From the Vault: Cynicism, Part 3

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Whether you're new to growing or already know your way around the garden, we've got the plants, tools, and expert advice to help transform your outdoor space. And when your shopping is done, relax and refuel in our restaurants. Find your nearest centre at British Garden on the I Heart Radio app. BritishGardenCenters.com. For every gardener, for every garden, for everyone. Make it bloom with British Garden Centres. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have a vault episode for you. This is going to be part three of four in our cynicism series. This episode originally published for 22, 2025. Let's dive right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick, and today we are returning with part three in our series on cynicism, the tendency to believe that other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral. In part one of the series, we defined cynicism in its modern usage along the lines I just said, and we distinguished it from other concepts like pessimism and from the cynic school of philosophy founded in ancient Greece, which was not defined by thinking about other people as morally bad and undeserving of trust, but instead by the idea that people should strive for self-sufficiency and moral integrity based on living according to our nature, sort of throwing off the hypocrisies that are mandated by culture. And I think this goal of exposing hypocrisy is one of the few threads you might find between modern cynicism and ancient cynic philosophy, though still with some differences. It's not quite this simple, but I was thinking the other day about it. I think you could say cynic philosophy was like, hypocrisy is bad and I'm going to try to get rid of it, whereas modern cynicism is more like, everybody's a hypocrite, you can't trust them. So a decay from what was once a positive mission for truth into a kind of surrender to the idea that we're all living a lie. In part one, we also talked about research into the correlates of modern cynicism. So like if I am highly cynical, what are the effects of that on my life? It turns out there's a lot of research on this question and the answer is the effects are overwhelmingly negative. Cynicism appears to be bad for health outcomes, leading to things like cardiovascular disease, depression, substance abuse and early death. It is correlated with lower quality relationships, a decreased tendency to pursue certain types of goals. And even contrary to the very familiar image of the cynical Machiavellian elite power player, and of course we can think of individual examples of this from the real world, on average cynicism actually makes it harder for regular people to achieve even cynically coded material goals like money and positions of power, probably because in part cynicism makes people less likely to cooperate with others, and thus less likely to benefit from relationships of mutual trust. In part two, we followed up on a number of tangents from the first episode, and we also took a detailed look at a paper on the so-called cynical genius illusion. The short version of this is that while people don't necessarily like cynics, we do tend to believe on average that cynics are more intelligent and more cognitively competent than non-cynics. For example, people are more likely to assign a cynical person jobs like doing mathematical calculations or reviewing charts of scientific results. And this is in line with the long running archetype in fiction of the cynical genius like Sherlock Holmes, someone who withholds trust and has a very low opinion of human nature, but also has superior knowledge, memory, and powers of reasoning. One thing that I neglected to bring up when we were talking about the Sherlock Holmes trope is that there is a distinction to be made between skepticism and cynicism. Yes. Now, you can imagine where the line begins to blur at some points, and certainly as we've been discussing, your cynicism level may not be constant throughout your life. You may drift back and forth. And so you can imagine a scenario where one is essentially a skeptic, but then that may sort of stray into cynical territory. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was thinking about the distinction there also. I was in fact talking about this with Rachel, and I guess we never got into this in the previous parts, but I think there is a big difference between how I use the word cynicism and skepticism. For me, skepticism is an attempt to dole out your trust according to how trustworthy something is based on the evidence. It's essentially trying to overcome your natural biases to be more trusting or less trusting than the situation actually deserves. It's just trying to be as rational as you can. What reasons do I have to trust or distrust? Whereas cynicism is just a bias toward distrust. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. One of the interesting things though is that someone who is truly cynical about a given topic may self-label as skeptical. And that can lead to a fair amount of confusion. Right, well, of course, if skepticism is defined as being as reasonable as you can with trust, the cynic always thinks they're being reasonable or usually probably thinks they're being reasonable. They just think it is reasonable to have very low trust and think everyone's gonna stab them in the back. And in fact, that brings us back, coming back to the recap of the cynical genius illusion. The question is, are they correct in thinking that? Is the cynic in fact being reasonable and having correct insights that non-cynics lack? The other half of the finding in that paper was that the cynical genius illusion is actually an illusion. Highly cynical people are not smarter or more knowledgeable on average. In fact, in the majority of scenarios tested, the association runs the other way with education and intelligence being correlated with a greater tendency to trust. The big caveat here, of course, is that cynicism is warranted in some situations, in particularly corrupt situations and scenarios. So it seems like a common pattern the researchers found is that knowledgeable and intelligent people might be more trusting by default, but shift into cynical mode when they recognize that they are dealing with a corrupt and untrustworthy situation or environment. And in fact, that would sort of line up with how I just defined skepticism, right? It's sort of like detecting reliable signals from your environment, essentially paying attention to evidence of how trustworthy the situation you're in is. But anyway, this study and some studies cited by it helped us answer some questions we raised in part one. First of all, do cynics or non-cynics have a more accurate model of the world? Of course, it's hard to answer that question in a way that averages out all environments in all situations. It's kind of hard to say who's more correct overall, but at least in a bunch of experimental scenarios, random strangers are much more trustworthy than we tend to give them credit