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Dec 17, 2008

Empathy Action Group (CLICK)

I am forcing the change in the Empathy group; I have not done all the perpetration work that I hoped, but I can wait no longer.

Our group has passed its second anniversary, and has experienced radical growth; we have fleshed out what is probably the most important issue of all feeling beings: empathy. I think the most important lesson from our learning is to focus on emotional communication as the tool of positive change, and leave behind most of the thought, because thought is not necessarily feeling.

It has been a great two years. I have reactivated nearly all of the threads and the discussions are some of the most valuable in the world.

Empathy Action is Action Research guided by Empathy, or more accurately, Emotional Communication. Following the model developed in the Katrina group (CLICK), we will try to find a few important and deep rooted and focused causes. With Empathy, these efforts should reach out to all the people of America and the world because they focus on all their personal benefits. And because we have demonstrated empathy, they can feel confidence in what we are asking for; even those who themselves lack empathy; who have no functioning emotional communication neurons.

  • Animal related causes
  • Wide group interaction -- with whole nations, continents and even the world
  • Information Society support: highly technical
  • Energy as part of the world economy, and important to polar bears * Nuturition, housing, and the other basics
  • Psychological and theraputic reality: showing people that they need to feel the effects they have on others

The empathy model, my next area of writing is here at the Wikiversity (CLICK)

The framework is good, a good start. There is a discussion page there, and sub-set pages can be created to contain the action projects.

Ultimately Empathy Action needs to be framed as Emotional Communication as that is what empathy really is, as empathy is about the connections between us, even the connections we feel within ourselves.

Empathy Model

The action aspect will be based on the success of the Katrina support group now known as "Katrina, Remembered" and the writing I developed from our success for my degree in Information Technology that looked closely at the action research model. There are links on the group page, and I will create a library of all our writing after I work on the Empathy Model page.

The basic idea is to focus the efforts of the group along the lines of the psycho- and sociological model we have been developing here in this group. With a few but important and wide-reaching causes developed based on highly accurate information aimed, almost as a weapon, a the policy makers of the world on behalf of the greater good.

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Posted: Dec 17, 2008 4:04pm
Feb 26, 2008


I have been looking carefully at police behavior lately -- through the corners of my eyes of course.

Today I saw two cars pulled over just now in the in pouring rain in Highland. Both cars had their driver's side doors open, both drivers were standing behind their cars getting soaked, and both police officers were leaning inside the cars looking around.

Quite frankly, as I learn more about the functions of the human, especially with respect to neurology and morality, I find it difficult to believe that humans are "basically criminal," as this kind of enforcement would imply. So these two attempts at search and seizure would then not only be rights violations, but immoral acts, as I believe a warrants or "cause" is necessary for searches.

Because of what I have learned about neurology, I have suspicions about the neural "facilities" of these officers. Do they have the ability to understand that what they are doing is wrong, not from a legal or "psychotic" perspective, but from an empathic perspective? It appears extremely likely to me that these police may have defective, or perhaps disconnected, empathic neurons: specifically spindle and mirror cells.

If this is so, then it would also seem likely that the "system" for recruiting and training police is promoting people who are lacking these key human neurons; If this is the case, then the police may be largely defective. To extend this idea further, investigators lacking the mirror neuron should have almost no way to determine if a suspect is lying as people known to be missing this neuron are easily fooled.

In my experience, this is as bad as I have seen things-- our state enforcement officials here seem determined to hurt people, possibly more so than in other states. Why? Are the officials likewise missing key neurons? In the very near future these neurons will be visible to magnetic scanning equipment.

I am not too worried about the police myself in this regard. As a former trucker, I am exceedingly careful about speed limits, lights, turns, and intersections, so I don't expect to get pulled over myself. And if I do, I know how to act -- really friendly !!

Here is a debate on this very subject here on care2: Police_brutality_mentality_CLICK
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Posted: Feb 26, 2008 3:24pm
Oct 5, 2007

Radical Empathy Group, please join


Writing about how society is deliberately unemphatic and how it is de-evolving humanity.

