Thursday 8 August 2019

Humanity Challenged: A Thematic Overview

 For the next eight weeks I will be highlighting on this site an overview of talks on the topic "Humanity Challenged" that I will be presenting for Learning Unlimited. Quotations have been sometimes lightly edited and are sourced whenever possible. Most of the longer quotations are linked to the complete article. 
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"People who lack empathy see others as mere objects."
― Baron Simon-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy, 2011


"Hatred is the vice of narrow souls. They feed with all their smallness. They use it as an excuse for their vile tyrannies.”

― Balzac

“Genocide is a process. The Holocaust did not start with the gas chambers. It started with hate speech.”
― Adama Dieng, the UN’s  Special  Advisor on the prevention of Genocide

“We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.”
― Michel de Montaigne

"Forgiveness allows us to actually let us go of the pain in the memory. And if we let go  of the pain in the memory we can have the memory but it doesn't control us. I think it's the fact that when memory controls us, we are then puppets of the past."

― Alexandra Asseily, psychotherapist in Lebanon


    Conditions that challenge one’s humanity:
    A lack of integrity or moral compass, and the inability to       respect and demonstrate empathy for others
    A desire for revenge or to get even
    The inability to forgive
    The willingness to inflict harm on others physically or     emotionally through exploitation, humiliation or ridicule
    The unwillingness to accept personal responsibility
    A disregard for the rule of law, a free press and an independent judiciary