Every single time headlines break about a brutal homicide, the exact same pantomime plays out in front of our cameras. Neighbors peer through blinds, shaking their heads. Close friends stand before microphones, blinking back tears, offering up the exact same cliché as a shield against reality. They knew the accused. They shared drinks. They worked side by side. And therefore, they offer the ultimate absolution wrapped in a defense mechanism: I didn't think he was capable of this.
Stop buying the lie. Expanding on this topic, you can also read: Why Everyone Is Completely Wrong About China Taking Over Latin America.
The lazy consensus in every true crime tragedy is that monsters look like monsters, that evil wears a neon sign, and that proximity to someone grants you X-ray vision into the darkest corners of their psyche. When Nikitha Godishala’s friend expressed utter disbelief that Arjun Sharma could cross the line into murder, they were not offering an insightful character assessment. They were participating in a collective delusion designed to keep everyone sleeping soundly at night.
We cling to the comforting fiction that serial killers, murderers, and violent offenders walk around with twitchy eyes, sneering lips, and a palpable aura of menace. Criminology and basic human psychology tell us the exact opposite. The people most capable of extreme violence are usually the ones who have mastered the art of blending in. They are the pleasant colleagues, the quiet acquaintances, the reliable neighbors who mow their lawns on Saturdays. Observers at Associated Press have also weighed in on this trend.
The Fallacy of Radical Familiarity
Human beings suffer from a cognitive bias so thick it borders on clinical blindness: proximity bias. We assume that the more time we spend with someone, the better we understand their operational limits. If you have eaten tacos with a guy, shared a workspace cubicle, or traded text messages about weekend football, your brain files that person away under the label of "safe."
This is a rookie mistake.
In forensic psychology, behavioral compartmentalization is standard operating procedure. A person can be completely normal, even charming or mundane, in ninety-nine percent of their interactions while harboring cognitive distortions, violent fantasies, or dangerous volatility in another sealed-off compartment of their life. When a friend says, "I never thought he had it in him," what they are actually admitting is a staggering lack of imagination about the depths of human duplicity.
You do not know what goes on behind closed doors. You do not know what happens when the dopamine hits zero, when a perceived slight festers into an obsession, or when the fragile ego of an ordinary person shatters under pressure. Thinking you can read someone's soul because you hung out at a coffee shop together is like looking at the exterior paint of a burning house and declaring the foundation entirely structurally sound.
Why We Need the Monster Myth
Why do we cling so desperately to the idea that violent offenders are obvious freaks of nature? Because accepting the alternative requires terrifying mental labor.
If monsters look like everyday people, then the guy standing behind you in the grocery store line could be dangerous. If murderers are indistinguishable from honor roll students, decent coworkers, and polite apartment dwellers, then safety is an illusion. We invent the myth of the obvious predator to protect our own comfort. We need to believe that red flags are always visible so we can pretend we would have spotted them in time.
When the Arjun Sharma case hit the public consciousness, the immediate shockwaves were not just about the horror of the crime itself, but about the cognitive dissonance it triggered in everyone connected to the suspect. The shock is proof of our collective naivety. We mistake social pleasantry for moral purity. A polite "good morning" in the hallway is not a character reference; it is social grease.
Deconstructing the Cliché of Surprise
Let us look at how the media and the public process these moments. A crime occurs. Shock registers. Friends are interviewed. They express disbelief. The news cycle moves on. Nothing changes because we treat the perpetrator as an anomalous glitch in an otherwise peaceful matrix rather than a predictable symptom of human volatility.
Imagine a scenario where we stopped treating human behavior as fixed and started treating it as situational. Imagine if, instead of accepting "I never thought he was capable of this" as a valid defense of character, we recognized it for what it is: an admission of willful blindness.
People are entirely capable of compartmentalizing monstrous acts precisely because human beings are remarkably adaptable creatures. Our brains are built to rationalize, to hide, and to compartmentalize. The person who commits a horrific act rarely sees themselves as a villain in their own narrative. They are the aggrieved party, the misunderstood victim, or the rational actor executing a necessary step. They do not look in the mirror and think, "I am a monster." They look in the mirror and think about what they are going to eat for lunch.
The Danger of Trusting Your Gut
We are constantly told to trust our instincts. If someone feels off, run. But instincts fail miserably when applied to calculated deception or compartmentalized pathology. Predators do not set off internal alarms because they look like everyone else. In fact, the most dangerous people often possess above-average social intelligence. They know how to mirror acceptable behavior, how to smile at the right moments, and how to manage impressions so effectively that when the mask finally slips, everyone around them is paralyzed by disbelief.
Relying on your gut to vet humanity is a great way to get blindsided. Real safety comes from abandoning the fantasy that you can look into someone's eyes and declare them harmless. You cannot. You can only evaluate actions, boundaries, and environments.
Stop Looking for Red Flags
The obsession with finding red flags after a tragedy is a retrospective exercise in self-delusion. People scramble backward through text threads and past interactions, trying to connect unrelated dots into a neat little timeline that explains the unexplainable. They find a slightly tense message or a moody Facebook post and declare, "There it is! The warning sign!"
This is garbage logic. Everyone sends moody texts. Everyone has bad days, awkward interactions, and dark thoughts. If normal human friction equaled future homicide, half the population would be behind bars. The terrifying truth is that there often are no neat red flags. There is just ordinary life right up until the exact moment a line is crossed.
We need to ditch the comforting narrative that murderers live on the fringes of society, identifiable by their weirdness or their isolation. They live next door. They sit across from you at meetings. They are charming, polite, and thoroughly integrated into the fabric of normal life.
The next time you hear someone say they never thought their friend was capable of murder, don't nod along with the tragedy of their blindness. Recognize it as the baseline condition of human interaction. We are all walking through a world of strangers wearing masks we cannot see through, hoping for the best while ignoring the reality that anyone, under the right set of conditions, pressures, and internal fractures, can become someone you never imagined.
Take off the blinders. Nobody is safe from the capacity of human ruin, least of all the people you think you know best.
