Cynicism, Part 1

In this 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Land, and I am Joe McCormick.
And today we wanted to begin a series of episodes
talking about something that has been on my mind a
lot lately, and that is the concept of cynicism. Now,
as we go on, we're going to have to distinguish
the common contemporary usage of cynicism from other meanings extending

(00:35):
into history, but as used in common language today. We
can think of cynicism as a cognitive disposition, the core
element of which is social distrust. Cynicism is a dim
view of human nature. It's a suspicion of other people's
motives and a tendency to believe that people are primarily

(00:58):
self interested and un trustworthy. So there are a variety
of kind of inventories or tests that psychological studies will
do to evaluate how cynical you are as a person.
They'll often give you like a list of statements to
see how much you agree or disagree with them. A
cynical person is going to be more likely to agree

(01:18):
with statements like altruism and compassion are just for show
when it comes down to it, people are in it
for themselves. Everybody lies and cheats when they can get
away with it, cliches like no good deed goes unpunished,
it's a dog eat dog world, the idea that people
are not sincere, they'll just tell you what you want

(01:39):
to hear. And I think the core idea of it
really is that you can't trust anybody. We're all on
our own. And before we started today, I had been
digging around trying to find good examples of the cynical
worldview presented in works of English literature. And while you
can find some pretty good examples, I think, particularly for

(02:02):
some reason in like seventeenth and eighteenth century English literature
with writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, is some
really hardcore cynical stuff there. I actually think the most
cynical canon of great literature is in the Bible. So
many books of the Bible, especially like the later books

(02:22):
of the Tanakh, like the Prophets, have awesomely cynical passages.
Can I offer you a few examples, Rob, Yes, let's
hear it. Okay. Here's Micah chapter seven, verses two to six.
This is the King James translation. The good man is
perished out of the earth, and there is none upright
among men. They all lie in wait for blood. They

(02:43):
hunt every man his brother with a net, that they
may do evil with both hands. Earnestly. The prince asketh,
and the judge asketh for a reward, and the great
man he uttereth his mischievous desire. So they wrap it up.
The best of them is as a brier. The most
upright is sharper than a thorn hedge. The day of

(03:03):
thy watchmen and thy visitation cometh now shall be their perplexity.
Trust ye not in a friend, Put ye not confidence
in a guide. Keep the doors of thy mouth from
her that lieth in thy bosom. For the son dishonoreth
the father. The daughter riseth up against her mother, the
daughter in law against her mother in law. A man's

(03:24):
enemies are the men of his own house.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Brutal, Yeah, if true, A sad state of affairs.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Yeah, okay, I got a couple of more shorter ones.
This is from Psalm fourteen, verses two to four. The
Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men,
to see if there were any that did understand and
seek God. They are all gone aside, they are all
together become filthy. There is none that doeth good, no,

(03:50):
not one. And then finally this one. I think some
of the best poetry in the Bible is in the
Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah's like great, great writing, but it
contains the famous statement from Jeremiah seventeen the heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?

(04:12):
And these passages really emphasized something for me. I think
I am not an especially cynical person. I think I'm
not the least cynical person in the world, but I'm
very far from the most.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
You know.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
I try to be skeptical of like sweeping negative characterizations
about people and all that. And yet I notice that
when a cynical condemnation of human nature is phrased really elegantly,
as I think these are in the King James translation,
they really takes mental effort to disagree with. So it

(04:47):
is not my worldview that the heart is deceitful above
all things. I don't think that's true. But I feel
kind of foolish trying to shake my head or argue
with that statement when it's phrased in that way, it
possesses what feels like an a priori factuality. If you
don't force yourself to stop and think about it, it

(05:08):
just kind of hits you as self evidently true, and
you feel like you'd have to be naive to doubt it.
And yet it's not really what I think. So I
don't know if you have a similar experience, Rob maybe not,
but I wonder, at least for myself, and I think
this is probably pretty common. Why do cynical condemnations, and
especially when they're elegantly phrased, why do they like walk

(05:29):
into my mind with a perfectly forged hall pass. Why
does it take such effortful, deliberate scrutiny to repel them.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, yeah, this is I think this is something that
will come up again and again in this discussion, because yeah,
it these kind of statements they either ring really true
to you, and they ring true because you can take them,
you can hold them up to the world and you
can find examples. You know, you may be engaging in
a certain amount of cherry picking, or just point them

