Socratic Seminar

I thought that the socratic seminar brought up a lot of controversial topics.  The first topic that I found interesting was our discussion about empathy.  Some believe that people who are born with empathy naturally learn it while they are raised.  Others believe that everyone is born with empathy but what they are empathic towards varies.  After seeing what Mrs. Cabrera said about the study I have come to believe that how people grow up influence their empathy.  People with little empathy to start out with aren't going to understand the feeling compared to someone who is born with the average amount.  The people that are born with little empathy are going to ignore the feeling and therefore not use it all because it would take a lot of progress and time for them to develop it.  Many people don't have the feeling of empathy then we realize.  Of course we see that serial killers have no empathy, but not all people who lack it are necessarily bad.  A serial killer has other mental issues besides their lack of empathy, probably addiction of some sort.  I read somewhere that a lot of successful businessmen have little or no empathy.  The reason they are so successful is probably because they were always for themselves their entire lives.

I also found the discussion about how to better our planet interesting.  In Out of the Silent Planet all three species get along without conflict even though they are different.  I think the reason for this is because they all have a common higher power that they believe in.  Earth is corrupt for many reasons so an attempt at world peace would be impossible.  First of all our planet is overpopulated and this is an issue because people require resources and people are selfish.  People on Earth don't have one common belief which also causes problems because religion has put some people against each other. The reason that life worked on Malacandra is also because they had a normal amount of species on their planet.  If we tried to implement a common belief system for the entire world, it still wouldn't work because how people view things is different.  For example, what one person believes is good may not be the same for someone else.  Obviously life works on Malacandra because it is fictional but even if we brought the same ideas to Earth, the people would still corrupt it.