This is another GRE Analytical Writing exercise that comes from the following topic:
TOPIC: ISSUE185 – "Scandals-whether in politics, academia, or other areas-can be useful. They focus our attention on problems in ways that no speaker or reformer ever could."
More and more scandals are presenting in front of us through various mediums, including newspapers, magazines and internet. And they refer to every realm of our lives, ranging from politics to academia that drive people’s attention from one field to another. Some argues that such scandal to be good, with the reason that they can focus our attentions in different ways and lead to some fresh discoveries, but a question comes out in this way. Do they really matter in this way?
The formation, or those preconditions for scandals, carries various stories themselves, including the eager to success but without patience, a failure that is developed from the ideal anticipation from the reformers, etc, and in this way, such happening of scandals can really help people be aware of their mistakes and make attempts to overcome. Dating back to the 19th century in Europe, when people were exhausted to make a kind of non-stop working machine, existed George L. Push, a gentleman who was convinced on the existence of such machine, announced his success of building ups of such machine in a local newspaper. But his followers soon found it to be false since what he had made was only an ideal model, but without any realistic machine at all! The critics from the readers and his fans then drove to him like a storm. But soon after the in-depth discussion based on this scandal, people eventually accepted the fact that such machine can never be existed.
The scandals can also drive people to the new fields of research, the development of new policy that they are not initially focused. When getting focused, the reformers, scientists, etc can get more suggestions and critics from the public that boost their efficiency and reduce their possibility of failure. As a reformer that is proposing a new housing policy aiming at solving the housing problems for the disabled, they found very few citizen get interested on that at the begining. So he then conducted a test in some communities where the scandals then come out due to some faults on the proposal. The scandal draw people’s attention to this policy and people start to write to the newspapers and government for the deliveries of their new ideas. Then the policy is rapidly improved under these suggestions, while we cannot deny the contribution from the scandals.
But we must be aware that such benefit can hardly be brought to permanently. In fact, such severe scandals, especially those refer to the fields that are unknown to the public, can mislead them. Because such scandals can make people feel the related affairs unbelievable, such as a new policy, a new skill and a new medicine, and the anticipation for these from the public would be greatly mitigated. A real example on the investment can help explain this. We are dating back to the 1920s in US, where there were still no equivalent accounting standards among the listed companies and financial fraud were popular. But when some frauds were getting to known to the public, the public trust on the accounting number were totally lost and people start to sell out their stocks in hand. The consequence of such scandals is known to all, that is, the Great Deficiency. It is the scandal that brings all the investors into the disaster.
That’s why we are caring so much on scandals. For the public, it is a good way for them to refer to some new fields that are strange to them, offering them new room of thinking. While it is apparently more significant to the reformers and government, since such scandals from different areas can help them to improve their developing policy, skills etc, but we must also be aware that such scandals can also reduce the trust from the public that can lead to severe consequence sometimes. We are not to deny the usefulness of scandals, but we should also be aware of their potential harms.