I ran into a curious individual.

He was bullying me because I was in his way (I did not move, the goal did). As soon as I was not in his way he would try to recruit me into bullying the next person who was.

I’d say he was a manipulative psycopath but he was so inept at what he was trying to do and calling him a psycopath would be an insult to psycopaths. He kept falling into the holes he dug for others.

It’s the only person I’ve felt joy when they suffered.

Side note: what do you call a person who is manipulative, no remorse, see people as something to step on to get where they want but are incredibly bad and keep getting caught, fired, dumped because of it? Psycopaths seems to be good at what they do, he was in his 30s and bad at it.

I guess I could tell a story about the worst person I ever met. I don’t know exactly what criteria elevate someone to the level of “evil” versus just being an awful, horrid person, so I’ll let readers make that judgement.

It was 2010. I was 20 years old and needed a job. Through family networking, I was able to land a brief stint working with a distant cousin of mine who I’d never met before. Let’s call him “James”. I’m scheduled to work with him for about a week, traveling out of state to a small town in Virginia to do some maintenance on pools and such. Seems like a simple enough gig.

He pulls up to my house in his pickup truck to pick me up. Keep in mind I’ve never met this guy before in my life. We’re not 10 minutes down the road when he starts dropping every racial slur you can think of talking about Obama and minorities and such. Guy was like a thesaurus of epithets.

Fast forward 5 or 6 hours that we’ve been driving. During this brief window of time I have heard this guy scream at his girlfriend over the phone about how she “better not be at the bar” or “hanging out with her friends”. He has road raged at every inconsequential inconvenience, making multiple reckless, dangerous maneuvers to save virtually zero transit time. He has pinned every misfortune in his life on black people, immigrants, gays. Anyone but himself.

After this harrowing trip, we’re finally at our destination and we can get to work. To say this guy was an abusive boss would not do it justice. His preferred method of communication was yelling. He’d light up a joint and smoke it very brazenly when there were children not particularly far away from us (one of the pools we worked on was at a community center where lots of kids would play). I don’t have any problem with weed, but c’mon.

Each day when we were done with work, we’d pick out some place to eat. During this week-long stay in this small town, I witnessed multiple random acts of kindness by strangers. James had nothing but angry, hateful things to say about every single one. I saw a guy let some veterans cut in front of him in line at a Bojangles. “What a kiss-ass,” James says. One day at a KFC, an elderly woman gives me and James a big bucket of chicken and biscuits because they got her order wrong and told her to keep it. “Old bitch,” says James after she walks away.

Every night after dinner he’d be at the bar getting hammered. Picking fights with other patrons and generally being a miserable pile of shit. One evening James gets up from the bar to go take a piss. A big biker guy James has been fucking with comes up to me and says, “Your friend’s got a big mouth.”

“Not my friend,” I reply. “He’s my boss, unfortunately. But if you and your biker buddies wanna drag him out back and beat the piss out of him, you ain’t gonna hear me complain.” Biker guy gives a big laugh and pats me on the back in an understanding way.

On the last day of the job, we’ve begun the drive back home. He sees a hotel with a pool that we’re about to pass and unilaterally decides we’re gonna try to fleece some hotel owner by doing some “maintenance” on the pool. He convinces this old man that the pool needs inspecting and the guy agrees to purchase our services. James fucks around for an hour doing virtually nothing to this pool and then charges the guy several hundred dollars. Brow beating and bullying him the entire time.

And to wrap it all up, he didn’t pay me what we’d negotiated. Unfortunately I wasn’t good at advocating for myself at this time in my life, so I just put up with it.

The silver lining to all this is I haven’t seen or heard from him since then. He drove away and has never darkened my doorway in the 15 years since that dismal week. Good riddance.

My older brother used to run around with a young man that was raised by racist bikers. The guy killed someone during a house robbery. And still I’m not sure that that person was irredeemably evil.

But I’ve also done time in prison. And was celled up with an old man that hurt a little girl. No acknowledgement, no remorse. Smiling, outgoing. But at the time I had no idea what he had done. And I had no idea that he was a sociopath until he opened up to me about cutting crow’s tongues when he was young, because he had seen a talking crow at a circus. No empathy. As ‘nice’ as he seemed.

Looking back, he had that same look in his eyes that you can see in cult leaders and other sociopaths. When I watched the Nixium documentary with my partner, it was like that. A charismatic predator.

I knew a guy in grad school who was a hard-core Trumper back in 2015/16 who thought I was too because we both owned guns and were white I guess.

Anyway - I was talking to him one day about an epidemiological analysis I was leading a team on for HHS. I’m a geographer, and our group was analyzing the demographic, spatial, socioeconomic, and temporal distribution of cases of gonorrhea in a major metropolitan area.

I explain that we’re doing multivariate analysis on the demographic stuff because of all the issues caused by covariance showing “fake” correlation between gonorrhea and other variables. I explained that while the strongest indicator of gonorrhea in univariate analysis was whether or not you were black, that was actually an artifact from the fact that being black had a strong covariance with other variables like low income status, low employment rate, low education level, high population density, poor access to preventative healthcare, etc, and that when you took all the covariance into account there was no actual statistically significant correlation between gonorrhea and being black.

