The Wellness Connection with Fiona Kane

Charlie Kirk: Politics, Polarisation, and a Path Forward | Ep. 129

• Fiona Kane • Season 1 • Episode 129

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As a wellness advocate, I've watched with growing concern as our collective mental health suffers under the weight of toxic discourse and dehumanizing language. This episode delves into this troubling connection through the lens of recent tragedies - particularly the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What happens when we categorize people as either "oppressors" or "oppressed" with no middle ground? We create a society where some believe violence against political opponents is justified. The celebration that followed Kirk's assassination reveals something deeply disturbing about our cultural moment. Charlie, regardless of your politics, was someone who invited disagreement and championed open dialogue in university settings where many students now fear expressing unpopular opinions.

The Socratic method - asking questions, engaging with different perspectives, and being willing to occasionally stumble through difficult conversations - offers us a path forward. Rather than assuming the worst about those who disagree with us, what if we tried to understand why they hold their views? This simple shift doesn't require changing your mind, but it does result in recognising the humanity in others.

In this episode I discuss my thoughts and feelings about the death and ongoing legacy of Charlie Kirk. RIP Charlie Kirk.

Learn more about booking a nutrition consultation with Fiona: https://informedhealth.com.au/

Learn more about Fiona's speaking and media services: https://fionakane.com.au/

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Credit for the music used in this podcast:

The Beat of Nature

Music by Olexy from Pixabay



Fiona Kane:

Hello and welcome to the Wellness Connection. I'm your host, fiona Cain. Now, today I'm going to be talking about some sad things and some challenging things. I originally tried to keep any kind of politics type of conversation or culture conversation away from this podcast because I thought, well, wellness and culture, they're different. But as time goes on, I'm seeing that they're not so different that they're very heavily related to each other, because I feel like we've got a huge issue with our society, with mental health, with the narratives we're being told, with the stories we tell each other ourselves, the language that we use. There's all sorts of things going on in society at the moment and they're on a cultural and political level and they are affecting our physical and mental health. Chicken or egg, whichever way it's going around, I don't know. So, more and more I see these things as combined and not separate. So today I'm going to be talking about Charlie Kirk and I'm going to be talking a little bit about Irina I think her name was a lovely, beautiful Ukrainian woman who was murdered a few weeks ago and I'm going to talk about the world and language and the things that I think we need to talk about. If anything else, the loss of Charlie Kirk makes me think that we need to talk more about these things, not less about these things.

Fiona Kane:

So anyone who's watching the video excuse me, my mouse isn't working, so I'm just using a touchscreen to do a few things, okay, so there's a couple of videos I saw in this last week, both of which I wish I never saw, and the first one was Irina I hope I'm saying her name right Irina Zarutska, who's a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine who was living in the United States, and you know she came there because she thought she was safe and you know, look what happened to her. It was just dreadful. Now, I didn't watch the full video I likely stopped myself in time, but I saw that still of her after she had been attacked and moments before she died, and the look on her face, the look of horror on her face. I don't think I'll ever get that face, that look, out of my brain. It was just horrendous, and one of the people who was brave enough to talk about it was Charlie Kirk, and we do need to talk about why it's acceptable for a young woman to get on a light rail or whatever it was and be murdered in cold blood in front of a whole bunch of people and why the media didn't want to talk about it and didn't want to share it. Now I'm not going to go into the whole race thing here. That's a really complicated thing in the United States. But these discussions need to be had, why the media felt the need to hide this and Charlie Kirk was defending this and defending not defending the media by doing that, but sort of defending the woman and saying why don't we care about her and where were her rights and how could this happen? And how could we have a society where I think for a whole minute nobody did a thing to help her. And then people did come to her aid, but it was too late. And I understand too, because you'd be terrified in that situation. But more and more, what's happening is anyone who does come to help someone in that situation they end up in prison themselves or they try and put them in prison and they destroy their lives for two, three, four years and they have to go off and hide somewhere because they've tried to be a good citizen and do the right thing. So like I get why that happens.

