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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I had a nazi say to my face that they wanted to kill me and hang me from a wall.

I suppose that counts to be a real pos.

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.

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 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.

Someone called me evil in their suicide note once, and ever since then I've been wondering if they were right.

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.

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.

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.

I see American and Canadian politicians on TV news every day (I'm Canadian by the way)

The epitome of evil to me is in watching a group of wealthy affluent, influential people doing their absolute best day in and day out to keep their money and the money of those with way too much away from those who need it just to have a little bit of a life. They work to make us all miserable in order for them to keep having everything and to take even more from everyone else who have little or nothing.

My ex wife was abusive, manipulative, and just turned out to be an awful person all around. Like her whole personality changed on our wedding night and she went from being one of the kindest people I knew to fearing she would stab me in my sleep over the course of a year after knowing her for 3.

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 did. A boomer guy, he must be in his late 70s, early 80s now. He owned a construction company that killed 20 people in the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey, including distant members of his extended family. The guy did shoddy construction work, did not use proper concrete and dressed up a damaged building to look ok. The result was 20 dead lives when the building came down on November 12, 1999. (the building was damaged in the first quake in august and collapsed in the second one in november) The name is Hamza Cebeci, and a quick internet search today shows that his family business is still in the construction business.

I met the guy almost 10 year after the earthquake (and almost 15 years ago from today) at an event where he spoke. From outside you would not guess that he has the blood of 20 people on his hands. It was the purest example of the 'Banality of Evil' that I have ever seen. I'm orginally from the same small town (Düzce) where all this happened and knew the story well.

News article from those days: https://postimg.cc/HctXCVFT

yep, a guy with a history in law enforcement, had a job where he investigated claims of misconduct of employees, he seemed to use that to serially sexually prey on the people who he ended up investigating

can't be more specific for legal reasons unfortunately

not sure he was inherently evil per se, but what he did I would consider evil