“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” –Albert Einstein

The empathy deficit

Think about some of the knottiest problems facing the world today and the suggested solutions to them. Climate change? Answer it with carbon sequestering and transitions to clean energy. Migration? Answer it with streamlined visas and new systems of border control. Humans tend to seek solutions to problems like these – both macro and micro, simple and complex – through a short-term, external perspective that doesn’t obligate individual participation. In today’s world, the dominant approach to tackling the challenges we face has been to amputate emotion from our decision-making whenever possible. We instead opt for cold, technical solutions. This hyper-rational perspective is at least as old as Aristotle, who described passions as capricious, dangerous roadblocks on the path to becoming fully human. And there is a utilitarian wisdom to this position. Emotions can be stoked by forces outside of our control. But trying to suppress our emotional responses to our current circumstances cannot eliminate the role they play entirely. Our feelings are not only an integral part of our moral, social, and personal well-being, but also are vital tools for solving complex challenges we face individually, organisationally, and even as a species. Humanity is in a period of great upheaval. For people and organisations attempting to thrive in this tumultuous time, old mindsets and approaches no longer work. To create a better future where everyone can flourish, leaders and organisations need to find ways to engage and encourage emotions more fully. If we are to truly shift course, to make individual commitments that allow us to build better futures, we need to find ways of using emotion to our advantage. A good starting point for developing this kind of mindset is to nurture a suite of feelings known as “self-transcendent emotions”. These emotions – which include feelings of empathy, gratitude, and awe – evolved to help manage social relationships with others and orient humans to a world that is bigger than themselves.

Hamna Imran,
Karachi.

Safety and security in the age of global tourism

Safety and security have always been indispensable condition for travel and tourism. But it is an incontestable fact that safety and security issues gained a much bigger importance in the last two decades in tourism. Changes in the world during the last two decades were enormous. Due terrorist acts, local wars, natural disasters, epidemics and pandemics, that we were witnesses to, security has significantly decreased. The travel and tourism industry could not avoid the negative impacts and consequences of these events. Moreover, some of these events manifested the vulnerability of tourism both on global and regional levels. Therefore, this fact necessitates the research and study of the relationship between security issues and tourism, including the creation of a new, up to date definition of the notion “security and safety in tourism”. Studying problems of safety and security became vital for the tourism industry. Why did safety and security become so important in the Age of Global Tourism? What are the main factors influencing security issues? What are the key elements that are treated as belonging to security and safety problems and that are included nowadays in the notion “tourism safety and security”? How do safety problems influence the tourists when they are choosing their destination? What is the tasks and responsibilities of the actors in tourism – including tourists – in reducing menaces against tourists and their possessions as well as against people working in the industry and tourism infrastructure? Answering these questions means not only satisfying the researcher’s curiosity, but has very practical objectives, that is to give management tools and working plans to all actors and levels of the tourism to parry and/or at least to reduce the risks. Security has undergone a significant change: from a more or less passive factor it is now an active element of tourism, an imperative to act in order to protect tourists and their belongings as well as all the achievements of the industry.

Laraib Asif,
Karachi.