Fiona Kane:

So then there's Charlie. I didn't know Charlie, but I feel like I did. I've been watching Charlie's university talks and talks and just his rise in life and in politics and in free speech and all of those things for I don't know at least six years and I've seen hundreds and hundreds of hours of him and his speaking. So I feel like I knew him, even though I didn't really know him. And when I woke up the other morning and I kind of saw the news and I clicked on a video, thinking, oh no, this can't be true. And I saw the video and then I thought, oh my God, I saw the closed-up video and I just thought, oh my god, I I saw the close-up video and I just thought, oh, I hope this is some sort of deep fake. I hope this is just some stupid deep fake. You know, uh, because there's a, you know, there was a rumor about, you know, trump passing away last week. That wasn't true, so I was hope it's just one of those things. And then very quickly I realized it wasn't fake and he passed away and he was just teaching people how to talk and have conversations.

Fiona Kane:

Now he obviously he was aligned with Trump and he was a conservative, which, you know, is fine by me, but regardless of your politics or what you do, and don't think someone being murdered that way for trying to encourage free speech and trying to teach students how to have open dialogue, that's not okay. It doesn't matter what side someone's on, it's not okay. I would not be celebrating if someone on a different side of politics to me or someone who I disagree with died in that way. So many were celebrating when Charlie died and they're still celebrating and celebrating that a father and a husband and a good man, I mean. You can just see. You can tell by looking at Charlie. You could tell by looking at Charlie. He carried a light with him and he had this big smile and even when South Park did that parody of him last month, I think it was which was quite funny, he thought it was funny too and he embraced it and he told people to go and watch it and he had a good sense of humor and what he was essentially doing was going around to universities and getting young people interested in having conversations and getting young people interested in politics. Obviously he was a conservative, so he was teaching them conservative values, but he was also hearing them out and having conversations with them. So what he was trying to do is really teach that sort of Socratic method of conversation where you do ask questions. So why do you think that? What does that mean? Why do you think that is true? Or have you thought about it this way? That's what he was doing and that's what we need more and more of.

Fiona Kane:

And in the last sort of especially, I suppose over the last 10 years, I've seen, bit by bit by bit, free speech becoming more and more a thing of the past, right? You know, graham Linehan was arrested when he arrived at Heathrow Airport for some tweets, some mean tweets. There's a woman in prison in the UK, actually many people in prison in the UK for mean things they've said, and there's many people over there who aren't going to prison for terrible, terrible things they're doing. In fact, they let out a bunch of violent criminals so that they could put in people who said hurty things into prison. That's what's going on in the UK at the moment. You know, why aren't we talking about that? Like what the hell?

Fiona Kane:

The problem is that we were lucky enough in places like Australia and the US and the UK. We've been lucky enough to grow up with a minimal amount of you know in my generation, right, my generation and maybe the one before me many of us grew up without being touched by war not saying everyone, but in general. You know world war one and world war two a long time ago, and the other wars didn't affect whole, whole countries and and whole world like the other ones did, right? So us in the West, many of us, have had great comfort due to the fact that people risked their lives, people lost their lives so that we could have freedom. And now we have freedom, or to a certain degree we have freedom, and we don't value it. In fact, we're taking it away bit by bit, by bit by bit, and many of us, many people, are cheering it on and are happy for it, and that's just really, really, really frightening to me.

Fiona Kane:

And what's happened is universities, once upon a time look, there's always been. Of course, universities have always been kind of lefty training camps. Of course they are, being young, used to be all about, you know, being a socialist and thinking that you know you're going to save the world and all this sort of stuff. And then you grow older and you grow up and you realize that that's a whole lot of BS. However, that's what it used to be, but as things have changed, so once upon a time, like when I was younger, I would have classed myself as being on the left, and to me that meant things like you know equal rights and you know equal rights for you know, like gay people, being treated well and being treated. You know no different to anybody else, right? And? And it doesn't matter what color you are, what different to anybody else, right? And it doesn't matter what colour you are, what skin colour, where you're from, whatever, Again, everyone gets treated equally. You know sort of you know no racism or sexism or those kinds of things, right?

Fiona Kane:

So it's like what we wanted was just a fair and equal society, and I think in the West we got a long way there. We got very close to it, as probably as close as you can, by having these kind of so-called multicultural sort of societies you're always going to have. There's always going to be stuff around the edges, there's always going to be issues, because it's human beings and human beings are human beings, right? So it's never going to be perfect, but I think we did pretty well overall. However, then all of the people activists had nothing to do and all of these nasty types had nothing to do and so they had to create new things to fight about. So that is exactly what they did.

