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MichaelVassar comments on Have no heroes, and no villains - Less Wrong
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This is simply not what I observe to be the case from my experience with politicians and high-level business people.
People quite consciously play and want to play varied parts in life, some of which are villain parts.
There are certainly a fairly large group of people who are inclined to refer to others as "do-gooders" but I think this usually this is a consequence of not thinking of things in terms of wrong and right, but in terms of winners and losers. They adopt stereotypically villainous traits mockingly, to display their contempt for people they think are inferior to them. I know and see a lot of businessmen and commentators like that, but not many politicians, at least above the level of the president of the Young Tory or Debating society.
Similarly people who decide that the most important thing to do is to smash some "the other side" they can't credibly be cast as oppressive tend to adopt villainous traits.
OK, that sounds about right. I suspect that one difference is that we treat politicians as meaning different things. You may mean "candidates" while I'm also including lobbyests and other party organizers and influencers.
I would need actual examples of people who thought of themselves as villains here. (I realise this request may involve mindreading.)
Some do appear to be running through the Cool Villain pages on TVTropes, but would think of themselves as doing so to achieve an end. Some seem to have talked themselves into a position of moral ambiguity, where you can't do just one thing and someone will always get hurt and they might as well be the ones trying to make the least hash of it and achieve something better than bad. And the Xanatos gambits! It's quite dazzling having a party apparatchik describe to you their ridiculous gambit that they then seem to pull off. And wonder if the bit where they tell you about it was part of the gambit. Anything involving politics is a thirty Xanatos pileup every day anyway.
(It's not a counterexample to what you've said, but I think of Pol Pot's last recorded words, "Everything I did, I did for my country" and marvel at humans' power not to paint themselves as villains. Though that quote could arguably show slight awareness sneaking in.)
Here is a This American Life episode about just such a real-life group of people: a collection of various chemical company executives arranging and implementing an international price fixing scheme that lasted years.
The episode focuses on an informant, a junior executive with one of the companies, who captured an enormous amount of footage of the executives jovially discussing the various ways and means they'd be using to knowingly screw over their customers and, in turn, a great deal of the agricultural and industrial economies that depended on their products. The footage is justly described as "probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act".
Everyone has reasons for the things they do, post-hoc or otherwise; I think what distinguishes a villian is a callous acceptance of their own selfishness and a pointed indifference to, or even enjoyment of, the suffering inflicted upon others due to their actions.
O_O
Okay. Mostly there's just sincere stupidity.
I'd want to see a lot more examples of covert villany footage to be confident that this footage was atypical.
Er, I don't understand. Do you mean "was typical" or "wasn't atypical", or have I misparsed?
Amusingly, I misparsed your sentence, and was about to point out that "was typical" is the same as "wasn't atypical".
I parsed ciphergoth's comment as saying "I would want a lot more footage before I said that this footage is an exception to the rule of 'mostly sincere stupidity'."
Yes, that's what I meant.
I've met a few people on TVTropes who claim to be playing a villain role or something roughly cognate to one in real life, without having any particular higher-level reason for doing so in mind; the infamous Troper Tales pages are a particularly fruitful source of examples, although it's likely that a lot of the more extreme ones come out of attempts at trolling.
Even if we discount active attempts at deception, that site selects for people who spend a lot of time thinking about character types, and additionally has the right demographics for many of them to put an excessively high priority on looking cool; it's wise to take this sort of character identification with several grains of salt. As best I can tell the motivations involved aren't usually all that villainous relative to most external observers, but it's self-image that's at issue here.
A fictional example of someone wanting to be a villain might be Shakespeare's Richard III. In the opening soliloquy in the play:
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardiii/full.html
Of course, the real Richard III probably wasn't that bad a chap, just poorly treated by Tudor propaganda (arguably)...
And it is so argued.