The Genetics of Evil: Are People Born Bad? - Dr Kathryn Paige Harden

What happened after the publication of your last book?

[laughs] Oh, it was a wild time. I, I... There was a lot of controversy. There was a lot of pushback. Um, the conversations that I had with real people, not with other academics, but with just people who wrote me, people who, you know, happened to encounter the book in some way. That was fantastic.

Mm.

Um, people wrote me and they said, "I've always wondered why I'm so different from my parents or why I'm so different from my siblings, and your work has given me a new way of understanding that." They, um, wrote to me about their decision to have kids or their decision not to have kids, and how thinking about genetics has shaped that. So that part of the conversation, which is the dialogue between an author and their readers, was fantastic. I loved that.

Mm-hmm.

And then there was another part of the dialogue, which was me with other academics, and that was really surprising to me, um, in part because I felt like they n- some people needed to turn me into a villain in order to get their own message out. Um, and I was kind of caught off guard by that whole process, so. Um, I wish I could say that I had a thicker skin now, but I, but I don't in many ways. I, I really do care what people think. I care about getting it right. Um, so it took me a bit to think about how to get myself back out there in terms of the ideas in the wake of that.

Especially if you're doing something that you think is trying to educate people about what is true.

Yes.

I'm trying to emancipate you from ignorance and explain things that make you feel less broken and alone, and then someone comes in and says, "Well, actually, what she's trying to-"

[laughs] What she's really saying-

Dude, don't try and fucking imbue me with your perspective of who you think I am or what you think my work is. And that's where we get indignant. There's that line, right, that the only insults that hurt are the ones that we believe. I don't think that's true. I think the only insults that hurt, or the insults that hurt most, are the ones that we think other people might believe about us.

I think the insults that hurt worst are the ones in which I didn't recognize the person they were insulting. So when you write a book, you have ideas and they're literally, you know, in black and white, they're on the text.

Mm.

You can point and you can say, "Look, I wrote this." And then when someone says, "She said X," when I literally had said the exact opposite of that.

Mm.

There's something very alienating and disorienting about feeling like you are talking, but people are deliberately not hearing you.

Surely part of that must be a sense that other people could pattern match it as truth, though. Because if not... I- if, if I call you fat, you're not fat. So you go, "Well, I..." It's funny, if I, if I, if I say that you're too tanned, you've got too much fake tan on, you go, "I'm not wearing any fake tan."