So, considering this is Lemmy I’ll clarify. I’m not talking about your neighbor who voted for Trump or your uncle who’s always been a dick. I’m talking about coming in contact with a deep down evil scary human. I’ve only met one that I can think of. When I was 12 or 13 I spent a ton of time at my best friends house. He lived on a big beautiful rural property with his dad, a few brothers and always one or two random dudes. His dad was a good electrician and a biker. So, he always had friends/associates hanging around. So one day I was staying over for a long weekend and we met a new guy his dad was housing for a week or two. Dude was a real full fledged nazi. Had a swastika under his eye and tats all over most of his body. He was from California I guess. He was “working” with my buddies dad for awhile. Anyway, the main interaction I had with him was when he pulled my friend and I in for a sermon. We were going to go hunt squirrels and do rural kid shit. He stopped us outside and had us sit on the porch. Spent about 20 minutes explaining all the things youd imagine a nazi explains. Moslty about catholics, jews and blacks. My friends dad came out after awhile and told him we didn’t need to hear that shit. He sent us away, but, I never forgot the look this dude had in his eyes. It was like the look of complete bordem mixed with extreme anger all the time.
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.
Your perception of what a psychopath is colored by media portrayals and what notable psychopaths have done. Not all physicists are like Richard Feynman, and they’re all at least reasonably smart.
What you’re describing is a psychopath who is stupid. They do stupid things because they are stupid, and they do psychopath things because they’re a psychopath. They aren’t going to lead the police on a chase across the country after a string of murders. If they kill someone, they’ll probably be caught the very first time. The reason they will kill will be somewhat less nuanced than an intelligent psychopath’s reasons, but that’s the smart vs. stupid difference - they’re both psychopaths. Neither will feel remorse, neither will feel any compelling need to achieve their goals by not harming someone else, and both would do it again if they felt the circumstances warranted it. One will just do it in a way where he might not get caught and the other won’t think that far ahead or will do such a poor job of it that thinking ahead won’t help.
From what I’ve heard “psychopath” is in fact a disorder that makes a person worse at managing their own life, in addition to making things worse for the people around them.