Empathy, Globalization, Peace, and the Shared Global Economy

Mengchao Xie
Prof. Cantor
EAD II Sec. 20
11/2/2018
Paper 3 Rough Draft
Empathy, Globalization, and Peace
Empathy as a product of arts stands for one of the edges that balance the mind. For individuals, empathy puts emotional factors into account when making decisions. On a global scale, empathy reduces conflicts among countries, which helps cooperation. When conflicts reduced to a minimum, countries that exist in the economy would operate against wars and forms a chain of supplies around the globe. Thomas Friedman believes in his essay "The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention" that if two countries have economic connections, these two countries would have higher agendas than wars. Down to the scale of individuals, cellist Yo-Yo Ma argues in his essay "Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education," that arts promote empathetic thinking and collaborations among individuals. Both Friedman and Ma believe that only successful collaborations among countries and individuals would achieve under certain circumstances. That includes empathy and its by-product, shared global economy. Empathy assists individuals to form a variety of perspectives, which also have the ability to assemble different ideas. The shared global economy, which helps maintain peace and encourages business on a global scale. This together contributes to successful global collaboration.
Empathy helps individuals with the formation of perspectives regarding various life scenarios especially in the world of business. Because individuals can incorporate the feelings associated with business decisions into something meaningful in their life, the perspectives are based on the ease which they can analyze the situation in order to make a profit. Friedman claims that emotions are irrational when it comes to a certain situation, it would be less difficult to understand and easier to digest. "Because irrationality is more emotionally loaded, it requires less knowledge; it explains more to more people, it goes down easier" (138). Irrationality is the ability to make unreasonable decisions. As a result, this makes it easy for individuals to analyze the different situations that they face in life. Some situations require individuals to act following what they feel about the situation, while others, requires critical analysis to come up with a conclusive answer. The critical thinking process does not necessarily require an individual to apply their emotions during the decision-making process. However, they follow the best decision based on the logic of the situation at hand. Ma states that human brains are capable of choosing which neural pathways to use when thinking. "Advances in neurobiology now make it clear that we humans have dual neural pathways, one for critical thinking and one for empathetic thinking. Only one pathway can be activated at a time, so when one is on, the other is off" (258). Neural pathways facilitate an individual's thinking capacity. Therefore, this explains the reason as to why human beings can have different perspectives regarding the different situations that they face in life. In addition to the fact that only one way of thinking can function in a human's brain, the overall logical decision has a contribution of both the empathetic and the critical way of thinking. Such perspectives are, in most cases, directed toward the achievement of great economic decisions which, in turn, leads to peace in the world. As well, the empathetic thinking of human beings plays a substantial role in the irrational decision making because it enables individuals to consider their emotions while making a decision. It is, therefore, the obligation of every human beings to identify the situations that require them to incorporate their feelings before deciding to ensure that they make the right decision.
Empathy is able to bring different th...