Julia Shaw

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 that are these other factors.

But the core is in all of us.

I think all of us are capable of doing basically the worst things we can imagine.

And one of the reasons I think that is because you can see neighbors turning on each other, especially if you look historically at the start of wars or big political moments where you have people who would have called each other friends, turning each other into the police, killing each other, doing terrible things.

So I think all it takes is to become convinced that the people you think are your friends are actually your enemies.

Whether that's just in your own world or in a larger political national landscape that I think I don't think it takes all that much for us to be capable of doing terrible things.

But that's also why it's really important when things are good and when you're not at war and when you have the capacity to think deeply about important issues to train your mind on these thoughts.

of knowing that things like loneliness can manifest in these extreme ways, that things like jealousy and aggression, that they can turn into murder, that they can turn into these horrible versions, and to then also spot the red flags if you start going down that path.

I think if we don't rehearse evil, if you will, we are much more likely to engage in it, especially in those moments where we don't have much time or energy to really think about what we're doing.

And it's important to admit that to ourselves.

And research on murder fantasies finds that most men have fantasized about killing someone, about 70% in two studies.

And most women as well, more than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody.

So murder fantasies are incredibly common.

And certainly, according to some researchers...

That's a good thing.

Being able to rehearse and think through doing the most terrible things is it's a great dress rehearsal for also how we don't want to live our lives.

And only if you are able to fully think through what would I actually be like if I was engaging in this?