The importance of being empathetic

It wasn’t just Susan Sontag who claimed the importance of the role played by empathy in her book, Regarding the pain of others.

Empathy sounds like a word you could find in a GRE test, it comes from Greek (which doesn’t help) and, let’s face it, it seems difficult. In ancient Greek the word “empatheia” means “is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.” Which in a weird way somehow sounds very similar to the English expression “in someone else’s shoes”. Thinking about it, there are several expressions in English that are unconsciously related to the concept of empathy. Try to think about all those times you said to your friend “I know how it feels, I’ve been there”. No one knows where “there” actually is, but we all know that it’s a place where people gather together and feel the same emotions.

Maybe the executives of Ashoka, the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, have read Sontag’s book, or maybe they’ve simply realized how often they’ve told their friends that “they’d been there”,  however they know so well the importance of the role played by empathy in our society, that they consider it a key factor of active citizenship. They are launching the Global Empathy Initiative, a campaign to educate students all over the world on the importance of empathy. As a matter of fact, Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, thinks that it’s the desire to stop the pain of others that pushes people to play an active role in society and to become change makers. According to Drayton, empathy will be the trigger for the next social revolution and whoever doesn’t develop it will be marginalized.

http://www.ashoka.org/leadempathy