Translator: Larisa Esteche Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
Every semester, on the first day of class,
I invite my students to join me on a spaceship.
I say we are all aliens
traveling across the ether faster than the speed of light
on our way to planet Earth to do a little anthropological research
circa 2013.
When we get there, here's what we would discover.
In the first instance, we would notice that there are 11 million millionaires.
And at the same time,
60% of people live on just 6% of the world's income.
Nearly one billion people have no access to safe drinking water.
And over a billion people practice open defecation
because they lack access to sanitation facilities.
A hundred million children are not in school,
60% of them girls.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of kids serve as child soldiers.
Twenty-seven million people are currently being held captive as sex slaves
or in some form of bonded labor.
That is three times the amount of people
that suffered throughout the 300-year African slave trade.
And finally, there's climate change -
the most fundamental crisis to ever confront humanity.
And why?
Because people are unwilling to face the reality
that overconsuming finite resources is totally unsustainable.
So I ask my students, "How are they doing over there?"
And they respond,
"Wow, they could be doing so much better."
In the face of these social and environmental injustices,
some of us feel rage,
and some of us feel impotent,
while others turn a blind eye.
So I invite you to consider these two quotes in juxtaposition.
Polish poet Stanislaw Lec once wrote,
"Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty."
So in other words,
we've got a whole bunch of snowflakes running around saying,
"Whoa, not my fault. I'm little old me.
What have I got to do with that big old avalanche?"
On the other hand,
Italian preacher St. Francis of Assisi once said,
"All the darkness in the world
cannot extinguish the light of a single candle."
"All the darkness in the world
cannot extinguish the light of a single candle."
What that speaks to is the power of one:
Gandhi, King, Mother Teresa,
and as of three days ago, our dearly departed Mandela.
So we can pretend the problems don't exist
and that we're not responsible,
or we can engage,
accept that people are suffering and do something about it.
And the only difference in these two attitudes
is empathy.
And that's what I want to talk about.
Imagine for a moment a typical lottery machine.
Except in this case,
the number of balls bouncing around inside
is equivalent to the number of people on the planet:
so roughly about seven billion, plus or minus.
And on the day you were born,
one ball popped out from the machine with your life's lucky number on it.
In other words, where on the planet you were born to which set of parents.
Now, how many of you here today
would give up your ball for a chance at a better one?
My guess is none of you would.
And that's because the odds of a better ball
are overwhelmingly stacked against you.
I learnt about this lottery machine metaphor
when I traveled with a group of students to Omaha, Nebraska,
to meet with legendary investment superstar Warren Buffett.
And on that day, he shared with us that we had all won the ovarian lottery.
And with that kind of privilege comes great responsibility.
And in his case, that means donating billions of dollars.
What he's responding to -
because he can imagine himself
and the hardship that people face when they haven't won the ovarian lottery -
what he's responding to is cognitive empathy.
My dear friend Jennifer also is committed to helping other people,
but her motivation is fueled by something different.
Jen is the founder of a social enterprise
which empowers women through entrepreneurship training.
Recently, they completed a five-day workshop in Bolivia.
Twenty women traveled from far and wide to attend this workshop.
None of them were formally educated.
All of them were farmers or artisans.
On the first day of the workshop,
the facilitators wrote down a dozen words on large sheets of paper
and hung them up on the wall.
And then they invited the participants to come down and write down their name
under each word they felt described them in some way.
The words that they identified with were "mother," "seamstress," and "weaver."
At the end of the workshop, the organizers repeated this exercise,
and to everyone's amazement,
virtually all of the women put their names under a whole new set of words,
including "entrepreneur" and "leader."
After five short days, they saw themselves in a new light,
as potent, capable, strong women.
My friend Jennifer wept when she told me that beautiful story
because she recognized that the work she's doing
is much less about entrepreneurship training
and much more about empowering women to embrace their full potential
and step into their greatness.
What's at play here is affective empathy.
So, to recap,
when you imagine yourself in someone else's shoes,
that's cognitive empathy.
And when you feel what someone else is feeling,
that's affective empathy.
And when these two phenomenons come into alignment,
that's when the power of empathy is huge.
In fact, I reckon there's only one force on this entire planet stronger,
and that is love.
Empathy trumps pity, sympathy, compassion,
words that are often used interchangeably when they are not synonymous.
In fact, I situate empathy on what I call an altruistic emotion continuum.
On one side is pity,
which is an emotional response to someone in distress,
full of misfortune.
But pity regards its object as inferior
and oftentimes with contempt.
Bottom line is when you pity somebody, you look down on them.
But as you make your way across this continuum,
and you get to empathy,
that's where things start to get really interesting.
Because when you empathize with someone,
you recognize that you share a common humanity.
We all have very different circumstances on this planet,
and most of that is dictated by the ovarian lottery system.
But at the end of the day,
we are all inherently worthy as human beings.
Today, empathy research is on fire and with very good reason.
Breakthroughs in neurocience
have proven what the mystics and sages have been saying for millennia.
And that is that we are all born with the innate capacity to empathize,
regardless of where you come from,
nationality, race, social class, or age.
And just like you go to the gym,
and you bulk up your biceps by doing curls,
you can become more empathic with practice.
Listen to this:
the adult brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons.
And each neuron has about 5,000 connections called synapsis.
The number of probable combinations or possible combinations
of 100 billion neurons firing together
is approximately 10 to the power of a million.
That's 1 followed by a million zeros.
And just to blow your mind,
by comparison,
the number of atoms in the entire known universe
is a mere 10 to the power of 80.
So,
as we go through life and face the deluge of stimuli
that we encounter all day long, every day,
new neuronal pathways are being created constantly.
Our brains are always changing, and this is known as brain plasticity.
And since we are in charge of what we think about and for how long,
we literally control our brain's transformation.
This begs the question for me,
What would happen if we all spent more time thinking empathic thoughts?
And more importantly,
What if we all started engaging in more empathic action?
Empathic action, to me, unleashes the true power of empathy
because it forces us to confront social injustices,
not as spectators but as participants,
fully committed to ending indignity and suffering.
And guess what.
Engaging in empathic action has positive implications
for self and society.
It's true:
you and everyone else stand to gain personally
by engaging in empathic action.
Recent scientific breakthroughs
again are revealing that the same reward and pleasure centers in the brain
when you're in service to others, light up,
as do when you're taking cocaine, heroin
or when you're engaged in really great sex.
And remarkably, empathic action also reduces anxiety and stress
and diminishes depression.
It heightens immune system functioning,
it elevates self-esteem, it improves personal relationships,
and it even boosts workplace productivity.
So here's a final word on empathy.
Despite the fact that we're living in a global village
with an extraordinary capacity for interconnectedness,
I believe we lack a sense of interdependence.
As humans, we have a deep-seeded need to be in communion with one another
and to be in service to one another.
So we don't just need an explosion of empathic action to thwart catastrophe;
we need it to flourish as human beings.
Soon, we're going to be nine billion people on this planet,
on this very beautiful planet,
sharing one common destiny.
Victor Hugo once famously said,
"There is only one thing more powerful than all the armies in the world,
and that is an idea whose time has come."
I believe the time has come to leverage the power of empathy
and embark on a global empathic action revolution.
Ladies and gentlemen, and especially those students I love,
I really would love to see you there.
Thank you.
(Applause)