Personal Fiction

Why are people bad?

In my whole life I must have done 400 or 500 interviews. Yes, it’s part of my job, the one I do when I’m not a writer. I confess that I have always liked them, although they exhaust me. I started by chance and with the passage of time it has become a full-fledged professional activity. If you have read“11.4 light dreams”, maybe now some things explain to you. You might also be interested in reading another article I wrote a long, long time ago about my love/hate relationship with psychopaths, in“My childhood friend was a psychopath” which has a lot to do with my topic today.

I have one virtue and that is that I always see the good side of people. Always. I am able to fall in love with that which makes each individual special and unique and I fall in love with terrible ease. I guess that’s what makes me particularly good as an interviewer, being able to see the magic bubbling under dirty fingernails. However, as a counterpart to my superpower I have one major flaw: I don’t see evil, whether it forms smiles or hides like herds of lice in the curly hair of its wearer. It is always hidden from my eyes, disguised as something. I am unable to see it.

Over the years, time and again I have fallen prey to the spell of virtue. Different people, but the same curse. I know I’m the perfect victim, I think it’s genetic, my sister has the same thing. Over the years I have built several layers of armor to protect myself from them, because like psychopaths, evil people recognize their easiest victims from afar. No matter the protection, the stench of evil passes through any pore, like humidity, which sooner or later penetrates any wall if the insulation is not perfect.

Professionally, I have built a selection system that, supported by other people and different psychological evaluation tests, allows me to detect some suspicious indicators, but I have not yet found the perfect test to determine if someone is rotten inside. The day I do, I promise to write a book about it. We have all been victims of people who leave indelible wounds in their wake. I don’t have a solution to that problem yet, but I can talk about some of the characteristics of evil people. I hope it helps.

The video that illustrates this article is perfect to talk about evil. Mask Makers: “Liars”, listen to it in the background while you read…

Study of evil, by nicholas avedon

The first characteristic of evil is that you never see it coming, because it always disguises itself as something you would never believe to be evil, so when it catches you, it does it full on.

There is a reason why he hides so well, the same reason why there are liars indistinguishable from a saint: because they believe his lies at face value. Someone bad will think that he is not bad, that the bad guy is someone else, probably you. Although you don’t know that yet, you are still getting to know him (or her) and his (or her) misfortunes. They are people who seem to have had bad luck, victims of some injustice or the behavior of third parties, that luckily for them, you don’t know. With time you will understand that there is another side to the story, and that many times, their misfortunes are a direct consequence of their actions.

The second characteristic of evil is that it always has a justification.

An evil person, truly evil, reflects his own projections in the actions of others. He will see evil around him in the form of abusers, mistreaters or people who use their power to dominate others. His reaction to the evil of others may even be that of a vigilante, but in any case he will always show his third trait, hatred. A bad person always has a justification for his actions, whatever they are, and will not see evil in them, but an understandable and justified reaction.

The third characteristic of evil is its innate capacity for visceral and illogical hatred.

Maybe because they don’t trust you yet, they will be cautious and ecumenical in their first value judgments, but soon the small criticisms and ironic comments will go further. Not against you but against other people, who will gradually receive higher and higher doses of hatred and aggression. See how their eyes shine and the viciousness they exude in their comments. You yourself may think it is a joke or an exaggeration, but no, there is hate in their comments. Absurd and illogical hatred, an inordinate hatred against specific people. That irrational hatred that sooner or later will turn against you. That hatred feeds itself and doesn’t need witnesses or adventure partners, that hatred feeds you. Do not take it as a joke, it is real. Hatred, contempt and the coldest inhumanity is innate in them. They can be tender with a puppy, but act with boundless cruelty to a random person.

The fourth characteristic of evil is that it wants to control everything, starting with the image it projects on others.

Those you don’t know yet, whose true face you haven’t seen yet, don’t like to look at themselves in the mirror, because like vampires, they know that mirrors don’t lie. Only they can see their true face, that’s why they don’t look at themselves or don’t like photos, unless they are photos they prepare themselves. You will never catch them in an impromptu photograph, if you do they won’t like it and will ask you to destroy it. They will never tell you anything really deep about themselves, they will never open up because even if you get them drunk they won’t cry, laugh or scream like a normal person does, they have something inside that they can’t let out, and they know it.

