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BLACKWELL'S OXFORD The Empathy Festival Injustice and Empathy - Why Social Inequality still persists

Inequality and Empathy

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BLACKWELL'S OXFORD The Empathy Festival

Injustice and Empathy - Why Social Inequality still persists

This is what I promised

We are living in the most remarkable and dangerous times. Globally, the richest 1% have never held a greater share of world wealth, while the share of most of the other 99% has collapsed in the last five years. In this fully rewritten and updated edition of Injustice, Dorling offers hope of a more equal society.

(you could query ‘collapsed’ – but more importantly ‘hope’)

How pro-social are you?

• My friends burst out laughing when I suggested I could talk about empathy

• They had a point…

• But what we really need to understand is a lack of empathy…. Which is what “Injustice” is about

Let’s look at how children are labelled:

And what kind of picture forms

Are people ‘successes’ because of

their abilities ?

How do they cycle?

Only 31% were

comfor-table

before the

crash…

We need to see that

what is we have now is not all good and

often new

Including huge

increases in the legal taking of

mind altering

drugs (now to 13% of

pop.)

And we need to

know both that very different ways of thinking prevail,

both more +ve and -ve

Fountainhead, a movie made in ’49

Trying to understand others not like you

We are helped by Sajid Javid

• The new Business Secretary who was reported in the Conservative Home website on January 13th this year to have “I read the courtroom scene from ‘The Fountainhead’ to my future wife!” –

http://www.conservativehome.com/parliament/2015/01/javid-i-read-the-courtroom-scene-from-the-fountainhead-to-my-future-wife.html

When I was watching raiders of the lost Ark – Javid was watching….

• King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, scripted by Rand herself and starring Gary Cooper as the individualist architect Howard Roark.

Javid only entered the political world after a highly successful – and lucrative – career in the financial sector. He started as a trader in New York for Chase Manhattan, and by the age of 25 was the youngest vice-president in the bank’s history. Head-hunted to join Deutschebank, Javid’s stellar rise was well remunerated, with his personal wealth said to be comfortably in the millions.http://www.totalpolitics.com/features/446112/the-art-of-politics-sajid-javid-interview.thtml

This is what a 12 year old felt!

Javid explained that this … is the most important [Film] to him. He first watched it on television in 1981, aged 12, and even then it struck him as “a film that was articulating what I felt”. From there, he soon read the book, wore out a VHS copy of the film, and brought his enthusiasm for all things Fountainhead with him to university. He even admitted, with a self-deprecating grin, that “I read the courtroom scene to my future wife!”

The Culture Secretary now makes sure to read that scene to himself at least twice a year. You can watch the movie’s version of it here…..