Who do you think was history's greatest villain?
The evilest person who committed the most horrendous deeds, propagated the worst ideas, or was responsible for other moustache-twirling affairs.
Anyone who is currently alive does not count.
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Pol pot killed about 25% of Cambodias population and deserve a nomination.
Pol pot is definitely up there.
Genghis Khan is up there. His conquests killed millions, I see estimates of up to 40 million, a significant percentage of the world's population (possibly double-digits). It's even theorized that so many people died that global temperature dropped as a result. You could go and argue that a large unified empire would prevent many future wars and thus could be a net positive even if establishing it is very bloody (see Pax Romana), and Genghis' rule was reportedly relatively progressive compared to his contemporaries. But then, you need to make it so that the emprie doesn't immediately break apart after its ruler dies, which he failed at.
Though you can always argue that he wasn't really more evil than other rulers, just more successful. Which still makes him a "great villain", but there are more directly evil deeds than conquest, such as genocide.
Also, let's not put too fine a point on it, his famed virility - leading to potentially millions of people with traces of his DNA - was likely expressed (for the most part) through decades of rape in unheard of numbers.
bingo. the Mongol Empire lasted less than 90 years. A flash in the pan in terms of world history. Yeah he was great at conquering a massive amount of land mass but they sure as fuck were unable to hold it. and the 4 Khans after Genghis ruled for like a handful of years each. One of which only lasted a couple years.
I think you and I just solved the climate crisis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
Genghis Khan was the original Thanos!?! 🤯
Yeah I'm inclined to agree with this if we define "evil" by destructive power at least (and always worth remembering that we merely have general agreements on what "evil" is, usually based on what is and isn't considered advantageous for human well-being. Absolute good and evil are religious myths.). But GK was also kinda interesting in that his conquests etc. were "honest". He wasn't trying to build some ideal society, he just lived in accordance to "Might Makes Right" and surprisingly indiscriminately applied that into his domain as well. Whatever one could claim for themselves, was theirs so long as they could defend it. Regardless of gender, religion, further cultural details etc.
I feel like he represents the logical conclusion of non-conservative right-wing ideals taken to the extreme. Individual power (however that manifests - raw strength, charisma) trumps everything else, so in a way, libertarian... but everything was of course to be absolutely subject to the Mongol Empire rule so, authoritarian.
If we go by ideology + destructiveness as a metric of "evil", probably Hitler.
He did also have a good side sort of. He also did some good, there are people who only did pure evil.
I hear Hitler treated his dog very well.
IMO, people generally aren't pure good or evil. But that doesn't mean that people like Hitler or Genghis Khan aren't giant assholes.
I call him, "Rapey McRapenstein".
Thomas Midgley, Jr
Invented CFCs like Freon, which caused the hole in the ozone layer, and then later went on to pioneer the use of lead in gasoline, which is estimated to have resulted in the cumulative loss of millions of IQ points from humanity during its use, not to mention lead-derived cancers and other illnesses.
Possibly the single greatest negative contribution to the environment and humanity.
Did the most damage... But I'm not sure he's villainous. Just competently dangerous. Happy to be corrected but I thought tmjr was trying to improve the world. He just got massively unlucky... Multiple times.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he invented freon use in refrigeration because he knew he fucked up with the lead in gasoline and wanted to do something good to outweight that.
The effects of lead poisoning were already very well known, 8 people died of lead poisoning at DuPont during the development and Midgely himself suffered the effects of lead poisoning after "proving" his compound was safe in a public demonstration.
He absolutely knew there would have been widescale negative health effects if they continued to push the product on the market. He also knew about widely available alternative "anti-knocking" agents they could have used but they were unable to be patented and so there was no profit.
He is absolutely a case of someone who simply did not care about the consequences of his work beyond what profit could be extracted.
CFCs are a slightly different issue because no one could have reasonably anticipate their effects on the atmosphere and he was long dead before those effects were starting to be felt.
I don't believe he would have stopped developing them even if he did know however.
The universe got the last laugh however after he became entangled in self made contraption to help him after he developed polio, suffocating him.
He was just a feckless chemist, better to blame the DuPonts, GM, and other moneyed interests who have depended on such useful idiots and the corruptability of the US government since its earliest days.
