I had never expected to find myself in the backseat of a limousine with Dick Cheney baring his soul about misleading the country into going to war in Iraq, but there I was.

"Stanley, if you believed that you could end centuries—centuries!—of bloodshed and bring peace to the Middle East, wouldn't you do everything you could, even if it meant lying to the public?"

He articulated his larger strategy with passion, reason, even humanity.

Then I woke up.

It was one in a series of recurring dreams I have where I find myself in a private, enclosed space with a maligned public figure as they share their side of an otherwise one-sided story. Other subjects have been Lindsey Lohan ("Have you ever made a mistake but luckily no one noticed? I haven't.") and Fox News pollster Frank Luntz ("I've pulled away the curtain, exposing the fickle and arbitrary nature of modern politics, but no one cares!").

It's easy to vilify, to dismiss, to construct strawman identities for people you don't know out of moral disgust or even simple disagreement. It's harder to understand where they're coming from, to try their viewpoint on for size and imagine how (or if) you'd do anything differently. I do this a lot, possibly too often.

Empathy is a useful trait in design. Every task involves a thought experiment where I assume the role of The User and try to see things with fresh eyes. This process usually results in removing things that aren't important, simplifying things that are important, and explaining things that can't be simplified. The product I'm building is seldom the most important thing in the user's life; they're thinking about how to pay rent this month, how their kid is doing in kindergarten, and if they remembered to thaw chicken for dinner that night.

Empathy is less useful in running a design business. It means I can see both sides of whether or not an invoice should be paid on time and whether or not a feature that was never mentioned until Monday should or shouldn't be in scope for the Friday milestone.

Nor is empathy's downside limited to the design business. Many of my friends cite their ability to genuinely appreciate what other people want as a detriment to getting what they want themselves. There's a fine line between being a good host by anticipating others' needs and being a doormat by making those needs more important than your own. It requires honesty about what matters to you and confidence that the burden heaped upon others by your seeking happiness is largely imagined (or at least justifiable).

When asked about the turning point of the Serbian revolution, activists cite befriending the police as what ultimately helped them topple Milošević. They stopped treating them as a wall of riot shields and saw them as they were: fathers, brothers, and sons, all vulnerable and scared, all potential allies.

Here in the United States, the wealthiest 1% have been bristling at "the demonization of the rich". They don't like being the bad guys. The reaction to their repeated exclamations of discomfort at being objects of scorn is mostly laughter; here is a demographic (at last?) whose feelings we do not need consider. Mock away. Indeed, its hard to imagine the distant affluent as people with fears, insecurities, or all but the basest desires. Equally hard, I imagine, as doing the same to riot police in Serbia. Perhaps the key to addressing income inequality is taking seriously the perpetual persecution complex of the filthiest rich.

Not that we should do whatever they ask of us. Trickle-down economics has been widely debunked, so handing over more money in the hopes that some of it would be handed back is certainly folly. It strikes me as equally foolish to pursue some alternative solution that leaves unaddressed or even openly disregards the fact that the wealthy require ever more wealth. What psychology underpins this neurosis and can we correct it?

Macro-economics is one thing, but what if someone were threatening your life? In that situation you'd be forgiven for not seeing their side... Right?

I studied aikido for a few years and the concept of non-violent self defense has stuck with me. It suggests that it is possible to avoid personal injury while allowing others to maintain agency. Aikido tells us that we can best deter an attack not by running but by getting closer to our attacker and even change our facing to match theirs. Irimi, to enter.

It was only hours after my first aikido class when, coming home from an ATM at 2am—ridiculously stupid in retrospect, but I was new to San Francisco—I was robbed at gunpoint.

The man gave me a choice, the easy way or the hard way, and showed me his gun. I opted for the easy and handed him my wallet.

"No, just the cash."

How considerate, I thought. I won't have to cancel my credit cards and get a new drivers license. I took out the cash and handed it to him—briefly considering performing the only aikido move I knew, which specifically required him to grab my left wrist with his right hand.

"You have enough money to get home?"

His question was so unexpected I didn't immediately recognize what he was asking, but eventually nodded and told him I lived nearby.

"I'm sorry. My baby's in trouble. Have a nice night."

And he walked off into the darkness.