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Empicipate?

“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 understanding or feeling what another person feels’ and does not necessarily lead to an attempt to alleviate suffering.

You can learn more about the topic and why I think we need more caring and compassionate societies here.

Pascal Wenz-Kim (2024)