To address both you and the person below you: he deliberately gave himself lead poisoning on national television by inhaling the concentrated vapor of leaded gasoline for over a minute. He did this not because he was ignorant of the health dangers of lead (he had already had lead poisoning TWICE BEFORE), but because he was purposefully misleading the public.
I didn't mean to say he was innocent of anything. His crimes are well known; but they were done in service of moneyed interests who were the real decision-makers behind it all.
He might have lead to Boomers being such psychopaths, including the later greatest villians.
He DID do it on purpose too!
I consider this man to be the worst individual in all of human history. Maybe the single worst human to ever live on the face of the planet.
What makes him this bad? He knew. He knew what leaded gasoline was doing and what freon would do and he did it anyway to help cooperations make a little more money.
There are some pretty bad people under the post. But this guy... Man.
This is definitely a moustache twirling villainous affair.
Belgian Congo/Jewish Holocaust is right up there. I wouldn't say a specific person but innumerable people involved.
King Leopold and Hitler were THE authority, so ultimately they signed off on the death and suffering of millions of Congolese and Jews (and other minorities) respectively.
For the Congo: imagine a father staring at the severed hand and foot of his five year old daughter. That's a photograph searchable online, and needs to be seen to understand the violence and dehumanism of colonialism.
For the holocaust: we have all seen at least one picture. But imagine a baby being smashed against a wall because it wouldn't stop crying. Pretty women (maybe even underage girls) being raped. To say just a small part of the atrocities of the holocaust.
Well, I haven't even included Unit 731. General Shiro Ishii.
Now, what to say about today in 2026? Who's to say these atrocities are not being repeated?
Hitler and king Leopold are great answers. The things they perpetrated are very difficult to stomach. I consider myself someone who is fairly desensitized, especially growing up during the wild west of the internet. Unit 731, though? I can't. Absolutely the most vile humans to have walked the face of the earth. Humans aren't born good or evil, but rather have potential for either. The fucking shitstains of unit 731 found a way to maximize the human capacity for evil. Naming anyone in that group is the correct answer.
Ottomans were quite vile as well. My grandmother grew up watching ottoman soldiers slicing open pregnant women's bellies because they were Greek and laughing.
Quite vile is an understatement, that's one of the worst on the list.
Since I'm personally connected, I don't want to use superlatives. But yes.
Israel and USA seem intent on first place in the atrocities contest.
Don't forget Churchill.
Ea-nāṣir, merrily flogging low quality copper to unsuspecting punters. The rotter.
And just look at what that has lead to.
Laventiy Beria was the head of Stalin's NKVD. He may not be the greatest villain, but more people need to know about this motherfucker.
Stalin introduced him as "My Himmler". Despite all the spying and torture you'd expect from the secret police, Beria found time to be a prolific rapist as a side hustle.
I think you're underselling just how evil he was...
They found lots of bones from women and girls when excavating the torture chamber beneath his former mansion, and Stalin distrusted him so much that he dropped everything when he learnt his daughter was alone with Beria.
Most people in this thread were either evil in their career, or in their personal lives, but Beria managed to excel separately in both.
My favourite scene in The Death of Stalin is when the rest of the Poliboro decided that they've had enough of Beria's shit and have him shot after a ten-second "trial".
While Hitler, Pol Pot, Beria, and Kissinger are all good and obvious contenders, I think these will be surpassed by someone who is alive right now.
But who? Well, it's most likely someone who already has significant resources at their disposal. For all their flaws, I don't think the lizards of Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and Facebook have much of an agenda beyond growing their fortunes. But I am convinced we haven't seen the final form of Peter Thiel.
I would like to nominate Diego de Landa, burner of the Mayan books. And a lot of Mayan people. The Mayans had books, like normal paper booms filled with Mayan writing. Histories, religion, presumably everything a society would write down. There are only four Mayan books left now. It's all gone. It's a tragedy that particularly boils my blood and I'm making him the final boss of a Mesoamerican-themed Pathfinder campaign I'm about to run, because I want to live out a fantasy where he gets fireballed to death or something.
Ronald Reagan
Great choice
Henry Kissinger is up there as quite a villain of modern times. Puppet master of most of the fucked up modern world order.
