Julia Shaw: preference

Transcript context

…Is there a psychological cost to empathizing with so-called monsters? You referenced Nietzsche in the book, you know, “Gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” If you study, quote unquote, “evil,” or study monsters, you may become that. Is there a danger of that? I don’t think so. I think that’s what people fear. So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use are… some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about, and the issues I write about. But some of them I also like because they are how people think about evil and people who are labeled evil. And I do think with gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back, it’s more of a… You’re trying to find it. And that’s why in some ways that doesn’t work actually, because it isn’t a total blank. It isn’t the abyss. There are in fact things that you can see, even if it’s just superficially, and patterns you can recognize to help you and key decision-makers, especially in legal settings, make better decisions around people like this. So, when they see these patterns, they act a better way. So, I get asked a lot as a criminal psychologist, “Do you carry the cases that you deal with around with you?” Some of the cases involve huge amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes. And I think that as someone who does this work, you can’t be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle. So, you have to look at it and go, “Here’s the different pieces of information. What I am doing is pattern recognition. I’m not here to emotionally invest in each of these victims or potential victims. That’s not my role. There are therapists for that. There are other people who do that work. I am here working with the police. I’m here working with lawyers. I’m here looking at it more objectively to see how this all fits together.” And so I think that’s how I engage with it. I see it as this puzzle that I’m trying to figure out. I worry for my own brain that when I confront people and see them as a puzzle, which I do, I see the beauty in the puzzle. All the puzzles look beautiful to me. I’m sometimes like a Prince Myshkin character from The Idiot by Dostoevsky, where you just see… It’s not the good in people, but the beauty in the puzzle. And I think you can lose your footing on the moral landscape if you see the beauty in everything a bit too much. Because everyone is interesting. Everyone is complicated. It’s the classic scientist response as well to what other people in society go, “Ooh.” They go, you know, “This is horrible,” or, “This atrocious thing has happened,” or, “This shocking, existential crisis-inducing thing I’ve just found is, you know, giving me an existential crisis.” And scientists instead go, “Oh, wow!” And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well. cking, existential crisis-inducing thing I’ve just found is, you know, giving me an existential crisis.” And scientists instead go, “Oh, wow!” And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well. And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights. And it just feels like this little light bulb has gone off and you go, “Oh, I understand a tiny bit more about the human experience or about the world around us.” And I think it must be similar. I don’t know that I feel or worry that I sort of become more, quote unquote, “evil.” I think it’s more that you add this nuance, which I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people. So, there’s that. So, when you speak with others, sometimes… Like, even when I say, “We shouldn’t use the word evil,” people go, “No, but you have to. Does that mean you’re trivializing things?” And the answer is, no, I’m not trivializing. I’m just trying to understand. Also, sympathizing or being empathetic towards people whom others have written off is always going to get that response from some people. And, I mean, there are real questions around whom we’re platforming and what that has and what role we have as content creators, both of us, of the people we talk about, how we cover them. I often come across this in true crime work that I do, because I get asked to do TV shows. I host TV shows, and I host BBC podcasts. And there’s always the question of sometimes people commit murder to become famous. And should it be a blanket ban that we don’t cover those cases, or should we cover those cases but in a different way, or should we anonymize them? So, it doesn’t mean that you should never cover that case. It just means that you need to think about it. Speaking of which, you’ve done a lot of really great stuff, podcast shows. One of them is Bad People Podcast. You co-host it. It has over 100 episodes, each covering a crime. What’s maybe the most disturbing crime you’ve covered? One of the most disturbing crimes that we covered on Bad People, and just to be clear, Bad People, much like the title Evil, is sort of tongue in cheek, where the idea is it’s people whom we refer to as bad people. And then it’s always a question of, like, who are these, quote unquote, “bad people,” and are we all capable of doing these terrible things? But one of the most, certainly, problematic, dark cases that we covered was the Robert Pickton case.…

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