Cultural Study

Jeremy Rifkin outlined a theory that all humans are good in their basic nature, and they naturally feel empathy. He would argue that although many people say people are bad unless taught to be good, many species including humans, are in fact born with an innate tendency to feel emotions together. "...Suggests that we are actually soft wired not for aggression and violence and self-interest and utilitarianism that we are actually soft wired for sociability, attachment...affection, companionship and that the first drive is the drive to actually belong - it's an empathic drive" (Rifkin). He recognizes that humans are capable of possessing various negative traits as well, but by default we want to care for others. Roman Krznaric has a similar claim, his differing in his statement that we must experience the plight of others in order to truly understand how they feel in a given situation. He talks about cognitive empathy, which is "Stepping into somebody else's world...it's about understanding somebody else's world views, their beliefs, their fears, and the experiences that shape how they look at the world" (Krznaric). He changes the idea of empathy from an ability to just see peoples plight and understand it into a act that requires effort to dive into somebody else's problems and see how it affects them.

The other topic is about certain flaws in our society. One flaw is our education system, which was discussed by Sir Ken Robinson. His views consisted of several ways in which our current education system is outdated and flawed in such a way that groups of students are shut out due to social and intellectual differences. "The problem is they're trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And on the way they're alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school " (Robinson). The old way of teaching kids was how to produce a uniform work force to man the factories, but that goal is no longer relevant. There is greater diversity in the "real world" now that a great deal of our nations infrastructure and industrial foundation has been set. He says that we need to allow "divergent thinking" to take place, which is the act of incorporating many different possible answer into a final outcome. This helps to add to the amount of different ideas and thoughts that contribute to a project. Slavoj Zizek outlines another flaw in our society, and one that is so ingrained in  our attitudes that it is not readily apparent. He addresses the problem of charity, claiming that it provides a temporary "fix" to an ongoing problem that has a much deeper and involved solution. "The real aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible" (Zizek). By continually implemented our successful methods of development on communities that do not have to ability to imitate it, we just show them their faults and worsen the situation. He claims that the worst slave owners were the compassionate ones, because people truly evolve and help themselves when they are faced with extreme adversity.