Empathic Civilization

A much-needed paradigm shift in how we view other animals and ourselves brings hope and life to our dreams for a more compassionate, empathic, fair, and peaceful planet in which social justice prevails.

Arianna's reading a new book for March -- the fourth in the young life of HuffPost Books. If you've kept up with our series, you know that there's goi...

All throughout February, Arianna's been reading Jeremy Rifkin's "The Empathic Civilization"--the historical argument that empathy has helped us surviv...

Following rules of morality, or adhering to convention are important for our social system to function smoothly, but they may not reflect empathy.

As a child psychologist, it is clear to me that the quickest route to a more empathic civilization is to stop beating, belittling and in other ways psychologically scarring boys when they are young.

Competition is lonely. Within organisations it may or may not increase productivity, but it does not increase happiness. To extol it is to make a fundamental misjudgment about human nature.

Today, a new generation of scientists, scholars, and social reformers are beginning to challenge some of the underlying assumptions of both the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason, taking us into the Age of Empathy.

When empathy is guided by a deeper understanding of each other's perspectives, it offers enormous promise for helping us build global cooperation.

To suggest that the American Dream itself is misguided, outdated, and even damaging to the American psyche, would be considered almost treasonous. Yet, I would like to suggest just that.

Do we see children just as future breadwinners who will support us in our old age? Or do we see them as people who will lead us to a higher moral level of civilization?

President Obama, who was elected by a generation who is growing up on Facebook and the vast distributed power of the Internet, appears to not understand the job potential of a distributed Third Industrial Revolution.

In our culture we're taught to think of ourselves as independent and self-actualizing. In reality, our brain is uniquely constructed for experiencing other people's thoughts, emotions and actions as if they were our own.

Today's emerging adults see themselves as international citizens to an extent rarely experienced before.

Washington insiders say they can't ever recall a period in American public life as full of anger and polarization as now.

Prairie humanists depend on the human biological capacity for empathy. This isn't surprising. There would be no human culture, and certainly no democracy, without empathy, which allows us to see the world through others' eyes.

The following is an excerpt from the HuffPost book club pick for February, Jeremy Rifkin's "The Empathic Civilization". Historians, by and large, wri...

Only recently, in the wake of the disastrous downturn of the global economy have some economists begun to turn their attention to the role social trust plays in providing the foundation for commerce and trade.

For this month's HuffPost Book Club, I have chosen Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization, which boldly sets out to present nothing less than -- as Rifkin puts it -- "a new rendering of human history."

Our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change. Can we reach biosphere consciousness in time to avert planetary collapse?

'Empathic Civilization' and Jeremy Rifkin are giving HuffPost Books the chance to deliver the coolest online reading experience we've seen yet. Why ar...