for. One example of this was that trust-based investing game we talked about where researchers give you an initial reward of money. So they give you $5 and then you have the option to either just keep the five or hand that money to a stranger, which quadruples the initial sum, turning $5 into $20. And then the stranger has the option to either keep all the money or give you back half of the total sum, doubling your initial investment. So you started with five, you end up with 10 if the stranger gives you the money back. And in these types of experiments, strangers tended to be cooperative and trustworthy in the overwhelming number of cases. People doubted them way too often. So again, that doesn't tell you about every situation in life, but it is a piece of evidence that people on average tend to overestimate other people's selfishness. And thus the highly cynical person is probably gonna miss out on lots of opportunities to trust and to benefit from cooperation. But the other question that study shed some light on for us was since generalized cynicism has so many horrible downsides, it's like really bad for you in so many ways, not just for the people around the cynic, but for the cynic themselves. What are its upsides, if any? And there were a few answers here. If you are not good at being able to recognize the difference between a corrupt situation and a trustworthy one, generalized cynicism may help you avoid catastrophic outcomes from misplacing your trust. But again, this comes at great cost. It's sort of, you know, we have to destroy the town in order to save it. Yeah, or you can imagine like a biological analogy would be some sort of an organism that has had to extend a great deal of energy into evolving some sort of like highly protective shell that also slows it down and restricts its range or something to that effect. Exactly, I think that's a great analogy. And then the other thing being that cynicism may have, according to the cynical genius effect, the socially desirable effect of making you appear smarter and more competent to others. Again, this comes at great cost. Like Sherlock Holmes is cool, you might wanna seem smart like Sherlock Holmes, but given all the downsides, the Sherlock gambit is probably not worth it, at least in my opinion. Anyway, we're back today to talk about more. Yeah, and in this episode, we're gonna get a little bit into social media and politics, which shouldn't come as a surprise, right? Cynicism, social media, politics, these are all, I think, expected waters. Wait, did you mean to sound cynical when you were saying that? Was that the joke? Probably, probably. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to feel cynical about all of this sort of thing, right? So just looking, considering just say cynicism and social media, like this alone is a really big area to get into. And likewise, political cynicism is another huge topic. Both of these have been topics of discussion and analysis for years and years and years. Yes, and I would say, of course, the relationship between cynicism and politics is especially important to understand within democracies, within places of popular political participation and civil liberties and freedoms. Whether you are cynical about the political structures you live under matters a lot less if you are like a peasant in medieval France than it does if you are somebody who is free to act within a democracy, free to vote and run for office yourself and engage in political rhetoric. Yeah, yeah, because it means coming to believe that the thing that you can do that matters, does it matter? And then it's like the old saying, by doing nothing, all problems are solved. So one of the books that I referenced in the first episode is the MIT Press book on cynicism by Ansgar Allen. And Allen digs into this topic a lot. And I won't attempt to cover every point that he makes and every point that he brings up on the matter, but there's some really good nuggets of wisdom and observation in here related to the level of high energy, negative and critical rhetoric that you tend to find on the internet and on social media, very much encouraged for profit by service providers and social media companies, as we've discussed in the past. So I've long been a fan of the LA-based artist collective known as Everything is Terrible. Joe, I know you're familiar with them as well. Oh yeah. Their slogan is, if everything is terrible, then nothing is. That's great. I think that statement is meant with a dash of irony, but yeah, everything is terrible is great. You may have seen videos of theirs, even if you're not familiar with the name of like supercuts of weird moments from old found media. One of my favorites of all time is, I think everything is terrible, did the video of, it was just moments from a video cassette that accompanied a Star Trek board game where there's like a Klingon guy who keeps like screaming at you to punish you. It was one of those things where they were trying to do like mixed media board games, I think in the late 80s or early 90s, where like, I don't know, you put the tape in and then you'd have to roll stuff. And anyway, this guy keeps suddenly there's a Klingon popping on the TV saying like, you the one who is moving now, punishment. Yeah, yeah, there's several different individuals involved with that over the years. And yeah, they resurrect different bits of old media and then often supercut them into some sort of a presentation. If you ever get to get the chance to see them live, it's well worth it. So if everything is terrible, then nothing is. Allen brings up this exact point amid contemplations on the possible death of philosophy in modern times, citing German philosopher and social critic, Peter Sloterdijk, who frequently cites ancient cynic diogenes as pooping in public in his evaluation of modern cynicism as well. So Allen, now I should clarify though, Allen in discussing Sloterdijk's ideas, he sees them as an overstatement. But Sloterdijk says that quote, because everything has become problematic, everything is also now a matter of indifference. So I'm not sure I understand the context of that, right? But the way I guess I'd interpret that at face value is like because of our increasing sort of critical consciousness and awareness of the world, you can sort of find that there are flaws in literally everything. And thus if there are flaws in literally everything, nothing matters. Yeah, yeah. And especially if you're just hyper aware of all of the negative stories. You know, and this has been the case for a while. I mean, it comes back to some of the very ancient ideas of how do you survive in the world maybe focusing a little more on the dangers, certainly. You know, if it bleeds, it leads and so forth. But the social media age, as we've discussed in the show before, you know, various social media algorithms have long favored engagement over everything else. And engagement can certainly mean things like love and excitement, like look, a cute cat, or look, there's a new John Carpenter Blu-ray, but it can also just mean hate, anger and disgust. Yes, where your emotions become a tech company's business model because your emotions are correlated to behavior on the app and your susceptibility, you know, how long you stay on the app, how long you scroll, you know, whether you're likely to click on ads and things like that. And it turns out that certain emotions, I think positive and negative emotions when manipulated in certain ways have been found to increase people's engagement. But the negative emotions, it seems like those are really easy. That's an easy button to push. