Argumentative Essay

Rocío Gabilán
Christian Olavarría
Diego Sepúlveda
Emilio Torres
 Introduction
The purpose of this essay has as its objective to demonstrate a clearly and well detailed

explanation about why the story ‘’The Other Foot’’, from Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated

Man, is quite related with the concept of blinding paradigms seen it on Morin’s Seven

Complex Lesson. We want to explain about how the story of white people living on Mars and

black people left behind on Earth, it represents clearly and undoubtedly the concept explained

by Morin: blinding paradigms.

Body

Regarding The Other Foot plot, it is about the story of a black people community who moved

from Earth to Mars because they were tired to live there, mostly, because the way white

people treated them was not very good. After a long period of peace in Mars, they heard that

,for the first time in twenty years, a white man was coming to the planet. The kids, who were

born in mars and had never seen white people before, were pretty excited about how a white

person looks like. Nonetheless, the older people were quite resentful against them because of

all the troubles that they had in the past. When the white man arrived at Mars, Willie, a guy

whose parents had been murdered by white people, was thinking about torturing and killing

him, but the man explains them that after they had left, a nuclear war started devastating

everything, so they only wanted peace now. After reflecting about that, Willie’s mind and

perception about white people changed, and everything he had ever believed had changed

too. The point of view that Willie had is something that we could call, a paradigm, who Edgar

Morin, the writer of Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, defined as:
 Determination of master logical operations. The paradigm, hidden beneath logic,

selects the logical operations that become preponderant, pertinent and evident underits

dominion (exclusion-inclusion,disjunction-conjunction,implication-negation). The

paradigm grants privilege to certain logical operation to the detriment of others, such

as disjunction to the detriment of conjunction; and grants validity and universality to

its chosen logic. Thereby it gives the qualities of necessity and truth to the discourse

and theory it controls. ​(Morin, 2001)

By understanding that concept, we could say that Willie had an “exclusion-inclusion” relation

with the white man because, to his paradigm, the white man should be excluded. All the

racism and discrimination existing on Earth, and all the conflicts that black people had to

face, were the bases of Willie’s paradigm, where the white people is represented as the bad

guys. Therefore, it grants validity to his logic to justify the way that he is going to treat the

newcomer.

Conclusion

The mind can make a system so closed that we could think that everything is black or white,

but that’s not necessarily the truth. Just a single change in the theory or our logic, could

change everything that we have ever believed, the same way that it happened to Willie, who

trusted, for the first time, a white man. Education is what made people think in paradigms

that could be dangerous to others, specially when you living with some kind of privilege, but

education is also the tool to overcome those blinding paradigms, to create a better world.
 References

Morin, E. (2001). ​Seven complex lessons in education for the future​. Paris: Unesco.