How To Be Truly Evil

I have said for quite a long time that being evil is not a hobby, it’s a vocation.

Oh sure, we can all envision ourselves sabotaging someone’s hard labored project or intentionally not tipping a waiter, but that’s nothing more than some marginal mischief. The moments are ephemeral and fleeting.

They are not true evil.

To the layman, being evil is a very overt thing. One might contemplate wearing all black and donning a cape with sharp spikes at the collar. Men may even feel the need to grow a handlebar mustache and twirl it by the corners. I find that the evil laugh comes more naturally after getting into that kind of spirit. The urge to say things like, “You’re money is mine and I’m going to blow it all on hats! You pitiful fool!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! MOOHOOHWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!” falls gently off of the tongue like raindrops from a flower petal.

But that kind of evil is open and you can deal with that. Anyone can do it. It’s like having training wheels. The black dressed, cape wearing, mustache twirling evil doer should be what lurks in your soul. It shouldn’t be on the outside.

True evil is subtle. True evil is viral. True evil is offensive. That kind of evil takes skill. True evil is really effective when it is wrapped within a burrito of innocence.

We all know to stay away from the knife wielding sex maniac who hides in the shadows. You know what he’s all about. We never think twice about the preacher who spills prejudicial hate speech in the name of God, especially when his words are backed by chapter and verse of the Bible.

It’s like being an immune carrier of the Ebola virus. Each person you touch and infect with your subtle brand of contagious evil suffers in how it kills every soul it comes in contact with over a long geometric progression. It spreads like an urban myth. Eventually it will lay its evil eggs in a zit and explode baby spiders all over someone’s face.

Now, I can hear some of you asking, “Is there a way I can be evil, too?”

I’m glad you asked – because what you’ll eventually want is to not only be evil but you’ll also want to be offensive. Being evil without being offensive is like having a sundae without the sprinkles and the chocolate syrup. Sure, you can have it, but you won’t enjoy it as much.

I had a very unique experience the other day.

I was with a group of people in a non-business environment and one man got up to tell a joke. This man was a foreigner who seemed to have lacked the subtleties of our culture. He’d obviously had heard a joke from one of his American co-workers who had his sense of humor and taste surgically removed during the Eisenhower administration.

In the space of four minutes this innocent man managed to offend Irish people, Indians, and Chinese people. I actually found part of my own genetic makeup rise in silent mental protest and was silenced by the knowledge that the joke teller really didn’t know better. I also cringed when I saw a Chinese man in the audience look down for a moment and searched his own soul for the same kind of patience.

If you were an idiot, you could almost admire it. The audience stood transfixed at this innocent man, who couldn’t possibly have known that what he was saying was just plain wrong. Yet, out of sheer politeness and good will, the audience gave some smattering of applause.

And that is evil.

A seed was planted in this man’s head then he spread that seed which I’m sure found purchase in the mind of someone else who didn’t know any better. When it was over, we rewarded him with applause. In our tolerance, we allowed this man to go forward and possibly repeat this to a group that may not be as tolerant as we were. In our kindness to keep this man from being embarrassed, he will tell this joke again to another group of people who will not be as kind – leave alone the innocents that did not understand this joke at all may possibly pass it along to other people who may or may not find it tolerable.

Once again, the father of this piece of evil merely passed an ethnically tasteless joke to a person who didn’t know any better. The original joke teller probably was told that it wasn’t funny. But he didn’t care. He told the joke because he thought it was funny and gave the impression to a foreigner that this was American humor.

There is an entire industry of bumper sticker makers, t-shirt designers, poster makers, and joke book publishers determined to preserve these pathetic old wheezes of humor that six people in America feel is funny.

And just in case you don’t know, the following is not funny anymore:

• Ethnic jokes
• Joke breasts
• Novelty ties
• Racist jokes
• Practical jokes
• Whoopee Cushions
• Fake dog poo
• Fake vomit
• “Honk, if you’re horny!”

If you currently are working with these things or if you think they’re funny, you need surgery to have your sense of humor put back. It’s a simple procedure to have. Your sense of humor is actually located in a hidden organ behind your duodenum and next to your stomach. Many people think it’s your funny bone but it’s an organ close to your gut. That’s why when you laugh really hard you hold your stomach and try to get your breath. When you can’t breathe, it’s your sense of humor trying to get air in order to laugh again.

Therapy consists of watching about a hundred hours of current stand-up comedy. It must be fresh and it should be some kind of humor written after 1980. If the comedian has a nickname of “Sheckie” switch to something else.

You can’t be truly evil without causing pain.

While it is true that it is more effective to have that shroud of innocence about you as you do many of these works, there is nothing quite like being sadistically cruel and abusive. I’ll grant you, there are naturally sadistic people on this planet who find a youth full of tearing the wings off of flies and giving a nice healthy kick to a puppy dog.

Once again, these acts of petty terrorism are like training wheels to a true sadist.

If you’re looking to see an authentic example to abusive sadistic cruelty, look no further than any Fortune 100 corporation. These places are like incubation cubes for sociopaths. Nothing says success louder than an abusive sociopath with ambition and a deadline.