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it can often feel like you're just being bombarded by all of this. And I mean, there's a strong case to be made that this is weaponized to a certain extent by various players, right? If there's just enough bad news coming at you, if there's enough controversy, then, you know, what are you gonna respond to? You can't possibly respond to all of it, and maybe you end up responding to nothing at all. But you have to keep scrolling because there's something you don't know about yet. Now, Alan cites that all of this is an overstatement because according to him, for individuals to truly feel this way, their cynicism would have to be complete. And this reminds me a bit in theme of something that's come up on the show before. Author, R. Scott Baker had this idea, something he called the Semantic Apocalypse, in which, quote, all the shoulds of a meaningful life are either individual or subcultural. As a result, the only universal imperatives that remain are those arising out of our shared biology, our fears and hungers. So everything else just kind of shuts down, descends into chaos or entropy. So absolute widespread cynicism would, to paraphrase the words of Slaughter Dyke, be a situation where everything is poop in the street and people are nauseated all the time. Okay, sounds bad. Yeah, yeah. My understanding is we would be talking about a world in which cynicism concerning the human experience at large becomes more absolute. And basically we withdraw into individual and localized efforts. But Allen's counterargument here is that most people are not so absolutely cynical. He contends, quote, modern cynicism is driven not by generalized apathy, but by incomplete disenchantment. In other words, his argument here is that modern cynics have not entirely submitted themselves to cynicism. They never hit rock bottom, the point at which they might be forced to confront their own cynicism. And so he mentions how, coming back to the idea of diogenes, again, living in the streets among dogs and rags and shrouds, pooping in the streets, he brings up this public defecation as a shock tactic that's meant to make a point, quote, how funny is it that you find this upsetting? And that the modern cynic is just not nauseated enough by the reality they're faced with to the point where they make that big C cynic shift toward the pursuit of virtue. Okay. So almost as if we're forever weightless in our cynicism, free falling toward a point of forced self-recognition and revelation that we never quite reach. Like an imagined space vessel inching ever closer to the speed of light, but unable to actually touch it. Or to quote Allen again, he refers to his quote, unembedded but is yet underdeveloped negativity. Interesting. Okay. Wait, so am I interpreting this right then? Essentially that Allen is suggesting that maybe if cynicism were more intense and more total, that would actually lead to a kind of horseshoe boomerang into seeing value and virtue again. Exactly. Yeah. That is exactly the point I believe he's making is that we're just with this incomplete disenchantment with the world. Like we think things are bad, we've lost trust in establishments, but we haven't completely bottomed out. Like to the point where we actually look up and potentially begin scaling back up this ladder of virtue. Hmm. I wonder, I wonder about that. I don't know if it really works that way, but I'm interested in the idea. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting concept. And the idea here is that social media would be part of that equation. Allen writes the quote, the visceral discomfort of a live audience gathered before the defecating cynic, that's a capital cynic as in the philosopher, has been replaced by a virtual audience that turns indignation into profit. So an internet ecosystem that thrives on bad sentiments and becomes characterized by just nonstop righteous indignation. But one that is discouraged from actually going anywhere positive, instead just kind of festering negative emotion. Yeah. Now this made me think about past discussions of the ideas of Jiren Lanier. And I don't know that he ever directly invoked cynicism in any of his works or not ones I'm familiar with, but one of his basic observations was that social media companies reduce us to data and to a product that's sold to advertisers. And there's an inherent modern cynicism to that view of people, like the people are the product and people are data. While at the same time, realizing this can fuel individual cynicism towards the entire social media endeavor to the point that it's really hard to trust even alternate decentralized social media alternatives. Or at least that's how it seems to me. Now there have been a number of papers about this over the years, there have been some studies, a recent study published in the International Journal of Press Politics by Hassel et al. Digs into this a little bit. And also there have been some past papers by the lead author here, Ariel Hassel. The basic idea that I was reading about from this author is that political cynicism is on the rise in democracies around the world, as people increasingly use social media to access their news as well as additional political information, much of which is hostile and lacking in civility. This should come as no surprise. If you are not aware of this phenomena, then God bless you, because you have stayed out of the mud of all of this over the past decade. I think this is broadly what's found by research in general, but Rob, maybe you can let me know what you've come across here. At least in myself, I've noticed that if I, there is a huge difference in how I feel about the same news, when I'm getting it from like reading articles in a newspaper or online newspaper, versus seeing it by scrolling social media, gigantic difference in how I process that. Even very bad and distressing news when I'm reading about it in news articles, I feel like my response to it is more measured and productive. My mind tends to go to what would be things that could be done to fix this situation, that sort of thing. Whereas when I consume basically the same news events by like say scrolling on a social media, I tend to not do this these days, but I can remember from other times, and I have done it a few times recently, profoundly different emotional experience, one that is much more distressing, and it just creates a feeling of despair and helplessness. Like I do not have a productive response to it, like thinking