Julia Shaw

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 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.

That's right.

And on top of dehumanization, there's also this other thing called deindividuation, 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.

My case for empathy, or evil empathy as I sometimes call it, is 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...

Well, 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.