MISSION
The Empathy-Based Society Institute exists to bring the idea of the empathy-based society into public view as a coherent alternative to the violence-based one that currently organises most of the world.
We live in a society organised around normalised violence: wars, poverty, ecological breakdown, and the slaughter of more than 80 billion animals every year. These look like separate crises. They share one root: violence. Violence is the abuse of power that denies the needs, dignity, and lives of others, and it has been embedded in economic systems, cultural structures, and everyday practice until it looks like the natural order of things.
Empathy is its neurological counterforce. Research by Professor Luis Moya-Albiol and his team (2010) shows that empathy and violence rely on partly overlapping brain circuits. When empathy is active, it suppresses violence. When violence is active, it suppresses empathy. What we practise, individually and collectively, grows stronger. Which of the two a society strengthens is not fixed. It is the outcome of what its people, institutions, and cultures choose to reinforce.
What we do
· Educates on how violence and empathy shape our society: two organising principles, two futures, and the ways each is built, sustained, or dismantled by the choices people, institutions, and cultures make.
· Argues for empathic practices at both individual and systemic levels. Individually, in how we relate to ourselves and one another, what we eat and purchase, and how we treat nature and the planet. Collectively, in how laws, policies, economies, media, education, and institutions are organised.
· Builds global Network. An empathy-based society is not waiting to be invented. It already exists in fragments, in the work of organisations, movements, businesses, artists, researchers, and millions of people who work to eliminate suffering and advance the well-being of people, animals, nature, and the planet. Through the EBSI Network, we connect them and make their collective power and scale visible.
The EBSI Global Network
It connects the people, organisations, initiatives, businesses, researchers, and artists already building the foundations of an empathy-based society. By making their shared purpose visible and their collective power usable, it turns fragmented work into the visible foundations of an empathy-based society being built. Members come to see their own work as part of an empathy-based society in the making, not as isolated attempts to fix isolated problems of the violence-based one.
What we're building toward
An empathy-based society: institutions, economies, laws, and cultures organised around recognising and responding to the needs of all sentient beings and the living systems that sustain them.
Animals are not resources or property. Their lives belong to them. The living world is not a warehouse for human use. It is a community of life to which we belong. Communities become places where people are safe, supported, and able to shape the conditions that affect their lives. Children grow up learning empathy toward themselves, others, animals, and the planet as naturally as they learn language.
The full vision, principles, and purpose are set out in the Call.
Programs & Resources
Organization & Contact
Empathy-Based Society Institute
Zavod Raziskovalni Inštitut za empatično družbo
Ljubljana, Slovenia, Europe
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