Most people think that being a sadistic and abusive bastard come at a price of being visibly unpleasant and mean. The master abusive sadist is not verbally abusive. He doesn’t yell or scream. That would imply caring for something.

No, this guy smiles when he pulls the trigger.

Among the tools that he uses is the silver tongue employed to create dreams for his underlings. There is a goal for getting a project done. He won’t promise anything. However, he will imply that a reward will be made for excellence in performance. What that line is, how it is exceeded, and what the rewards for good work would be are left purposely vague.

The underling will sacrifice anything in the pursuit of his own goals and ambitions. This includes, but is not limited to, spending hours and weekends working on projects that, in the long run, mean nothing.

When the work is done, depending on the success or failure of the project, the underling is either let go or given nothing in return. Lives are ruined, marriages end, spirits are crushed, and people fall into despair all for the abusive bastard whose only goal was to look good in front of his abusive bastard boss.

You don’t have to be violently mean to be abusive. All you need to do is withhold reward for hard work or give a meaningless “attaboy”.

“Attaboys” don’t pay the mortgage.

Back in the day, people stole office supplies for their own personal use.

Yes, it’s petty, but given the shrinking salaries after 2008 and the vanishing 401k’s stolen from hard working people – who’s going to complain about a missing Sharpie?

It used to be that when we thought of a bank robbery, we could envision an intricately organized crime with lots of guns, a man with a stopwatch, a team of people removing money from a large vault, and a getaway driver. Then the team would rendezvous at a secret location to count and divvy up their ill-gotten gains.

Hollywood.

Yes, if you’re an overt thief, that’s what you do. We all grew up thinking that the bandits were the guys who wore the horizontally striped shirts with a black domino mask making away with two bags of cash marked with a “$” on the side. However, that’s small potatoes to today’s modern swindler who can organize a Ponzi scheme faster than you can say, “Have I got a deal for you?”

Why go to the trouble of gunplay when you can work for a company that deals with property and casualty home insurance. This is double if your work deals in flood insurance for New Jersey. When you look at how business is done and that people are trying to own a home – they need insurance to secure a mortgage. Should your home be in a flood zone, you’ll be paying premiums through the nose indefinitely.

But that’s not the fun part. These companies will collect these premiums almost indefinitely. The fun part happens when places like New Jersey are struck by natural disasters like super storm Sandy. That’s when they bring your attention to a loophole in the contract or negotiate on a settlement that’s nowhere near the amount of damage on your home.

People buy insurance for one reason – they have to. When they buy a home it’s what protects them against losing their largest asset. The bank wants them to have insurance to keep them paying a mortgage. It also keeps the home owner from just walking away from the property when disaster strikes.

However, when the property is foreclosed on, the bank doesn’t want to be in the business of real estate and will sell the property to the highest bidder. In the meantime, any kind of home equity in the house is gone and reabsorbed by the bank.

So the real difference in modern day thieving is in the stripes. The new bandits wear vertical pinstripes on a conservative charcoal suit.

Many have said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’ve always doubted that.

No, those of us who have the blackest of hearts know where we’re going. In for a penny… in for a pound. True evil is malicious and made with intent. There is little difference between the con artist who steals and ruins the lives of thousands and the boy who rips the wings off of flies.

Real evil is subtle. You never see it coming. And sometimes, the seduction of wealth and power blind you to that feeling in your gut and make you deaf to the small voice screaming how wrong the situation is.

In all seriousness, I found myself going down a path at one point that I really wanted to follow. There was the potential for money. There was an opportunity to use my skills for profit. When I found myself having to do something I knew was wrong to the most innocent of people, it was my body that rebelled. I began to have health problems and I knew I could not continue that work without dying.

It takes someone who is completely removed from his own morality or any kind of morality to consistently perpetuate evil. You need to love it. And once you love it, no bit of petty evil is beyond you. All that remains is your mastery in executing it.

And if you have to execute it properly, you should do it with subtlety.

We don’t write moral stories anymore. A friend of mine made a comment to me about the new Star Trek movie and noticed what was missing from the movies. Each of the episodes had some kind of valuable moral lesson as the theme to each story. For example, in the original episode of Space Seed (the episode that spawned The Wrath of Khan), the lesson was that superior ability bred superior ambition. It is a good lesson. It has legs. When I saw the movie, Star Trek: Into the Darkness, there were no philosophical debates on why Khan would do what he would do. There was only the conjecture made by fans that had seen the original series and could deduce what would happen from those morality lessons.

We’ve lost the ability to understand why some things are inherently wrong.

The point is we need to understand that. If there is some kind of eternal damnation that is for evil doers, they should only go if it is their intent to cause harm. The man who suffers a blackout from a brain hemorrhage and kills three children while driving his car is not guilty of anything outside of not seeing his doctor in time. Had he left his home that day and said to himself, “I’m going to kill three kids today because that’s what I do on Tuesdays” he would deserve utter damnation.

The Catholic Church had defined sin as being “a grievous matter, sufficient reflection, and full consent of the will.” George Carlin boiled it down to “you had to wanna.”

The act of evil is not enough, it is the desire to do so that make us all bastards.