I Have Empathy

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. I always seem to be able to understand the difference between a good and a bad person, but it never really works with the rest of the world.

I am not a very good swimmer. I have been in the water many times. I can become very hot underwater. I am a little vain, and I have never been very good at concealing my beauty. On the other hand, I am very good at knowing when I have been spotted. I have seen my father in the water several times, and he has never been in better shape.

I seek my own happiness in other people. I have always tried to find a way to live that satisfies my own wants. I have no wish to be a slave to anybody.

I have never got over the thought that I was once a good boy.

But I have never been a slave to anybody.

I am not a man of letters.

I was born, as the saying goes, in a house with a bath, and from that day on I have lived in a bath, in a house where the bath is wet. The baths were of the standard construction, a mean, a simple-looking tub; but this bath, which I call my "naked house," is my home, my abode.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

You have talked about your relationship with your father and how you've had to put up with him for years. What makes it so difficult to accept that he is playing a role in your life?

I think it came about because he was my father. He was also my friend. He is a man who, because of his own circumstances, had a good life, a good family, and gave me the best the world had to offer.

He was a very devoted husband, but he was also a man who was a control freak, and that had an effect. He was an extremely complicated man, and he did everything he could to frighten me. I was always afraid of him.

At the time, when we were in college, we were engaged, and my father had a job as a clerk in the United States Postal Service. I think that he had hoped that I would be his successor. He was not very open with me about it.

One day, I went down to the office with him, and I had a series of conversations with the clerk about what I should do. A few days later, he asked me to go and see him.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

The last year has been a kind of parallel journey. I've been looking for answers to questions like "why do we have this low level of unemployment?" and "why do some of our young people have so much trouble?" But the answers are always the same: We have a religious culture, a tradition of poverty, etc., and we have a system of education that is not very good, which is a source of our troubles. We have some of the best universities in the world and we have been very successful at creating a class of highly educated people, but we are not very good at teaching them. We have a caste system in our society, we have an iron discipline, and we have one of the deepest ideological divisions in our nation. I think it could be called the new caste system.

Now one thing I want to say about this division is that it is a very deep problem. I think I speak for all of us when I say that it is one that is very difficult to overcome. We have a whole class of people who are classically educated, all of whom have come into the United States and are working on the side that they earn. Yet their minds are so divided and their ideas so deep that they cannot work together. They think that they know better than anybody else, they think that they have a right to their opinions. They have developed a system of discrimination that is evidently hard to break.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. On the other hand, I feel that people who are quite different from me are often quite different from me. The whole point of me studying sociology is that I could understand them. I did it in middle school in the way that I've always done it.

I do it every year on a Sunday. I'm at the very top of the class in my school, in the top third of my class. I haven't even taken algebra in a while and I'm almost finished with University, so I'm pretty much no good in it. I feel pretty confident about it, though, because I know the students, and I've done my homework. So I'm pretty good in it.

I was a student in the Sociology Department at the University of California at Berkeley. I was in Berkeley and I knew many of them, but I knew none of them well. I did not have a sense of the world outside Berkeley, and I didn't have a sense of my own social position. I was in a minority when it came to the social world. I was trying to find out what it was like to be a heterosexual. I had to be a heterosexual because I knew that was the only social role that attracted me. I was quite successful with it when I got into high school, but I was quite unsuccessful in college.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

With this in mind, I try to imagine what it would feel like to be at the centre of a life-changing event, to be in front of the camera, to be on the receiving end of a flattering interview. I think of myself as a sensitive person, and I think I can relate well to such situations. But perhaps I'm too sensitive, too sensitive to be able to see the beauty of a beautiful man.

I've tried to think of a way of re-imagining myself, to rediscover my beauty, but I still think I'm a sensitive man. It's certainly been a difficult task to get out from under these troubles.

In the end I got to see what I wanted to see, and I had an experience that I never could have expected to have had.

I was watching the gymnastics competition at the Royal London Games when, as I was walking down the stairs, a young man who looked about 11 or 12 came out of the darkness. He had a sack of shoes on his back, and he was swinging them like he wasn't paying attention to the crowd. In the end, he was dragged down the steps by one of the policemen, and he died.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

I have seen the new program, the Love of the City, in action. I have been in it every month since it was started. Tell me, what do you make of it?

I think it is one of the best things that has ever been done in the city. It is a more sophisticated program than I have been able to do in about three years. It has a degree of sophistication that is rare in the city. I think it is a very successful program.

At first, I thought I was trying to do a good job. Then I saw that almost every one of the people who have been in the program was a young man or a woman, and they were all in their twenties or thirties, and they were living in the same neighborhood. They were all working, and their families were all working, so I was quite disappointed when I saw that.

When I started the program, and as I was helping people to finish their education, I had to do a lot of listening. I had to learn what was really going on. I have always found that people who do this are much more intelligent than the average person. People who do it are much more sincere. I was in a perfectly decent college, at Princeton, and I am in a perfectly decent university now.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

One of the problems in our society, and this is really true for all of us, is that we find ourselves in situations where we are not much better off than most of our society. We are not much better off because we have lost our jobs, because we have had some bad luck, because we have had to go to school, because we have been without jobs for too long, because we have been unemployed for too long, and we have been too poor to get into the university. We are all looking for ways to survive.

