Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization (Animated)

Very interesting but not to forget there are some people with very little empathy in this world

I've long had a feeling that empathy is very important, but particularly toward the planet, and other species, even more than toward each other. The biosphere is now in peril, and we need to not only all know that, but also feel it, in our hearts, and care. That's the message in that amazing video. The speaker clearly understands the importance of extending a feeling of kinship and concern to the entire planet, and to all the life on it. If we mess up the beautiful and bountiful world we inherited, we will not get another. Time is short! Those who do not believe that we are rapidly warming this planet - with perilous consequences for virtually ALL species - are really, really foolish, and blind. The evidence is everywhere. And only caring - empathy with Mother Nature, or Mother Earth - will stop it. Otherwise, humans are likely doomed to become extinct; a failed experiment of nature. Too arrogant to ever be - truly - Homo Sapiens. As things stand, that's a rather pretentious Latin label for humans.

As that thoughtful man says: the life jacket still within our reach is empathy, particularly with the planet we live on. The entire biosphere. All lifeforms on it. And awareness of what we are doing to them. A realization that it's wrong. That can save us. I don't believe that anything else can. Currently humans are drifting toward a cliff. And too few people care. Too few people believe it. Too few people know about all the detrimental changes we are causing in the biosphere. We're a very destructive species.

I applaud the maker of that excellent film for so well expressing a vital message. All of humanity needs to wake up and care, so humanity can have a future, like it's had a past.

Don't confuse empathy with sympathy and pity. Empathy is a capability to "feel into" another person's emotions and feelings. It was essential for survival of the tiny group of people on the plains of Africa many thousands years ago. There was a necessity to stick together because a loss of even one person was the loss of a big part of the group. Circumstances changed a bit since.
Empathy as capability to tune into the other person's thoughts and feelings is also very useful during war because you can better understand the intentions of the foe.

Hope that it is true, especially in these nationalistic, religious and divided times.

In fact this theory is as old as Darwin. See 'Is Darwin Racist' on this site for an exposition. Darwin considered 'sympathy' to be dominant trait in human beings and said that civilisation was basically the extension of sympathy beyond our tribe to others of our species and finally beyond our own species to others.

The trouble is that : 1-"mirror", "empathy", "myself", "narcissism" and 2-"aggressiveness", are two different faces of essentially the same coin. "My fellow", "my neighbor", is based on the self-mirroring of myself. Primates are different from "man", because only man has "narcissism", only man falls in love of his own image, only man is capable of killing because of that image. The problem with 'mirror neurons", is not the "neurons", but the "mirror". We are not monkeys in this sense, but also in this very sense the challenge is how to get beyond narcissism.

The trouble is that not everyone feels empathy. When primates are studied in the wild there are instances of murder and rape by dominant individuals. We have a classification for people who lack impathy, we call them 'sociopaths' or 'psychopaths' but there are a lot of them around and they tend toward positions of dominance, at least the ones smart enough not to commit murders themselves but to get others to do it for them.

Don't get carried away!

No, it's much deeper than that. Remember the babies crying in empathy. We are social animals despite what some philosophers say. We have this in common with all other primates so it must be wired into our brains by evolution. And it isn't mystical or mysterious. We're one of the weakest, slowest animals on earth, if we hadn't learned to stick together we wouldn't be here. Maybe that's why we're all in the same family with two common ancestors.

How can he argue that empathy isn't an act of selfishness? Empathy creates social cohesion, self worth and helps insure our own survival. As much as empathy is an act of selflessness, it is equally beneficial for the self.

On his bit on the bible being right, if you have enough generations pass, at some point genealogical trees are going to cross paths. Say we have family A and family B. Any generation after this we will add another repeating letter. For example AAA is the third generation of A. Enough time passes and enough generations pass, at some point AAAAAAAA... and BBBBBBBB... are going to cross paths. We have a great genealogical mixing pot here you see. His way of presenting this fact was a little misleading. This is not an exclusively human phenomenon.

I loved Dmitry76's and mvanderford's input. *above*