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There are villains, and then there are monsters, and then there are creatures so cosmically, transcendently, almost admirably terrible that language itself recoils from the task of describing them.

Grammar buckles. Syntax weeps. The thesaurus slams itself shut and refuses to cooperate. He is this thing. He is the thing past the thing past the thing. He is the sub-basement of the human condition, the moldy crawlspace beneath that sub-basement, and the writhing centipede beneath that.

To call him despicable is to call the sun "a little warm." To call him hatable is to say that the Black Death was "somewhat inconvenient." He does not merely inspire hatred. He manufactures it, industrializes it, ships it wholesale to people who had never previously experienced a single negative emotion in their lives.

Buddhists who have spent forty years meditating toward unconditional love have encountered him briefly and immediately relapsed into pure, screaming fury. Pacifists clench their fists. Quakers throw things. He has caused more apostasy, more broken vows, more abandoned philosophies than any theological crisis in recorded history, simply by existing in the same zip code as decent people.

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He has no morals. Not a single one. Not even the bad morals that at least imply a moral framework: the corrupt cop who loves his dog, the mob boss who goes to church. No. He exists in a morality vacuum so total that ethicists have proposed naming it after him. Philosophy departments around the world now use him as a thought experiment: "Imagine a being entirely without moral content. Not evil, because evil requires intention. Simply absent of the entire apparatus." He is the null set of conscience. A moral negative space shaped vaguely like a man.

He has no empathy. Scientists have confirmed this. They put him in a brain scanner and watched his amygdala just sit there, inert, like a raisin, unmoved by footage of suffering, by crying children, by injured animals, by literally anything. The researchers wept. He asked if there were snacks.

He has no sympathy either, which is worse, because sympathy doesn't even require feeling. It only requires pretending. He cannot manage the performance. He cannot fake it. When people around him suffer, his face rearranges itself into an expression that experts have described as "a beige wall trying to look interested." He is incapable of the most basic social theater that even sociopaths manage. He makes sociopaths look like Florence Nightingale.