I did some volunteer work in town for a couple of organizations that are supposedly trying to do economic development and I was trying to use that as a means to make connections and develop a better income.
I had applied for a job locally and the guy that got it fits your terrific description: He's a manipulator and has no talent for doing the job. He was stealing ideas from me and actively denying me credit, thereby killing my hopes of establishing a better income on the ground locally.
He and other people were loading me up with volunteer work because I was actually getting things done and he apparently wasn't. He measured his so-called productivity in terms of the number of meetings he attended each month.
I quit all my volunteer work last year in May. It wasn't any one thing and he wasn't the only reason. Part of it was the pandemic and I just didn't want to become "the dog everyone kicks" because we are all losing our marbles during a pandemic.
I am absolutely certain that after I quit in part to try to escape his abusive bullshit, this awful guy continued to cyberstalk me and steal ideas from me without giving me credit, like he did when I was doing volunteer work in a good faith effort to help my town become a better place. And I cannot tell you how burned, used and pissed off I feel about his amazingly shitty, abusive behavior. It's gone way beyond the pale for being anything understandable or excusable.
But I think one element of why he was able to get away with his crap is that I did a lot of volunteer work when I was a homemaker and a number of people involved in these organizations are married women doing volunteer work themselves (mostly retirees in this case). And I think some of these people failed to connect the dots that I was obviously very poor and clearly trying to improve my income.
I think some of them just sort of mentally lumped me in with other women there who weren't there with any goal of improving their own income because they have enough.
That one guy who was stealing my ideas and intentionally screwing me over -- his behavior is outright unethical and wholly unforgivable. But I have mixed feelings about the part other people played and I can see where some of them just sort of assumed on some level that I was a comfortably well off homemaker whose man was taking care of her even though that clearly was not true.
And that's partly because I am a former homemaker and likely behaved a lot like these other women who have well-heeled husbands and don't need to network to try to establish an income. I "read" as being enough like them that kind of on autopilot they failed to get the memo that "I'm here because you people are supposedly doing economic development and I'm dirt poor and need more earned income."
Like you, I also take time to gather information and make a decision based on context and patterns over time. Abusers, like the guy stealing my ideas, like to interpret that as "She's put up with it this long. She will keep putting up with it."
That seems to be a key difference. Decent people seem to be more aware that "I've got two strikes against me already. I need to get it right from here on out or I'm through." and abusers are like "They let it slide twice. They will clearly let it slide again and I can count on this indefinitely." (And then they actively try to con you into "just one more chance...just one more chance.." ad infinitum.)
And it's a case of "I know you actually know better and are intentionally being abusive because you keep trying to take more from me even after I've tried to cut your sorry ass out of my life, you piece of shit of a human being."
This is far beyond "I gave freely and he just was too stupid to realize that I expected him to actually do his job and help me improve my income." He's not qualified to do the job. He knows that. He obviously knows that and has zero plans to actually do the job and had zero compunction about actively denying me opportunity -- in direct contradiction to his duties -- so he could pretend to have ideas of his own and pretend to work just enough to keep his paycheck.
Keeping his paycheck was his only real goal and he doesn't care that he's not only crapping all over me, he's crapping all over this small town that is paying him to make the town better.
He's basically a vampire. I think he absolutely knows that and isn't at all bothered by it. He has zero ethics or conscience.