We all hear about people with extreme, loathsome, indefensible opinions on the news, and some who have committed outrageous acts of evil.
There are people who insist on believing (or pretending to believe so they can hang with the Cool Kids) that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was faked, and some have gone as far as to threaten the lives of the parents of the murdered children.
In the Gamergate scandal, an unfortunately large number of gamers waged a campaign of terror against female game developers and critics, posting their home addresses online and even calling for their rape and murder, for the crime of being female in a male-dominated industry. I’m a gamer myself, and as such I know many gamers both online and in real life, but I know NONE who participated or even approved of such behavior.
Those are just a couple of examples out of countless. My question is: Who ARE these people? To me, they are “Other,” like a disaster in another part of the world that has no reality in your own life. But they obviously exist, and someone must know them – they must have friends and family.
Am I unique in not knowing anyone that blatantly evil? Who is the most evil person you know?
Please, let’s not include those with differing political opinions and think we’re oh-so-clever. I would even disinclude anti-vaxxers; despite their mind-blowing ignorance, they’re not intentionally trying to harm their children.
I’m looking for over-the-top evil here. It can be your uncle the child molester, your neighbor the wife beater, or anyone else who has done something heinous (or at least has sincerely held horrifying beliefs).
I once briefly did a work for accommodation stay (while backpacking round Australia) with someone who sincerely claimed that everything that happened to you was because you, consciously or subconsciously, asked for it.
My grandpa got Alzheimer’s because he secretly wanted it (and yes, that was an example I asked her). Newborn babies die because their parents secretly ‘want the attention’ (her words).
In daily life she was just ordinary- tending heavily to selfishness and thoughtless in interactions- but her philosophy was just straight up evil. No-one needed sympathy, empathy or any kind of assistance, ever, because they’d intentionally caused their own problems. Disaster survivors? They needed to sort out whatever in their own mind brought horror upon themselves, rather than selfishly ask for help from people sensible enough not to wish for such things.
My good, lifelong friend’s Step-mom was pure evil. I don’t like to categorize people like that. But she did truly atrocious thing to my friend. Such as, getting her fired from a afterschool job, messing up her forms for college financing. The worst, turning her Father against her. She tried to turn me against her when I was but a teenager. She was horrible.
I once had a boss who strongarmed me out of taking a month of paternity leave when my twins were born. It was in his purview to grant it but he chose to make me look like a slacker. It’s not like the company was austere… the very next year they instituted a policy of monthlong paternity. He was just your typical sociopath MBA.
I think we actually need sociopath MBA’s in business, but by God somebody needs to keep a close watch on them, and they should never be people managers.
I knew Mark Twitchell. I worked on one of his films before he went on into murder. I didn’t like him even then, but just thought he was a douchebag. I had no idea what was to come. I get chills when I think about times I was alone with him.
I didn’t know this guy thank god but I knew people whose lives he affected and he was pointed out to me at a gig. This was thirty years ago and he had escaped conviction (or even charges) in two murder cases. I believe he was guilty on the basis of what I was told at the time by friends who knew the people involved One was an arson, in which people died and the other murder of his girlfriend who was found in a river with her hands bound, six weeks after she had gone missing. In the latter case as the last person to have seen her, he claimed to have “dropped her off” near her parents house. I keep hoping to hear that modern forensics have turned up new evidence that leads to a conviction.
My office suffered through three years of having a sociopath boss. Nitpicky to the point of obsession, control freak, manipulator, just a horrible person. She would spy on her other workgroup using the building’s security cameras. She would harrass our customers, complaining about the tiniest infraction of the house rules. We would often be instructed to “dog” customers to make sure of compliance. (This is at a data center where customers are paying us a LOT of money for hosting…and IT people are notorious for having a lax attitude about following mundane rules)
Oh, but she was so so nice to her management peers, always a team player and ready to volunteer for any new project–especially ones where new policies needed to be implemented.
We had a conference call with her superior after an incident and she blatantly lied to him during the call. I spoke up and said “How can you say that?”, not wanting to say “you’re a liar” because I wanted to keep my job. She brushed off my comment, saying she didn’t remember it the way I did. Her boss let her off the hook; that’s when we found out they were long-time friends…so there was no help there. So we all just sort of hunkered down for the duration.
She retired a year and a half ago. No one bothered to even pass around a “congrats on your retirement” card.
I think what you’re partly missing is that people with such views are generally at least self-aware enough not to broadcast them.
