Outside the Lines With Rap Genius - OTL 61: Robert Greene Excerpt #3 "The Decline of Empathy" lyrics

Robert Greene: They've shown that newborn babies -- at 1 hour! -- are showing levels of empathy that no other animal, no other primate can begin to display. In other words, the infant is responding to the mother's smile back and forth as if the infant can read what her thoughts are. But the study that I'm referring to -- which is a University of Michigan study that has been going on since 1979 -- has showed they have a test where they can test people's levels of empathy. And it's been going down and down and down and down. The last 10 years it's been plummeting. It's given to college graduates. Basically saying, kids in their 20s and early 30s have the lowest levels of empathy that we've seen since 1979, a**uming that it was already going down in 1979. What it means is people are so self-absorbed now. It's not a moral criticism on my part -- I've even become... It's easy to become that way. Because of social media, because of so much technology, because we're not interacting as we used to face to face with people, for various reasons, it's going down, down, down And so I've said a lot of people losing social sk**s by the day. We see it with all the snarkiness and all the cantankerousness, but I see it as a consultant where every day 20 people are coming to me with their problems... I said this; I worked with a partner; I hired this person; they're a nightmare. I don't know how to handle people anymore. We're losing a sense of how to handle our social relations because we're losing that sense of being able to observe people, go inside them, think inside their minds. It's a sense of getting outside yourself and into the world. So it's not like should there be another book on the subject. It's like there is no other book out there on the subject, I'm afraid