#90 | The evil within us

"People want to be good - but they can't always be."

Your favorite series at the end of the day or the podcast on the way to work. Thanks to True Crime, even the most serious violent crimes have a high entertainment value for us. True Crime shocks and fascinates us in equal measure. And it raises questions: is there evil in me too? Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Nahlah Saimeh has a frightening answer: although we want to be good people, evil lies dormant in all of us.

"This other person sitting in front of me could also be me."

Saimeh is one of the most renowned forensic psychiatrists in Germany. In her decades of working with offenders, she has learned to look at them with humility - without justifying their actions. Instead, she advocates asking yourself the question: What would have become of me if I had had similarly difficult dispositions and experiences?

"When we are born, we are not a blank slate."

She gets to the bottom of this question with Georgiy Michailov. The two talk about the baggage of predispositions we carry through life and what influence this has on whether people become perpetrators or not. In this SMP LeaderTalk, the pair also talk about male and female violence, the changing nature of crime - and explore the question of why true crime fascinates us so much.

*Video only in German