Julia Shaw: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, you promote empathy as an important thing to do when we’re trying to understand each other, and then a lot of people are, are uncomfortable with empathy when it comes to folks that we traditionally label as evil. Hitler’s an example. To have empathy means that you’re somehow dirtying yourself by the evil. What’s your case for empathy, even when we’re talking about some of the darker humans in human history? My case for empathy, or “evil empathy” as I sometimes call it — so empathy for people who we often call evil… Also, the title of my book is “Evil,” or in the UK market, it’s “Making Evil,” which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote, which is, “Thinking evil is making evil.” The idea being that evil is a label we place onto others. There’s nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil. And so I also think that we need to dismantle that and empathize with people we call evil, because if we’re saying that this is the worst kind of act or worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be, so if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others… I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials, and so in those contexts, that word “evil” is used all the time. So, “This person is evil.” And if we’re doing that, then we need to go, “Okay, but what we actually want is…” We don’t really just want to label people. We want to stop that behavior from happening, and the only way we’re going to do that is if we understand what led that person to come to that situation and to engage in that behavior. And so that’s why evil empathy, I think, is crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer. And the only way we can do that is to understand the psychological and social levers that led them to engage in this behavior in the first place. On a small tangent, I get to interview a bunch of folks that a large number of people consider evil. So, how would you give advice about how to conduct such interviews when you’re sitting in front of a world leader that some millions of people consider evil? Or if you’re sitting in front of people that are actual, like convicted criminals, what’s the way to conduct that interview? Because to me, I want to understand that human being. They also have their own narrative about why they’re good and why they’re misunderstood, and they have a story in which they’re not evil, and they’re going to try to tell that story. And some of them are exceptionally good at telling that story. So, if it’s for public consumption, how would you do that interview?…

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