From the Vault: Cynicism, Part 3

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the topic of modern psychological cynicism, as well as its roots in the philosophy of the ancient Cynics. (part 3 of 4) (originally published 4/22/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so I have
a vault episode for you. This is going to be
part three of four in our Cynicism series. This episode
originally published four twenty two, twenty twenty five. Let's dive
right in.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
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

(01:01):
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

(01:24):
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.

(01:48):
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 re search 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,

(02:10):
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

(02:32):
very familiar image of the cynical Machiavelian 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

(02:55):
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

(03:16):
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 and fiction
of the cynical genius, like Sherlock Holmes, someone who withholds

(03:39):
trust and has a very low opinion of human nature,
but also has superior knowledge, memory, and powers of reasoning.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
One thing that I neglected to bring up when we
were talking about the Sherlock Holmes trope is that you know,
there is a distinction to be made between skepticism and cynesism. Yes, now,
you can imagine where the line begins to blur at
some points, and certainly, as we've been discussing, you know,

(04:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
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

(04:46):
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 is just
a bias toward distrust.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
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 going to stab them in the back.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
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

(05:56):
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,

(06:16):
in particularly corrupt situations and scenarios. So it seems like
a common pattern the researchers found is that knowledgeable and
intelligent people might be 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.

(06:38):
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,

(07:00):
I'll do cynics or nonsenics 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, like who's
more correct overall, but at least in a bunch of
experimental scenarios like random strangers are much more trustworthy than

(07:21):
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 five dollars, 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
five dollars into twenty dollars. And then the stranger has

(07:43):
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 ten
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

(08:05):
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 going to
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

(08:28):
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,

(08:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
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 it restricts its range, or something to that
effect exactly.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
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 want
to seem smart like Sherlock Holmes, but given all the downsides,

(09:40):
the Sherlock gambit is probably not worth it, at least
in my opinion. Anyway, we're back today to talk about more.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, and in this episode we're going to 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.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
Wait, did you mean to sound cynical when you were
saying that? Was that the joke?

Speaker 1 (10:03):
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

(10:25):
and years.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yes, and I would say, of course the relationship between
cynicism and politics is especially important to understand within democracies.
You know, within places of popular political participation and civil
liberties and freedoms. You know, whether you are cynical about
the political structures you live under matters a lot less.

(10:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah. Yeah, because it means coming to believe that the
thing that you can do that matters doesn't matter, and then,
like the old saying, by doing nothing, you know, all
problems are solved. So one of the books that I
referenced in the first episode is the MIT Press book
on Cynicism by anskar Allen and Alan digs into this

(11:24):
topic a lot, and I want 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,

(11:46):
as we've discussed in the past.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
So I've long been a fan of the La based
artists collective known as Everything Is Terrible, Joe, I know
you're familiar with them as well. They're slow is. If
everything is terrible, then nothing is that's great.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
I think that statement is meant with a dash of irony.
But but yeah, everything is terrible is great. You know,
you may have seen videos of theirs, even if you're
not familiar with the name of like super cuts of
weird moments from old found media. One of my favorites
of all times. I think everything is Terrible did the

(12:25):
video of it was just moments from a video cassette
that accompanied a Star Trek board game where there's a
like a kling on guy who keeps like screaming at
you to punish you. It was one of the one
of those things where they were trying to do like
mixed media board games I think in the late eighties
or early nineties, where like I don't know, you'd put

(12:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Yeah. Yeah, they several different the individuals involved with that
over the years, and the resurrect different bits of old
media and now often super cut them into some sort
of a presentation. If you ever get to get the
chance to see them live, it's it's well worth it.
So if everything is terrible, then nothing is. Alan brings
up this exact point amid contemplations on the possible death

(13:21):
of philosophy in modern times, citing German philosopher and social
critic Peter Slaughterdyke, who frequently cites ancient cynic Diogenes is
pooping in public in his evaluation of modern cynicism as well.
So Alan now I should clarify though, Alan, in discussing

(13:41):
Slaughterdyke's ideas, he sees them as an overstatement. But slaughter
Dyke says that quote, because everything has become problematic, everything
is also now a matter of indifference.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
So I'm not sure I understand the context of that, right,
But the way I guess i'd inter but 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.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Yeah, yeah, and especially if you are just hyper aware
of all of the negative stories. You know, and this
has been this has been the case for a while.
I mean it comes back to some of the you know,
the very ancient ideas of how do you survive in
the world by maybe focusing a little more on the dangers. Certainly,
you know, if it bleeds, it leads and so forth.