Trump (yes, hoping he's dead)
Stalin of course.
But I fully expect this totally verifiably factual post to be violently downmodded in 3, 2, 1... 🙂
I'd put a vote in for Lavrentiy Beria, he's basically "but what if Stalin had also been a serial rapist"
Serial rapist pedophile, to be exact. And Stalin knew the whole time.
I think that where we are today, it's more important than ever to really recognise that there is absolutely no "evilest" person. And moreso, almost all of them genuinely believed they were being a force for good.
The main reason for there being no "evilest" is because there are not just tens, or hundreds, but thousands of people who have committed horrific atrocities which even as individual acts would be in contention for the evilest.
Just within the Holocaust, you have so many individuals perpetrating such evil. The croatian fascist groups always stick out in my memory for the raw personal brutality.
However, there are so many comparable situations throughout history that we know very little about. Sacking of cities, mass rapes, Jeffrey fucking epstein, what's been happening in Sudan, what happened in Ethiopia a few years ago, the Holocaust, the Mongols, the ottomans, the British empire, south American dictators, the Japanese empire, the russian empire, the soviet union, al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, the IRA, the Vikings, and on, and on, and on.
Yes, arguments can be made about how much more evil things are when they are organised etc. However, in my mind, organisation is just a tool that we have improved. We need to be hyper vigilant that anyone, at any time can end up being so radicalised that they are willing to perpetrate evil. Including ourselves. We are not really different from these evil humans.
Got to agree with this. We’ve got the evil leaders, and then what about those immediately second to them supporting and enabling all those orders that wind up in mass death and harm?
I don’t think it’s possible to say it’s one person, there’s a huge support structure that makes their version of evil happen.
There's a difference, now, though:
Humankind's doing its "mitosis" thing.
Humankind is dividing-by-alignment.
That only happens 1x per world, ttbomk.
( after the original Industrial Revolution, the Roman Empire, then the "seedling" that that was, in our world eventually grew into a "sapling", the official Industrial Revolutions-sequence..
then, as population reaches ecological-saturation & technology simultaneously reaches world-breaking power, ClimatePunctuation kicks-in..
etc
all eventually enforce The Great Filter.
& in that Great Filter, alignment polarizes.
Anti-Life polarization & With-Life polarization.
Every world of people-similar-to-our-kind would have to go through it, same as "puberty", but for whole-species )
As the process progresses, the polarization is going to become more & more extreme.
So, until now we've been mixtures, every individual ( with few exceptions ), but .. that's going to be changing, until there's zero mixture left, & everybody ( near the end of this century ) is absolutely-polarized, 1 way or the other.
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I don't believe that. Sociopathy is extremely common in those that achieve high levels of power. Most of them used and manipulated others credulity around things being forces for good to increase their own power. For such people getting what they want is their only real criteria for good.
I agree with your last statement though.
While that is true, I think that many of the most successful at building a following are true believers. Hitler is a pretty good example.
I think Mao or Pol Pot also started out quite idealistic and then we're warped by power.
I suppose it's very difficult to really say one way or the other, and I would argue that true evil is only possible when the intent is purely self serving.
Even with sociopathy, they may genuinely think they are doing good without feeling empathy for those they harm. However, it's a very good point that many of those that rise are sociopaths or become sociopathic.
Cain singlehandedly killed 25% of world's human population.
And fucked his mother.
The motherfucker.
Hitler is a pretty obvious answer
In terms of raw numbers he is probably behind pol pot, gengis,etc...
Billionaires.
I sorta don't want to go down the rabbit hole. To find the answer you would literally need to compare attrocities. Im aware of quite a few but watching the actual footage of the aftermath and such is literally sickening. I've heard pol pot.
God, and probably even dont exists, that makes it more impresive.
Shirō Ishii
What did they do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shir%C5%8D_Ishii
Ah yeah, that's a pretty good contender.
Commander of Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army's biological and chemical weapons "research" unit.
If you don't know the details of their crimes, I strongly urge you not to do any research into them. Suffice to say they committed the most brutal and callous forms of torture imaginable on many thousands of people, including babies.
Idk if this counts because he didn't realise how bad it was but Thomas Midgley Jr put CFCs in fridges and put lead in petrol
Dave Miller from Stratford-upon-Avon.
