The person with an empathic imagination and a healthy reflective mind . . .

Can embrace an endless expanse of identification: 

We can recognize commonalities across cultures and feel an essential connection not only to our closest family, friends and community, but to humanity as a whole, and to other sentient creatures . . .

An emotionally-healthy adult with a fully-developed moral compass:
  • Can provide nurturing and ease pain and grief
  • Can better recognize the suffering and experience of those most alien to ourselves
  • Can respect the dignity and self-determination of all others
  • Can participate in movements working to overcome cruelty and bigotry, ignorance and unfair attributions
  • Can ask an open-ended question . . .
  • Can look for commonalities, common ground, and consensus
  • Can stand strong against injustice in spite of peer or group influence
  • Can make reparation and amends
  • Can reconcile, resolve, and forgive 
  • Can fight for justice, defend the abused, protect the mistreated
  • Can understand priorities and work for the common good, the general welfare of all people
  • Can support the rule of law without coercion or a need to be in central command

Interesting animated view of "Empathic Imagination":
The Power of "Outrospection"
RSA Animate 
Roman Krznaric

But, without empathic imagination . . .

Without a blink of regret or any lost sleep:

  • A CEO pollutes a waterway ten thousand miles away.
  • A corporation fights mandated reparation for the death of 1,000s.
  • The owner of a mine lobbies to deregulate safety protocols even after a mining disaster buries workers alive.
  • A politician authorizes the release of defoliant to destroy the agriculture of a far away land in order to stymie a small group of drug traffickers.
  • A military leader cluster bombs a neighborhood or napalms a village filled with children and civilians to destroy the hide-out of one insurgent.
  • An immigration official indefinitely detains a traumatized refugee who seeks asylum after fleeing the worst torture, for purely technical reasons. 

Without empathy—dehumanization and contempt have free reign to proliferate. Authoritarianism and bigotry create a tendency for people to:

  • Disdain the person on the outside who is not “our kind”
  • Dehumanize an entire group simply for looking, dressing, or speaking differently.
  • Blame the victim: Fathers stone or kill a raped daughter in the name of "honor"
  • Enjoy enacting harsh punishment—even for minor offenses
  • Promote authoritarian policies that strip dignity from the marginalized and disenfranchised.
  • Condone the use of taser, pepper spray, or mace on innocent people acting on their Constitutional civil rights of peaceable assembly and civil disobedience.
  • Condone the use of torture 

Without Empathic Imagination, people create extreme belief systems in the name of rationality and morality. 

It’s easier to deny, to project, and to justify atrocities or heedless corruption, because the true suffering of another is not as important as maintaining the status and image of the self or the system. But authoritarians will arrogantly proclaim, “I would never be corrupt or abuse power if I was in that position. I would never make unjust decisions.”