Roman Krznaric video and transcript

Roman Krznaric

“The Power of Outrospection”

The 20th century I see as the age of introspection. That was the era in which the self help industry and therapy culture told us that the best way to discover who we are and what to do with our lives was to look inside ourselves, to gaze at our own navels; and what we've discovered of course is that that has not delivered the good life.

So the 21st century needs to be different; instead of the age of introspection we need to shift to the age of outrospection. And by outrospection I mean the idea of discovering who you are and what to do with your life by stepping outside yourself, discovering the lives of other people, other civilisations. And the ultimate art form for the age of outrospection is empathy; I want to talk about what empathy is, why it matters and, ultimately, how we can expand our empathic potential.

Of course empathy is more popular today as a concept than at any point in his history. Barack Obama's been talking for several years now about America's empathy deficit. You've got business people talking about empathy marketing. The neuroscientists are measuring the empathy parts of our brains - but I think what we need to do is focus more on two things. First, the way that empathy can be part of the art of living, a philosophy of life. Empathy isn't just something that that expands your moral universe, empathy is something that can make you a more creative thinker, improve your relationships, can create the human bonds that make life worth living.

But more than that empathy is also about social change, radical social change. A lot of people think of empathy as sort of a nice, soft, fluffy concept - I think it's anything but that. I think it's actually quite dangerous because empathy can create revolution. Not one of those old fashioned revolutions of new states, policies, governments, laws but something much more fiery and dangerous, which is a revolution of human relationships.

Now if you open a standard psychology textbook you'll see two definitions of empathy. One of them is this: “Affective empathy. Empathy as a shared emotional response,” a sort of mirrored response. So, if you look at the face of this child in anguish and you too feel anguish, that's affective empathy, you're mirroring their emotions.

The second kind you'll find when you open your psychology textbook is this: “cognitive empathy,” which is about perspective taking, about stepping into somebody else's world, almost like an actor looking through the eyes of their character. It's about understanding somebody else's world view, their beliefs, the fears, the experiences that shape how they look at the world and how they look at themselves.

We make assumptions about people, we have prejudices about people which block us from seeing their uniqueness, their individuality, we use labels. And highly empathic people get beyond that, or get beyond those labels, by nurturing their curiosity about others. So how might we nurture our curiosity, where can we find inspiration?

I think we can find inspiration in George Orwell, who you might think of as, you know, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, but he was also one of the great empathic adventurers of the 20th century. You might remember or might know that he came from a very privileged background -- he went to Eton, he was a colonial police officer in Burma -- but what he realised in his 20s was that he knew very little about his own country particularly about the way that those people living on the social margins really experienced life.

So he decided to do something about it and conduct one of the most brilliant empathy experiments which was to go tramping on the streets of east London. He wrote about this famously in his book Down and Out in Paris and London. But the important thing about Orwell's experience was that it not only expanded his moral universe--he became a more compassionate person--but it also cultivated his curiosity about strangers, he developed new friendships, he gathered a whole load of literary materials he used for the rest of his life. In a way this empathy adventure made him good but it was also good for him.

Highly empathic people tend to be very sensitive listeners, they're very good at understanding what somebody else's needs are. They tend to be also people who in conversations share part of their own lives, make conversations two-way dialogues, make themselves vulnerable.

Worth thinking about as well is to think about political conversations. “It won't stop until we talk.” This is the motto of a grassroots peace building organisation in Israel and the Palestinian territories called 'The Parents Circle'. What it does is bring together Palestinian and Israeli families who share something very special - these families have all lost members of their own families in the conflict. And The Parents Circle brings them together for conversations, picnics, meetings where they share each other's stories, they discover that they share the same pain, the same blood - the make that empathic bond.

They also have other fantastic projects, my favourite one is called 'Hello Peace'. It's a free phone telephone line so anybody can pick up and call that number. If you're a Palestinian and call it you're immediately put through to an Israeli, you can have a half hour conversation. If you're an Israeli pick it up you're put through to a Palestinian. Since 2002 over a million calls have been logged on the Hello Peace free phone line. That's the kind of project which is trying to create grassroots empathy.

Now we normally think of empathy as something that happens between individuals. But I also believe it can be a collective force, it can happen on a mass scale. When I think of history I think not of the rise and fall of civilisations and religions or political systems; I think of the rise and fall of empathy: moments of mass empathic flowering and also of course of empathic collapse.

As you probably know in the 1780s in Britain slavery was an accepted part of society. People felt the economy was as dependent on slavery as our economy is on oil today; half a million African slaves were being worked to death on British plantations in the Caribbean and nobody thought this could ever be eroded. But in the late 1780s, there was the rise of the world's first great human rights movement. And it was a movement powered by empathy. Its leaders developed a very empathic campaign. The idea they had was to try and get people in Britain to experience or understand at least what it was like to be a slave on a slave ship, on a slave plantation. They published oral stories of former slaves talking about what it like to be whipped until they were lying on the ground. They also ran public meetings where they showed these little instruments, which were used to keep slaves' jaws open to force-feed them. They organised for former slaves to give talks around Britain about their experiences.

And this led to a sort of revolutionary social movement really. It led to petitions, it led to public protests, it led to the first great fair trade boycott of sugar. Eventually it led to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and later slavery itself. What this all led to, or what it really showed, was that empathy could be a collective force.

We normally think of empathy as empathising with the down and outs, the poor and marginalised, those on the edges of society. I think we need to be more adventurous in who we try to empathise with. I think we need to empathise with those in power. We need to understand how those in power, in whatever realm it is, think about the world and their lives and their ambitions. We need to understand their values. Only then are we going to be able to develop effective strategies for social, political and economic transformation.

Equally, I think we need to apply our more ambitious thinking in policy realms such as thinking about climate change. We all know there's a huge gap between what we know about climate change and the amount of action that people are taking, i.e. not very much. I think that gap is explained by empathy in two forms. I think there's an empathic gap in terms of we're not empathising across space with people in developing countries like in India, people who are being hit by climate change induced floods or droughts in Kenya. And, almost more importantly perhaps, we are failing to empathise through time with future generations and I think we need to learn to expand our empathic imaginations forwards through time as well as across space.

How are we going to do it? I think we need new social institutions. We need, for example, empathy museums - a place which is not about dusty exhibits, you know like an old Victorian museum, but an experiential and conversational public space where you might walk in and in the first room there is a human library where you can borrow people for conversations.

You walk into the next room and there are 20 sewing machines and there are former Vietnamese sweatshop workers who will teach you how to make a t-shirt like the one you're probably wearing under sweatshop labour conditions and you'll be paid five pence at the end of it - so you understand the labour behind the label.

You may well go into the cafe and scan in your food and discover that the working conditions of those who picked the coffee beans of the drink that you're drinking. You may see a video of them talking about their lives trying to make a connection across space and into realms that you don't know about.

I think we need to think about bringing empathy into our everyday lives in a very sort of habitual way. Socrates said that 'The way to live a wise and good life was to know thyself' and we've generally thought of that as being about being self reflective, looking in at ourselves, it's been about introspection. But I think in the 21st century we need to recognise that to know thyself is something that can also be achieved by stepping outside yourself by discovering other people's lives. And I think empathy is the way to revolutionise our own philosophies of life, to become more outrospective, and to create the revolution of human relationships that I think we so desperately need.