The fifth characteristic of evil is that it never really cries.

Evil people suffer a lot, sometimes they show it and sometimes they do not. Generally they do not show the origin of what has transformed them into what they are, perhaps they talk about substitutes, bastard consequences of the origin of their evil. They will never confess that deep down, they do not love themselves. A person who hates himself is incapable of giving sincere love to anyone, a person who hates himself as much as they hate themselves is incapable of appreciating anything beautiful, because in their world, it rains bleach and the snowflakes are gray, pieces of an existence that is slowly consumed.

The sixth characteristic of evil is cruelty.

They confuse irony with cruelty. They can combine humor and cruelty without a problem, but don’t be fooled, it’s pure cruelty. They are capable of being cold and ruthless, but you’ll only see it when it’s too late. Look at their jokes when they’re still pretending to be funny and you’ll see a patina of sadism in them. In all of them. Humor is another vehicle they use to immunize those around them with their corrosive view of humanity. You will not see tenderness without irony. In all of them there is confrontation, always taking a belligerent stance. In time, the venom they distill will have anesthetized you and you will see their way of acting as normal.

The seventh characteristic of evil is the impossibility of appreciating beauty in fragile or ethereal things.

Someone with a broken and frozen heart, rotten and black for a long time, will only see weakness in that which is fragile. He will not be able to stop and enjoy an instant, because he cannot possess it or break it. He is only interested in that against which he can direct his hatred. Ideas without practical weight, such as idealism, or friendship without interest bore them because they cannot attack it. He will only appreciate art in order to criticize the artist, those who appreciate it, or the market that supports it. A truly evil person is incapable of creating anything for himself, he can only destroy, never build anything for himself. Evil people cannot love that which they cannot possess.

The eighth characteristic is the absence of lack of remorse for their actions.

He will always have a self-justification, he will always hide behind a moment of weakness -produced by a cause beyond his control- or he will look for a way to mitigate the impact of his actions with possible unexpected positive consequences, even if they were not the original ones. If he is locked in and forced to confront his actions, he will always do so reluctantly and never sincerely. Even if he knows he is trapped, he will fight, because recognizing that he has made a mistake would lead him to look inward, which is where he avoids looking at all costs. He will never ask for forgiveness. Do not expect it, and if he does it is because it is in his plans to achieve something.

The ninth characteristic is the absence of spirituality and an absolute materialism.

Absolute evil denies God, pretends to put him on its level. Just as it denies divinity, it denies spirituality in human beings. It denies man’s capacity to surpass himself, to achieve a higher plane. It will deny the non-materialistic virtues of third persons, such as their capacity to create beauty, their compassion or their generosity. He will not believe in an afterlife, nor in a final judgment, because he does not believe in morality. Someone who is evil is not amoral, but twists morality as he pleases, justifying all his acts as necessary. Evil people are especially cruel to those who believe in something greater than themselves.

The tenth characteristic is mediocrity.

It is difficult to see this point, because they shed their skin and mimic me with skill. They know how to convince and change the north to the west without the compass moving a millimeter. Their shadow is very long, but if you objectively and methodically examine their actions and their trajectory over time, you will see that they leave behind them a collection of mediocre ruins, the product of stealing ideas from others, changing the place or name of things that already existed or directly building castles of cards on foundations of dry and hollow lies. They leave only pain and bad memories, often distorted.

The eleventh facet of evil, perhaps one of the most important, is that evil is cowardly.

When you identify him and point your finger at him, he will snort like a cornered cat, threaten you and scream. But he will never expose himself to the light, he will do everything he can to remain in the shadows so that all those who still do not know who he really is, remain in ignorance. If you confront them, do it in the light of day, face to face and with witnesses, or they will stab you in the back.

¿Eres lo suficientemente especial para ser parte de este nuevo mundo?

"El Reino" es una isla mística, escondida en el pacífico norte, un paraíso exótico al cual solo se accede mediante invitación y un largo proceso de selección. Inaccesible para aquellos que carecen de un don, pero muy exigente: lo da todo, pero reclama una entrega total, en cuerpo y alma.

Haz click para más información.