(06:01):
in the right general direction and you'll find evidence to
support this. I think these statements can also feel rather cathartic,
because whatever's going on in your life, in your world,
in the like the media that you're consuming, you know
there are going to be perceptions of this sort of
thing going on, and it can feel empowering to hold

(06:24):
up something that is sort of like an elegant takedown
of what's going on and say, yeah, yeah, this is
this is exactly what I see in the world, This
is exactly what people's hearts are about. And you know,
it may not even be something that you believe all
the time, but it's kind of like, you know, sometimes
you got to go there. And in the same sense

(06:44):
that you might not listen to sad breakup songs all
the time, but there are times when you definitely need
to listen to a sad breakup song.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
Rob, I think that's a really good point. I didn't
quite think about that, But the catharsis element that's exactly right.
It does describe the experience of either saying or agreeing
with a really cynical statement. It feels like blowing off steam.
There's like a kind of relief that comes with expressing
that that just total condemnation and lack of trust in

(07:13):
human nature.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, you know, sometimes you've got to crank up the
rage against the machine in the car. It doesn't mean
that you necessarily feel that all the time, but sometimes
you've got to do it.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
Now, coming back to like the definitions of cynicism, I
think one thing that's important to flag at the top
here is like that cynicism is used kind of loosely,
and sometimes it's used to mean different things. We're going
to be trying in this series to focus on the
use of cynicism as like this dim view of human
nature and lack of trust in others, But I would

(07:46):
say less often. Cynicism is also used interchangeably with pessimism,
the belief that things will go poorly or that the
future will be bad. I think we should just note
for our purposes these are different concepts. Pessimism is more
of an outlook on reality and all of life, all

(08:06):
future prospects. So this would include you know, low expectations
for random events so called acts of God, and for
our own ability to do as we would hope. You know,
that's pessimism, whereas you might think of cynicism as pessimism
applied specifically to other people. Other people will always let

(08:29):
you down, they'll stab you in the back. They're only
in it for themselves.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, it got me thinking about the saying, don't hate
the player, hate the game. Your modern cynic definitely hates
the players, or at least sees them as the underlying problem.
You know. It'd also add that cynicism can also easily
bleed over into downright nihilism. Though that's not to say
that modern cynicism isn't compatible with different philosophies and creeds,

(08:54):
because you could be a cynic and a hedonist at
the same time. Certainly, I don't know that you'd bea
trementdu is fun to hang out with, but you know
it is possible.

Speaker 3 (09:03):
Now, what does it mean to say a person is
cynical in a way that is subjective? Because cynicism is,
by its nature a comparative idea or sort of expression
of degree. I would compare being cynical to being tall.
You know, there's no height at which a person becomes
objectively tall. People judge whether you're tall or not based

(09:25):
on the context. You know, they compare you to people
around you, or to other people in the culture where
you live, or other people in the room. And then,
on the other hand, while there's no objective cutoff point,
somebody who's like seven foot three is pretty much always
going to be considered tall, no matter what context they're in.
And I think being cynical is like that. It's a
comparative idea. There's no threshold score of social trust, and

(09:48):
if you fall below that score, you're objectively cynical. But
there are some people who are so cynical that basically
everybody's going to think of them as a cynical person.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah, And then of course it also depends on how
well you know that person as well, right, Because if
all you know about a person is one cynical thing
they said, you might be like, oh, well, that person's
really cynical. But maybe they're not that way all the time.
You know. It kind of gets into the way we
sometimes use the term, right. We say like I hate
to be cynical, but or you might call somebody out
and be like, I think you're being a little cynical

(10:19):
about this. You know, in those usages acknowledge the fact
that it's not necessarily a constant. It maybe something that
we dip into in response to different circumstances, different stimuli
and so forth.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
That's right, that's a really good point. So, like a
lot of things in personality, you can think of cynicism
as a kind of it's a tendency. You know, you
might be you're more kind of pointed in one general
direction of interpretation, but it's not going to dictate that
every single moment of your life and every single thought
you have is exactly the same.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
So, when we're trying to judge is a person cynical?
I think there are two main comparative ideas we use there.
One is what I was just talking about, like how
cynical is that person compared to other people, like compared
to the average of their peers. If they show less
social trusts than the people around them, we think of
them as cynical. But then there's a second metric that
I think people use, and that is how cynical a

