Dr. Rick Hanson

What it's about essentially is the combination of empathy and benevolence in response to suffering. Kindness does not presuppose suffering. Compassion presupposes suffering. It's a response to suffering in ourselves or in others. And clearly, if we don't give a damn about their suffering, that kind of is foundational for they don't matter, right?

Flip the other way, if we're with people who really clearly, they just don't give a darn about our suffering, we don't really matter to them, certainly as our innermost self. Maybe we matter to them as a tool they can use for their purposes, but it's not like our innermost being matters to them. So compassion is really foundational.

Flip the other way, if we're with people who really clearly, they just don't give a darn about our suffering, we don't really matter to them, certainly as our innermost self. Maybe we matter to them as a tool they can use for their purposes, but it's not like our innermost being matters to them. So compassion is really foundational.

Flip the other way, if we're with people who really clearly, they just don't give a darn about our suffering, we don't really matter to them, certainly as our innermost self. Maybe we matter to them as a tool they can use for their purposes, but it's not like our innermost being matters to them. So compassion is really foundational.

That's partly why you may know I founded the Global Compassion Coalition a couple of years ago. And I think that much as you've said, there's a, as you say, disease of disconnection, but there's a loss of mattering. Part of it has to do with the ways that in our hunter-gatherer bands in which we live with just 40 people our whole lives, more or less,

That's partly why you may know I founded the Global Compassion Coalition a couple of years ago. And I think that much as you've said, there's a, as you say, disease of disconnection, but there's a loss of mattering. Part of it has to do with the ways that in our hunter-gatherer bands in which we live with just 40 people our whole lives, more or less,

That's partly why you may know I founded the Global Compassion Coalition a couple of years ago. And I think that much as you've said, there's a, as you say, disease of disconnection, but there's a loss of mattering. Part of it has to do with the ways that in our hunter-gatherer bands in which we live with just 40 people our whole lives, more or less,

Because everybody mattered in the band. There was common welfare. You needed to function as a team. People brought food in. They shared it. You were related to each other. You had to fight to deal with those marauding other bands who wanted to kill the men and take the women, frankly, and all the rest of that, and take your food and move into your area. You had to really matter. You knew that.

Because everybody mattered in the band. There was common welfare. You needed to function as a team. People brought food in. They shared it. You were related to each other. You had to fight to deal with those marauding other bands who wanted to kill the men and take the women, frankly, and all the rest of that, and take your food and move into your area. You had to really matter. You knew that.

Because everybody mattered in the band. There was common welfare. You needed to function as a team. People brought food in. They shared it. You were related to each other. You had to fight to deal with those marauding other bands who wanted to kill the men and take the women, frankly, and all the rest of that, and take your food and move into your area. You had to really matter. You knew that.

But now, since agriculture, the last 10,000 years has been much more like Game of Thrones, in which that sense of mattering has just been blown up. And to me, the central challenge of this time and opportunity is to reestablish the sense of mattering, just like you're saying, grounded in connection, like you're saying, at the scale of the whole 8 billion strong human tribe. How do we do that?

But now, since agriculture, the last 10,000 years has been much more like Game of Thrones, in which that sense of mattering has just been blown up. And to me, the central challenge of this time and opportunity is to reestablish the sense of mattering, just like you're saying, grounded in connection, like you're saying, at the scale of the whole 8 billion strong human tribe. How do we do that?

But now, since agriculture, the last 10,000 years has been much more like Game of Thrones, in which that sense of mattering has just been blown up. And to me, the central challenge of this time and opportunity is to reestablish the sense of mattering, just like you're saying, grounded in connection, like you're saying, at the scale of the whole 8 billion strong human tribe. How do we do that?

That we have our work cut out.

That we have our work cut out.

That we have our work cut out.

If I could underline, I think the power of compassion is a way to expand the circle of us, the circle of caring. I think that in evolutionary terms, the fact that we lived in small bands, in effect, enabled us to be morally lazy. What I mean by that is because it was so natural and easy to care about our kin and our partners and the people we lived with and were in our faces every day.

If I could underline, I think the power of compassion is a way to expand the circle of us, the circle of caring. I think that in evolutionary terms, the fact that we lived in small bands, in effect, enabled us to be morally lazy. What I mean by that is because it was so natural and easy to care about our kin and our partners and the people we lived with and were in our faces every day.

If I could underline, I think the power of compassion is a way to expand the circle of us, the circle of caring. I think that in evolutionary terms, the fact that we lived in small bands, in effect, enabled us to be morally lazy. What I mean by that is because it was so natural and easy to care about our kin and our partners and the people we lived with and were in our faces every day.

And if we didn't care about them, if they did not matter to us, they would throw us out of the band, right? We didn't have to learn. obviously, to care about 330 other million Americans, let's say, or 8 billion other humans on the planet. So compassion is a very powerful way to reestablish that circle of caring at wider and larger scale. So compassion is really central to that.