Jackson Fisher
Ms. Lehmann
English 1-1A
4 December 2019
Argumentative Essay
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 because it could cost them their lives. Most survival stories prove that people can't count on other people to save them.
If people count on other people to save them, they often die. People who waited to be saved during 9/11 died because rescue personnel couldn’t get to them. Gonzales says, “An Employee of the Aon Insurance Company on the ninety-third floor of the south tower had begun his escape but returned to his office after the security guards made a general announcement that the building was safe and that people should stay in their office until they were told to leave” (Gonzales pp 327). This proves that survival is selfish because all those people were used to following the rules and were told to do something, so they listened which killed them. And those who didn’t listed and didn’t follow the rules survived Juliane survived a plane crash because she left the others and saved herself. “She had a plan that she believed in. She had a task. Meanwhile the others who had lived through the fall decided to await rescue.” (Gonzales pp 326).
Since Julianne put herself as number 1, she survived. Her selfish decision to leave the others was vital to then survive.
When people assume that they are capable of saving others. People shouldn’t assume they are capable of saving others; it could cost them their lives. In the story Is Survival Selfish it says “Could she 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 pp 318). To support that Wallace says, “The women who survived the plan crash would have died had she attempted to save others on the plane” (Gonzales pp 318). That supports my claim that survival is selfish and that in order to survive you will have to be selfish and put yourself first not second, because it said she would’ve died if she had tried. Although it’s clear that survival is selfish, not everyone agrees.
Some people argue that people shouldn’t assume they are capable of saving others because it could save others. This is wrong because Gonzales said in Deep Survival that Rescue personelle have a higher survival rate because they were trained to save others which proves that you still have to be selfish to survive unless you have professional training.
Because people can’t count on others to save them and people shouldn’t assume they are capable of saving others it could cost them their lives, survival is selfish. If people can't count on other people to save them, they often die. People who waited to be saved during 9/11 died because rescue personnel couldn’t get to them. Gonzales says “An Employee of the Aon Insurance Company on the ninety-third floor of the south tower had begun his escape but returned to his office after the security guards made a General announcement that the building was safe and that people should stay in their office until they were told to leave” (pp 327). In the story Is Survival Selfish it says “Could she 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, pp 318). To support that Wallace says “The women who survived the plan crash would So, is survival selfish? Obviously not.
Works Cited Page
Wallace, Lane Is Survival Selfish Collections, edited by Kylene Beers, Martha Hougen, Cargo Jago, Willian L. McBride, Erik Palmer, & Lydia Stack, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, pp.317-320
Deep Survival Gonzales, Laurence” Collections, edited by Kylene Beers, Martha Hougen, Cargo Jago, Willian L. McBride, Erik Palmer, & Lydia Stack, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, pp 325-334.
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 we read the story(s), Second we wrote our first draft of the paper, Then Ms. Lehmann corrected them, Later we corrected them, and finally we uploaded it to our website.
2, What qualifies this paper as an argumentative essay? What are the requirements for this genre and how did you meet them?
We argued whether you have to be selfish to survive.
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?
I found my found my favorite part of the story(s) and found a quote about it.