<p>Essay Option 1: “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.” -Oscar Wilde. </p>
<p>Othello and Iago. Dorothy and the Wicked Witch. The Autobots and the Decepticons. History and art are full of heroes and their enemies. Tell us about the relationship between you and your arch-nemesis (either real or imagined).</p>
<p>Man or machine</p>
<p>My arch-nemesis is a machine. A bionic robot programmed for perfectiona soulless, single-dimensional horror. Faceless, monotonous workers engineered her, injecting performance-enhancing neurons to create a killer creature, a competitive monster. The machine travels down the assembly line joining the never-ending army of machines–a clone in an army of clones. Every machine is identical in its ideal image, its flawless focus, and its perfect productivity. My arch-nemesis is produced to pursue perfection with weapons of mass destruction - cerebral engines polished for perfunctory performance. She is a Stepford student. And she is me.
Inimicus pessimus meus ipsius sum, or I am my worst enemy as the saying goes. The machine in me is my cutthroat competitor. Her exemplary, or more accurately stated, extremely inane expectations guide my life. I unleash the brute beast within me to meet her demands, working senselessly while losing my humanity. The beast clocks countless hours memorizing heavy, never-ending textbooks, churning out papers, and practicing math problems with a religious fervor. I worship at her flawless feet and offer myself as sacrifice. I become a mental machine; I become the beast. I sell my soul and enter my hell: a dark society obsessed with sinful superiority. My education becomes a cliché survivor show, obsessed with success.
Because machines share the same programmed cerebral sequence, machines congregate together. Our bloodthirsty beasts salivate over scholarly success. Scholarly success, however, is limited to a machine mindset. We are algorithms of computed calculations: college and then career choice. My comrade clone automates to go to an Ivy, work in a cubicle, and make a lot of money. This is the program of clone culture. To do anything else is to fail. Computed noises escape from her engines. Success is status. Success is money. Success is power. Success is machine-made. Failure is man-made. My clone is built under a mask of incessant fear. Failure is her public enemy. Man is her public enemy. In my stainless steel surface, something snaps. My soul cannot survive in this soulless system. My struggling soul reveals a revelation. I am not a machine; I am a man-made malfunction. Finally, my machine hard drive breaks down, and I regain my human memory.
The malfunction frees me from my cerebral coma. Clone cultures definition of success and failure in status, power, and money cannot fulfill me. I measure success and failure not in these superficial terms but in a deeper, darker definition, my personal growth. In order to grow, I must tame my beast who fears separating from clone culture and facing my true nature. I am an idiosyncrasy of both light and dark; my life is imperfectly immeasurable. I am on a journey without a definitive ending, a work in progress that grows and stumbles in taming my beast. I battle my beast to find my light; I fight a constant, endless struggle. My struggle to find my light, however, is essential in my enlightenment.
My enlightenment truly heals my battle scars, releasing me from the machine and awakening my humanity. I arise from my former mad-man machinery to create my own culture apart from clone culture. The internally important aspects of life become my cultural mantras: compassion, passion, and discovery. I free myself from the cold competition to feel for my foe. I discover my inner peace, when I step into the strangers shoes. I can see the common thread, the desire to break free from the machine. Underneath our darkness, we have our lingering lights, our wish to embrace our good. I find my passion in creating this new culture, a culture of compassionate community. My culture evolves from my hope for the future. I wish to discover my humanity, to cultivate the qualities of the man. I, evidently, am man not machine.</p>