The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World

As the great psychologist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl writes, “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being…will never be able to throw his life away. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.

Fiction is empathy's gateway drug. It helps us feel for others when real-world caring is too difficult, complicated or painful. Because of this, it can restore bonds between people even when that seems impossible.

Novels and stories give people the chance to experience countless lives.

Bring people together, and they'll awaken to their common humanity. A similar thought led Mark Twain to quip, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

People who believe in themselves do things that give them even more reason to believe. They adopt habits of mind that work over the long term.

In his magnum opus, The Nature of Prejudice, Allport reasoned that bigotry often boils down to a lack of acquaintance. Its antidote was just as simple: Bring people together, and they’ll awaken to their common humanity. A similar thought led Mark Twain to quip, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” In psychology, this idea came to be known as “contact theory,” and it caught fire. Allport’s book, published in 1954, became a bestseller; he delighted in spotting it at airports and malls alongside beach novels. Thanks to him, optimists everywhere came to believe that hatred was a misunderstanding and that contact could fix it.

In his Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan... writes "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, loved out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar', every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus believed that emotions were a product of thinking. "It is not events that disturb people," he wrote. "It is their judgments concerning them." This was an empowering view, because it meant by changing how we think, we could change our feelings as well.

According to the Roddenberry hypothesis, empathy is a trait, locked away and impervious to our efforts. This idea jibes with common sense. Of course some people care more than others; that’s why we have saints and psychopaths.

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being…will never be able to throw his life away. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’