Social Norms and Working Class Treatment

     Apparently there are some individuals who don't immediately feel empathy towards other individuals. Namely the incident that recently happened where a working class servant was abused by his employer. It shows that the social norms there imply that it’s acceptable to express anger in a violent manner with no regards to the individual. So, who is to blame here? Is it the individual who attacked the servant, because it was through his actions alone that enabled the incident to take place? Is it the social norms of the country at the moment, because all individuals will ultimately learn from their surroundings? Or is it the system of government in place at the time which will set precedent for said social norms. And if not set an example they at least will decide what is the proper way to act on a country wide basis. I think that based on the way the Saudi media is reacting to the video and the story overall the government should not hold too much of the blame, but personally I think that they are not doing enough to change the general mindset of their people to think that treating other individuals in this way is in anyway ok. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think that social norms in Middle Eastern countries emphasize the feelings of other individuals, it seems as if it’s something learned personally, but if one is raised in a closed environment, the sense of empathy that would be gained through social interaction is lost by growing up in a privileged environment. Finally as far as the action of the individual go, I don’t think that it’s possible to figure out what’s going on in someone’s head at any given time, however I think that I can draw two reasonable conclusions about the individual’s behavior. Either he didn’t fully understand what he was doing by physically punishing his servant on impulse. Or he knew exactly what he was doing and decided to inflict pain to correct the actions of his servant.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2013/10/31/pkg-jamjooon-saudi-man-beats-servant.cnn.html