„We need to empicipate“

What does empicipate mean?

Empicipate means to ‚empower people to create more caring and compassionate communities‘.

It is a new word that combines ‚empower‘ and ‚participate‚ and hints at the important question of what role ‚empathy‘ should play in this process.

• ‚empicipate‘ is a verb, the noun is ‚empicipation‘
• ‚empicipate‘ does not have an object: you do not say ‚empicipate someone‘. Rather, it refers to the effort of ‚fostering a culture in which people feel empowered to create more caring and compassionate communities‘
• You can say ‚I want to help empicipate‘ or ‚throughout my career I have tried to empicipate‘ or ‚my mission is empicipation‘. And you can join me in spreading the message that ‚we need to empicipate‘

At the most basic level, compassion is here defined as ‚a concern for the suffering of others and an action that attempts to alleviate it‘. In this sense, it is different from empathy which emphasizes ‚the act of understand or feeling what another person feels‘ and does not necessarily lead to an attempt to alleviate suffering.

You can learn more about why I think we need a more caring and compassionate society here.

How to empicipate?

In order to empower people to participate in creating a more caring and compassionate society, we first need to have a powerful theory of compassion and a powerful theory of learning.

The general definition of compassion that I have introduced above leaves ample room for interpretation:

‚a concern for the suffering of others and an action that attempts to alleviate it‘

What is ’suffering‘, who are the ‚others‘ that we should be concerned about, and what ‚action‘ is appropriate to alleviate their suffering? There is no universal answer to these questions because any answer will be informed by values as well as practical considerations. That is why it is crucial that we have constructive and ongoing debates about these questions.

In addition to debating what compassion should constitute, we also need to define what we mean by empowerment. What does someone need in order to take part in creating a more caring society? Part of the answer are skills and tools. How can we learn and teach the skills and tools we consider necessary? To answer this question we need to have a theory of learning.

Arguably, to answer the question of empowerment we also require a theory of society. This is a topic I will explore further and perhaps create an additional section on this website for in the future.

Using this website

This website is built on the premise that we first need to have a powerful theory of compassion and a powerful theory of learning to make society more caring and compassionate. I hope it will be a resource for everyone interested in this topic.

The Lexicon of Compassion currently includes the following two sections:

• The Understanding Compassion section aims to help you build a theory of compassion. This section introduces a range of definitions of what empathy and compassion mean, and debates that are related to these definitions. 
• The Learning Compassion section aims to help you build a theory of learning. It introduces theories and research about learning that are particularly relevant to the question of compassion. It encourages you to consider compassion as something that can be learned.

The Blog discusses some of the issues raised in the other sections from my own personal perspective.