(14:39):
But the social media age, as we've discussed on the
show before, you know, various social media algorithms have long
favorite 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.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Yes, where you're 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

(15:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
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, there's enough controversy,
then you know, what are you going to respond to?
You can't possibly respond to all of it, and maybe

(15:51):
you end up responding to nothing at all.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
But you have to keep scrolling because what if there's
something you don't know about yet.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
Now, Alan site 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 from
the show before. The author R. Scott Baker had this idea,
something he called the somatic apocalypse, in which quote, all

(16:20):
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 are fears and hungers.
So everything else just kind of shuts down, descends into
chaos or entropy. So absolute widespread cynicism would, to paraphrase

(16:41):
the words of Slaughterdyke, be a situation where everything is
poop in the street and people are nauseated all the time.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Okay, sounds bad.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Yeah, yeah, my understanding, as we would be talking about
a world in which cynicism concerning the human experience at
large becomes more absolute, and you know, basically we withdraw
into individual and localized efforts. But Allen's counter argument here
is that most people are not so absolutely cynical. He contends,

(17:12):
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, you know, coming back to the idea

(17:33):
of diogenies, you know again living in the streets among
dogs and you know, 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

(17:56):
reality they're faced with to the point where they make
that big see cynic shift toward the pursuit of virtue. Hmm, Okay,
so almost as if we're forever weightless in our cynicism,
free falling toward a point a forced self recognition and
revelation we never quite reach, like an imagined space vessel,
inching ever closer to the speed of light, but unable

(18:18):
to actually touch it. Or to quote Alan again, he
refers to it as quote unembedded but is yet underdeveloped negativity.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Interesting. Okay, wait, so am I interpreting this right?

Speaker 1 (18:32):
Then?

Speaker 3 (18:32):
Essentially that Allan 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.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Again exactly, Yeah, that is exactly the point I believe
he's making is that, yeah, we're just with this incomplete
disenchantment with the world, like we think things were bad,
We've lost trust and establishments. 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.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Hmmm, I wonder I wonder about that. I don't know
if it really works that way, but I'm interested in
the idea.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting concept. And the idea here
is that social media would be part of that equation.
Alan 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

(19:39):
that thrives on bad sentiments and becomes characterized by just
non stop righteous indignation.

Speaker 3 (19:45):
But one that is discouraged from actually going anywhere positive
instead just kind of festering negative emotion.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah. Now this made me think about past discussions of
the ideas of Jaron Lanier, and I don't know that
he ever directly invoked cynicism in any of his works,
or not the 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.

(20:16):
And you know, 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
you know, alternate decentralized social media alternatives, or at least
that's how it seems to me now. There have been

(20:38):
a number of papers about this over the years. Have
been some studies. A recent study published in the International
Journal of Press Politics by Hassel at all digs into
this a little bit, and also there have been some
pass papers by the lead author here, Ariel Hassel. The
basic idea that I was reading about from this author

(20:58):
is that in political 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're
not aware of this phenomena, then God bless you because

(21:20):
you have stayed out of the mud of all of
this over the past decade.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
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
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

(21:50):
by scrolling social media. Gigantic difference in how I process that,
you know, even very bad and distressing news. When I'm
reading about it in you know, 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

(22:11):
that could be done to fix this situation, well, you
know 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 you know, 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

(22:35):
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, you know. It's much more disempowering
and horrifying.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, and I think that's that's not an uncommon experience. Now,
coming back to this study from the International Journal of
Press Politics, this is basically what they found out based

(23:15):
on a panel survey of eighteen hundred American American adults
during the twenty twenty 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

(23:36):
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 they're failures,
it's right to have like some response of cynicism. But

(23:59):
this is the sort of cynicism that is much more
dangerous and it can ultimately lead to the delegitimization of
democratic process.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
I might make the distinction we talked about earlier between
skepticism and cynicism, like that it can be very health
healthy to be skeptical of politics, to not just take
politician's 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.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
Yeah. Yeah. And 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

(24:50):
can result in cynical inaction, where it's 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 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

(25:11):
to it. Rather, you're just generally nauseated by all the
poop you see and you dis engage from seeing it
all together.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
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 study
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

(25:40):
running link 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 for full suppression of dissent. So I wanted

(26:03):
to look at one pretty highly cited paper on the
subject of cynicism in politics, and this was published in
the year twenty twelve in the European Journal of Personality
by Svin Patten, Elaine van Heil, Christoph Daunt and Emma
Onrit and it's called Stripping the Political Political cynic a
psychological exploration of the concept of political cynicism. Now, this

(26:27):
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

(26:48):
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 now 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

(27:11):
been talking about throughout this series, and from a 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

(27:32):
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,

(27:54):
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

(28:16):
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

(28:38):
just caution or skepticism about the claims emanating from it.
Does that distinction makes sense?

Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (28:44):
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

(29:07):
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

(29:29):
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 with at least within
the context of the samples from Belgium and the Netherlands.
The rate of voting among political cynics is not very

(29:52):
different from that of less cynical people, but people high
in political cynicism tended to view their vote more as
a prote or as a rebuke of the political system,
rather than a means of advancing a specific policy agenda. Quote,
political cenics boost parties not for their ideological program per se,

(30:12):
but rather because of their supposed integrity, you know. So
it's like 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

(30:32):
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 twenty twelve, and it's possible that
in a different political environment, cynicism could be more left

(30:54):
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

(31:16):
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

(31:36):
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. So ultimately, political cynicism, it seems, is certainly
a thing that is distinct in itself. It's related to,

(31:57):
but distinct from, general social cynisism, 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 predict democracies, you need to understand political cynicism. It
is a factor. But another way I was thinking about

(32:19):
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

(32:41):
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,

(33:05):
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

(33:26):
sweeping statements of political cynicism. I think last time we
mentioned the example in all politicians they're all the same,
you know, 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

(33:49):
having to do any homework.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah. I think we've seen some very
strong examples of this over the past ten years, and
sometimes sadly you see it puppeted in say comedy, in
mainstream rhetoric. One of the main examples being in any
case where someone is just talking about a given election

(34:14):
and saying 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 it doesn't matter, everything's just as bad. It doesn't
it doesn't matter if I vote for one or the other.
But it also means you don't have to get into
actually comparing the two if you just assume they're all

(34:35):
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,

(34:55):
the end result is the same for you, the consumer
of the toxic mushroom.

Speaker 3 (34:59):
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 can today it's and you know that's fair, but like, yeah,
the statements like they're all the same, Like if you
if you really meant that, that would be absurd. It
couldn't be all exactly the same. Maybe neither is to
your liking. But but but if you phrased it that way,

(35:22):
that might invite people to ask follow up questions like, well,
in what way you know, Yeah, like.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
What's your scoring method? And is it a scoring method
where yeah, you reach an absolute zero, but you can't
get underneath the zero, so you can just have have
them bottomed out an equal I guess, but that doesn't
sound like a great scoring mechanism.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
And you know what I want to say also that
I think there is a more innoxious 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

(36:02):
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?

Speaker 1 (36:23):
Yeah, Yeah, just as an escape hatch for an unpleasant conversation,
that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
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 to avoid uncomfortable specifics,
whether that's like revealing that you don't have as much

(36:49):
knowledge as you would like to appear to have, or
you know, revealing sort of uncomfortable tensions and differences between people.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Yeah. And I think also we have to ignore knowledge
that this sort of cynicism can arise, and certainly in
response to the very sort of social media bombardment so
we've been talking about, but also as a direct result
of manipulation and disinformation that can force you into this mode.
So I want to be not to completely forgive cynicism

(37:19):
as it manifests, but we have to acknowledge the complexity
of its manifestation in a given person as a response
to streams of information and their overall media, political, social environment.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
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 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,

(37:52):
like you've talked about, we have cynical moments, and we
might well become more cynical over time if we sort
of water those little cine instincts and let them grow.
But anyway, coming back to that idea 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.

(38:14):
There's a study in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly in
twenty twenty four by Hillary K's Style 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

(38:35):
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,

(38:56):
many see value to cynicism in politics, fine, 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

(39:19):
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

(39:40):
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,
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

(40:01):
avoiding coming off as dumb or not knowing anything about politics.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
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, you know,
I don't know yet, I'm just kind of in a
fact finding area right now, then the 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

(40:28):
everything is horrible, then that kind of pushes people away
and they'll be like, okay, fair enough.

Speaker 3 (40:34):
But 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

(40:57):
political system very often what are can 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

(41:20):
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,

(41:45):
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. You know,
I think most people listening will probably agree these are
like bad outcomes, And I don't have a way of

(42:07):
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

(42:29):
hear things like that over and over.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
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 shoot of
cynicism for everyone else. Like everyone if someone has like
a cynical trajectory going on in the way they're viewing

(42:53):
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 huot, Like, obviously that's
not helping anyone, and we don't want to find it out.
What is it the end of that shoot? Yeah, Now,

(43:18):
at this point I wanted 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.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Ah, yeah, I think this is going to be some
fertile ground.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
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 in conspiracy theories to not only distrust
of authority, but also general political cynicism and just general

(43:59):
cynicism as well. One paper I was looking at on
this topic is from twenty thirteen by Einstein and Glick
titled Scandals, Conspiracies, and the Vicious Cycle of Cynicism, and
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, diminished trust

(44:23):
in government. This lower confidence, in turn spurs higher levels
of conspiracy belief, even in claims unrelated to ongoing scandals.
So the idea of 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 you know, money scandal here with other politicians,

(44:46):
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 UFO or what have you.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
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 transitive property
of distrust, where it's like if if one politician or
political institution, government, or whatever has done something to earn
your distrust, that therefore is evidence against all of them

(45:24):
or all objects of that class. So it's like, you know,
a politician A lied, therefore we know politician B is lying.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
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 uh, you know, and this
this is a pretty you know, rich area as well.
You know, in some levels, perhaps it's most pure form.
There is the idea of like I want aliens to

(45:55):
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 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

(46:18):
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 no are doing
so because they are covering something up.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
Yeah, they must all be evil, otherwise why would they lie.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
Now. Of course, 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.

