Roman Krznaric is a cultural thinker and writer on the art of living. He is a founding faculty member of The School of Life in London, which offers instruction and inspiration on the important questions of everyday life, and advises organisations including Oxfam and the United Nations on using empathy and conversation to create social change. He has developed the concept of outrospection – the antithesis of introspection. In his RSAnimate, he describes the six habits of highly empathic people. He sets the context by describing Barrack Obama’s sense of America’s empathy deficit, the notion of empathy marketing, and the neuro-scientific curiosity about understanding how ’empathy works’. He asserts that empathy can help create a revolution of human relationships.
He describes
- affective empathy – shared emotional responses, facilitated by mirror neurons; and
- cognitive empathy – curiosity which stimulates the act of stepping into someone else’s world
He describes the Parents’ Circle in the middle east, that links bereaved and injured Palestinians and Israelis with one another – their ‘motto’ being it won’t stop until we talk. Getting beyond labels, they pioneer the primacy of ‘two sided stories’, instigating initiatives like ‘the crack in the wall’ trying to bring the ‘o’ into ‘hope’. He re-imagines museums – as experiential arenas in which we discover empathy across time and space – for example by
- borrowing time from people in a ‘human library’, where I can learn about you and your world, from your point of view
- spending time in an experiential sweatshop, actually feeling what it is like to manufacture the t-shirt you are wearing
- re-discovering the Socratic notion of ‘know thyself’ by discovering other people’s lives
How you attend to and what you attend to creates value and meaning. Making it more plural gives hope. The west eastern divan orchestra is an expression of this empathy across boundaries, with their wedo message, and art – when we listen, we can change. Other people are evocative objects – we can change if we are immersed in the shared experience of others.
Slingshot