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#compassion

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@BrianJopek
While I thought Pavlozitz’s blog post was quite good, it suffers from a poor disctinction between compassion and empathy. This confusion is widespread. I have recently caused an uproar on my timeline about this because most comments confound the two terms.

Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. (Source: Wikipedia)

Compassion is a social [act] which motivates people to go out of their way to relieve the physical, mental, or emotional pains of others and themselves. Compassion is sensitivity to the emotional aspects of the suffering of others. When based on notions such as fairness, justice, and interdependence, it may be considered partially rational in nature. (Source: Wikipedia)

If I were to sum it up, I would say that empathy, inate in human nature (possibly due to physionomy - mirror brain cells), allows us to feel as if in the mind of another — it’s an imagining that arouses deep-seated feelings, especially of suffering as the Other. Compassion, on the other hand, is a social act which results from moral/ethical imperatives which enables us to live harmoniously with Others. I.e. Empathy is not an act, whereas compassion is.

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@RationalizedInsanity "No matter how badly I mess up in life:"

All you care about is better than other humans, the competition of defeating other low-programmed stupid idiot humans, that is #Egomania and you are expressing values of #Egoism that you are better than #Reddit #HiveMind better than #OutGroup that you are better than humanism because you won some contest of measure and logic and you know nothing of #Compassion is NOT logical.

The indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. That state appeals to pleasure, as well as fear, to crush compassion. … We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the injustice visited on others… As long as we defy these forces, we remain alive. And, for now, this is the only victory possible.
—Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (2010)
#empathy #compassion #justice