You didn't know him, but he had the worst ideas.
Carl Panzram was a (mostly) one man wrecking ball of unbridled badness. A lot of people would say he lived an evil life.
Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex
TIL Douglas Adams published the real name and address of presumably, either a friend or a former school rival, then only changed it upon request.
In comparison to the rest of the thread, it’s nothing, but that’s fucked up.
Mao was not so great.
I don't think it comes down to sheer numbers; I think it's about deliberately causing suffering and reveling in it. So, maybe the BTK killer or another serial killer who liked to torture their victims.
Btk was mentally unwell.
I should say so.
Idk if Powell is alive. Ayn Rand, but she is just a fool with a strange philosophy, she can't be responsible for what the morons did with it.
Idk if whoever founded Mossad is still alive, but they sure sabotaged and sent backwards the entire world.
Whoever took advantage of Jesus delusions, and convinced him he is the messiah, leading to a religion that would be used to stop people from taking on science.
It's not Jesus that caused people to not listen to science. Humans are just naturally superstitious. Religion has existed in every human civilisation since the beginning of history. Even if Christianity never arose, humans would just be following some other religions.
There will always be a story we tell about anything, whether its accurate or not. In my opinion, both science and religion are a form of storytelling.
I don't think it's fair to make Jesus responsible for the modern pick-and-chose followers of his religion, and I doubt modern Christianity would even be recognizable to him - the late Roman state religion is pretty different from his reformed Judaism. Plus IIRC early Christendom had some doomsday cult elements.
Couldn't the same be said of Marx?
Look at the great leap forward, that killed millions of people due to idiotic central planning.
That's what happens when you take ideology and philosophy over reason.
Trump. Even Jeffrey Epstein said Trump was beyond evil. Those files are still censored for a reason.
Are you saying you genuinely 100% believe that Trump is more evil than Hitler, Stalin, Pot and Khan?
I only have knowledge of Trump raping children but not others
Holy shit dude. Trump is a nightmare, but please go touch grass.
At this point, putin.
I'm seeing that people aren't having a good objective framework for judging evil, so here's my dimensions-of-evil, including the stuff in DarkTriad & DarkTetrad:
The more dimensions of evil, the worse.
The stronger on any dimension, the worse.
More-dimensions is more worse than stronger-in-a-single-dimension, though.
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Well, I used to blame all of humanity's ills on the dark tethrad.
Until I realized what a bastard the average person is.
Paul the Apostle or Abraham.
Trump and Netanyahu
That’s the thing, his moustache couldn’t be twirled
I'm gonna bet that is someone alive today. Some billionaire whose only ideals are personal gain.
"...whose only ideals are personal gain." I think you're describing every billionaire, no?
Narratively, Julius Caesar
From an aristocratic family that had just suffered a major defeat/humiliation
Floated around the Mediterranean as a bottom to powerful men
The whole, got captured by pirates, had them raise his ransom, and then returned to kill them story
Formed a shadow council to control the world
Genococided the gauls
Had a love affair with Cleopatra
Became dictator for life
Got stabbed in the back by everyone close to him
There's a lot of competition, but right now Trump is vying for a gold medal as hard as he can, which might actually explain a few things. He wants to be the best at being the worst.
Unless I've missed the good news he's not eligible
We all know he got hospitalized this weekend. I’m expecting a press conference to announce he died Friday but miraculously came back this morning. His fanbase will eat it up.
Robert Moses, responsible for fucking up public transportation and paving over minority communities with shitty highways
Well that last qualification ends my answer
Nature.
Mother Nature
smugface.jpg
He wasn’t at his most evil when he had a mustache and he’s a person who’s not currently alive: the Joker.
Maybe Abraham or the guy who made him up one afternoon?
Ego.
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Bruh, how are you going to criticize others for the way they're answering the question, and yet respond with this? 😂
Ancel Keys, the perpetuator of the diet heart hypothesis.
A dietitian who "established the link between cholesterol and heart disease, created K rations for the US military" and died in 2004 aged 100 is the world's greatest villain for you?...