about things that could be done to make the situation better. It's more just like I want to surrender and curl up in a ball. It's much more disempowering and horrifying. Yeah, and I think that's not an uncommon experience. MUSIC Now coming back to this study from the international Journal of Press Politics. This is basically what they found out. Based on a panel survey of 1800 American adults during the 2020 election, they found that the more a person was exposed to political attacks on social media, the more politically cynical they became. Yeah, okay. Exposure led to anger with increased political cynicism. Thus, it became this kind of like rodent wheel of exposure, anger, rising cynicism. Then more exposure, more anger, more rising cynicism. And to be clear, they characterized this not as a kind of healthy cynicism in response to corruption or failure, which they acknowledge, you know, when the system is corrupt, when there are failures, it's right to have like some response of cynicism. But this is the sort of cynicism that is much more dangerous and can ultimately lead to the delegitimization of democratic process. I might make the distinction we talked about earlier between skepticism and cynicism. Yes. Like that it can be very healthy to be skeptical of politics, to not just take politicians word for it, you know, to look for evidence of claims and things like that, versus cynicism where you just have a bias toward negative emotion and low opinions of moral character. Yeah, yeah. And what's interesting here too is that it ultimately goes beyond the sort of like, you could frame it as positive political fear mongering, or you know, the sort of anxiety-fueling messaging that does get people to the polls, that does inspire some sort of action. But instead, we're getting to like the level where it can result in cynical inaction, where it's not like, well, I'm revved up. I'm going to go do something about it. It's I'm revved up, but I can do nothing about it because thus is the world. Now, to go back to that discussion of cynical poop in the streets, again, it's not that you're fed up with all the poop and want to do something about it or in response to it. Rather, you're just generally nauseated by all the poop you see, and you just engage from seeing it all together. So that is one type of response to political cynicism. I came across a paper talking about talking about it a little bit differently that I think has some interesting insights here. So I was looking for research that studied the particular characteristics of how cynicism is expressed in political behavior. And it turns out there's a decent amount of research on this going back many years. Actually, there's a long running link in the in the literature between high cynicism and a preference for authoritarian rhetoric and governance, authoritarianism being the concentration of power under a central authority, under a figure or structure, often a single person, and the repression of individual freedoms, especially the forceful suppression of dissent. So I wanted to look at one pretty highly cited paper on the subject of cynicism and politics. And this was published in the year 2012 in the European Journal of Personality by Sven Patten, Elaine van Heil, Christoph Daut, and Emma Onrit. And it's called Stripping the Political Cynic, a Psychological Exploration of the Concept of Political Cynicism. Now, this was a study of how cynicism manifests in politics in multiple samples, specifically from Western Europe. And the authors note multiple times that some of these results could be culture specific. And so cynicism could manifest differently in one culture than it does in another, or differently in one type of political system than it does in another. But at least looking at these samples in Belgium and the Netherlands, they found some interesting results. And I'm not going to be able to get into everything the study found, but a few bullets that stood out to me. The authors were able to detect political cynicism as its own variable, which was distinct from just generalized social cynicism, which we've been talking about throughout this series, and from somewhat distinct from what they call political distrust. Now, what would be the difference there? Political cynicism is cynicism applied specifically to politics and politicians. So if general cynicism is the belief that people are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake, political cynicism is the belief that politics and politicians are bad, they're motivated by self-interest, and are unbound by professed morals. Political cynicism is also differentiated here from simple distrust of politicians and of politics. And I think a simple way of explaining this slight difference is, if I have political distrust, I am cautious about believing politicians and what they say. I think that politicians and political institutions may in some cases have incentives to lie or to make promises they can't keep, so I am skeptical of what they say. And I try, you know, I am withholding some trust. So there is this withholding trust element. But if I have high political cynicism, I not only treat their claims skeptically and withhold trust, but I also think politicians and political institutions are bad, corrupt, and in it exclusively for themselves. So it's like more of a negative emotional and moral judgment against politics, not just caution or skepticism about the claims emanating from it. Does that distinction make sense? Yes. So in this study, the authors found evidence that political cynicism was its own thing. And while related to general social cynicism and political distrust, it had its own distinct predictive characteristics separate from those other two categories. Political cynicism in particular was a predictor of a bunch of other variables in a person. It tended to be related to feelings of political powerlessness and political normlessness. So kind of there's nothing I can do. And also there is no right or wrong in politics, just power. The authors also find that people high in political cynicism do not always just sit out of politics. And we've talked about, or we mentioned at least in previous parts, some other studies finding that people high in general cynicism were less likely to vote, less likely to be involved in the political process. But in this study, they did not find that political cynics were always sitting things out, at least within the context of the samples from Belgium and the Netherlands. The rate of voting among political cynics is not very different from that of less cynical people. But people high in political cynicism tended to view their vote more as a protest or as a rebuke of the political system rather than a means of advancing a specific policy agenda. Quote, political cynics boost parties not for their ideological program, per se, but rather because of their supposed integrity. So it's not so much about the policies that the party they're supporting is proposing, but more often about like, this is the only party that really tells it like it is. The authors