Fiona Kane:

So there's this kind of new version of Marxism that's come through there's just different variations that go through, and this one's based on all the critical theories the critical race theory and gender theory and things like that, and essentially I don't need to go into detail about it. But what it comes down to is it comes down to the oppression Olympics and it comes down to whether or not you're oppressed or whether or not you're an oppressor. And essentially what they've done is they've sort of divided all the lines and just worked out who exactly is oppressed and who exactly is an oppressor. If someone's oppressed, we feel sorry for them, we have empathy for them, we care about them and they can do no wrong and we worship them. If someone is classed as an oppressor, they are evil and bad and terrible, and it doesn't really matter what you do to them, because they're oppressors. So they're terrible, evil and bad. So that's pretty much what has happened in the world as far as this Marxist theory that has majorly infected a whole lot of people in the Western world.

Fiona Kane:

So they get given instructions of who the oppressed are and who the oppressors are, and they go off and march and they just do as they're told. And, of course, these oppressed Olympics. They don't really make sense because none of it makes sense, right? That's the thing. None of it makes sense, which is why, instead of actually engaging a dialogue on the topic, engaging a dialogue on the issue, that all they do is call you names. So if you're someone like Jacinta Nampat-Jemper-Price, who in Australia talked about some things in regards to immigration she's a lovely woman who's not racist. She might have sort of said things slightly not well, but straight away racist, racist, racist she gets called, but she's also half Australian Aboriginal and normally that would put you in the class of being the oppressed, but she's half white. So then she's the oppressor, but also she's the oppressor because she's a conservative. So if you're a conservative, you're automatically bad, you're an oppressor. So that's kind of the way the rules work. It's kind of weird, but anyway, they can't engage on the topic. So what they do is they character assassinate and they and not just character assassinate, assassinate.

Fiona Kane:

Look, I don't know exactly this young man who has been arrested for killing Charlie. I don't know the details. The only bits I've heard is that he sounds like he's been radicalized into this Marxism that I've been talking about from what I hear, even if he hasn't even that's not what this he's about. Obviously he hates Charlie. It's something to do with politics, but regardless, it's just. It's just an evil that this sort of thing is going on in the world and people think that this is the answer to. I don't like what that person says, so I think I should kill them. So what's happening with this oppressor-oppressed Olympics that we have in our world at the moment is?

Fiona Kane:

It's quite weird, because the people who I used to align myself with, the people who I used to agree with, they're all about empathy. They talk about empathy all the time and how. You know people on the right people, conservatives, are not empathetic enough, not empathetic at all, but they're so empathetic and they talk about how people on the right and look and, by the way, the right is anything right of Stalin? Like, honestly, you're far right if you're right of Stalin or Mao. So I mean right just means that you're not completely crazy far left. Now, that's silly. There's a whole bunch of people in the middle, by the way, but they've just been. It's just.

Fiona Kane:

The major voices are these people on the extremes and they have decided that. You decided that if you just dehumanize anyone who's a conservative, say that they have no empathy because they are the purveyors of empathy. They know all about empathy. Apparently, conservatives do not and are evil and bad and don't have empathy. And they show their empathy so well because they are laugh and make fun when someone is murdered and don't care about his wife and children and all the people who loved him and what a difference he made in the world. And this isn't just the only example. The same thing happened on the multiple attempts on the life of the president and many, many other times over. You see it over and over again. Whenever someone who is conservative passes away, for whatever reason, however it happens, they delight in it. So it's kind of interesting because it's like the people who talk about bullying and empathy the most are the least empathetic people I've ever seen and the biggest bullies I have ever seen.

Fiona Kane:

Now, dehumanizing language it's another one that gets talked about a lot on the left, and I used to, you know. I remember Brene Brown talking about this when I used to really enjoy listening to her and reading her things, and she talked all about dehumanizing and how we shouldn't do that, and she's absolutely right we shouldn't, and that's what used to happen back in the day, and that's kind of how something like slavery happens we dehumanize people and we make them our slaves. Now I'm not going to go into a long whole history about slavery, but essentially, it happened all around the world, to all people. I mean. The word slave comes from Slav, so it was actually white people from the Slavic countries who, I think, were the first slaves, and it's hideous and it's terrible and it should have never happened and it shouldn't be happening now it still is. One thing I will say, though, is that Britain were the first people to abolish it.

