Here is the full transcript of author Julia Shaw’s talk titled “Time To Rethink Evil” at TEDxOxford 2018 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
What is the Worst Thing You Have Ever Done?
What is the worst thing that you have ever done, something that you’re probably ashamed of? Now imagine that everybody knew about it – your friends, your parents, your colleagues. We hate the world to judge us. We would hate for the world to judge us based on the worst things that we’ve ever done, yet we judge others in exactly this way every day.
For our own behaviors, we see the context, the complexity, we see the difficulties. But for other people, we just see the outcomes of their behaviors. And that leads us to label people, with all their complexity, with one single, heinous term: murderer, thief, liar, pedophile, monster, evil. It’s urgently time for empathy. It’s time for us to give humanity and understanding back to a population that we too often deprive of both. So first, do you think that you are evil?
Now, when I ask people this question, of course, everybody says, “Well, no. I’m a good person.” Because guess what? We all seem to think that evil is something that other people are.
Jeffrey Dahmer
People like Jeffrey Dahmer, people who abduct rape, murder, dismember other individuals. Jeffrey Dahmer was a notorious serial killer, and it’s easy to see someone like this and say, “I would never be capable of those kinds of things” – until we are. Because some of us do.
Now, the question here is, “Why do we forget the underlying humanity?” When it’s our turn to be the monsters, again, we see the nuance. We have an explanation. But for others, we don’t see the same things.
With Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, he kept pieces of his victims. Now, this sounds like an atrocious thing to do, and it’s not an excuse. But as a partial explanation, when asked, “Why did you keep body parts from your victims?” he said, “I was so lonely. I didn’t want them to leave.”
Abu Ghraib Torture
Now, when we think of evil, we also think of torture, and we think of situations like Abu Ghraib, where human rights violations happened in a confined military space and people were found taking pictures and posing gleefully next to individuals who they were torturing, who they were sodomizing, who they were murdering. Now, when this came to light, the public said, “No, it’s not a systemic problem; it’s a few bad apples.”
It’s really easy to do this, to say, “No, it’s not a system of oppression. It’s not a system that dehumanizes the people we come in contact with. It’s not problems with levels and ranks. No, it’s that person; it’s that sadist.”
But when we look a bit deeper, we find that there are structures and systems in place that make it significantly more likely for us to commit heinous acts in certain situations. And then, of course, there are stereotypical versions of evil. We think of evil scientists. We think of a murderer who’s laughing while he’s killing his victim. We think of evil clowns.
Oversimplifying Human Atrocity
Now, these caricatures have to die because what happens when we oversimplify a complex issue like human atrocity in this particular way, it makes it seem as though it’s something that we can spot, and it’s something that is so different from us that we shouldn’t even try to understand it. But evil and the things that we call evil might actually be something that we’re all capable of. And the line between us and people like Jeffrey Dahmer might not be as distinct as we’d like to think.
In fact, many of the things that we associate with evil actually happen with surprising frequency. Some of these things happen every day. For example, in a study on murder fantasies, it was found that most people have at some point wanted to kill somebody.
In one study, 73% of men admitted to having murder fantasies, and 66% of women. Now, that’s most of the people in this room. And the people you probably want to kill or have at some point wanted to kill are your parents, are your lovers, and are – a very popular target – potentially your boss.
Now, this in and of itself does not, of course, mean that someone is going to actually go through with the fantasy. It can remain a fantasy. But given different circumstances, given maybe enough push, enough adversity, that fantasy might turn into reality quicker than we think.
Aggression in Relationships
What about the people who we love? When we think of psychopaths or serial killers, we say, “No, well, how could that person have possibly killed or been aggressive to someone they love? But in a study of long-term relationships, it was found that 35% of people within these long-term couples said that in the last month, they had acted aggressively towards possibly the person they love most in the world.
Aggression isn’t limited to serial killers, aggression is something that’s actually quite a normal part of the human experience. Another thing that we associate with serial killing, that we associate with the word evil, is a propensity for, well, sexual deviance. Now, we might have the stereotypical picture of someone sadistically tying someone up and having gratification, sexually or otherwise, from the situations, but once again, research shows us that, actually, when we look at how many people enjoy bondage, enjoy either dominating or being dominated in bed, we get to about half of the population.
In one study, 46.8% of individuals had not just said that they’d fantasized about BDSM activities, they said that they’d engaged in them. So if you look at your neighbor, Who knows what they’re doing at home? But it does lead us to rethink what it actually means when we’re trying to differentiate and find those particular factors that identify someone who is a wrongdoer, who is an evil monster.
And maybe those fall apart when we start to look deeper.
Maybe even some of those things that we label as characteristic of evil individuals are actually quite mainstream rather than being as deviant as we sometimes think they are.
Everyday Evil
Here’s another example of everyday evil. We – most of us – eat meat. Now, if we were to walk by an animal on the street that’s being tortured and murdered by an individual, we would be appalled.
Now, 70 billion animals are currently living in factory farms, experiencing, as far as we know, essentially that: being tortured and murdered and ending up on our plates. Yet knowing that doesn’t necessarily stop us from contributing to that kind of gross violence. Because guess what?
Not just are humans, well, pretty bad at having insight into the harm that they themselves might be causing, but we’re also really good at hypocrisy.
Money
Finally, if we talk about money, money changes our relationship with morality. When you look at research on even just introducing cash into a situation, we see that people act differently. But there’s also some things that we consider taboos, things that we would never trade for money.
For example, if I said, “How much would it cost to buy your kidney?” You’d say, “My kidney’s not for sale.” If I asked, “How much would it cost to sleep with you, to have sex with you?” You’d say, “My body is not for sale.”