say political cynicism can be found all across the political spectrum, but in this context in these Western European democracies, it tended to manifest most in support of extreme right-wing protest parties that use anti-establishment rhetoric. And the authors say it's possible that this link is specific to Belgium and the Netherlands. At this time, the study was from 2012. And it's possible that in a different political environment, cynicism could be more left-wing coded or maybe even centrist. More research would be needed on that. However, another dimension is that the authors here also found a link between high political cynicism, racial prejudice and intolerance. This is in line with previous findings in political psychology. And the research was only able to establish a correlation, not to determine if there was a causal effect between these variables. And so it invites the question, if there is an effect, which way does the effect go? Does racial prejudice tend to cause people to become politically cynical? Or does political cynicism tend to cause people to become more racist? It could be thought, of course, that political cynicism serves to support racist assumptions if the racist believes the political system is working to the benefit of racial groups they dislike. But it also could be that racial prejudice itself is maybe a particular variety or expression of underlying cynicism. And so ultimately, political cynicism, it seems, is certainly a thing that is distinct in itself. It's related to, but distinct from, general social cynicism. And its expression is a very important factor in understanding how democracies work. So if you're involved in political science or political psychology, and you want to understand and be able to model and predict democracies, you need to understand political cynicism. It is a factor. But another way I was thinking about the expression of political cynicism is actually related to what we talked about last time, to the cynical genius illusion. The cynical genius illusion study found that while people don't necessarily love cynics or think that they are the best at everything, remember, people were less likely to trust cynics with, say, a social task, like cheering up a depressed friend or taking care of a stray animal or something like that. It found that, you know, so we don't love cynics for everything. We do tend, on average, to assume highly cynical people are smarter and more cognitively competent. And, you know, who doesn't want to be seen as smart? So specifically, I was thinking about how this applies to conversations about politics, where I've had this thought for a while that I think people often selectively deploy cynical rhetoric in political conversations, whether or not they really believe it all that strongly, in order to look like they know what they're talking about without having to get into specifics. So, like, broad sweeping statements of political cynicism, I think last time we mentioned the example, you know, all politicians, they're all the same, you know, or it's just, they're all liars, they're all the same. It allows you to sound like you know what you're talking about and sit up on a high horse about the subject without having to know anything or read anything or follow the news. You can loftily condemn others without having to do any homework. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I think we've seen some very strong examples of this over the past 10 years. And sometimes, sadly, you see it puppeted in, say, comedy and in mainstream rhetoric. One of the main examples being in any case where someone is just talking about a given election and saying, ah, it's just a choice between two bad choices, you know, it was like, both of the choices are just as bad. I mean, that's just like, I mean, that's a great example of lowercase the cynicism where it's like, oh, it doesn't matter. Everything's just as bad. It doesn't, it doesn't matter if I go for one or the other. But it also means you don't have to get into actually comparing the two. Yes. If you assume they're all just as bad, which I mean, is there ever a case where two bad choices are exactly as bad? Yeah. I mean, if you're given a choice between two different toxic mushrooms, there are going to be different symptoms. There are different dosages and so forth. Like they're not exactly the same, even if, yes, in this one cherry picked example, the end result is the same for you, the consumer of the toxic mushroom. I think that's a great analogy. And it's not to say it is illegitimate to say in a, you know, in a two party democracy to dislike both major parties or community debates. And you know, that's fair. But like, yeah, the statement's like, they're all the same. Like if you really meant that, that would be absurd. It couldn't be all exactly the same. Maybe neither is to your liking. But if you phrased it that way, that might invite people to ask follow up questions like, well, in what way? Yeah. Like what's your scoring method? And is it a scoring method where, yeah, you reach an absolute zero, but you can't get underneath a zero. So you can just have them bottomed out and equal, I guess. But that doesn't sound like a great scoring mechanism. And you know what? I want to say also that I think there is a more innocuous version of this exact thing. I mean, I've been framing it in a kind of like, I'm framing this hypothetical person in a kind of unfriendly way. Like they're trying to seem smart without doing any homework. But there's also a more common, you know, you might say at least seemingly benign version of it where you're just trying to like, sort of get through a tense moment in a conversation or like get through something quickly. I don't know, with a relative or something like that, just by making a kind of quick sweep it all under the rug conversation, you know, statement about politics just to like avoid having a difficult conversation go on. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah. It just is an escape hatch for an unpleasant conversation, that sort of thing. I think people do that sort of thing all the time, even if they're not like trying to look like a cynical genius. And to an extent that functions the same kind of way. It's just like, it's a defense mechanism. It's a way of using cynicism to avoid uncomfortable specifics, whether that's like revealing that you don't have as much knowledge as you would like to appear to have or, you know, revealing sort of uncomfortable tensions and differences between people. Yeah. And I think also we have to acknowledge that this sort of cynicism can arise. I mean, certainly in response to the very sort of social media bombardments that we've been talking about, but also as a direct result of manipulation and disinformation that can, you know, force you into this mode. So I want to be good not to completely forgive cynicism as it manifests, but we have to acknowledge like the complexity of its manifestation in a given person as a response to streams of information and their overall media, political, social