Rethink the human narrative

[Trifecta]

[KeenInsight]

Awesome video. I enjoyed that!

[tazmic]

A good set of comments too:

There is a distinct possibility that the current collective human hysteria would be due to--and perhaps engineered by--a relatively small numbers of "oligarchs" who would influence just about every institution of importance while being psychologically abnormal, namely psychopathic or completely incapable of empathy. Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush/Lieberman come to mind. Systematically psychoanalyzing "our" leaders may do "us the people" some good.

Amazing video, very impressive! If you guys like/agree with this video please check out the Venus Project! Keep this video going!

Our collectives (governments/religions/corporations) are behaveing immorally relative to the goal of humanity's survival, i.e. war, polution... Survival, health, and empathy are the basis for a secular ethic.

Take another bong hit, hippie.

Mirror neurons are evidence that the brain simulates the outside world in order to make predictions and learn. Using this to justify some philosophy of "empathy" is pure horseshit pseudoscience.

[tazmic]

Bwahahahah - the empathic civilisation indeed.

Jeremy Rifkin - http://www.foet.org/lecture.html

Mega Trends in Globalization
Lecture Topics:

The Third Industrial Revolution: Leading the way to a green energy era and a hydrogen economy

The Global Environmental Crisis: The path to sustainable development

The European Dream: How Europe's vision of the future is changing the global economy

The Age of Access: Understanding the historic shift in economic models, from traditional capitalist markets to emerging global commercial networks

The Future of Work: Rethinking the nature of employment in an increasingly automated, borderless and highly mobile global economy

The Hi-tech Revolutions of the 21st Century: Harnessing the scientific and technological fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology, advanced IT, and cognitive science in ways that advance the process of globalization

Rethinking the Global Health Paradigm: Making the shift from managing disease to promoting wellness

Living in a Three Sector World: Building new partnerships between the global business community, civil society, and governments to create a sustainable approach to globalization

Deep Globalization: Deepening and expanding the global economy by bringing the remaining 60% of the human race into the 21st century marketplace

Educating Youth for a Global Era: Introducing service learning and experiential education into schools and colleges to prepare youth for working and living in a diverse, multicultural world

Immigration in a Globally Connected World: Addressing the challenges of migration in an era of cultural diasporas

Beyond the Nation State: Examining the future prospects of transnational political spaces in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa

This stuff is priceless, thanks. (Putting such things as the venus project, zeitgeist and anti-capitalism for the landless peasants, into a better perspective.)

[operator kos]

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

[justdrew]

i'd think game theory can prove altruism is the best policy unless psychos are >50% of the population. surely empathy was the default norm during human evolution. to be otherwise is mostly just a pr campaign

[tazmic]

A good backgrounder to the cartoon is here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-empathic-civilization_b_416589.html

Extracts:

Neither the world's political or business leaders anticipated the economic debacle of July 2008

The problem runs deeper than the issue of finding new ways to regulate the market or imposing legally binding global green house gas emission reduction targets. The real crisis lies in the set of assumptions about human nature that governs the behavior of world leaders--assumptions that were spawned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago at the dawn of the modern market economy and the emergence of the nation state era.

If human nature is as the Enlightenment philosophers claimed, then we are likely doomed. It is impossible to imagine how we might create a sustainable global economy and restore the biosphere to health if each and every one of us is, at the core of our biology, an autonomous agent and a self-centered and materialistic being.

Recent discoveries in brain science and child development, however, are forcing us to rethink these long-held shibboleths about human nature.

What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history?

The new communications revolutions become the command and control mechanisms for structuring, organizing and managing more complex civilizations that the new energy regimes make possible.

Today, we are on the cusp of another historic convergence of energy and communication--a third industrial revolution

We talk breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What's sorely missing is an overarching reason that billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end?

More important, making global connections without any real transcendent purpose risks a narrowing rather than an expanding of human consciousness. But what if our distributed global communication networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep communion with the common biosphere that sustains all of our lives?

If we can harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet, we will have moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new era of biosphere consciousness.

But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change.

Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

"Mr. Rifkin is the principle architect of the European Union’s Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change. The Third Industrial Revolution was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and is now being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission as well as in the 27 member-states.

Mr. Rifkin is also the founder and chairperson of the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Roundtable, comprised of 100 of the world’s leading renewable energy companies, construction companies, architectural firms, real estate companies, IT companies, power and utility companies, and transport and logistics companies. Mr. Rifkin’s global economic development team is the largest of its kind in the world and is working with cities, regions, and national governments to develop master plans to transition their economies into post- carbon Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures."

http://www.foet.org/JeremyRifkin.htm

[thurnundtaxis]

Conversely:
Today's College Students Lack Empathy

College students today are less likely to "get" the emotions of others than their counterparts 20 and 30 years ago, a new review study suggests.
Specifically, today's students scored 40 percent lower on a measure of empathy than their elders did.
The findings are based on a review of 72 studies of 14,000 American college students overall conducted between 1979 and 2009.
"We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000," said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.
The study was presented this week at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Boston.
Is "generation me" all about me?
Compared with college students of the late 1970s, current students are less likely to agree with statements such as "I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective," and "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."
"Many people see the current group of college students - sometimes called 'Generation Me' - as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history," said Konrath, who is also affiliated with the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry.
Konrath's colleague graduate student Edward O'Brien added, "It's not surprising that this growing emphasis on the self is accompanied by a corresponding devaluation of others."
Other recent studies have shown mixed results on the character of today's youth. For instance, one study of more than 450,000 high-school seniors born at different time periods showed today's youth are no more self-centered than their parents were at their age.
The role of media
Even so, Konrath and O'Brien suggest several reasons for the lower empathy they found, including the ever-increasing exposure to media in the current generation.
"Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much nonwork-related information," Konrath said. "In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games, and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others."
The rise in social media could also play a role.
"The ease of having 'friends' online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don't feel like responding to others' problems, a behavior that could carry over offline," O'Brien said.
In fact, past research has suggested college students are addicted to social media.
Other possible causes include a society today that's hypercompetitive and focused on success, as well as the fast-paced nature of today, in which people are less likely than in time periods past to slow down to really listen to others, O'Brien added.
"College students today may be so busy worrying about themselves and their own issues that they don't have time to spend empathizing with others, or at least perceive such time to be limited," O'Brien said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/201 ... ackempathy

[Luther Blissett]

i'd think game theory can prove altruism is the best policy unless psychos are >50% of the population. surely empathy was the default norm during human evolution. to be otherwise is mostly just a pr campaign

We're still evolving. Possibly at a more rapid rate than any time in human history if we're to believe Hawking.

Maybe you have to be programmed to be non-empathetic.

[thurnundtaxis]

Maybe you have to be programmed to be non-empathetic.

That was my "take-away" from that Yahoo article. A hyper-mediated world of simulated experiences devaluates the real in comparison.
Now how much of this programming is intentional or just the end results of mass-market capitalism can be debated quite a bit it would seem.