Julia Shaw: belief

Transcript context

…That’s fascinating. So that’s one important component of serial killers. What else can we say about the psychology? What motivates them? So if you look at some of the famous serial killers, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, are there other things we could say about their psychology that motivates them? So interesting, the tether to reality. Loneliness is a part of the human condition. It is, in fact, one of its side effects is you can get untethered. And then with some of these brains, I guess the untethered goes to some dark place. The untethered goes to a dark place, and it then is often combined with some of these other dark tetrad traits. So you’ve got someone who maybe is high on psychopathy, low on empathy, someone who’s high on sadism, someone who thinks that it’s okay to pursue your own goals. And your own goal can be, like with Jeffrey Dahmer, you can be wanting to create the perfect partner, which in some ways seems to be what he was trying to do by killing people and piecing them together and sewing up a sort of new version. There’s something in that where I can’t help but go, “That’s so sad.” I don’t go, “Oh my God, how awful.” Of course, it’s atrocious. Of course, it’s heinous, but I have this real sympathy for that, and I think that’s important for us to have, though. And not to say, “I can’t relate to this person at all,” but to say, “That is an extreme manifestation of something I have felt, and the difference between me engaging in that and this person engaging in that are these other factors.” But the core is in all of us. Do you think all of us are capable of evil, of some of the things we label as evil?…

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