Fiona Kane:

The UK and the US fought to abolish slavery, but no one gives them any credit for that. It's only all the things they did wrong. No one looks at what they did right, and that's what's happening with these young people, is they're being brought up to believe that everything that happened to do with any Western country is evil and bad and wrong. And while Western countries have done evil, bad and wrong things, they've done a lot of right things as well, and they've tried to fix those things. They've tried to correct those things, and you know there's no perfect country or system.

Fiona Kane:

But why do you think all the people in the world who are fleeing their countries and looking for somewhere better to go to, why do you think they're landing in parts of Europe and the UK and the US and Australia? Why do you think they're coming here? Are they coming here because it's so awful and we've got it so wrong? Or are they coming here because we've got a lot of things right? We've got a lot of things right and we've got some things wrong as well, and we do absolutely need to own our history and we do need to do better.

Fiona Kane:

However, all we do is obsess about how evil and bad we all are, so you bring up whole generations of people. Instead of being proud of their country though you know, I knew people who went and enlisted when they were 16 to go and fight in World War II right, instead of being proud and wanting to go and fight for our freedoms and our country, people are being brought up to be ashamed. They're being taught to be completely ashamed and shameful about who we all are and our history. And why do you think that these young people are so confused and get so angry Because they are brought up with no sense of purpose and then their only sense of purpose is to fight against these horrible oppressors, and so that's what they're doing. So they actually, you know, I haven't heard his reasoning, but I could almost guarantee you that when we hear, if we hear, the so-called reasoning, the so-called justification for assassinating Charlie Kirk, he will think that he's a freedom fighter and he will think that he saved the world from a dictator. That's what he will believe. And why does he believe that? Why would he believe that? Well, he would believe that because that's what he is told.

Fiona Kane:

Because, if you look at the majority of the media and many people on the left I'm not saying all people, but many people, especially politicians, and especially in the US, for the last 10 years, they have consistently been, consistently been consistently calling trump every name under the under the sun, but usually words that are associated with hitler right. So all of the words, you know, fascist and nazi and those sorts of words, and dictator, all of that language. Now, more and more and more, hysterically, day after day after day, these people, including Obama, were talking about dictator and hysterical, you know, hysterical. We'll never have a country back, we'll never be able to vote again. Blah, blah, blah. All of this hysterical language, I don't know. Did anyone see at whose? Whose funeral was it? Was it Jimmy Carter's funeral? Someone, a president who recently passed away? Did you see Obama sitting next to Trump there and having a good old laugh? Did you see that? One minute he's saying he's the devil and he's about to destroy our country? The next minute he's having a laugh with the guy because he doesn't believe what he said. But for the last 10 years, that language has been spread around.

Fiona Kane:

I hear the same thing being said about Charlie how he hated gay people. No, he did not. He was good friends with many gay people. Or how he hated trans people. No, he did not. He just tried to tell them that they were beautiful and their bodies that they were born in and they didn't need to destroy themselves or take medications or have surgeries to be okay. But what we're hearing is that he was hateful and he was this and he was that and all these horrific things about him that are simply not true.

Fiona Kane:

But even if you didn't like Charlie, you didn't like his politics, you didn't agree with him. It's okay to not agree with someone. That is fine and actually he was really open to that. That's why at all of his college tours, the first thing he said was the people who disagree with me come to the front of the line. So he actually let them in first and let them up front, because he didn't want to just talk to people who said, oh, I love you, charlie, I'm a big fan. He wanted to talk to people who disagreed because he wanted to have those conversations, because he wanted to show it's important to have those conversations.

Fiona Kane:

And what he did is he opened up the universities, because for so many years now and this is still happening today I don't know this is happening in Australia and in the UK and in the US, I don't know where else it's happening, but I know students who are not saying what they want to say in their assignments and in their classroom classes at university because if they say anything but the leftist agenda, you know things I've been talking about. If I say anything about that, they get marked down and sometimes they get kicked out of their course. Sometimes they get barred from things, banned from things and all sorts of have to go to tribunals and have to defend themselves and the rest of it right. So many people now are just not being honest and not being open about what they believe or who they are. Now, charlie made it okay for people to be conservative if they wanted to be, but he also made it okay to not and to come up and talk about it and to come up and have conversations.

