DFW Response

I do agree that our lives have not really started and that students today are too arrogant, and we need to be humbler. Some of the most successful people that I know never went to college and started as an apprentice for trades. Arrogance is the downfall of stiff minds and not being able to adjust your thinking process will always lead to failure. I do not believe he is referring to empathy. I feel like he is talking about discipline and arrogance. Through discipline people have achieved remarkable things and going back to my first paragraph those who have no discipline and are arrogant, rarely succeed in life. I feel that discipline is the start of all things great. If Steve Jobs was not disciplined enough, then he never would have persevered and made Apple, after all he did start in his garage and through his perseverance and humility, he was able to really take off. Arrogance and confidence are different, arrogance is thinking you know something, and confidence is knowing through experience. DFW says this best “Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too” (Wallace 3). Thinking something is automatically true is arrogance, because unless you confirm this “something”, then how can you believe it? Bloom talks about a similar type of arrogance but it is more focused on self centeredness. When Bloom writes about the Sandy Hook shooting, he mentions the charity to the town and how, “Hundreds of volunteers had to be recruited to store the gifts and toys that got sent to the city, which kept arriving despite pleas from Newtown officials for people to stop.”(Bloom 2). Even though the people of the town asked for the donations to stop, so satisfy their own “morals” people still sent gifts like their asking does not apply because they are doing something nice. For me, this arrogance is much worse than the type that DFW describes in his speech. You do not have empathy for someone for your personal benefit you do it for theirs. Both Bloom and DFW talk about the negatives of being arrogant and how its downfalls are sometimes worse than what you learn from it.