We are all looking for ways to survive. So we have got to find some way of one-upmanship. I am not surprised when I hear somebody say that the Nazis were right, and that they had the right attitude toward working people. I am surprised when I hear somebody say that the Communists were right, and that they had the right attitude toward working people. But I have never heard anybody say that the Communists had the right attitude toward people who had been unemployed for too long, or had been unemployed for too long.

Now we have got to find some way of one-upmanship, and it is more difficult than it has ever been.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. This is why I am so keen to bring people into my circle when I can. I try to keep them from isolating themselves from me, and to keep them from feeling that I am a failure at my profession. I am not interested in my career, I am not interested in my life.

But there is a problem in my work, and that is that I am a bit of a man. I know that a lot of men are very angry with me at the moment, and I know that they are not angry with me because they feel that I am not keeping up with them. I am not sure whether I do as well as I should do. But I am sure that, when I am in my twenties, I will have achieved more than I ever could have had if I had continued to work until I was fifty.

The problem then is that I am unable to meet the demands of my profession. I have a very busy life. I have no leisure. I am quite a busy man. And yet, if I had been a man, I would have accepted that I was working like a man, and I would have called myself a man.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. The best way to understand someone who is a friend is to see them as an ally. There is no way to talk to someone who is a friend without talking to them first, and that's why I don't really have any friends.

In my youth I was always drawn to the hippies. But I found that they were two-faced. They were very much of the leftist tradition, but they had a real attachment to the hippies, to the hippies' sense of idealism.

In my own mind I can see that the hippies were such a formidable force in their own time, and I think that they gave me a great deal of confidence about my ability to work with them and become friends with them.

At the same time I was beginning to see that the hippies were very much of a left wing tradition. I had no sympathy for them. I was a left wing man, and I was very much impressed by them as well as by the anarchist movement.

Some of my friends were from the left wing of the movement, and I think that a certain section of those who were left wing in their thought were very much in sympathy with the emphasis of the movement upon the rights of men, and on the right to make their own lives as they please.

They were great friends.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. That is why I have a problem with the idea that we can talk about the Dalai Lama without talking about the Dalai Lama. I'm not sure I can arrive at a common perception of him.

I am attracted to people who are contemporary and who are not in the middle of their lives. If you're in the middle of your life, you have to talk about yourself, your relationships with your friends, your family, to somebody. But I think that when you are in the middle of your life, you have to talk about yourself as well, because if you don't, you have to talk about it. But I think it is important to talk about what you are doing. People who have lived their lives without talking about what they are doing are just as embarrassing as those who have been living under a rock. The thing that has always struck me is that it is difficult to talk about the Dalai Lama and not talk about the Dalai Lama.

Do you know how many years he has been in China?

He was in China for over 40 years. He was not in Tibet until 1955.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

However, I think it's possible to understand people as capable of empathy with respect to the same issues as the people I've been around since I was a child, even though they may be distant from me. For example, I've been around people who have been themselves for a long time, with whom I have friends, and who, at least in my experience, have an outlook that is much more for the future than for the past.

What I want to say is that I think it's possible for anybody to have empathy with people who are not quite as like him or her. And if, like me, you have difficulty in understanding that, I don't think you'll be surprised to find that you can have an empathy with the people you meet.

And here's one, perhaps an odd one, the idea that empathy is something that is diminished by our disposition to take pleasure in things other than ourselves. You've probably heard the old saying: the man who wins a fight with a shoe, wins a fight with a shoe. You know that's a little humorous, but it's true.

But of course, the shoe did not win the fight. The man who wins it has learned to walk with it. He is a better man for it than he would have been had he never had it.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

I don't want to be misunderstood. But I'm not going to let it go. So I don't want to let people know that I'm an oddball. I don't want them to know that I'm not the person they thought they knew. They might think I'm just another quirky guy.

If I can be honest, I don't even want to be called funny. In fact, I think of myself as an oddball.

That was in my first year of college—about his age. I was the only one of my future classmates who was not a smoker, and I never would be.

But you can see me now. I've watched him smoke a couple of cigarettes a morning. I can tell him that I have what he calls "a little cigar," and that he's got his own cigar drawer in the dorm. (It's the one he keeps, but I won't reveal his name.)

But one high-school class mate doesn't smoke—but he is his own worst enemy.

We're friends at the University of Michigan, and he likes to smoke. He has a little cigar, and he smokes it and that's about the extent of it.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

Am I honest? I don't think so. The way I see it, the people who are closest to me in my life are the ones who are the most useful to me.

I've done a lot of research and I know that it's true. But I don't want to give away any secrets. I made some of them up.

Q. What do you think of the notion that the West has the right to dictate to Australia what it wants to think? And you have a lot of sympathy with the argument that Australia has the same moral obligations as other nations?

A. I have a great deal of sympathy for that argument. I don't think it's right to say that Australia has the right to impose its own morality on others.