Fiona Kane:

For our world to succeed, for our freedom, for our free world to succeed the one that what we created in the West that works so well we have to be able to have conversations and that means we have to be able to maybe get the words slightly wrong without being completely cancelled and canned. And oh, you're a this, you're a ist, this sort of you know, you're a transphobe or you're a homophobe, or you're a racist or this or that. Now, if someone's actively really going out of their way to say really nasty things and screeching about different racism, whatever, that's one thing. But if someone's saying, look, we're having problems with immigration, let's talk about it. Let's talk about what works and what doesn't, there's nothing wrong with that. It's important to have the conversation right.

Fiona Kane:

If someone's saying, look, I'm really happy for my friends who are gay, but I'm really worried about the theories behind the queer theory and the theories that are teaching people that they're not okay in their body and they need to change it because they're somehow trans. That's not being phobic or hateful, that's actually just saying I'm really worried about this situation and, hey, let's have a conversation about it. We need to talk about this as a society. But what's happened now with this, uh, with this marxist agenda, this oppressor, oppressed agenda? Because they can't defend those things, because who can defend that right? No one can defend those things. So what they do is they just scream fascist or whatever other language, and that's how they do it and they silence. They silence people, which is exactly what they did to Charlie the other day. They silenced him. Well, I think they've silenced him and they may have, but they haven't.

Fiona Kane:

Because what I do know is that, even though all of the typical nasty people had, hey, you get to know who people are and what's in their souls when you see how they respond to how people have died. You don't have to mourn for someone you don't know or you don't like. You don't really have to care much if you don't know or don't like someone. It's one thing to kind of not care or not be interested. It's a whole other level to delight in it. Delighting in it, it's just revolting, the vileness I'm seeing.

Fiona Kane:

Or I'm seeing some people say, oh look, we shouldn't do violence, we shouldn't do political violence, which of course we shouldn't which I agree with, of course. No matter what side it's on, we shouldn't do political violence. Oh, he was a really nasty, terrible person and he was all these names and blah, blah, blah and his terrible rhetoric and blah, blah, blah, blah, but we shouldn't do political violence. So you basically say we shouldn't do political violence, but he's really nasty and well, you know, and you've got all these young people thinking that it's Hitler again. Right, that we've got to.

Fiona Kane:

All these fascists are out there and we've got to defend our country, and the only people behaving like fascists are the people on the far left who are creating impelled speech. You have to speak this way, you have to say this thing, you have to believe this thing. You're not allowed to have free speech. You're going to get put in prison if you say something mean on X. That's fascism. Right, shutting down speech, killing a man for his speech, that's fascism.

Fiona Kane:

Being open and having open dialogues and encouraging discussion is not fascism. If you're a bit confused about what fascism is. It's not having open dialogues, it's not having, you know, going and speaking to the media every day and telling them what you're doing and why you're doing. That's not fascism. That's not what Hitler was doing. If you're a bit confused about what fascism is, maybe you need to look into that Again.

Fiona Kane:

You don't have to agree with people's politics, but just don't get talked into this ridiculous language, this dehumanizing language that we're using, because this dehumanizing language is getting people killed but it's also destroying our young people, because young people, many young people, now think that words are violence. Silence is violence, but violence is not violence, because if you do violence to the oppressor in the name of the oppressed, then you're a freedom fighter. Yeah, what the actual like? What? I don't want to say those words, so I won't say them. But that is the sort of stuff that people believe now. They believe that hurty words if they hear a word they don't like like.

Fiona Kane:

Speech they don't like is hate speech. No, hate speech is when someone says, yeah, we need to go and kill that. You know those people, or that race, or those people with that sexuality, whatever. Of course that's terrible, but I don't believe in queer theory isn't hate speech. That's just someone saying they don't believe in something. Or I don't understand why children should be mutilated and put on medications, and put on medications that are going to damage them when they find how they are. That's not hate speech, right? So we do need to understand that.

