The Problem

The problem we are addressing is that that world has an empathy deficit.

What are the empathy deficits you see?

  • People are not understanding each other across the gulf of race, class, region, religion, etc.

  • Violence, conflicts, war, genocide,

  • Hunger, disease, poverty,

  • Refugees

  • Climate change, environmental degradation

  • Personal problems,

  • Family problems,

  • Community problems

  • Overwhelm, alienation, lack of meaning, depression, self-righteousness, greed, anxiety, hare, indifference, fear, hopelessness,....

  • Drug addiction

  • People not caring about each other.

Barack Obama on the Empathy Deficit

It seems like we got an empathy shortage, an empathy deficit. More serious than the federal budget deficit. We've become so cynical that it almost seems naive to believe that we can understand each other across the gulf of race, or class or region or religion...

An empathy shortage. That's what the principle of empathy does, its calls us all to task. The heartless conservative, the patronizing liberal, the powerful and the powerless. The oppressed and the oppressor. No one is exempt from finding common ground, because when no one is exempt it forces all of us to examine our own actions, our own belief systems. It shakes us out of our complacency and protects us from our own blindness our own self-righteousness. Our own fanaticism.

2002-01-21 - Martin Luther King Day - Chicago IL

I often say we've got a budget deficit that's important, we've got a trade deficit that's critical, but what I worry about most is our empathy deficit.When I speak to students, I tell them that one of the most important things we can do is to look through somebody else's eyes. People like bin Laden are missing that sense of empathy. That's why they can think of the people in the World Trade Center as abstractions. They can just crash a plane into them and not even consider, "How would I feel if my child were in there?"

2004-11-01 - Barack Obama Promotes Empathy with Oprah Magazine

What is the empathy deficit?

Barack Obama: The inability of people to stand in other folks shoes. .. It's hard to empathize with people who have different values than you.

2004-11-23 - Barack Obama Promotes Empathy: Charlie Rose Show

The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else's shoes and see the world through their eyes.

Barack Obama Promotes Empathy from Books

The world doesn't just revolve around you. There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit.

2006-06-16 - Northwestern Commencement

The last piece of advice is to cultivate a sense of empathy. There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit - the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us - the child who's hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.

2006-07-12 - Barack Obama: Campus Progress Conference

If we hope to meet the moral test of our times, we’re going to have to talk more about the empathy deficit—the ability to see ourselves when we choose to empathize with the plight of others. It is time for a sense of empathy to infuse our politics in America.

2006-12-04 - K.I.D.S. Fashion Delivers Gala

somehow we have lost the capacity to recognize our self in each other. People talk a lot about the federal deficit, but one of the things I always talk about is we have a empathy deficit in this country. That people seem to have lost a sense that we are all in it together.

2007-07-03 - Barack Obama Promotes Empathy: Town Hall Meeting - Fairfield IA

I'm talking about an empathy deficit that exists. I'm talking about an inability to recognize ourselves in each other, to understand that we are our brother's keeper, that we are our sister's keeper, that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny. We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame instead of corridors of opportunity, not just in South Carolina but all across the United States of America.

2008-01-21 - Barack Obama Promotes Empathy: King Day At The Dome