Editor’s note: This episode comes from Vistopia Moment Episode 14, first released on December 24, 2024. The year saw a disturbing succession of serious crimes: stabbings in supermarkets, vehicles driven into crowds, knife attacks on campuses, and other indiscriminate violence. From a psychological perspective, Professor Wang Fang discusses how we might confront “the distance between us and evil.”

 

05:26 Why does the drama The World Between Us still linger in our minds today?

07:31 Why does the series never tell us why Li Xiaoming committed his crime?

11:57 Does analyzing the causes behind a violent offender risk making excuses for them?

17:36 What does it mean to “other” evil? Could anyone become an evildoer?

22:57 Are men more likely to commit atrocities, and is this connected to toxic masculinity?

28:24 Why do some people attack complete strangers, especially those weaker than themselves? Are they taking revenge on society or demanding recognition?

Does legitimizing hatred toward a group create an even more frightening consequence of violent crime?

32:14 How complex are the psychological causes of serious offenders, and what is a “crisis point” in everyday life?

41:40 Why does trauma make some people kinder but lead others to believe more strongly in the law of the jungle?

43:28 Are mental problems connected with criminal behavior? How should we understand dark personality traits and antisocial personality disorder?

48:20 Do all of us have psychological difficulties to some degree? What disciplinary perspective is missing from clinical diagnosis?

53:15 What can individuals and society still do in psychological crisis intervention and social support?

Can we build our own safety system? Can our personal and social worlds compensate for one another?

1:04:03 Psychology has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Why might that be unsettling?

1:10:16 NPD, PUA, PTSD: does turning psychological concepts into everyday labels intensify conflict? How can ordinary people use psychology more constructively?

1:18:45 Casual conversation: how we relax, thoughts on the Korean reality show The Thought Verification Zone, and more.

 

Finally, in Professor Wang Fang’s words: may light surround you, and may you be that light.

 

Each episode of The World Between Us begins with a social incident that implicates, in the broadest sense, every one of us who might be capable of doing harm. It presents in fine detail the wounds, struggles, and fluctuations of humanity on every side. That makes us realize how complex both so-called evil and the humanity reflected behind it truly are.

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When a murder occurs, we must attend not only to the killing itself but to the harm in every direction. We must therefore return to the question of why it happened, rather than merely demand a swift death sentence. Once it has become a public event, the public also has a right to know.

Knowing is not the same as understanding; understanding is not approval, still less support. The idea that learning a crime’s causes automatically excuses it is illogical. It also underestimates most people’s basic moral judgment and the independence of the judiciary.

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To “other” evil means habitually imagining it as entirely unlike ourselves: extraordinary, rare, and incomprehensible. One consequence is that we may overlook—or fail to recognize—the thoroughly ordinary environmental conditions that repeatedly produce harm.

Othering evil can also reverse direction: once we regard the other as evil and see only what frightens us in them, everything classified as other or unfamiliar becomes evil. The logic forms a loop.

In other words, the more deliberately we distance ourselves from evil, the more unintelligible it becomes. We may then encounter its random eruption in the future wholly unprepared and defenseless.

Conversely, acknowledging that evil is not so distant—that in some sense it may be only a fine line away and within reach—keeps us alert to its potential and better able to anticipate and prevent it.

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Patriarchy’s rules oppress men by insisting that a man must continually climb a ladder of power and status in order to have value. Yet climbing always brings the risk of falling, so status must constantly be defended or pursued.

Competing for fame and gain is one means; accumulating wealth is another; conquering women is another; violence is another.

Violence is not limited to direct attack. Attracting attention through violence can itself feel like a rise in status.

Looking at these offenders’ histories, most have experienced social frustration. The theme of that failure usually involves culturally masculine concerns such as ambition, money, and courtship. Failure signifies lost status and power and a devaluation or negation of the self.

At that point, violence—an act deeply bound to masculinity—can become a way to restore status, recover self-respect, and display supposed manhood.

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At the individual level, victims may indeed have had no grievance with their attacker. But if a victim belongs to an out-group the offender hates—perhaps the group they blame for unfair treatment—the link, however strained, can legitimize attack. “You belong to the school that wronged me, so every one of you took part in my persecution.”

From the offender’s subjective perspective, then, the targets are not entirely innocent strangers.

Perpetrators of mass violence are often not acting on a sudden impulse; they have planned it. They know what they are doing and know that law and morality forbid it, so they must invent reasons to explain or even beautify their crimes. Sometimes others accept those reasons.

The true danger appears when hatred of an out-group already expresses a wider social feeling and some people actually applaud extreme violence committed in its name.

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A rare overseas research project assembled available evidence about mass attackers. It found that 42 percent had experienced childhood trauma—most often physical or sexual abuse, witnessing a parent’s suicide, or severe bullying at school. More than 80 percent reached a “crisis point” in the weeks or months before the incident: suspension or dismissal from work, the collapse of an intimate relationship, social exclusion, or personal financial crisis.

These crises triggered visible behavioral changes: intense anxiety, isolation, and despair. They felt abandoned, humiliated, and marginalized, even developing self-loathing. That self-hatred was eventually externalized as “everyone else’s fault,” growing into grievance and anger, followed by plans for mass killing.

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Most people with serious mental illness are not violent. They are more likely to become victims than perpetrators. One statistic I encountered estimated that a person with schizophrenia has only a one-in-144,000 chance of killing a stranger. Yet whenever such an incident occurs, we hear that the killer must be mad or mentally ill.

Perhaps that claim supplies an explanation for something shocking, illogical, and incomprehensible. But it easily becomes circular reasoning: Why did this person do something so terrible? Because they were mentally ill. How do you know they were mentally ill? Because they did something so terrible.

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One theory says that a person’s social safety system consists of two worlds. The personal world includes partners, family, friends, and close colleagues, who provide emotional connection and vital support. The social world includes companies, workplaces, schools, communities, institutions, public systems, the broader economy, and social stability. It provides income, identity, social protection and order, and an abstract foundation of values such as fairness and justice.

These worlds can compensate for one another. When one system fails, people turn to the other for the security they need.

If trust in both collapses at once, a person may enter a state of extreme cynicism and seek violent revenge that is also an act of self-destruction.

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Mutual aid is the smallest system. We sometimes imagine a “system” as something vast, but two people extending kindness to each other can change the real environment and circumstances in which both live.