Across our world, we are witnessing the consequences of a society organised around normalised violence: the genocide and deliberate starvation of children in Gaza, economic systems that produce billionaires alongside preventable suffering and poverty, the slaughter of more than 80 billion animals every year, and the accelerating breakdown of Earth's living systems. More and more people can see that something is profoundly wrong.

We live in a society that has normalised violence toward humans, animals, nature and the planet, and has built an economic system on this basis. Normalised violence is embedded in capitalism and other systems of domination and oppression, including patriarchy, colonialism, speciesism, and anthropocentrism.

Violence and aggression are often considered synonyms, but they are not. Aggression is a natural response to distress. It signals a threatened boundary or a need for help. It helps us to defend ourselves and those we care about from harm and injustice. Violence, on the other hand, is not simply causing suffering. It is the abuse of power that denies the needs, dignity, and lives of others.

Violence needs a winner and a loser, it requires an imbalance of power. When such imbalances are sustained through force, they grow into dominance hierarchies. Dominance hierarchies create separation: us and them, human and animal, people and planet. Separation breeds alienation. Alienation kills connection and cooperation. Non-cooperation leads to deterioration. These dynamics shape our world. Their consequences are devastating for all living beings and for the planet. But this is not a mistake. It is the result of a system’s design.

We often see wars, inequality, discrimination, ecological destruction, animal exploitation, and social injustice as separate crises. Yet they are just different manifestations of the same underlying problem: violence. As long as we treat only the symptoms without addressing their root cause, there will be no end to these violence pathologies.

If violence is the behaviour that separates us from one another and from the living world, empathy is the capacity that restores that connection.

Empathy is deeply rooted in our neurology. We are born with capacities for empathy, attachment, and cooperation, which develop through our relationships, culture, and experience. Empathy allows us to recognise the feelings, intentions, and needs of others, and it moves us to act. It is the foundation of care, cooperation, and thriving communities. Its equal part is self-empathy: recognising and meeting our own needs, protecting ourselves from harm, and holding healthy boundaries.

Empathy evolved in small groups, helping us care for those closest to us. Beyond that circle, it does not disappear. Society draws the boundaries of moral concern and history shows how far they can be moved. Throughout history, those boundaries have separated races, nations, classes, genders, and species, making some suffering visible while rendering other suffering invisible or normalized. Today this circle is getting alarmingly narrow.

Professor Luis Moya-Albiol and his team have shown that empathy and violence rely on partly overlapping brain circuits. When empathy is active, it suppresses the capacity for violence, and when violence is active, it suppresses empathy. What we practise, individually and collectively, grows stronger. Their work contributes to the rehabilitation of domestic violence perpetrators by strengthening their capacity for empathy. I believe this same principle can be expanded beyond individual rehabilitation and applied at the level of communities and society. Demonising violence does not end it. Understanding its roots and changing the conditions that sustain it does.

The future will be shaped by the values people practise and the systems they support. If our society continues to organise around violence, so will our future. If more people choose empathy, cooperation, and care, a different future becomes possible.

An empathy-based society is not a society where people merely feel compassion. It is a society where institutions, economies, laws, and cultures are organised around recognising and responding to the needs of all sentient beings and the living systems that sustain them.

In such a society, no one is left to starve because there is enough for all. No one is worked into the ground so another can grow rich, or discarded when they stop producing. The measure of a society becomes how its most vulnerable live, not how much profit is made.

Animals are not resources or property. Their lives belong to them. They are not ours to cage, eat, wear, or experiment on. The living world is not scenery, nor a warehouse for human use. It is a community of life to which we belong. Its forests, rivers, oceans, minerals, and soil sustain all life and are the shared inheritance of present and future generations.

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. As the conditions that suppress empathy fade, trust, belonging, creativity, curiosity, and cooperation flourish.

An empathy-based society is not waiting to be invented. Across every country and every field, thousands of organisations, movements, businesses, artists, researchers, and millions of people work to prevent harm and advance the well-being of people, animals, nature, and the planet. Seen together, within a shared frame, these efforts are the foundations of an empathy-based society being built.

Yet the violence-based systems that shape our world keep these efforts isolated and fragmented. Many do not recognise empathy as the shared principle that unites their work. As a result, their collective scale remains invisible and their power remains scattered.

The missing piece is connection. An empathy-based society will not emerge from a single organisation, ideology, institution, or leader. It becomes possible when those already working to eliminate harm see their efforts within a shared frame, and see themselves as part of the same civilisational alternative. This is where the transition begins: with the recognition that the shared principle beneath these fragmented efforts is empathy, and that together they are building something coherent. As this frame is taken up, empathy becomes not only a personal value, but a shared social value and collective commitment.

This is why we are building the Empathy-Based Society Initiative Network (EBSI Network): a global connector for the transition toward an empathy-based civilisation, bringing together those already working from these values and helping them recognise their work as part of something larger. It gives organisations, initiatives, businesses, researchers, artists, and individuals a place to connect, collaborate, and make visible the empathy-based society already being built. It also helps people see how their choices contribute to this transition.

This Call may be dismissed as utopian, or impossible. But what is unrealistic is expecting a system built on violence to create lasting peace, justice, and well-being. The question before humanity is no longer whether another way is possible. The question is whether we will choose to create it. We already have the knowledge and tools needed for this transition. What remains is the collective decision to use them. This is a step we owe to ourselves, to animals, to nature, to the planet, and to future generations.

Every society is organised around a principle. For too long, ours has been organised around violence. It is time to organise it around empathy instead. If you refuse to accept the suffering of people, animals, or the living world as the price of progress, you are already part of this transition. The next step is for us to find one another, connect our efforts, and build together what none of us can build alone: an empathy-based society.

Maša Blaznik

Empathy-Based Society Initiative

Ljubljana, 13th February 2026