We have in society what is called "limited empathy," which is often described as the ability to do things to other people so as to allow one to make money. An example would be a landlord evicting a poor tenant for not having money; a lack of empathy would defiantly benefit a slumlord.

The single most important trait of empathy is eye contact. When people communicate, their bodies synchronize and large amounts of emotional information are exchanged beyond the character-based, or "digital," information in the language of conversation. Eye contact is where the majority of emotional information is exchanged, and hence the empathic communication neurons are called mirror cells.

In terms of our behaviors is very hard to generalize about empathy except in cases of obvious cruelty. For me, the obvious test is eye contact, but for a therapist, say working in a prison, the test is in "reaching" somebody -- helping them become grounded.

People are pulled away from nature by society, so that the rich can harvest it, or her, and people are disconnected even from their bodies, as how the Catholic church convinces women that their bodies are "dirty" -- a major focus of the feminist movement as I was growing up.

The empathic revolution is about re-connecting all the components that society has pulled apart. Genetics play only a general role in the empathic equation; my feeling is that the majority of heinous crimes are committed by people who lack empathy, but people without empathy don't necessarily commit heinous crimes. In fact, in my experience, people who lack empathy adhere excessively to the "rules" of society because they are unable to make value judgments themselves.

This is why I say ethics are "cognitive imprints," and exist for the benefit of people who lack empathic facilities.

In society we have structure and structure is not human, and therefore structure cannot have empathy; this is another example of "limited empathy." Because structure lacks empathy, then it tends to self-replicate by promoting people who lack empathy. As structures get bigger and bigger, and resemble a pyramidal shape, as a generality the tops of structures becoms less and less connected to their bottoms, the operators at the top have less and less empathy for the masses of people at the bottom.

Clearly the present president of the US, Bush, lacks empathy and illustrates this generalization.

What I think is that we are dealing with a reproductive "tendency" -- a feature of evolution that in the case of society is often called de-evolution. As society becomes more and more structural, the structure itself rewards the less empathic in an attempt to replicate itself, and encourages "limited empathy" people to reproduce faster than empathic people. In the end, society will become less and less empathic and more robot-like.

To me the actual proof of this de-evolution, or devolution, is the melting of the ice caps. Humanity as a whole cannot prevent itself from destroying the planet it lives on, and will very likely act as a suicidal parasite.

That is the challenge that we are attempt to face here in these discussions; how can we increase levels of empathy so as to get humanity to care enough to stop its predicted self-destruction.

Besides the empathy group, I also started a group to discuss PeTA and the accusations that came to it of being a mass euthanizer of stray pets: PeTA: the unbiased discussion. The conclusion of the group is there there is definitely something wrong with Ingrid Newkirk; she tells us in her own words: she enjoys euthanizing animals. She said of feral cats that they are better off killed with an injection than living in the wild. She said that pit bulls -- English Staffordshire terriers -- are killing machines and helped create law all over the country that resulted in the euthanization of many, many pets.

She operates with thought in the absence of feeling. She "rationalizes" her actions, a process which means to most people "making excuses for bad behaviors." This is the basic idea behind ethics as a mental system, and as a system, ethics seem to work well most of the time.

But it is in an important minority of decisions that the ethical process collapses, and rationalization becomes the basis of extreme suffering such as the invasion of Iraq and the planned invasion of Iran. (Both these invasions seem to be promoted by a "rationalized" desire to promote an ancient religion at the expense of world peace, millions of lives, and the sovereignty of the United States.)

What we have in ethics as rational thought is thinking without feeling, and thinking without feeling is anti-empathic; that in the end will kill us all. We have to feel aggressively to counteract this crisis and combat anti-empathy.

The beauty behind empathy, is that since empathy is based mostly on eye contact, we can unite simply by using eye contact, and the unempathic will never be the wiser: what they don't know won't hurt them.
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Posted: Oct 5, 2007 7:07am

 

 
 
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JohnBessa VSOP
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