environment. So in this series, I think at several points, it's clear I'm coming down somewhat normatively against cynicism in a lot of scenarios. But I also think it's like very important to understand and be sympathetic to the pressures that give rise to cynicism and to understand how we're all susceptible to it. Even people who are not high in cynicism, like we've talked about, we have cynical moments and we might well become more cynical over time if we sort of water those little cynical instincts and let them grow. Yeah. But anyway, coming back to that idea I raised of trying to leverage expressions of cynicism to make yourself look better or to come off more favorably in conversation. I did find a study on this. So it wasn't just a hunch. There's a study in the Journal Public Opinion Quarterly in 2024 by Hillary K. Stile called impression management and expectations of political cynicism. And this found that cynicism specifically with reference to politics was a means that people use to try to control how others perceive them. To read from the abstract quote, in three studies, I demonstrate that people report they are cynical in order to avoid giving the impression they do not know much about politics. Political cynicism is not a socially desirable characteristic. People do not believe cynicism is normatively good. At the same time, many see value to cynicism in politics, a finding which carries broad implications for the relationship between cynicism and perceived knowledge in political discourse. And so I think that's important too, like recognizing that you might not be overall a highly cynical person and yet you might still deploy cynicism specifically with reference to politics. Maybe because of a response to how you perceive politics. You know, maybe you think you're just rationally responding to politics being very corrupt and something that is not worthy of trust or investing the time and energy to figure out who is worth trusting within politics. Or maybe you're trying to manage the impressions you make on other people, which again, despite the kind of unfriendly way I was phrasing it earlier, I mean, that's something we're all always trying to do. I mean, let's be real. I mean, everybody's always to some extent, even if you're a very authentic person or you think you are, you're somewhat trying to control how other people think about you. And it seems that people often think cynicism is one way of avoiding coming off as dumb or not knowing anything about politics. Right, right. And perhaps a way to express neutrality, but kind of like a hard edge neutrality that keeps people from poking at you. Because if you're just like, I don't know yet, I'm just kind of a fact finding area right now. Then people might want to understandably help you with your fact finding. But if you're like, no, I've already figured it all out and everything is horrible, then that kind of pushes people away and they'll be like, OK, fair enough. Though another thing that is interesting going back to the previous study is you might assume at first glance that if you express generalized political cynicism, that is politically neutral. But it turns out that is not the case. In fact, people who express generalized political cynicism were often fans of extreme parties. There actually were supporters of people within the political system. Very often what are considered by most people the extreme wings of the political spectrum, especially at least within the Western European sample here, the extreme right wing anti-establishment parties. But also coming back to the idea of impression management and these little moments in conversation where we might use cynicism to paper over something or try to come off a certain way to kind of get through a tough spot. I had to wonder to what extent these little acts of performative political cynicism, which again may seem harmless enough because you're just trying to get through a conversation without revealing you don't know much or trying to get through some tension. To what extent these actually contribute over time to genuine generalized political cynicism, which is sometimes linked to these toxic attitudes like racism and intolerance, which can erode the legitimacy of democracies, can lead people toward authoritarianism or make them submit to it more easily, even if they don't love it. I think most people listening will probably agree these are bad outcomes. And I don't have a way of proving that these little more harmless seeming moments contribute to that snowball effect overall. But I have to suspect that they do. And it makes me think that I at least personally want to be more careful about having these little harmless seeming moments of cynicism, even in passing. Because I think they do kind of add up when you hear things like that over and over. Yeah, because I feel like on a personal level, you're just kind of going into that cynical mindset more and potentially going into at the very least that area of no hope and no action. But then perhaps in our social interactions, you're kind of like greasing the chute of cynicism for everyone else. Like everyone, if someone has like a cynical trajectory going on and the way they're viewing the world and interacting with others, if they come, if they interact with you and you're just kind of like carry on, let me actually speed you up a little bit as you head down that chute. Like obviously that's not helping anyone. And we don't want to find out what is at the end of that chute. Yeah. Now, at this point, I want to turn our attention not completely away from this topic because it's actually rather related to it. And that is to the interactions between cynicism and conspiracy theories and conspiracy thought. Yeah, I think this is going to be some fertile ground. Yeah, we of course, we've talked about conspiracy theories quite a bit on the show before. Generally, and often discussing the dangers of following their siren song to easy wonder, to prejudice endorsement and more harmful worldviews. And studies have indeed linked belief and conspiracy theories to not only distrust of authority, but also general political cynicism and just general cynicism as well. One paper I was looking at on this topic is from 2013 by Einstein and Glick titled scandals, conspiracies and the vicious cycle of cynicism. And this is this is from the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. And the authors here describe a cycle of cynicism that goes as follows, quote, political scandals diminish trust in government. This lower confidence in turn spurs higher levels of conspiracy belief, even in claims unrelated to ongoing scandals. So the idea being, you know, I think we can all sort of imagine the scenario here. There's some sort of sex scandal here that you're hearing about some sort of money scandal here with other politicians. And it kind of like in your viewpoint, like muddies the water makes them for a cynical political environment. And in that cynical political environment, it seems more likely that they're perhaps covering up UFOs or what have