The Genetics of Evil: Are People Born Bad? - Dr Kathryn Paige Harden - #1066

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What happened after the publication of your last book?

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (0:04)
Oh, it was a wild time. There was a lot of controversy, there was a lot of pushback.
The conversations that I had with real people, not with other academics, but with just people who wrote me, people who happened to encounter the book in some way, that was fantastic. 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 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 author and their readers, was fantastic. I loved that. And then there was another part of the dialogue, which was me with other academics. And that was really surprising to me. In part because I felt like some people needed to turn me into a villain in order to get their own message out. And I was kind of caught off guard by that whole process. So I wish I could say that I had a thicker skin now, but I don't in many ways. I really do care what people think. I care about getting it right. 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.

**Chris Williamson** (1:34)
Especially if you're doing something that you think is trying to educate people about what is true.

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (1:39)
Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (1:40)
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-

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (1:52)
What she's really saying.

**Chris Williamson** (1:53)
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.

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (2:14)
I think the insults that hurt most 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 in black and white, they're on the text. 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, there's something very alienating and disorienting about feeling like you are talking but people are deliberately not hearing you.

**Chris Williamson** (2:47)
Surely part of that must be a sense that other people could pattern match it as truth though. Because if not, if I call you fat, you're not fat. So, you go, well, it's funny 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. So, obviously, that's not going to land. So, that's what I mean that the lens through which these criticisms at least seem to bite the most are someone somewhere might believe that this could be true.

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (3:14)
This is a version of me, that's true. The author is Sally Rooney, she's a novelist, an Irish novelist, and she talks in one of her books about, there's you, the author, and then there's a version of you that wears your name and has your face, and everyone talks about her, but it's not you, and in some ways she's saying the exact opposite things. And so, you almost feel like there's like a doppelganger of you walking around that is making the exact opposite argument that you are, and I think you're right that it's thinking that other people are going to think that she's me.

**Chris Williamson** (3:46)
Yes, yes.

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (3:47)
It's so disorienting.

**Chris Williamson** (3:48)
This weird shadow page.

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (3:50)
Yeah. It's also, I think there's something about relationships, like I don't know if you've ever been in a relationship where you say something and the other person doesn't hear it at all the way you intended, and then you end up having this fight where you're like, but I didn't say that, but you can't convince the other person that you didn't say that, and you're really just seeing the world and you're hearing words in a totally different way, and it makes you feel really estranged from other people, I think, when that happens. Like, what's going on that I can't get my message across clearly? As a writer, words are so important to me. They're the way that I feel like I make sense of the world and I make change in the world.