Fiona Kane:

For us to succeed as free societies, we need to be able to have difficult conversations, we need to be able to hear things we don't like hearing, and we need to be able to have difficult conversations. We need to be able to hear things we don't like hearing and we need to be able to be okay with sounding silly. And it shouldn't be a risk that you're going to lose your job or you're going to be destroyed or someone is going to kill you because you have a different opinion or because you said something the slightly wrong way, you didn't mean it that way, but now everyone's going to cut the clip and do all the things to it and send it around and dox you and tell people to come and get you. That shouldn't be in our Western society, where we say we have freedom and we say we're so happy with what we've achieved in that front. We're letting it all go. Uh, douglas murray wrote about this in uh in his books and so, and gad sad has also been talking about it, jordan peterson has also been talking about it. And they're so right that we're just letting all of our freedoms go and, uh, we're joining in this just dehumanizing of each other.

Fiona Kane:

And you know, when I was younger, and even now in my experience, the good thing about people who are classed as conservative and I think I'd put myself in that camp now, people who class themselves as conservative, they argue a lot as well about things, which is a good thing, which is a really good thing Because it means it's not a dictatorship. There's not one person who says this is what we think. We actually say, well, no, actually I see it this way, I see it that way, no, I have this opinion and we discuss it, and that's really really healthy. And when I used to. Well, what I do believe for the most part is people who have a different opinion to me and people who have different politics to me.

Fiona Kane:

Now, at the worst, you might think that they, that's that person's stupid or silly, but you just think that for the most part, they're a good person or a reasonable, you know a a good enough person, a nice enough person with what you think is a bad opinion, right. But the other way around it doesn't work that way at all, because the other way around it is if that person is a conservative, then they're an evil bad person. So they're not just a good person who might be misguided or who you might disagree with or you might think is stupid or whatever, misled, whatever no, evil bad person. And as long as we paint each other that way, it's not going to help. And the problem is, the more these sorts of things happen that was happening to Charlie the more conservative people are going to start painting people on the other side as evil and bad. And I'm seeing more and more of that. And, like I said once, you see the way people have responded to when someone is murdered, you get to see who people really are and what sort of soul they have. And it's actually been. Yeah, it's been interesting to watch and sad to watch and sad to see.

Fiona Kane:

We need to stop dehumanizing each other and know that for the most part, there might be I'm not saying there's no such thing as evil people or people with bad intentions, and there are extremes on both sides of politics. That is absolutely true. However, for the most part, most people are just real people with real concerns and real worries about the world, and maybe they just have different ideas of what they think the solution might be or what they think the answer is, or who they think the answer is or who they believe they should vote for. If we are prepared to talk to each other and learn, like, why do you think that and what makes you think that and why do you believe that? And um, and have you thought about it this way, if we're prepared to do that, we can maybe save this thing, this freedom thing, this western world that we've you know that so many people fought and died for.

Fiona Kane:

But if we just continue to dehumanize each other and to believe that only one side has empathy and only one side is a good person and everyone on the other side is wrong or bad, no matter what side you're on, if you think you're on a side and look, many people aren't even on sides. Most people, to be honest, most people are somewhere in the middle. They're just somewhere in the middle and they just want to have a good life and have a family and our career, or live their life, and you know that's all that most people want. They don't really want to have to get involved in all of these sort of carry on, but you know, here we are, here we are, and I think the truth is that Charlie Kirk will live on through many of us, including me and including all the young people he's inspired, and I think that this will encourage people to speak out more, even though they'll be frightened that political terrorism is terrorism, assassination is terrorism and terrorism is designed to silence people. So I don't think this should silence people and I don't think Charlie would want that. He would want people to speak up and he would want people to amplify his voice and amplify their voice and continue having conversations.

Fiona Kane:

It is so important we need to have open dialogue. If you think about how we have solved anything, whether it have been political, whether it's been a scientific or whatever it is how do you solve it? You solve it by talking about it, because we have to understand, as human beings, part of how we think, part of the ability to think and to think through stuff and to work through stuff, part of how we do that is by talking or writing right. So you write something, you talk something, you say something, you say, okay, I believe this. And then sometimes, as you say it, you hear yourself and you say, oh, that sounds a bit weird. No, what I meant was that. Or someone says to you have you thought about this, this, or I agree with that part of it, but maybe you're a bit wrong there. But you get better ideas, you get, you come up with solutions because you're allowed to get it wrong, you're allowed to stumble a bit, you're allowed to sort of your words aren't absolutely perfect and you might have said a thing that sounded bad but you didn't mean it to be whatever. We need to be allowed to stumble a bit and fall a bit and have difficult conversations and have hard conversations and be awkward. That's far more important that we do that and we get to actually see each other as human beings again, rather than hating on each other.

