A New Epidemic: Empathy Deficit Disorder

Empathy is a humanizing force. It is the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from his angle without losing your own perspective.

Empathy is what you feel when you can step outside of yourself and enter the internal world of the other person, and experience the other person's emotions, conflicts, or aspirations.

Empathy is the basic ingredient of any good conversation. It's our chief way of learning. We perform at our best through the involvement of others.

However, empathy is not easy because, as obvious as this is going to sound, we are all individuals who have never been anybody but ourselves. Therefore empathy requires us to slow down and take the time to consider what it might be like to walk in another's shoes. Unfortunately, our fast paced society does not encourage the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

EDD (Empathy Deficit Disorder) as Douglas LaBier, Ph.D. says, "keeps you locked inside a self-centered world, and that breeds emotional isolation, disconnection and polarization."

How Do You Develop EDD?

Most people are socially conditioned into believing that acquiring and achieving things are "normal" - even "healthy" - ways to live. EDD grows when people focus too much on acquiring power, status, and money for themselves. Nearly every day we hear or read about more extreme examples: people who go over the edge in their pursuit of money, power or recognition, and end up resigning their jobs, in rehab or behind bars.

But many of the people I see everyday, whether in psychotherapy or executive consulting, struggle with their own versions of the same thing through too much emphasis on acquiring - both things and people. That's going to promote vanity and self-importance. Then, you become increasingly alienated from your own heart, and equate what you have with who you are.

And that's a killer for empathy, because then you're ripe for the delusion that you're completely independent and self-sufficient. You lose touch with the true reality, that all humans are interconnected and interdependent - all organs of the same body, so to speak. Your sense of being a part of the larger interwoven community - which is absolutely necessary for survival in today's world - fades away. And so does your awareness that we have to sink or swim together, help each other, and sustain the planet we inhabit - or else we're all in deep trouble.

The net result of this social conditioning is the decline of empathy for other human beings who are on the same boat you are. You don't recognize that we're all one, bound together. You only see yourself. And I think that's a bona fide emotional disorder in our times.

Social Melting Pots Foster Technological Innovation

Ubuntu philosophy

Xhosa proverb: "People are people through other people".

"My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up in yours. We belong in a bundle of life. I am a human because I belong. A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are." -- Desmond Tutu explaining Ubuntu in No Future Without Forgiveness

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Proof For the Existence of God?

Thomas Cahill's eloquent speech at an anti-death penalty event, with South Africa's Archbishop Tutu in attendance, gives additional details of Dominique Green's life as well as illuminating the kind of man Dominique Green became despite the never-ending brutality that was his life.

Dominique Green, after enduring years of torture at the hands of a mother who used to hold her son's hand over a gas flame when she disapproved of something he had done - a mother who was an alcoholic, a prostitute, and who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and multiple personalities disorder - was abandoned at the age of 15. With no place to go, he took up residence in a storage bin, until he was arrested and sentenced to death three years later, for a crime that all evidence suggests he didn't commit.

Yes, he did sell drugs, and he did rob and steal, but mostly to support himself in a world that failed to trickle down its wealth, and a world that never allowed him to think, speak, or play as a child, but fully expects that he "put away" what he never had in the first place.

Once on death row, Dominique became and avid reader and writer. Archbishop Desmond Tutu's book, No Future Without Forgiveness, impressed Dominique most of all. After reading the book, he did all he could to spread Desmond Tutu's message of love and forgiveness, spending all of his time trying to make life a little better for those, who, like him, knew only of man's inhumanity to man.

Despite Dominique's, what can only be called, miraculous transformation, considering his existence to this point was completely void of love, and despite the fact that he did not commit the *crime he was being executed for, and despite the video plea of the victim's entire family to commute Dominique's sentence, sent to the bloodthirsty state of Texas ( Thus far, in 2009, the state of Texas has executed twelve people. The other 49 states combined executed 7 people in total.) Board of Pardons and Parole, and to Gov. Rick Perry - "determined to exceed the number of executions of his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose number of executions on a per year basis remain virtually unequaled in American history" - all but one from the board called for Dominique's execution.

Moments before his own execution, Dominique said, "To think Archbishop Tutu came here. Nobody thinks we're anything...He came all the way from South Africa."

Logical and rational thought would dictate that a child, exposed only to violence, hatred, chaos and hopelessness, would render that child incapable of selfless love. In fact, many children raised in warm, nurturing environments are incapable of selfless love. Dominique's life, by defying valid reasoning, proves there are other forces operating outside the realm of logic, or at least, cannot be explained, without the grace of God.

“The souls of the just are in the hands of God, and the torment of malice shall not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, but they are at peace. If, as it seems to us, they suffered punishment, their hope was rich with immortality. Slight was their correction. Great will their blessings be.

God was putting them to the test and has proved them worthy to be with him. He has tested them like gold in a crucible and has accepted them as a perfect holocaust. In the hour of judgment they will shine in glory and will sweep over the world like sparks through stubble.

They will judge nations, rule over peoples, and the Lord will be their King forever. Those who trust in him will come to understand the truth. Those who are faithful to him will live with him in love. Only grace and mercy await them. All those, in His compassion who God has called to himself.”-- Book of Wisdom

* "that, before they could find the prisoner guilty they must be satisfied, 'not only that those circumstances were consistent with his having committed the act, but they must also be satisfied that the facts were such as to be inconsistent with any other rational conclusion than that the prisoner was the guilty person'"

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Desmond TuTu Apologizes to Gay People

“I want to apologise to you and all those who we in the church have persecuted.

“I’m sorry that we have been part of the persecution of a particular group. For me that is quite un-Christ like and, for that reason, it is unacceptable.”

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