Do people need to compare themselves with others in order to appreciate what they have?

Are widely held views often wrong, or are such views more likely to be correct? yes EXAMPLES- ANIMAL FARM (how most of the animals thought the pigs would make their life better than during the period of Mr.Jones OR how the animals thought Napolean was working for good and Snowball a traitor, when actually it was just the opposite.) GALILEO/ NICHOLAS COPPERNICUS - GALILEO - everybody thought the Earth was flat when actually it was round. NICHOLAS - everybody thought the Sun revolved around the Earth when it was just the opposite and NICHOLAS was sentenced to death.

Is there any value for people to belong only to a group or groups with which they have something in common? Is it always best to determine one's own views of right and wrong, or can we benefit from following the crowd? Is it more valuable for people to fit in than to be unique and different? Are people more likely to be productive and successful when they ignore the opinions of others?

______________________________________________________________________________ ---Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below:

It is easy to imagine that events and experiences in our lives will be perfect, but no matter how good something turns out to be, it can never live up to our expectations. Reality never matches our imaginations. For that reason, we should make sure our plans and goals are modest and attainable. We are much better off when reality surpasses our expectations and something turns out better than we thought it would. Adapted from Baltasar Gracian y Morales, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Assignment: Is it best to have low expectations and to set goals we are sure of achieving? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

It is often easy to imagine that we can never live up to our expectations. Often, too, people have low expectations of themselves. But, while it may appear that low expectations are optimal, low expectations can have deleterious effects on and can exacerbate the current situation. It is best to have high expectations, which can have incredibly positive outcomes. This point can be exemplified by examining two important figures in world history: Winston Churchill and Frederick Douglass.

In the Second World War, Britain fought against Adolf Hitler of Germany, and it appeared in the early stages that Britain would be forced to soon surrender. And yet a powerful British leader, Winston Churchill, gave an incredibly stirring speech to the British people, many of whom thought that they would lose. Winston Churchill said that Britain will fight to preserve its institutions and democracy. Britain would fight Germany against all odds. This boosted morale to a great extent, and indeed, Britain was one of the winners of the war. Surely without Churchill's high expectations, Britain could very possible not have had enough morale to continue fighting. Here is an example of a way in which high expectations positively shook the course of history.

A second character, one who lived several years before Churchill, is Frederick Douglass, a former slave in the nineteenth century. Most slaves in America at the time had no rights; many slaves simply obeyed their masters, demanding little of themselves. Douglass, however, was not weak and indeed strove to be the best he could be. He learned how to read and write -- a task not often pursued by slaves at the time. He had incredibly high expectations of himself -- he got himself a job working as a caulker and was a jack-of-all-trades. Through his great demands he eventually achieved his freedom. If he had low

expectations of himself, he most likely would not have advanced in American society. He would have remained a slave with low expectations of himself, as so many slaves in his time had.

History is said to teach the lessons of the past, and humanity has seen the dramatic results of high expectations. If history truly does repeat itself, then the greatest expectations are clearly the best.