This is such an important point that's easy to lose sight of. It's so easy to imagine ourselves as better than others; all the more so when those others live lives unfathomably different from our own. On that note, I want to share a favorite quote of mine, about the burgeoning of empathy via psychedelics:

"My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was tied to a tree and burned alive in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt/thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual/behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity."