31 People Who Singlehandedly Made the World Worse

‘Whoever decided to eat that bat a couple years ago’
31 People Who Singlehandedly Made the World Worse
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“One person can change the world” is usually peddled as a positive idea. A way to encourage young idealists so that they’re not ground down to depressed doormats for the world to trod over before they make it out of college. It is, however, true — just not always in the way we’d like. 

That singlehanded change has also been achieved by some villains from history, whether their actions were intentional or misguided. Read on for Redditors’ nominations of humans who swung the whole world onto the wrong path.

Harry-D-Hipster . 4y ago Mugabe, no one? single handedly turned a prosperous bread basket of Africa into extreme poverty with famine and hilarious infamous hyperinflation in a matter of decades. World leaders world wide are aware of this but kept looking away.
monadoboyX 4y ago It's not one person but the people who had the patent for electric cars but never did anything with it because they wanted to make money in fuel electric cars should have been a thing 30 years ago but millionaire wanted money so we are only just getting them now and unfortunately the damage we have done to the atmosphere is irreversible it's very sad
jaiagreen 4y ago Gavrilo Princip, the guy who shot Archduke Ferdinand and triggered WWI. And if that wasn't bad enough, the consequences of WWI led directly to WWII. The damage wasn't just the millions who died in the wars. It was the loss of the optimism of the time and the progress that it drove. After the war, people became less open to daring ideas and more skeptical of the possibility of progress. How much progress did that alone cost us?
RamenTheory . 4y ago Whoever decided to eat that bat a couple years ago
Strong-Second-2446 . . 4y ago King Leopold 2 Не wrecked havoc on the Congo, committed atrocities, and basically committed mass genocide. Scholars still don't know how many died under his reign, the range goes from 1 million to about 15 million.
Prof_Acorn 4y ago John Calvin. You know all the things you hate about Christians? I'd wager most, if not all, of them can be traced to John Calvin. (And Anselm as a dishonorable mention). His heresy informed the Puritans, which informed the origins of American society, which informs the norms of the west today. Individualism? Social darwinism? Belief that people are generally broken and evil? The view that people get what they deserve and the poor, the wretched, anyone struggling in life caused it and this deserve it? That the rich and happy deserve it? The Evangelicals in the US
4y ago Charles Koch That bastard will most likely be responsible for the extinction of humanity. He's spend the last 40 years propping up global warming denying nonsense so that Koch Industries can make more money.
DivyamAgrawal . 4y ago The guy who rejected Adolf Hitler's art school application
_WildeBeest_ 4y ago Harry J. Anslinger. The guy who kick-started the criminilization of drugs and layed all the groundworks for the global disaster that is The War on Drugs. This man was so evil and deluded and he has millions of deaths and destroyed lives to answer for.
- BATAINS Issue . GANES COULD ANDA ALT Not-the-batman 4y ago Queen Victoria, she was responsible for the deaths of around 60 million people in Brazil, China, India, and Ireland. In all of these cases the crown participated in the exporting of goods from famine struck areas, and waged campaigns to make poverty worse.
4y ago Edited 4y ago Charles Babbage. It wasn't necessarily malicious, but he hindered progress of computers for around 100 years. In the 1800s (industrial revolution) he designed a working computer. Не had interested buyers. Не had financial backwards. Не had created designs for analytical engines that wouldn't be created until the next century. And what did he do with all of this? Nothing. No final product was manufactured or released, and we didn't end up with computers until the 1900s.
Mesa 17 4y ago Mao Zedong. During The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, 50 million people died either by starvation, or killed by Mao's Red Guards. Mao actively did everything he could to destroy Chinese culture, shut down universities, and murder intellectuals. You can thank Mao the Monster for how China is today.
MichiganGeezer 4y ago Erich Ludendorff. Не caused a lot of deaths in WW1, then formed Adolph Hitler into the charming fellow he was. Remember when Adolph was locked up and writing that idiotic book? Не committed his crimes with the megalomaniac Ludendorff, who was spared the same jail time. Erich had a major hand in the deaths of TWO world wars.
Thereisnopurpose12 . 4y ago Whoever seized all of Nikola Tesla's chests and papers after he died.
. 4y ago up there would be Diego de Landa, who burned all of the Mayan books in the name of Christianity, on July 12th, 1561.
FrederickDerGrossen 4y ago Edited 4y ago Genghis Khan. While he personally didn't do much to hinder human progress, his reign began an era of Mongol expansionism and devastation, and his successors were responsible for the destruction of the House of Wisdom of Baghdad, ending the Islamic Golden Age, and not to mention the destruction of numerous cities and the deaths of many. Also the Mongol Empire eventually paved the way for the Black Death, the Empire led to many trade routes being formed between Europe and Asia, which eventually led to the transmission of the Black Death to Europe in
a 4y ago Edited 4y ago That monk who glued a page of geometry and algebra together to write prayers on it instead. Set the world of maths back about 300/400 years. Edit: Here you go. A Greek monastery held the papers for a whole, then it was overwritten with prayers
terry_shogun . 4y ago Because of the butterfly effect, Ug. If Ug hadn't hit Bog with that rock in 200000BC we'd be a galaxy spanning utopian civilization by now.
invisiblepeep 4y ago Edward Bernays. Не created modern day PR, which set the blueprint on how to control the masses by deception.
Lit-Rature 4y ago Sir Mark Sykes This man was the british element in the Sykes- Picot agreement. For those of you not in the know, 100 years ago the Middle-East was an area that did have some nations and some more tribal areas. So people were more divided by language and culture, some by religion. France and Britain decided to carve up the Middle-East into easier to govern territories, but fumbled this task and instead divided the territories on the map OVER these religious and tribal lines.
SorcererSupreme13 4y ago Bakhtiyar Khilji. Hands down. In 12th century there was the world's biggest university in India named Nalanda where intellectuals from all around the world used to study. Then Turks invaded India under Khilji. They killed almost all the intellectuals and destroyed the university. And they BURNT the library. The library continued to burn for 3 MONTHS. This has to be by far the biggest loss to mankind imo.
. 4y ago That stupid fish that decided to leave water.
boarderwhoskis 4y ago The Exxon scientists who first learned of man made climate change in the late 70s and chose to cover it up.
nobd7987 4y ago Edited 4y ago Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty in China ordered the fleet of Zheng Не, the greatest trading and exploration fleet of the time, to be burned during his reign in the early 1400's. This was the beginning of an era of isolation for Chinese kingdoms, which ultimately lead to the collapse of imperial China, and indirectly to the rise of the PRC. Additionally, the wealth of the world overall decreased as a result of reduced trade with China, and if China had continued exploring it is possible that they, not Europeans, would have colonized
kmabadshah . 4y ago . Edited 4y ago The Ottoman Caliphs who banned the printing press from the muslim world. That's exactly how you destroy a civilization.
danfromwaterloo 4y ago I would suggest Andrew Wakefield. His work 'lleal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children has been directly responsible for the mistrust of vaccines, the decline of Western rates of vaccination, and basically telling everybody that there's a boogeyman underneath your bed. Не is directly responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths. He's a scientist who made a mistake! Why are you blaming him?! It's not that he made a mistake. Не had purposely customized the outcomes to meet the hypothesis so that he could get rich selling safe vaccines and diagnostic kits. Не poisoned
Artivia . 4y ago Edited 4y ago Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislane. The man was the leading cause of paywalled scientific articles today. Before him science publishing was relatively open. Не helped shape the industry into the cancer on academia it is today
OctupussPrime . 4y ago The Mongolians, army of Hulagu, when they destroyed Baghdad's libraries that contained many of the past knowledge that setback humanity years.
better_than_shane 4y ago Edited 4y ago Guy de Chauliac. Не was a surgeon in the 1300s who vehemently spoke out against another fellow surgeon, Theodoric Borgognoni. Theodoric was a surgeon who wrote about his theories on proper wound care and believed that the best thing you can do to a wound is wrap it and keep it clean. Guy hated what Theodoric was writing because it directly went against the teachings of Galen, an Ancient Greek surgeon who believed pus was the body's way of balancing your humors. Guy's teachings were widely accepted and it's believed that his ignorance set
Star_Trekker 4y ago Trofim Lysenko. A Soviet biologist who thought Gregor Mendel was a reactionary whose thoughts had no place in the Soviet Union. Не tried to reinvent agricultural practices to maximize productivity, having farmers put seeds very close together under his belief that plants who belong to the same class will not compete for nutrients. Не was given the Order of Lenin eight times for his pseudoscience, while his theories contributed to the deaths of millions through famines that plagued the USSR. Later he was finally discredited after Stalin's death, but then Mao Zedong adopted his practices, which helped
nat3dog3 4y ago Edited 4y ago Thomas Midgley Jr. Не played a major role in development of tetraethyllead (leaded gasoline ) which went into mass production throughout the 1920's. This invention meant that the blood lead content in developing children rose causing numerous problems, including cognitive issues and physical growth, it was also noticed that the rise in blood lead content matched with violence in adolescents in multiple countries. Midgley is also accountable for the discovery of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) specifically Freon which as many know had a drastic impact on the Ozone. As of October 2020 the Ozone hole above Antarctica sits

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