But your body is for sale. If you go to work, if someone pays you for your time, for your health, and potentially for your body, that’s exactly the exchange that’s happening, except we often don’t see it as such.
So what I’m trying to say is that probably we’re all heathens in some ways. We just don’t think about ourselves that way, conveniently. And so the big question here as a criminal psychologist, as someone who has studied “why people do bad things, make bad decisions” for more than a decade, I have a few favorite theories as to why we act in these ways.
The Testosterone Assumption
And one of the theories I don’t like is the testosterone assumption. If someone comes up and tells you, “You know why this person committed this atrocity? It’s because of their high testosterone.”
Please tell them to go away. Because the link between testosterone and aggression has long been overstated. Last year, there was a review article which showed that, actually, the correlation is quite weak and we might even have it backwards.
Actually, it might be that increased aggression leads to increased testosterone rather than increased testosterone leading to increased aggression. And on top of that, it stereotypes men as aggressors, which I think is really a damaging thing to do. So let’s talk about the theories I actually like.
Bad Brains
First: I like the brain. Bad brains can lead to bad decisions. Now, one of these brains is the brain of a psychopath, and the other brain is one of normal control.
Now, what we see is that the psychopath is missing activity both in the part of the brain that is responsible for good decision-making and in the part of the brain that’s responsible for empathy. Now, this means that it’s much easier to hurt somebody and to make bad decisions because if you don’t feel the same things that the person you’re aggressing against feels, it’s easier to aggress. But of course it’s not a sufficient explanation.
It just makes it more likely, it makes it easier to do harm to others. So a second theory, a second factor that we need to consider is personality.
Personality
Now, people like to talk about psychopaths, but there are other types of personality characteristics that we know are associated with increased levels of behaviors we might label evil, including narcissism, including sadism, and including Machiavellianism. And together, actually, these also exist on what’s called a subclinical scale; that means that you might not have a diagnosis of a full-fledged, for example, psychopath, but you might meet some of the criteria. And if you meet some of the criteria for all four of these, then you are significantly more likely to harm other individuals.
I mean, this is also where we can think of like corporate criminals, people who might do OK in normal society but who are really kind of assholes. I call these the asshole chromosomes. Anyways, the “Dark Tetrad,” again, in and of itself isn’t sufficient to explain bad behavior, because it also doesn’t absolve people of basic responsibility, and just because you’re worse at making decisions or you’re more likely to make bad ones, doesn’t mean you have to do them necessarily.
Bad Culture
So three, another thing that strongly facilitates bad behavior. Bad culture can also lay the groundwork for bad behavior. Right now, there’s a lot of talk about sexual harassment.
I don’t think it’s surprising that in a society that treats women as inferior to men, in a society that teaches boys that women are seductive temptresses, that they’re not particularly good at science, that they’re not particularly good at math, that men, understandably perhaps, treat women differently. We as a society have laid the groundwork for certain values and beliefs, and when someone acts in ways that are in line with the values that we’ve taught them, we shouldn’t be surprised. Again, it doesn’t justify, but it helps to explain.
And we see things like rape, intimate-partner violence, we see sexual harassment disproportionately perpetrated against women by men. And this is a systemic problem. Right now, there’s a culture of pointing at the few bad apples, saying, “That’s the reason that there is sexual harassment in this industry.”
But what that is doing is trying to externalize the problem. It’s trying to say, “It’s not me, it’s not us, it’s that person.” But it is us. And we’re all part of the culture that facilitates bad behavior.
Bad Supervision or Lack of Rules
Four: Bad supervision or a lack of rules and regulations can also contribute to bad decision-making. A theory called “routine activity theory,” or “RAT,” suggests that if you put suitable victims in a place with motivated offenders without appropriate guardians, like regulators, like police, they are significantly more likely to commit crime. Now, one of the things that we’re seeing right now is that online rates of crime are astronomical.
And part of the rationale for that is that the cyber-RAT, that online, when we have so many potential victims and so many potential perpetrators in the same space without regulation, we get into trouble. So again there, we can take it upon ourselves to help and regulate and bring in ethical frameworks that can help structure our interactions online.
Dehumanization
But my favorite theory, my favorite theory of all that I think really helps explain the worst kinds of atrocities, that helps explain the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world, that helps explain why people in military situations can do awful things, why humans are capable, good, normal humans are capable of genocide is dehumanizing people. Because when we stop seeing people as human beings, it makes us capable of the worst kinds of atrocity.
And one of the ways that we do that is by calling people evil. When we call us someone evil, we’re trying to communicate to someone that, “This person, I don’t even want to try and understand. This person is so different from me that I’m not even going to consider them a human being; I’m going to use words like ‘monster’ instead.”
And the problem is – as Nietzsche has said in his critique of the concept of evil, especially of the dichotomous concept of good versus evil rather than in more nuanced understanding, suggesting that we’re all a mix of things that some people consider good and others consider evil – is that when you start fighting with monsters, you have to be careful that you don’t become the monster.
Rethinking Evil
And so what I need you to go out and do now is next time somebody mentions the word “evil,” ask them what they actually mean by that term. Because using the word evil is lazy. It’s unnuanced and it’s uninformed.
And you can speak up against this. I would challenge you to think the unthinkable, to speak about that which others deem unspeakable. Bring up taboo topics at home.
Try to delve and start discourse about these incredibly important issues. Because then we can start to explain that which some deem unexplainable, and hopefully, we can begin to prevent that which others have deemed unpreventable. Because it’s time for all of us to embrace our evil empathy. It’s time to rethink evil.