Speaker 3 (46:47):
Secret exactly, But you know, hypothetical incentive to lie is
not evidence for the underlying premise. It's 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

(47:09):
cloned by an alien.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
That's a good point. That's a good point. So I
was looking around for some additional thoughts in all of this,
and I found a twenty twenty four 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.

(47:33):
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.

(47:55):
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 link indigenous beliefs and stories to UFOs and
cryptids and so forth, reinterpreting those traditional stories as a

(48:18):
kind of proof and potentially corrupting those stories in the process.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
And not letting those stories just be what they actually are.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
Right, And you know, it's you know, 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. Milligan also says
that it all generates noise that distracts from genuine science
quote background noise which impedes science communication. So you know,

(48:48):
we've talked about this before, like putting scientists on the
defensive regarding something like the UFOs and so forth, instead
of you know, actually highlighting legitimate scientific efforts that can
improve our world.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
Well, right, because the kind of UFO conspiracy ideation we're
talking about is always engaging in motivated reasoning. I mean,
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

(49:25):
my experience, they always find that, like, yeah, there's no
good reason to believe any of these stories 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 at best,

(49:47):
you know, woefully naive, and at worst you're part of
the conspiracy.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
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,

(50:14):
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 one hundred percent shut off the cynicism.
You know, like if the government or institution said tomorrow, okay,
you got this alien life exists, but they say, here's
the kicker though it's only microbial or it, you know,

(50:37):
or even if they were just 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. Would 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 admit that

(50:58):
it's possible that some of what's out there in the
ufology world is real, but is all of it one
absolutely not, There's no way it could be. So you're
always going to have like some level of conspiracy thinking
and no matter what could conceivably be revealed.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
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

(51:40):
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.
I know that's not what you think, but imagine it
turns out you're wrong, and that is the case, what

(52:00):
what would satisfy you of that fact? What piece of evidence? What?

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Like?

Speaker 3 (52:05):
How would you be like, Okay, I'm convinced now.

Speaker 1 (52:09):
Well, I mean it's like it's it is. It becomes
a worldview, right, I mean, and the conspiracy is part
of the worldview. 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 would just

(52:30):
assume some greater revelation is possible and that some cover
up is still in place, like Okay, they told us
about the Grace, Why are they not telling us about
the Greens?

Speaker 3 (52:38):
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.

(52:59):
Some lie more than a there's some I think of,
you know, overall or 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 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

(53:21):
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

(53:43):
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 your assuming they're not telling you the
truth because they don't agree with you that we're hiding

(54:04):
an alien spacecraft somewhere.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
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. You know, it's
like it could be visual, it could be some other
kind of information. And certainly we can get even get

(54:28):
out of the realm of recorded information and into just
sightings and observations, you know, cases where you can make
a case for it. 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

(54:48):
interesting because I was looking back and there were various
headlines several years ago talking about an end of UFO
ology that arguing that, Okay, we're getting in this information
age full of you liquid as 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 see that happening,
Like there's always going to be low res ambiguous data.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
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 and these images, in fact, they'll just
capture things that are further away, yeah, or they're like

(55:33):
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

(55:53):
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?

Speaker 1 (56:06):
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 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. It can be shifted and applied to

(56:30):
any ambiguous data to produce the desired result.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
But it's funny even in this area of vieufology. 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 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,

(56:57):
and I can show you how, Like, you know, a
lot of times people just be like, you know, 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 a what looks to me
like a pretty good explanation of a weird looking image.
What this is really getting into, I think is that

(57:18):
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

(57:42):
doing something wrong that you really know is wrong, you
can't really make a defense of what you did. What
do people say? They say, everybody does it. Yeah, cynicism
is just like projecting cynicism onto others excuses your undeniable
bad behavior because it's just what everybody does. Everybody's like
this this, So, of course, in the realm of politics,

(58:03):
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

(58:27):
don't have you want to believe something and you don't
have good reasons too, 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. Why
should I believe anything you say.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
Yeah, it's like it lowers the horizon of like the
moral universe around us to the level of the of
whatever fallen star we're looking at.

Speaker 3 (58:53):
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 coming a little bit back into the light.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:23):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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 to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
Nations later,