(11:17):
person is compared to how cynical we, the people judging,
think it is reasonable to be.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, we generally assume we've got it figured out. We're
at the right level.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
We're at the right level, and anybody who's more cynical
than us is too cynical. Somebody less cynical is naive,
And this creates interesting levels of complexity, Like obviously, sometimes
it is reasonable to be suspicious of someone's motives and
to believe they will probably harm you if they can.
Here's a common but relatively benign example, and not getting

(11:51):
into like, you know, deep acts of harm against people.
You should not walk into a car lot expecting that
the salesperson and the finance it's manager are trying to
help you out and get you the best deal they can.
Maybe in some scenarios you'll find an extraordinarily unusually altruistic
car dealer, But a lot of the time, what they're

(12:12):
trying to do is make as much money off of
you as possible, which is not in your interest. And
that's not to suggest that people selling cars are like evil.
It's just it's their job to try to make money
selling cars. If they can make more on a sale
and you get you to buy at a higher price
or to take a less favorable financing option, they usually will.

(12:34):
And I think this is true, And yet I think
I'm not a very cynical person to make that judgment
about what happens at car lots. There are just specific
situations where it is reasonable, based on evidence and on
our background knowledge, to withhold trust from people, and this
is different, I think, from a generalized cynical distrust that

(12:54):
is not related to the specific situation. Now, of course,
what I think I just said is pretty uncontroversial in principle,
but we actually spend a lot of mental energy trying
to tell the difference between these two things, like the
situation where it's reasonable to be suspicious and the situation
where you're just expressing a bias towards cynicism. Like if

(13:17):
a friend comes to you and expresses distrust of something
or someone that you personally put a lot of faith in,
what's the most common defensive reaction for us to have.
I think it's like, don't be so cynical, or you're
just being cynical. Saying you're just being cynical downplays the
possibility that your doubting friend has a good insight, you know,

(13:41):
maybe that I have misplaced my faith and trust in something,
and instead it reframes the doubting friends' skepticism as part
of a general dispositional bias that they have. So dealing
with the balance between cynicism and reasonable suspicion is just
a really difficult thing that I think we all have
to deal with in our lives. We're asking the question like,

(14:04):
in general, how suspicious should we be of other people's motives?
And let's say you take generally cynical people and generally
trusting people, which groups model of the world makes more
accurate predictions, which group's model of the world is more
useful in life, and in which context does each model

(14:27):
thrive the most. I think we'll have to revisit that
question as we go along.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's always in short, it's a
careful balance, right, because do you want to protect yourself
absolutely all the time from all things, or do you
want to be able to move through life and open
yourself up to new possibilities that may in fact hurt you.
It always things like this will always remind me of
that C. S. Lewis quote about being afraid to love

(14:54):
because being because you're afraid that you will be hurt
through that love, either of you know, be a lot
or some other action. And therefore I think the analogy
made was like, you know, entombing yourself, you know, putting
yourself in a casket of loneliness, and I think some
of that applies here.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Now I do have to acknowledge that. Yeah, dealing with
cynicism in people can certainly be exhausting, you know. Like
we've been saying, the cynic, like the pessimist, tends toward
type one errors in cognition, false positives, believing that the
predator alerks in the bushes even when it doesn't. And
there is always, again, an ample evidence for the cynic

(15:43):
exhaustive evidence. Even because they are not wrong about many
generalities about our world and human nature, they tend to
put others on the defensive, forcing them to make non
cynical counter arguments, you know, essentially prove the righteousness of
their all of human beings. Yeah, and at the same time,

(16:04):
in making those counter arguments, you don't want to go
so far as to dismiss the perceived threats or threats entirely,
because then they're going to come back at you with
while you're being naive.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
This connects to what I was saying earlier, Like, again,
I think I'm not very cynical, but I feel kind
of silly or foolish if I try to argue with
somebody who says the heart is deceitful above all things.
It's like, I don't know it has a kind of
it has a kind of power because, as you were saying,
the cherry picking really works in its favor. You can

(16:36):
always think of examples when which you were wrong to
grant trust, but that if you think about it logically,
that doesn't actually mean you should always withhold trust. It's
just like it's very captivating those specific examples of when
it went wrong for you.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
I was thinking about this as well over the weekend.
I was doing a bit of driving, and driving is
sort of a you know, it's a limited, sort of
artificial in some ways, like social scenario, and it's probably
a scenario where like I'm more cynical when I'm driving,
but in that I am less trusting of the other drivers,

