Rhetorical Analysis On Empathy

"It all begins with empathy, take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person", That's how Sam Richard starts his TED talk "A radical experiment in empathy" which was given in 2010, claiming that empathy is the first step to be a sociologist. During Sam's talk, he was expressing the idea of empathy from the analogy of his imagined situation about China and the US to the real one of Iraq and the US, describing that the empathy makes us see the situation from another points of view to fully understand it. Sam used his credibility and his ability to convince the audience, to partially or even completely change the audience's point of view, aided with a very strong logical proof from his analogy, also from the expressing

Sam also in his slides brought a live pictures from real life situations that every person had seen, which had increased his credibility and the appeal to ethos in his talk. However, Sam mentioned some points like the US militarizing of the world and their continuous need for the Iraqi oil and based their truth on the everyday encounter with those issues without the need of a proof as they are very obvious. "There's this thing, this militarization of the world, and it's centered right in the United States. And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world's military spending" and also about the oil "the reason anyone is interested in your land, and particularly the United States, it's oil. It's all about oil; you know that, everybody knows that. People here back in the United States know it's about oil." The evidences for the previous quotes were something that people from the US see every day , and this, increased the credibility of Sam. (Richards, 2010) (Sociology.la.psu.edu,

Sam started by making the audience think of the US if China had invaded them a hundred of years ago for their search for coal, and then transport it to china to build their civilization on it. While in the US people suffer to have the least thing of their rights despite the large amount of coal they have. Then suddenly, Sam made the audience return to the factual life where US invaded Iraq for their search oil. Will the audience have the same empathy for Iraq that they had for the US? That was Sam's question and by this way, he makes the audience understand the idea of being in another one's shoes, which makes people understand each other in the different situations "……….. You're allowed to hate these people. You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being. And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch, one tiny inch, then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life." (Richards,