you. I was just thinking about this and about how this type of thinking, I think, benefits from what to use mathematical terms might be sort of like the transit of property of distrust, where it's like if one politician or political institution, government or whatever, has done something to earn your distrust that therefore is evidence against all of them or all objects of that class. So it's like, you know, a politician, a lied, therefore we know politician B is lying. Yeah, yeah. And my own tendency here is also to think about, you know, the desire for we've talked about the desire for for there to be aliens, for there to be UFO visitations. And, you know, and this this is a pretty, you know, rich area as well, you know, in some levels, perhaps its most pure form, there's the idea of like, I want aliens to be real because I want them to come here and solve our problems. Oh, yeah. Or, you know, or it's somehow you drop aliens into all of this and everything makes sense. It's it's going to be a way to understand a confusing world, a confusing and troubling world. But if you want to believe strongly enough, and the scientific world is saying there's no evidence for this, and the government or various government agencies and different governments are saying there's no evidence for this, then one response, one way to keep the dream alive is to just assume that all of these voices that are telling you know are doing so because they are covering something up. Yeah, they must all be evil. Otherwise, why would they lie? Now, of course, this is this is not to say that a government or some sort of governmental body wouldn't have reason to keep the discovery of alien technology or alien existence secret. Exactly. But, you know, in hypothetical incentive to lie is not evidence for the underlying premise. Right. Like how I could say if my wife had actually been replaced by the thing from John Carpenter's the thing, it would make sense for her to lie and say she was not the thing and was in fact still a human. But that is not evidence that she has in fact been cloned by an alien. That's a good point. That's a good point. So I was looking around for some additional thoughts and all of this and I found a 2024 article for proceedings of the International Astronomical Union from philosopher Tony Milligan. And this is interesting because Milligan argues that belief in UFO visitation may well at this point constitute a true societal problem. And while he contends that certainly low level belief and stuff like this and you know fringe belief and enthusiasm for stuff like this is nothing to get bent out of shape about. His point is that is it edges closer to like mainstream belief. Three major problems emerge. One of which is central to our discussion here and the other two I think are also interesting in their own right. One of them is that UFO narratives can sometimes infringe upon and even overwrite indigenous storytelling. I found this interesting because of course we see examples of this in popular conspiracy theories where they they link indigenous beliefs and stories to UFOs and cryptids and so forth. Reinterpreting those traditional stories as a kind of proof and potentially corrupting those stories in the process and not letting those stories just be what they actually are. Right. And you know it's you can note that we do see this with all aspects of history myth and religion. But I think the kicker here is the power imbalance and the appropriation involved. Melgen also says that it all generates noise that distracts from genuine science quote background noise which impedes science communication. So you know we've talked about this before like putting scientists on the defensive regarding something like the like UFOs and so forth instead of you know actually highlighting legitimate scientific efforts that can improve our world. Well right because the kind of UFO conspiracy ideation we're talking about is is always engaging in motivated reasoning. I mean we can you can hypothetically imagine a you know just a sort of a maximally unbiased skeptical UFO researcher who's like I'm just going to look into these claims and see what I find. But there are people like that and in my experience they always find that like yeah there's no good reason to believe any of these stories. Right. And so and so what you're left with among the UFO believers is people who are highly for a variety of reasons motivated to believe already that yes UFOs are real yes they're being hidden. And thus the fact that you do not agree with me is evidence that you are you are at best you know woefully naive and at worst you're part of the conspiracy. Yeah. But the number one point that Milligan makes is that it can lead to erosion of trust in governments and institutions because again if you want to believe if this is your like core belief then you just you just assume that everyone else is covering the aliens up. So of course you're not going to trust governments you're not going to trust institutions you're not going to trust experts and you know yeah if you're a true believer it seems to me. One of the problems here is you'd never be able to 100% shut off the cynicism you know like if the government or institution said tomorrow okay you got us alien life exists. But they say here's the kicker though it's only microbial. Yeah or it you know or even if they were to go even further than that and say all right here's the deal gray aliens absolutely real but like Nordic aliens green aliens and reptilians are totally not real with that that would not please everyone there's no way you could please everyone like there's. I'm you know I'm certainly willing to to admit that it's possible that some of what's out there in the ufology world is real but is all of it 100% real absolutely not there's no it could be so you're always going to have like some level of conspiracy thinking and no matter what could conceivably be revealed. I think this is actually a good point that in some cases could get through to people who are fond of this type of conspiracy ideation because. I think a lot of people in that situation and I'm trying to be sympathetic to people with whom I disagree about a lot of things but. I think a lot of them would recognize if you bring it up that there really isn't a plausible scenario they could imagine where they would be satisfied right like. What okay imagine you know to them that actually we had not been visited by aliens and that's not what you think but imagine it turns out you're wrong and that is the case. What what would satisfy you of that fact what what piece of evidence what like how would you be like okay I'm convinced now. Well I mean it's it's like it's it is it becomes a world view right I mean and and the conspiracy is part of the world view so you would have to like it would completely turn everything on its head. If you were able to do that so instead it just seems like it would be a case where you would have this revelation. But it wouldn't please everyone and so everyone just assume some greater revelation is possible and