Ancel Keys established a spurious link between cholesterol and heart disease. His Seven Countries Study was an early application of regression analysis. What is very rarely mentioned was that Keys omitted 5 countries (more? Can't exactly recall) that didn't fit the regression he wanted to show. (Ref: "Good Calories, Bad Calories," Gary Taubes)
Keys' contributions to lipid hypothesis fucked the metabolic health of millions for decades.
Regarding Keys' centenarian expiration, go find a pic of what that dude looked like for the last few decades of his life. I'll pass on the longevity and his diet plan.
And if you're interested in how nutritionally screwed we are in the US:
https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1155624137/es/foto/minneapolis-mn-friday-1-23-2004-ancel-keys-university-of-minnesota-professor-who-invented-k.jpg?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=HVYyLQRGSsxwfiC1tbiySOxnglu4JfRsezTwJUM8Ow8%3D
Ok, so, regarding these ideas:
He made a step, perhaps a bit too long in a mistaken direction, but understanding didn't and won't stop with him. How everyone reacted to his theory was also part of the fault.
These are excellent points and spot on. We're all looking for the silver bullet and elevator pitch, even those of us who know better. "Oh, just stop eating fatty meat, eggs, and salt!" Except it's way more complex than that. To Keys' credit, he also highlighted the importance of weight management/obesity, cardiovascular health, and "regular" exercise. The definition of "regular" of course keeps getting modified.
Agreed, although too much of anything is bad. "The toxicity is in the dose." Keys pushed replacing saturated fats with PUFAs, which became a whole different problem with industrial PUFAs becoming the norm. Industrial PUFAs are high in Omega-6 EFA while being low in Omega-3 EFA. Humans don't actually need any digestible carbohydrates to survive, but we very much need fats and protein to live. Nutritional research has merely been negotiating on where the borders are.
We worry too much about exogenous cholesterol, when endogenous cholesterol is the real problem. Cholesterol is a lot like that joke about the guy looking for his keys in the middle of the street. "Did you lose your keys around here?" "No, but this is where the light is." Cholesterol, especially back when nutrition policy was being set, was what we could easily measure, and that was a correlation that science pursued. Epidemiological studies are notoriously tricky, sometimes just a step above anecdote. And to discuss these things in any serious detail requires a couple book-feet of text, most of it being contextual qualification.
Regarding the importance of cholesterol as a risk indicator: What's probably closer to the truth is balance of HDL to LDL and cholesterol to HDL, with triglycerides being a case-by-case basis. If I recall correctly >500mg/dL being the absolute level for concern and interventions, with >200mg/dL being considered abnormally high.
I think in the end, we all have to find what works for us at our given point in life. Because no silver bullet and there's no way to discuss these things simply and quickly.
I believe the current view on LDL is that its level what the body needs it to be and generally doesn't require intervention. However, the Tg/HDL ratio is a reasonably good indicator of your metabolic health. OTOH Tg should be below 100 mg/dL, and ideally it should be lower than the HDL reading. The ratio of Tg/HDL should be below 1.8, using mg/dL.
Heart disease does kill a lot of people...
And you think this guy invented heart disease, then?
And he ruined cholesterol, too! Now I have to watch my salt intake. Thanks asshole!
Cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease, and salt in the form of sodium is fine too as long as you don't have chronically elevated levels of insulin in your blood.
Cholesterol has not been scientifically established to be the cause of heart disease in human beings. It was based on a study that was done on rabbits fed cholesterol and vegetable oil. The ensuing focus on low-fat diets has caused in my opinion an untold amount of suffering, including my own NAFLD.
Ancel Keys was a fish physiologist. He was highly charismatic, had a forceful personality, and dismissive of his peers that did not share his theory of heart disease.
But ya know what has been proven to contribute to heart disease, atherosclerosis, dyslipidemia, NAFLD, hyperinsulimia/Type 2 diabetes, and chronic inflammation? Refined carbohydrates (Taubes, Lustig, et al).
I kinda understand the downvotes because we've had 50+ years of saturated fat fearmongering. But when you start digging into this long running, test-in-production experiment on human diet and health, it's hard to avoid conspiratorial thinking.
The downvotes don't bother me. The day I stop getting downvotes is probably when I no longer need to bring this up :)
Thank you. I appreciate this information.
I mean feeding the military is fucked up.
You can't fight nazis with a empty stomach, you silly sausage.