. And the woman in the plane crash was thinking about herself and her own survival, that’s how she survived. If she had tried to save others, and if she was not thinking about herself, then she would have died along with many others. In both situations, the women survived by being selfish and thinking about their own survival. So, is survival selfish? Obviously, it is.
Works Cited Page Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival.Collections, edited by Lylene Beers, Martha Hougen, Carol Jago, William L. McBride, Erik Palmer Lydia Stack, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, pp. 326-327.
Wallace, Lane. “Is Survival Selfish.” Collections, edited by Lylene Beers, Martha Hougen, Carol Jago, William L. McBride, Erik Palmer Lydia Stack, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, pp. 318-319.
Argumentative Essay Reflection
Please answer all questions in complete, grammatically correct sentences.
1. Explain the process you went through to write this paper. Please be specific. First I had to decide what side I was on; is survival selfish or is it not. Next I took notes and I also used notes that Ms. Lehmann gave to me.I used these notes to write an outline. Once I was done with that I typed my essay. Next,I printed my essay and handed it in for Ms. Lehmann to grade. Then my got corrected and I had revisions to make. Once I made the revisions I was done.
2. What qualifies this paper as an argumentative essay? What are the requirements for this genre and how did you meet them? This paper is an argumentative essay because I am arguing that survival is selfish and I discussed both points. An argumentative essay should talk about both point of views, the person that typed the essay should pick one point to argue and prove why the other point of view is incorrect. I was arguing that survival is selfish and I proved it.
3. Explain how you found at least one of the quotations from the essay and tell me why you chose that particular quote. What did it do for your paper? To find my quotes I looked through the stories in the collections book and found something the author typed that supported my claim. One of the quotes that I picked is “In the World Trade Center disaster, many people who were used to following the rules died because they did what they were told by authority figures."This helped my paper because if these people had been selfish they most likely would have survived.