I do think, however, that we have a duty to the people of the Commonwealth. And that is to ensure that they are able to exercise their constitutional rights.

I sit in the Senate with some of the greatest men in the world, including Gough Whitlam. These are men who have fought some of the most important battles of our history and who have held their countries together through every possible combination of force and diplomacy.

We have learned a lot from them. They all have tried to fight, and they have won, in some ways, their own battles.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

I have been very lucky in that I am a good friend of many people. I have had the benefit of the friendship of one of my best friends, a man who is very dear to me and who I have often described as my oldest friend. His wife, I think, is a very fair-minded woman, but she carries out a very strict view of the propriety of the marriage. She is very protective of her husband and I think that is very good for the family.

I have had several close friends of mine and they have been very loyal.

I have had, too, some very good friends.

But I do not feel I can understand people who seem to be so different from myself.

I am not a fan of the written word. I do not believe that, in a language as critical and as intimate as English, one could develop anything useful.

But I think that there is something in the written word which is a powerful tool in the hands of the writer, and that it is not difficult to make the writer realize what he wants to say.

I have been a very good writer, and I have written a lot of my books in the language that I have learned.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. I'm not sure why it works.

You often write about your own life experience. How much of your experience since you were a child has been shaped by your parents?

And I'm sure there are many other untold tales.

I think that I have been an unusually tolerant, tolerant, tolerant person. I think I've had a very successful career, so I have been able to enjoy every day of my life. But the temptation to turn around and say "Well, I wasn't actually born in this country." That is one of the reasons that I was so reluctant to go to America.

While I was at school I was reading about the Irish famine, and one of my friends was saying that the Irish people were very lucky to be alive.

Do you think that you had your own experience in Ireland?

I certainly had my own experience. I never had a major Irish experience, but I was surprised to find that I had a very strong Irish accent. There is a strong Irish accent in my family.

But what about your mother?

She was brought up in an Irish village. She was the first person I had ever met who had a strong Irish accent.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

How do you feel about people who, like me, feel like they are constantly under the gun?

I agree that it is an unhealthy state of mind. I feel that there is a certain sense of entitlement on the part of the people in my circle that if they behave well they will be treated much better than they are. In a way, they are entitled to behave better, because they have been given to us. In their minds, they believe that their behavior is fine because we are all in it together.

Do you think that there is a natural division of labor that goes along with this?

I would say that those who are more loyal to their families have been driven by a sense of entitlement to do so, and they have taken advantage of the situation. They have been given a place, and they have been given a boss.

What would happen if there were a better system?

I would hope that it would be better than this. But there are certain people who are so addicted to their own success and so addicted to their own success that they are incapable of thinking of anything else. They are so familiar with their own level that they are incapable of thinking of anything else.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. I can see, when I'm at a meeting with a colleague, that this person has a lot in common with me, but I can't identify with him.

I'm also very sensitive to the feelings of others. I don't like to be drawn into arguments with people in my field. I've always been a fan of the way that people view their own work. I've always understood that you can't hold yourself to the same standards as your colleagues. And I've always been impressed by people who have a lot in common with me. And I think that is one of the reasons that I feel so comfortable here.

I'm also very interested in the lives of others. I've always had a great interest in the lives of people who are at different periods in their lives. I'm always interested in what they're doing in their own lives, and I can see that they're trying to make a difference in the world.

I'm also interested in the history of the world. I've always been interested in what happened in the past. I've always been interested in what remains in the past.

I'm also very interested in the future of the world. I think that I am a very capable observer, and I think that the future is one that I feel very comfortable with.

I think that I am a very intelligent person, and I think that I have a lot to offer the world.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. I always want to be friends with them, too. There is a better way, of course. We take a few steps back and ask ourselves, what is the best way to relate to each other? There are many ways, and the best way is the one that is most natural to us. It is not always easy to find that way. It may be necessary to take a step back and consider more deeply what it means to stand out in society. But it is also possible, and it is, and I will not deny it, the way I have always found to stand out.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me. Now, I'm not a great connection to them. I know some of them very well, but I've never really developed a relationship with them.

I was one of the first people I ever met who was not a "gay man." I was a bisexual man in a lesbian relationship, and I was married to a woman. I was a man at the time. I think that that was one of the reasons I took my life, but I don't think it was the only reason. It was a feeling of vulnerability and loneliness that I felt.

When I met the first gay people I met, these were friends of mine who were living in a house in the country, and they were living in the same room as me. They had spent their lives in a very different world. I was frightened to go out to them, but I was also interested in them and could see that they had a very different attitude toward me than I had. I found a way to make the connection.

I think of myself as an empathetic person. I love to emotionally understand other people. The only problem is that it works well with people in my circle, those who are similar to me, but I never feel I can understand those people who are not quite as similar to me.

I think it is the role of the mental health system to address people who have been diagnosed in the past. However, I have a very strong guess that more than half of the people who have been treated for depression in the mental health system have not been successful. I don't think anyone who has been treated successfully is likely to be successful in the future.