In the United States today, we get on Twitter and decry the lack of empathy in our country—and then we wonder why empathy keeps diminishing. A culture is not the sum of its outrage; it’s a set of actions. In a competitive corporate world, politeness might seem like a throwaway virtue. In fact, the way the samurai took the action-oriented nature of politeness and used it to express the abstract concepts of love and respect is exceptionally instructive.
