The Global Urgency of Everyday Empathy

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Mirror neurons may be in short supply here, but I do not believe that prevents us from enjoying and displaying empathy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG11gmv0p9s

I think it is a well-intended speech, but I don't think he realises there are more then one type of humans on the planet. Some people got no empathic ability, some got alot of it and most are in the middle. Not to speak of ability and ways to express it, next to the ability to channel the workload of all those emotions (to go metaphoric: A gas guzzler or a economy class car?).

Empathy might work for the masses, but the ones who are on the lower end of that spectrum are mostly people who are succesful in the positions of power - lacking empathy means you can easily be more ruthless then people who aren't and thus giving you the edge on the competition.

I am not just talking about autism when talking about having little empathy, there are other mental deviants like psychopathy who are so.

Cheerfully,
Wallourdes

I think the person in that video is missing something. The problem isn't lack of empathy. It's selective empathy. People have empathy mostly for people who are in their direct sphere of social contact. They don't have empathy for the "unclean masses" of the world. That's why so many right-wing people here in the US hate the idea of government taking from the rich to give to the poor in order to facilitate things like universal healthcare. The poor and the people suffering are simply masses of unclean flesh. Government can never be a force of good in the world because the face government will always be the face of a soulless meddling bureaucracy. Even if the bureaucracy saves many from unnecessary pain and hardship they will still always hate it and pour their scorn and contempt for it. We now live in a world where the problems are too big to solve on a local scale, yet any attempt to solve anything on a more global scale runs up against that wall - that is the limit of human empathy. This is the sickness of modern society. I think we are truly f****d.

I realize this is probably going to turn into more of a PPR topic, but I hope it stays here because I'm really tired of PPR and want to stay away from that awful mess.