understand in the same context.
- So, early in the book, you raised the question that I think you highlight is a very
important question: if you could go back in time, would you
kill baby Hitler? This is somehow a defining question. Can you explain?
- Well, it's about whether you think that people are born evil. So the
question of "Would you kill baby Hitler?" is meant to be something that gets
people chatting about whether or not they think that people are born with the traits
that make them capable of extreme harm towards others. Or whether they think
it's socialized, whether it's something that, maybe in how people are
raised, sort of manifests over
time. With Hitler, we know from certainly psychologists who have pored
over his traits over time and looked at who he was over the
course of his life, there's always this question of, "Was he mad or bad?"
And the answer to "Was he mad?" Well, he certainly
had some characteristics that people would associate with, for
example, maybe sadism, with this idea that
he was less high on empathy is probably also showcased
in his work. But in terms of whether he was born that
way, I think the answer usually would be no. And actually, in his early life, he
didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits that later defined the horrors that he
was capable of. So would I go back in time and kill baby Hitler? The answer is
no because I don't think it's a straight line from baby to adult,
and I don't think people are born evil.
- So you think a large part of it is nurture versus nature,
the environment shaping the person to become, to
manifest the evil that they bring out to the world?
- Well, and I'd be careful with using the word evil because I think we shouldn't use it to
describe human beings because it most commonly "others" people. In
fact, I think it makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes
against those we label evil. So for me, that word
is the end of a conversation. It's when we call somebody evil,
we say, "This person is so different from me that I don't even need
to bother trying to understand why they are capable of doing terrible things
because I would never do such things. I am good." And so that
artificial differentiation between good and evil is something that,
certainly with the book, I'm trying to dismantle. And that's why
introducing continuums for different kinds of negative traits is really important,
and introducing this idea that there's nothing fundamental to people
that makes them capable of great harm. We all have the
capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible things. The
question is, why we don't do those things rather than why we do those things
quite often. So I think humanizing and
understanding that we all have these traits is the most important thing in my book,
certainly.
- Yeah, I think a prerequisite of doing
evil, I see this in war a lot, is to dehumanize
the other. In order to be able to murder them on scale, you have to
reformulate the war as a fight between good and evil. And
the interesting thing you see with war is both sides
think that it's a battle of good versus evil. It almost
always is like that, especially at large-scale wars.
- That's right, and on top of dehumanization, there is also this other thing
called de-individuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the
group, and you no longer see yourself as an individual. And so, it's this
fight of us versus them. And so you need both of those things. You need that
sort of collapse of empathy for other people, the people who are on the
other side. And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the
group, and that gives you a sense of
also the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even
when, you know, maybe you're on the wrong side. And that's where, I mean,
getting into sort of who's on the right side of each war is always a more complicated issue.
But certainly calling other people evil and calling the other side evil
and dehumanizing them is crucial to most of these kinds of fights.
- 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 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.