He then said something that was etched into my memory:

“It’s just you and me here, [chilie]. You don’t have to be all PC about thisbshit with me. We both know that just like how there’s stupid breeds of dogs, there are stupid breeds of people, and it’s a fucking disgrace that you can’t study that honestly here.”

That racist motherfucker has a Master’s degree.

I’ve met people who managed to announce they were shitty in the first few minutes of our encounter. I’ve also gotten to know certian really shitty people pretty well.

There’s always a story they tell themselves that makes it okay, though, and it’s always driven by some kind of weakness they have, even if it’s rank narcissism. Evil implies a level of self-awareness that’s never been there.

I can’t say they don’t exist, but they’re damn rare and I’ve never crossed paths with them. Even Nazis have been known to self-improve over time.

I knew a kid when I was growing up that was evil. He would talk people into doing things that were not okay, and then he would immediately turn on them and get an authority figure to get them into trouble, all while laughing and then retelling the story to anybody who would listen. He repeated this pattern throughout the entire time I knew him (many years), only escalating the entire time.

I’m guessing he’s probably caused a death or two in his life by now, either directly or indirectly.

My grandmother used to bait a have a hart trap to catch local cats. She would let them finish whatever morsel she tempted them with, asked if they enjoyed their last meal, and would throw the trap in the pond. She would then call my cousin to come drag the trap out of the pond and bury the cat.

Is that evil?

I’m not sure about pure evil so much as sociopathic. I worked briefly in door to door sales, got taken to some high performer award celebration nonsense and was standing in one of those group circles as people were recounting war stories. “Give her the discount? Hell no. And then I realized she was too old to read what I was writing so I just added an extra year on to the contract!” Huge round of laughter, light applause.

To make it more gross… The discount was standard, we got no extra commission for having or not having it, was purely a free promotion to grease the wheels. He just didn’t because, well, the old lady he’d scammed was too trusting.

I quit shortly after.

My parent told me of a family they knew who lived on a farm in their village. All of them were outright monsters. There were only brothers in that family. No daughters. They had barn cats and when they had kittens, they’d crush their skulls in their hands for fun. They loved torturing animals. They were pysically big and they imposed themselves on everyone and everyone was scared shitless of these dudes. One ended up in jail for killing someone early on for some banal reason, and another became a Hell’s Angel motorcycle gang hitman essentially.

In a different kind of pure evil, I’ve always been affraid of Dennis in It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia. He really scares me. No joke. The character is a real psychopath. I’ve met a few people like this in real life. They were the rich successful types. They gave me the fucking creeps. Manipulative, controlling, always working to get what the want and always have the advantage to have power over others.

I work in residential mental health and my boss is a progressive queer wiccan. I thought we’d get on great.

But then she started using an HR mistake i told her about to falsely bill medicare, and lied about not knowing in official emails. She tried to force me to pay for a company parking ticket and acted shocked when i wouldn’t.

When a staff was punched in the head by a resident in the evening she took hours to arrive on site, told the staff they had to finish their shift before going to the hospital, then let them drive themself after a possible concussion, and tried to get staff to reclassify it as a non critical incident.

Not truly evil, but sociopathetically dishonest in her dealings, and about who she is.

I knew a guy who was, by all objective standards, a musical genius. Brilliant songwriter and lyricist, prolific, could master an instrument in weeks, took to sound production and engineering like a fish to water. In a sane world, he’d have easily flourished in the music business and possibly even made it big, as he had the drive. He had a razor sharp wit and a relentless sense of humor, and in his lucid moments, was a blast to be around.

Except he was an irredeemable and unapologetic pedophile. He had previously done ten years for making and distributing cp by the time I had met him. When I brought it up he vehemently defended himself and his vice as being completely normal and natural, and even bragged about his “work.” He insisted that he did nothing wrong and seemed to genuinely not understand why people didn’t accept it.

Shortly after we parted ways, I learned that he got caught again hoarding thousands of pictures and videos. He’s currently in prison and will spend the rest of his life there.

One of the boys we fostered over the years: he was ~10 at the time and pretty sure was bipolar or schizophrenic or something as his eyes / face would change suddenly and attitude would become extremely defiant, destructive and sometimes physically violent. Thankfully he never hurt his baby sister we also had. We managed to capture one of these episodes over phone with our social worker and was able to move him to a therapeutic home where he was the only child and able to get the help he needed. Kiddo was a chill, happy boy normally but “evil” is pretty accurate to how we felt during those episodes.

Why did you say “not your neighbor who voted for Trump” and then provide an example who absolutely [would have] voted for Trump?

I’ve met some low level sociopaths and some obvious narcissists. And a lot of people who were simple amoral when it came to using and abusing others for their own ends.

Nobody who was skinning cats for pleasure though. I interviewed a few Nazis for school projects. I would not call them evil.

To me, evil is when you know the thing you’re doing is morally wrong, you have the option to do anything else (including doing nothing at all) and you do it anyway.

I can make space for people who were trained on bad behavior.

I can make space for people doing the best they can in bad situations.

But I have met people who looked “normal” and could have easily not done the bad thing they were doing to someone else.

When you call them out, some will get defensive. They still have shame.

But the evil ones had this look like a child who knew they were getting away with something. And the something was hurting someone else.