For he reading project my group read Atlas Shrugged.Which is essentially an 1,100 page novel that tries to prove that selfishness can be moral and practical. We need to show this somehow in our presentation and we're not quite sure how.
One idea I had was to set up a game that the class would play where by do doing some action they earn pieces of candy and my group would act as administrators. After a few rounds we could then start "redistributing the wealth" by taking candy from the successful people to "support" the unsuccessful ones. We would design it so that as the game progressed the system would collapse upon itself as the successful loose their incentive to work because it's just going to be taken from it and the unsuccessful will loose their incentive because the successful will support them. This cycle is what happened in the end of the novel so it would be fitting. However, I'm concerned that it may be too difficult to design the game, and that it might not work out how we want which would be embarrassing.
The other idea we had was to arrange a Socratic Seminar where a few members of the class would discuss whether selfishness can be moral and/or practical. We like this idea but we are hesitant that the group will just all agree that selfishness isn't moral or practical, seeing they haven't read the novel and generally society looks down upon selfishness. We were thinking that maybe we would sit in on the discussion so that we could make it more dynamic but we feel that that may be a little weird.
Opinions?
I love that idea for the game. And by the way, it doesn't have to be complicated. All it has to do (like you said) is demonstrate a point. Perhaps you could have people make things, and the best made products get funding... each turn a certain amount of money is needed to progress to the next round, so you could justify the redistributing of money by "allowing the people who didn't do so well to stay in the game and get a second chance". But after this repeats several times then it will sink in what is happening and the game will collapse.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote he instead of the. Dummy.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Adam, I think your game can be very successful. You just have to make the purpose clear. I think a discussion, unless you forced people to play devil's advocate, would result in people being all high and mighty about how awesome they are by being selfless and it would, either way, be incredibly contrived.