Fiona Kane:

One thing I would suggest to you if there's someone that you disagree with strongly on something and if there's someone close to you or someone that you want to continue a close relationship with, I would suggest you do this thing and actually, if you check out Peter Boghossian, he does this thing called street epistemology. I think, is how you pronounce it. He shows examples of it on there, but essentially what he does is say you've got two people with differing opinions on I don't know whether it's on well, what are all the big topics, whether it be on you know, abortion, or whether it be on Israel, all the different things, right. So. But what you do is you get someone to say all right, I believe I strongly agree with like, so you have a statement, so the statement can be you know, abortion is good, abortion is bad. Like. So you have a statement, so the statement can be you know, abortion is good, abortion is bad. Like whatever.

Fiona Kane:

Whatever the statement is, you choose your statement and then you say not, oh yes, I agree with that, or I disagree with that, oh, okay, fine. But then what you do is you guess why the other person thinks the way they do and it makes you put your this is, it makes you put your mind like think, try and think how they think. So you sort of think okay, well, I think the reason that you might support Israel, or that you might support Palestinians, or whatever, whatever, whatever, I think the reason you think that is because. And then the person will say to you no, you're wrong, no, you're right, or whatever, or no, it's because of this, right? But essentially, what you're trying to do is, rather than go, oh, you think that that means you're evil and bad or you're stupid or whatever it's like. Okay, you think that you must think it for a reason, because you seem like a genuinely good person. So let's explore why you think that.

Fiona Kane:

Now, the point of it isn't to change each other's minds. You don't have to change each other's minds. It's okay to walk away and still have the same opinion, but it's to understand, oh, okay, my friend who is on the left, or my friend who is on the right, or whatever the thing is, the reason they think that is this, and now I might think they're misguided, but at least I know why they think that. I understand why they think that, and then you at least know that that's a human being with an opinion that you agree or disagree with, right. However, if you don't ask that question or if you don't have that conversation, it's like thinking that they're you know it's hateful stuff, right?

Fiona Kane:

So when we do this, when we have this conversation, and we try and put ourselves into the shoes of why do I think that person thinks that way. It's really really healthy to try and think why does that person think that way? And it also allows you to have a conversation. Because when you know what someone really thinks rather than what you know, oh well, they watch the ABC, so they must be, you know, think this way. Or they watch Fox, so they must think that way. They're just, they've just been you know, they've just been brainwashed or whatever.

Fiona Kane:

And instead of just assuming that straight up, it's actually giving the person the benefit of the doubt that they might be an intelligent person and they're a thoughtful person and they've got reasons for believing the thing. And that helps you learn. And look, sometimes having these conversations it might make you change your mind or might make you soften your stance or might make you more sure of your stance. That's fine as well, but at all. But what it does do is allows you to know that the other person's a human being. And I think that if we want to carry on the good, the good things that you know charlie's, the goodness he brought into the world, let's learn to have conversations to the Socratic method. Let's learn to give people the benefit of the doubt and have conversations about why they think the thing they do and, rather than assuming all sorts of negative things about why they think that, ask them. Have the conversation, be prepared to have difficult conversations and, as much as you might be tempted to, don't name call people, right, you know, and the reason that people name call people now is because they don't have an argument, they don't have a justification for the ridiculous stuff they're talking about. So the next best thing is calling someone a racist or whatever, fascist. So anyway, I think I'll leave it there, because I've gone on for long enough.

Fiona Kane:

Like I said before, I didn't really want to bring politics into my wellness channel. However, I think there's a great unwellness in our world at the moment. I think there is a mind virus that's gone through a lot of people and they're just they've gone right off the deep end and supporting terrorism, violence, supporting political murders and, you know, supporting transing the kids and not letting them grow up and go through puberty, which is the cure in most cases for that, their situation, not protecting children, those sorts of things. I think and and that whole victim olympics thing I was talking about, which I've talked about before as well that now what we do is, we lionize the victims and we shame people who are so-called successful, and that is for those of you who don't know, the oppressor oppressed thing. Essentially, if you're successful as a race or as a religion or as a country or even as a person.