So you have to put them in an environment where they feel there’s a sympathetic ear. The internet makes this easier.
That said, I can relate to the OP in some ways.
I live in China right now. And basically every fellow expat I meet here is open-minded, tolerant and does not generalize about people – you kind of have to be that kind of person to decide to go live in a country like China, and seeing a different culture makes you realize how arbitrary the rules of your own are.
However, there are a few events I go to, public debates, where there is often a contingent of white supremecist, misogynistic and generally rude guys, and I just can’t fathom where they emerge from. Where do they work, what do they do all day, why did they come here?
I don’t know if this is evil but it certainly indicates some lack of self awareness on the part of the person involved.
I socialize with this couple, and the woman is very glamorous and has plenty of money, but yet every time I see her she’s bragging about some thing or other that she did that screwed somebody over, only she doesn’t see it that way. Like: she and her roommate needed to clean up their place to get their deposit back so they bought a vacuum cleaner from Target, used it, then took it back to Target and got their money back. Always something like that.
So in this case she spent dinner regaling us with how she’d lost one of her diamond earrings, and damn it all wouldn’t you know, she had just dropped the insurance for that pair after having paid the insurance company for years and years. But she still had insurance on some other jewelry, so she filed a claim for some other jewelry, which she had not lost, in order to get the $$ to replace her lost diamond stud.
Later that evening as luck would have it we played this game called (I think) Scruples, and of all things, she got the card that said something like, “Likely to defraud an insurance company.” [In this game somebody gets a card and then everybody votes on whether the person would do that thing, something like that, I don’t remembr all that well.]
Well of course we all voted that she was in fact extremely likely to defraud an insurance company. And she was outraged. How could we think that of her? She was the most honest person. She was not defrauding them. She was getting her money back. What did we think she was, anyway? Even her husband voted that way! If that’s what we thought of her, she was leaving. (With her husband. I’ll bet they had an interesting evening after they left.)
Now I personally am not sure that I consider getting back at an insurance company pure evil. But I think if you do that you ought to be at least self-aware enough to realize you are in fact commiting fraud, defend it how you will.
I’ve told the story here about the boss I had who was in a near-fatal car crash and had the newspaper and a TV station do big, sappy stories about the accident and her recovery - and the reporters’ e-mail boxes crashed because of the volume of responses they got about what kind of person she really was.
The timelines are not the same, so I know this is not the same person, but this describes her to a T.
I went to high school with a guy who, even almost 40 years later, I would not be surprised to fire up my computer or turn on CNN, and find out that he’s been arrested for a white-collar crime, and in the meantime someone found out who did this to all the missing prostitutes. My younger sister became friendly with his sister, and I told our parents to never let her go over there, even if they knew he wasn’t there. They’d already heard that, more than once.
Well, he’s dead now. But my mother’s stepfather repeatedly molested – and more, I think – the three daughters of the family. I’ve not heard every detail nor do I ever wish to, but he clearly takes the cake do “most evil”. Disgustingly, I spent much of my childhood thinking of him essentially as a grandad, totally unaware of what had happened decades prior.
At this point I’m not sure I know anyone I’d really call evil. Hm. A few years ago I was being pulled from a contract by my employer and another contractor from a different employer completely turned on me for my few remaining weeks, repeatedly belittling me and my work in meetings. But she was an alcoholic in very tentative “recovery”, so I’m hesitant to say she’s evil to her core or anything.
Thats actually kind of a new age philosophy. I find it odious, but a lot of people tend to believe it because it is easier than accepting that life can be random and cruel.
My mother should have been committed to care long before I came along but privilege protected her and she was allowed to roam free destroying lives wherever she turned. I have no doubt she was terribly abused as a kid.
She hated everyone who was not of the same social strata she had been raised in. That is roughly 99.999% of the world. She was just nothing but cruel bile, a true waste of skin.
In the end she bought a humane death, I wish she had been forced to let the cancer eat her from the insides out like standard folks but in the end she got one thing right, money lets you escape near all consequences, even from smoking.
My father. I’ve posted extensively on the physical, emotional and sexual abuse he committed, so I won’t here.
I new a guy who would use anyone for anything. When I first moved to Tokyo, he was one of the few other foreigners I knew, so we were friends until I figured out what a scumbag he was. He set up businesses and simply defrauded partners. He’s meet naive women and pretend to love them until he got bored and moved on. Not the same catagory as a killer or child rapist, but evil enough.