(17:13):
and I'm not that I'm necessarily believing that they're out
to hurt me, but I maybe am more inclined to
believe that they are not looking out for me, and
they're maybe being a little greedy there and they might
not see me and so forth. But I guess the
danger would be taking cynicism from an environment like that
where it is maybe you know, low risk to engage

(17:35):
in such cynicism, To take that feeling off the road
and into the real world. I could see where that
could be kind of hurtful.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
Yeah, you take your defensive driving mentality and apply it
to your friend and family relationships and to politics and
to everything else in your life. Yeah, not a good idea,
I would argue. Yes.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Now, another huge problem about regarding mod and cynicism, this
is something we'll come back to again and again, is
that it's often pointed out that it generally fosters a
worldview in which no progress is possible. So again not
just talking about engaging in little feelings of cynicism now
and then like if the cynicism really piles up, and

(18:17):
if you really double down on your cynicism, then there's
no reason to try for or aspire for anything, you know,
because like if people are all bad essentially, if people
are all just in it for themselves, they're just greedy,
there's no caring. Then what can we do as a society,
What is it all possible? And you just kind of
become fossilized in the mud of your own distrust.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
I think that's exactly right. In fact, this link you're
suggesting between cynicism and inaction or lack of progress is
absolutely backed up by evidence. We might get more into
the details of these studies later, but I've been looking
at studies that have found cynicism tends to cause people
to skip opportunities to cooperate to achieve goals. It tends

(19:01):
to people high in cynicism tend to hold back from
involvement in the political process, not voting, not protesting, not
signing a petition, even if they care about an issue.
And it just seems like if you're higher in cynicism,
you are less likely to try to make things better
and more likely to give up.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
I want to read a quote here from Asgar Allen,
author of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series book Cynicism,
which deals, as I'll discuss and as I cite this
book again with both ancient cynicism and modern cynicism. More
on that in a bit, but he writes quote as
a cultural disposition, cynicism foments distrust, derails progress, and reduces

(19:44):
all higher things, all that is good about humankind, to
the level of its own diminished outlook. It assumes that
all human motives are basically selfish and denies the possibility
of a better world.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
Yeah, I think that's true. Despite the persuasive power of cynicism.
As I mentioned earlier, I think that is correct at
the level of my personal experience, and that seems borne
out by experimental evidence as well.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah. Yeah, And I'll also add that in the book
he stresses that, you know, while we can all point
out just you know, egregious examples of cynicism in the
world around us, we're also just all infected by cynicism.
Like it's not just a world of cynics and non
cynics for the most part, And he cites common sayings

(20:28):
like I hate to be cynical, but and so forth,
like we were talking, but you know, points out that
cynicism is pretty much in all of us, festering to
various degrees and very much takes on the form of
an affliction. It may dominate, it may go into remission,
it may flare up due to various and environmental factors.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
But it is there, absolutely, Yeah, which raises the good
question of if it's there latently to some degree in
all of us, and in some cases for quite understandable reasons,
what brings it out, what makes it grow, and maybe
what can diminish it. Now, I guess we'll have to
come back to that because one thing that we definitely
should address here is it gets a little confusing when

(21:08):
you're trying to look up research on cynicism, because cynicism
is a word that is used to mean at least
two completely different things. There is a school of classical
Greek philosophy called cynicism, which is not merely social distrust.
It's a whole school of thought that entails different things. Rob,

(21:29):
I think you're about to get into it in a second,
but these two cynicisms are totally different. And it was
a kind of an interesting question to me to wonder
how the same word came to be used for these
two different things.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, it's one of those things where it's complicated. We're
dealing with centuries upon centuries of human history with different
returns to ancient cynicism and so forth. You know, it's
not quite a scenario that you might encounter with movie
titles where you're like, Okay, well there's the Peter Lorie
Madlove movie and then there's the the nineties television series

(22:05):
Mad Love, and these are not connected at all. They
just share a title. There's there's more connective tissue here,
but it but it is I think also completely correct
to say you're dealing with two different things. They don't
line up on a lot of their principles, even if
there is ultimately some shared history there.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
So what's the rundown on capital C cynicism or cynic philosophy.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, So in the book Cynicism, Alan gets into this
a bit and he refers to like the broader transitionary
matter as capital C slash lower C cynicism. So it's
like like c C cynicism or something I don't know,
you wouldn't pronounce it out about, but like basically referring