Fiona Kane:

Sometimes, if you're successful, the only reason you could possibly be successful is because you've oppressed somebody and you stole it off them, so you're an oppressor. If you're unsuccessful, the only reason that could possibly be is because someone took it off you and someone oppressed you. So it's very it's kind of like I don't know, it's not even the university. It's such a naive way of looking at things that if anyone who's successful is bad, anyone who's unsuccessful has clearly been oppressed and someone did that to them Very simplistic way of looking at things that maybe you think when you're at school. But this is actually what people adults are sprouting and talking about now, which is ridiculous, and I think that what it does is it forces us to put people in all sorts of categories again and split people up rather than bring people together.

Fiona Kane:

So I don't think it's healthy and I think that it's encouraged a lot of people to really be mentally ill, look for mental illness and stay in their mental illness because you're a good person if you're oppressed. You're a bad person if you're not oppressed. Right, so you need to be oppressed, so you need to really, really relish in your victimhood to be a good person in our society now, according to these new rules. And that's not encouraging healing, that's not encouraging healing for individuals and it's also not encouraging agency for anyone Right now. I've had conversations about this before, I won't go into it you know in detail here. But essentially, if you tell people something bad happened to you, but let's help you and you can work your way through it and out of it and have a successful life, that's you know. That's a great outcome for people.

Fiona Kane:

But we're not doing that. We're saying that you've been oppressed and you deserve damages for that and you should sit around for the rest of your life and complain about how oppressed you are and how mentally ill you are and how terrible things are and just wallow in that and not achieve anything in your life. That doesn't help anybody. So we take away people's agency when we label them as oppressed. You're a part of the oppressed class. You're part of the victimhood class. You can just stay in that forever. That doesn't help people. It doesn't help anyone.

Fiona Kane:

So the oppressor-oppressed political theory is really damaging to people's health and to people's mental health, and it's really damaging to communities because it takes away people's agency. You take away people's agency. They can't go out and do things they want in their life and they're being told well, the reason you can't is because all these evil people are holding you down and you wonder why there's kids committing violence or there's people on trains thinking that this beautiful Ukrainian woman is their enemy and they need to kill her because she's probably the oppressor right? It's just so sick, so sick.

Fiona Kane:

So I'm going to end in just saying RIP Charlie, and I'm thinking of, like, the families of all the people who've been, all of the people who are experiencing violence in the world now, but in particular I'm thinking of Irene's family and Charlie's family and I thought that he was a beautiful man who brought a lot of light to the world and who was enthusiastic and excited about the world and achieved so much in his short years I think he was 31. He achieved so much in that time and I'm glad he lived and I'm glad he achieved what he achieved and I'm glad he's left his mark and I hope that we can turn that into that, gets turned into a beautiful legacy and I believe it will be and so I'm glad for that, I'm grateful for that. But so, so, very sad, so so, very sad, and this feels like another one of those moments in my lifetime where there's a before and after, and that shift happened this week, and let's just work towards the after being something good. Let's use this to teach each other about having important conversations, real conversations about things that matter. That's what I say this podcast is about. Let's learn how to do that. Let's learn how to have these difficult conversations so this political violence and just violence in general doesn't continue. Anyway, I'll leave it at that and please like, subscribe and share.

Fiona Kane:

Look, and I'm happy for you to have a different opinion to me, all I, all I say is that I only engage with people who want to discuss the topic, who want to discuss the topic, who want to discuss the situations, who want to discuss. If you stay on topic, I'm happy to talk to you. But people who want to just abuse and character, assassinate people not interested in having those conversations, that they're not productive, they don't help anyone which is the whole point of this episode was saying that that's not productive. So, please, if you did enjoy this episode or enjoy is probably the wrong word but if you thought it was interesting or thought provoking and you wanted to start a conversation with someone else, you know, please share it with them and let's start a conversation.

Fiona Kane:

I'm not pretending I'm right about everything. I'm just like I said. We just have to have conversations and be prepared to sometimes be wrong and sometimes be right and muddle our way through the human experience and what that means. But we won't do that, we won't be successful at that, unless we're prepared to have conversations and unless we're prepared to look at the other person and believe that they're human too, and know that they're a human too, even if their opinions seem pretty crazy to you. Okay, uh, yeah, like, subscribe, share, comment, all those things. Uh, please, you know, make an effort to share this episode for me. So more people. I just really want people to have conversations. Anyway, I'll leave it at that and I will talk to you again next time. Thank you, bye.

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Fiona Kane

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