“You see how this looks, right?”
That question captures Chris Hansen’s method. He takes a man who believed he was meeting a child for sex and forces him to look at his own conduct from the outside.
We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves. That is how ‘I knew it was wrong’ can coexist with ‘I did it anyway.’
For more than two decades, Hansen’s predator stings — from NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” to later investigations — have offered a grim case study in self-deception. The men know the conduct is wrong. They choose it anyway. Then, when Hansen arrives with the transcripts, they scramble to preserve the belief that they are good men.
In other words, Chris Hansen has given us a case study in sin.
The basic scenario is familiar. An adult begins communicating online with someone he believes is underage. The age is made explicit. The conversation becomes sexual. A meeting is arranged. The man drives to the house.
Then Hansen walks into the room.
“Have a seat. What are you doing here?”
Almost nobody simply says, “I came here because I wanted to have sex with a child.”
Instead, the explanations begin.
“I just came to talk.” “I was lonely.” “I wanted to make sure she was OK.” “I knew this was probably a setup.” Sometimes the man insists he intended to warn the supposed child about the dangers of talking to strangers online.
Then Hansen produces the chat logs.
He reads an explicit message in that grave, almost bureaucratic voice and asks, “What did you mean by that?” Everyone knows what it means. The point is that the words are no longer private. Hansen has dragged the man’s rationalizations into the open and placed them next to the evidence.
Now the story changes. Simple denial will not work, so the explanation becomes biography. He was lonely. He was depressed. He had a hard day. The goal is no longer to deny the conduct but to move the audience’s sympathy toward the man who chose it.
Hansen keeps returning to the same question: Does any of that make it acceptable to send sexual messages to someone who told you she was 13?
The excuses collapse one by one.
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Perhaps he missed the message stating the child’s age. Hansen points to the exchange in which the decoy asked whether the age was a problem and the man said it was not.
Perhaps he never intended to do anything sexual. Hansen reads the acts the man described in his own messages.
Perhaps he changed his mind on the drive over. Then why did he keep driving? Why did he knock on the door? Why did he bring condoms?
If he knew it was wrong, why did he still show up?
At some point, the rational answers run out. What remains is the answer many of the men cannot bear to say plainly: I wanted to do this.
Instead, they reach for the self-image they are desperate to protect. “I’m not a predator.” “I’m a good person.” “I just made one stupid mistake.”
The deception is not merely directed at Hansen. Much of it appears to be directed inward.
They are trying to preserve a portrait of themselves that the evidence no longer supports. Dorian Gray had the decency to keep his portrait hidden in the attic. Hansen puts the chat log on the kitchen table.
This is where Hansen becomes an accidental moral philosopher. He keeps asking a question human beings are remarkably good at avoiding: Why did you do what you did if you knew it was wrong?
The answer is frequently, “I don’t know.”
Philosophers have a name for part of this problem: weakness of the will, or akrasia. A person judges one course of action to be better and chooses another anyway.
Christianity goes farther. Sin is not merely rule-breaking. It disorders desire and corrupts our understanding of ourselves. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful. Paul describes people as suppressing truths they do not want to face.
We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves.
That is how “I knew it was wrong” can coexist with “I did it anyway.” Fallen human beings do not merely fail to do the good they claim to know. They can learn to love what is evil while renaming it good. Milton gives Satan the line: “Evil, be thou my good.”
Some of the strangest Hansen encounters make the point even more sharply: The men recognize him.
They have watched the show. They know what happens. They have seen other men caught in precisely the same way. Yet they somehow never placed themselves in the same category.
Those guys were predators. I’m different.
Hansen sometimes asks whether they have children the same age as the decoy. Many do. What would they think if a grown man sent their child these messages? The moral judgment suddenly becomes easy — until Hansen turns it back on them.
That brings us to the problem with toxic empathy.
Compassion is a virtue. But compassion becomes morally destructive when it rearranges the categories of victim and perpetrator.
A man who drives to a house believing he is about to sexually exploit a child may indeed be lonely. He may have suffered. He may have psychological problems. Those facts can help explain him. They do not make him the victim of the encounter.
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The child he intended to exploit is the victim.
Our culture increasingly prefers therapeutic questions: What happened to him? Why is he hurting? How did society fail him? Those can be legitimate questions. They become toxic when they displace the more basic moral question: What did he choose to do to someone else?
Hansen’s great contribution is remarkably simple. He puts the evidence on the table and asks the person to account for it.
In an interview with me, Hansen said he learned something from Mike Wallace: Sometimes the most powerful question is simply, “Explain.”
That is why the format has a moral force larger than the television sting itself. Explanation is where excuses either become clearer or finally run out.
For more than 20 years, Hansen’s subjects have demonstrated something Christianity has taught for 2,000 years. “The heart is deceitful above all things,” Jeremiah admonishes, “and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
Hansen’s kitchen table is not a confessional. But it is a place where self-deception has a hard time surviving the evidence.
