SYNERGY

A synthesis is an essay about transgressions

What’s so funny about this? I was of several minds trying to figure out what would be the best context to present this joke. At first I thought of a preacher admonishing the congregation to repent their sins before it was too late. But I didn’t think these folks would be using vocabulary words such as synthesis. That’s why I came up with the photo you see of a student having a discussion with her college professor about an essay she has written. She’s told him it’s a synthesis, which FYI, is a combination of ideas to form a theory or system. The German philosopher Hegel, wrote of thesis or one idea, antithesis or the opposite idea, and the two coming together to form a synthesis. This was known as the Hegelian Dialectic. Our old friend, Karl Marx, borrowed these ideas when he explained how Communism would eventually grow out of the clash between Capitalists and Workers. However, this student has a different meaning altogether. She says it’s