Ask Lemmy

I have a couple of examples, but here's one that's close to my heart (and that, sadly, hurts my heart).

I know someone who overheard the following conversation in a workshop on global policy. In one of the tables, there was a prominent doctor and one of the richest people on Earth.

The workshop went on as normal, until at some point the discussion turned to poverty and malnutrition. The rich person asked "What do you mean, malnutrition?" and the doctor politely explained the basics of acute hunger and chronic malnutrition. At the end of the explanation, the rich person asked "How can you believe any of that?" and explained that malnutrition was made up by "envious leftists" to steal from the rich.

The doctor tried to explain that malnutrition was real, and even pulled up their phone to search for a picture of a malnourished child. When the rich person saw the picture, they said "Well, I don't know about this, but if you're hungry, wouldn't you just go to a store and buy food? If someone can't figure that out, they're just not cut out to survive".

At that point, the conversation was cut short because the workshop organizers required them to move on.

You might be wondering who this rich person was. Here's what I'll tell you: their family extracted a lot of wealth in colonial times and, since then, they have used their power and wealth to remain powerful and wealthy.

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.

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.

A couple of them.

One, I met when we were both five years old, and I knew then he would end up in prison. He helped beat someone to death when he was 19 and went to prison.

Another I met when I was a child and he was an adult. I knew he wasn't quite right, but I had no idea how bad it was. As a teenager, I had an encounter with him that almost turned violent. He later raped both his daughters and went to prison.

Never met what I'd describe as a truly evil person, but definitely a lot of narcissistic people whose selfishness and lack of self awareness have caused numerous instances of wondering if they were in fact just evil people.

I'm not the person to have enemies but we live for a long time so we meet awful people eventually even if you avoid it.
So only a few people took advantage of me or have screwed me badly over the years.

I have never needed to take revenge since I seem to have some kind of guardian devil that does the work for me in an extreme way.

1 mean duo of girls: mental institution and death by brain tumor.

Ex GF: bad car crash

Ex friend that took my GF: some random guy punched out all his teeth, later became homeless.

So I guess, don't fuck with me evil people.

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'm with Hannah Ardent on this, true evil is banal and its ubiqutious.

I'll buy some bullshit coffee and not donate that to MSF, I'd classify that as evil writ large, I have seen evil and its in the mirror each morning.. Spend money.on Spotify or save a life ?

An example, its estimated 600,000 children have died since US Aid was cut and an estimated 22 million deaths by 2030, how many before it's a holocaust? Think about the weight the deaths of 600,000 children (so far) should carry, vs the weight of what it actually carries. Then you need to start to question what evil actually is.

Aside from proeslitization, is the averge person that different to your swastika tattoo'd interaction ?

For example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_Hands_with_the_Devil_%28book%29?wprov=sfla1

Im an atheist, the quote on the inside the cover of Romeo's book ... Paraphrasibg "I know god exisits, because i have looked into the eyes of the devil, sat across from him and shaken his hand"

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.

Stupid people are the most dangerous species of all, because they do not think at all about the consequences of their own actions. There are plenty of examples available if you look around you.

I'm not talking about your neighbor who voted for Trump
explaining all the things youd imagine a nazi explains. Mostly about catholics, jews and blacks.
It was like the look of complete bordem mixed with extreme anger all the time.

Why cant I group them if they have the same look and hold the same values?

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.