Softening the Edge: Empathy

The Ten Types of Human by Dexter Dias

I couldn’t have chosen a better book to start the year with.

Who are we?

What are we?

Who is inside of us?

Those are the questions asked at the start of this mind-blowing read.

Throughout the book you will encounter some extraordinary people. People who have, in their own exceptional ways, sought to overcome the world.

Some stories are heartbreaking and sometimes it’s hard to grasp the truth about what is going on in the world:

“Is there a way in which being kept free of the truth can ever be a kind of freedom?”

We need to be mindful of everything that’s here. And mindful of each other.

This book engages with some of the more troubling things that humans do to other humans; they are true and happening.

As Sophocles said: “Many things are both wonderful and terrible, but none more so than humankind.”

Through their struggle, these people have shown how one can react to certain situations in different ways; they have revealed what lies often unknown within us, the glory and glitz, the wonder and terror, of being human – the Ten Types.

Repeating Dias’s words “It is an outrageously presumptuous ambition to try to change the world. But there it is. Some things in the world need changing.”

We need to know these things, for us to understand, so we can find ways to stop them. The desire to understand who we are, with a view for who we can be, can be a gateway to tolerance.