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DSimon comments on Have no heroes, and no villains - Less Wrong
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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.