Write a 2500 word argumentative essay on Mind Control. For the purposes of this essay, mind control will be defined as anything which causes someone to choose in a way that they might not freely choose were they not being influenced. Consider the particular form of mind control you choose as inimical to American civic life since democracy depends on freely chosen alternatives and fully informed decisions. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, amusement parks and simulacra (fabricated and controlled environments), Behaviorism (making a comeback), architecture (inhuman or biophiliac?), store layout (Malcolm Gladwell and Paco Underhill), clothing (Alison Lurie), prescribed drugs (Prozac, anti-depressants, Ritalin), authority (Milgram and Zimbardo), advertising (pupilometers, tachistoscopes, plethysmographs, mooks and midriffs, subliminals), color, brainwashing of children in the Middle East, lying, education (The Language Police, college freshman indoctrination, speech codes, The Shadow University), entertainment, propaganda (Michael Moore et al.), interrogation techniques, language itself, therapy, 12 step programs, religious cults (Scientology, Raelians, the Rebbe’s Army, militant Islamic fundamentalism, Children of God, or other current cults), TQM and other management methods, Outcomes Based Education (Student Learning Outcomes), multiculturalism, salesmanship, surveillance, multi-level marketing, Child Development, behavioral economics, and so on. Use MLA parenthetical documentation and at least 15 sources (more reputable journals, fewer websites) should appear in your paper, properly noted on a separate Works Cited page. Have a solution!

Your greatest problems with this essay will be narrowing down enough, finding a solution and arguing for it (rather than just writing a report). This paper grows out of the news of mass suicides in religious cults (specifically the People’s Temple and Heaven’s Gate cults) which most people found incomprehensible. By what means did Jim Jones and Herf Applewhite convince ordinary people to kill themselves? All the research shows that neither man employed anything novel or unusual—they simply put well known techniques to use for malicious ends.

Remember:

Underline your thesis statement.
Double-space, and employ a standard font (e.g., Times New Roman) and point size (e.g., 12);
no illustrations;
number all your pages; put your name on each page;
late papers are not accepted;
a paper not handed in counts as zero points;
use MLA parenthetical documentation: http://www.mpc.edu/library/Articles_Databases/Documents/New%20Style%20MLA%20Citations%20Handout.pdf and simplified in your Syllabus attachment;
even though using MLA documentation, name each source before you use it, provide the source’s credentials, and the date of the referenced source, for example, “According to Dr. Sir Cedric Fentingmold, Co-Chair of the Department of Human Genetics of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Genomic Ideology (2009), ` . . . .’”