that some cover up isn't is still in place like okay they told us about the grace why are they not telling us about the greens. Yeah and coming back to your point about the erosion of trust. I mean one problem with this sort of the fondness for conspiracy narratives is really it makes trust impossible no matter how trustworthy. You know an institution has a track record of being institutions are actually of variable trustworthiness some lie more than others some I think have you know overall are quite trustworthy institutions others are not very trustworthy. And so like a skeptical person as opposed to a cynical person would try to evaluate the track record of of an institution or of an individual spokesperson and say like you know what do we have reason to trust them or not. But if you take a sort of a conspiracy cover up as a starting point and you start with that conclusion you will always have evidence that anybody who doesn't agree with you has already violated your trust. They've already lied to you so you're taking instead of the thing we talked about earlier with the kind of applying a you know a distrust inducing incident from one politician to another. What in that example we use something that really happened like so and so politician lied about something you know assuming that lie was real. Now I can't trust politician B because politician A lied. What if the initial thing was not even actually a lie it's just something you were you're assuming they're not telling you the truth because they don't agree with you that we're hiding an alien spacecraft somewhere. Yeah it's this like imagined original sin that prevents any kind of legitimate trust to ever take place. Another thing I was thinking about in all of this you know we've talked a good bit in over the past year or so about low res ambiguous data. Yeah it's like it could be visual it could be some other kind of information and certainly we can get even get out of the realm of recorded information and into just sightings and observations. You know cases where you can make a case for it's blurry it could be a UFO it's blurry or you know or we don't know exactly what we're looking at it could be an antenna on the bottom of the ocean floor. And this is interesting because I was looking back and there were various headlines several years ago talking about an end of UFO ology that arguing that OK we're going in this information age full of ubiquitous visual data gathering. You know we're just we're just going to see this stuff dry up and go away but I don't I don't see that happening like there's always going to be low res ambiguous data. Well yeah that's right I mean one thing you might have assumed that as like everybody's got a camera in their pocket and the cameras have become sharper and they get clearer images and stuff you're not going to see all these like blurry kind of like what is that in the sky. No it turns out like as the resolution gets better in these images in fact they'll just capture things that are further away. Or they're like still ambiguous just like what's that dot. And you know in some cases people actually can figure out like oh you know that's a star you know you're or that is a mylar balloon or something like that. In other cases like you can't figure it out there's just a dot on your image of the sky and you don't know what it is. And it's in those situations where it's low resolution and there's not enough image there's not enough information to really reach a solid conclusion where this kind of these thoughts can always bloom. There's always still the possibility you don't know what it is so why isn't it aliens. Or it's just the information is complex and you don't have the background to understand it or you don't have the additional you know insight and layers to understand it. And therefore it allows you to apply the script of the paranormal to it in order to interpret it. The script that is very malleable that can be shifted and applied to any ambiguous data to produce the desired result. But it's funny even in this area of view ofology I mean this is something I read about sometimes I mean cynicism plays in here too because often people will be able to come in and say oh you know this image that you were able to do. And what we're very excited about of like a thing moving in the sky I was able to calculate this is actually an artifact created by the camera system used and I can show you how a lot of times people just be like why would I believe you you've been part of the UFO cover up for years. You've been posting articles like that and so like there is a kind of cynicism that just prevents you from accepting what looks to me like a pretty good explanation of a weird looking image. What this is really getting into I think is that we've just sort of for a few minutes now been dancing around this but I think another big thing about cynicism is that it functions as an excuse cynicism functions as an excuse to excuse bad behavior on your own part for one thing we've been mentioning this less but I think this is absolutely true that. If you get caught doing something wrong that you really know is wrong you can't really make a defensive what you did what what do people say they say everybody does it. Yeah yeah cynicism is just like projecting cynicism on to others excuses your undeniable bad behavior because it's just what everybody does everybody's like this. This of course in the realm of politics this happens all the time when somebody's favorite politician it's really undeniable you know they get caught on camera doing something really bad. If they can't deny it what people say everybody does it they're all you're so naive you think the other ones are better than this. So it excuses bad behavior but then the other way it's an excuse is that it excuses poor epistemic practices when you don't have you want to believe something and you don't have good reasons to and in fact people are giving you very good reasons not to believe the thing you believe you can resort to cynicism so that you don't have to pay attention to that it's like well you're just all part of it you're all just all lying and why should I believe anything you say. Yeah it's like it lowers the horizon of like the moral universe around us to the level of the whatever fallen star we're looking at. Yeah yeah we have gotten into a lot of dark territory today but next time we do want to focus on the topic of how to avoid and combat cynicism. So I think we're coming coming a little bit back into the light. All right so join us on Thursday for that. Just a reminder to everyone out there that stuff to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future or just say hello you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com. Stuff to blow your mind is production of I heart radio for more podcasts from my heart radio visit the I heart radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I love you. No gloss. No filter. Just stories. Spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. 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