Disarming Through Empathy

I was quite affected when I, I visited, uh, Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin and listened to the stories of the, uh, the people who were involved in the, the first uprising at the General Post Office and the attempts there, and how they were summarily hung, hanged, um, and the whole story about the, the individuals that were, uh, hanged at that time.

And I found huge amounts of empathy for their cause and the way that the British at the time treated them.

And I, I guess some of the, the roots of what you experienced, your father lost his life through, trace right back to those historical injustices, if you like, the way the British and the Irish were at loggerheads back at the turn of the, the last century.

And it, it's really ingrained in people, isn't it?

Yes.

Yes, it goes back hundreds and hundreds of years.

And recently, the lack of justice, the difference between how Protestants were treated and how Catholics were treated, that's back in the '60s and the '70s.

So what I find in conflict in... well, in conflict that has turned violent, is people, they justify why they're right.

You know, they justify that their cause is absolutely right.

And then having defended their cause, the next step is to take actions to prove they're right, to act that they're right, and then that moves into the spectrum of violence.

And we're going a bit further in the story, so I'll leave that for now.

But it's something that I've certainly experienced, the political righteousness on all sides.

And the old adage, you know, history is written by the victors is...

So the stories-

Oh

... you hear are the stories of the winning side, if you wanna put it, if you ever wanna have winners and losers.

And one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.

And it- it's really understanding the echo chamber and the belief system and the, why people do this.

And I, I'm a great believer that nobody wakes up in the morning to be a bad person.

Everybody wakes up in the morning believing in what they believe they're doing for the right reasons and their right- righteous cause.

And I think being able to have that empathy for that belief means that you can sit down with people that you have no respect for, for their views, but you have respect for them as human beings.

Definitely.

You've hit the spot with that.

[laughs] Like, definitely.

And as human beings, we have the capacity, I think, to hear stories from different sides, from opposing sides, and to be able to listen and acknowledge them all, but that's not something that you see in our politicians or is taught in history.