Slides from a talk by Danny Dorling at the Oxford Empathy Festival, Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford, June 8th 2015. See more information at http://www.dannydorling.org/?p=4742

1. BLACKWELL'S OXFORD
The Empathy Festival
Injustice and Empathy - Why
Social Inequality still persists

2. This is what I promised
We are living in the most remarkable and
dangerous times. Globally, the richest 1% have
never held a greater share of world wealth, while
the share of most of the other 99% has collapsed in
the last five years. In this fully rewritten and
updated edition of Injustice, Dorling offers hope of
a more equal society.
(you could query ‘collapsed’ – but more importantly
‘hope’)

3. How pro-social are you?
• My friends burst out laughing when I
suggested I could talk about empathy
• They had a point…
• But what we really need to understand is a
lack of empathy…. Which is what “Injustice” is
about

4. Let’s look at how children are labelled:

5. And what kind of picture forms

6. Are people
‘successes’
because of
their abilities
?
How do they
cycle?

7. Only
31%
were
comfor-
table
before
the
crash…

8. We need
to see
that
what is
we have
now is
not all
good
and
often
new

9. Including
huge
increases in
the legal
taking of
mind
altering
drugs (now
to 13% of
pop.)

10. And we
need to
know both
that very
different
ways of
thinking
prevail,
both more
+ve and -ve

11. Fountainhead, a movie made in ’49

12. Trying to understand others not like you

13. We are helped by Sajid Javid
• The new Business Secretary who was reported
in the Conservative Home website on January
13th this year to have “I read the courtroom
scene from ‘The Fountainhead’ to my future
wife!” –
http://www.conservativehome.com/parliament/2015/01/javid-i-read-the-courtroom-scene-from-the-fountainhead-to-my-future-wife.html

14. When I was watching raiders of the
lost Ark – Javid was watching….
• King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s
The Fountainhead, scripted by Rand herself
and starring Gary Cooper as the individualist
architect Howard Roark.
Javid only entered the political world after a
highly successful – and lucrative – career in the
financial sector. He started as a trader in New
York for Chase Manhattan, and by the age of
25 was the youngest vice-president in the
bank’s history. Head-hunted to join
Deutschebank, Javid’s stellar rise was well
remunerated, with his personal wealth said to
be comfortably in the millions.
http://www.totalpolitics.com/features/446112/the-art-of-politics-sajid-javid-interview.thtml

15. This is what a 12 year old felt!
Javid explained that this … is the most important [Film] to
him. He first watched it on television in 1981, aged 12,
and even then it struck him as “a film that was
articulating what I felt”. From there, he soon read the
book, wore out a VHS copy of the film, and brought his
enthusiasm for all things Fountainhead with him to
university. He even admitted, with a self-deprecating grin,
that “I read the courtroom scene to my future wife!”
The Culture Secretary now makes sure to read that scene
to himself at least twice a year. You can watch the movie’s
version of it here…..