(22:49):
to this grander thing of cynism that begins with capital
C cynicism and eventually leads into lower case cynicism that
is in all of us today. In either case, he
stresses that cynics are not good people, not by mainstream
social standards anyway. But while the modern cynic is a

(23:09):
person under the influence again of this kind of infection
of distrust, the ancient cynics were a different matter. I
have to stress that the ancient cynics were totally punk,
like abrasively punk. Yes, And to really get into this,
we have to look at the most famous of these
ancient punks, and that of course is Diogenes the Cynic

(23:31):
or Diogenes of synop. We have talked about Diogenes on
the show before. I think in episodes we were talking
about solitary hermits and so forth, because one of the
more famous aspects of him that you often see illustrated
and rendered as the subject in various Renaissance paintings and
so forth is the fact that he lived in a

(23:53):
jar in public.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
I think in like the marketplace and athensres it lived
in a big tub or a jar just out in public.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah. Yeah, when we say lived in a jar, not
a little jar, like a big like a big old
you know, you can think of it more as like
a big barrel on its side. It's the way it's
generally depicted in art.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
Often he's basically naked as well.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, basically naked, dressed in rags, surrounded by dogs. Often
has a lantern out in the day, like he's like, yeah,
what about it, I've got a lantern. I'm burning the lantern.
I don't need it right now, but I'm burning it.
You know. That's that's how anti establishment I am.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
I think there's one story. I might have this wrong,
but there's a story that he would carry around the
lantern in the daytime and he would say that he
was looking for an honest man, which that almost connects
a little bit to the lower Sea cynicism. It kind
of there's a sort of critique of human nature or
an idea of hypocrisy and how people present themselves there,

(24:51):
so there's a little bit of connection.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:53):
Yeah, but again not to imply that Diogenes was just
a lowercase Sea cynic, because he's much more interesting than that.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, there are a lot of stories about him. There's
like the famous story of him telling Alexander the Great
essentially to to f off and then Alexander the Great's like, huh,
this guy's great, and that's basically the whole story there.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
But no, it's a great one. Alexander the Great came
through and he's like, oh, I want to meet the great,
the centic philosopher Diogenes. So like you know, he goes
with his retinue and the generals to go find him,
and he's I think the story's Diogenes is like laying
out sunning himself naked or something, and Alexander walks up
to him and his shadow falls over him, and he's like, hey,
can I you know, I'm the conquering king. Can I

(25:35):
give you anything? And Diogenes is like, I would like
you to get out of my light. Yeah, And so
Alexander did not kill him.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
He was just like, okay, yeah, I think that the
essentially the quote that has attributed to Alexander. He's like
if I if I wasn't Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
It's like this character I like. I like the cut
of his chip.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Well that's a that's the kind of story I like
telling the powerful man to f off. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
Though there are there are various stories about the Diogenes
and his travels, and also about the various bodily functions
that he would carry out in public, sometimes like mid
speech and so forth, and there are occasionals some stories
are thought to maybe maybe be a little more fictional
and a little more you know, legendary, but we are

(26:23):
definitely dealing with an historic person thought to have lived
four thirteen or four three BCE through three twenty one
or three twenty four BCE, and he did write. None
of his own writings survive, though I apparently wrote dialogues,
letters and tragedies. We mostly know of him through the

(26:46):
writings of others. Oh, I should correct that we know
about him exclusively through the writings of others. Again, his
own writings did not survive.

Speaker 3 (26:53):
Now you mentioned the bodily functions. If you don't read deeper,
you might be tempted to assume, based on the example
of Diogenes, that sin philosophy is just about like pooping
in public.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
And it is one of the more I guess, eye
catching aspects of their of their public display of humanity. Yeah,
they they were said to, especially Diagenies, was said to
freely engage in public dispension of the body's various functions
in a way that would still be shocking today and
would still very much be against social norms. But the

(27:25):
I guess the key way of understanding what it was.
I mean, certainly it does seem like it was about
shocking people. Again, these these guys were very punk, very
in everyone's faces with how they viewed human nature and
how they viewed society. But essentially we'll get into more
of what this meant to them. But they were living
the animal life, They were rooting the human experience in

(27:47):
the body. Uh and uh and uh, and so they
were they were saying, Hey, this is what we are.
Why should we deny what we are?

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Yeah, that the good life lies in dispensing with sort
of false pretension and living in accordance with your nature.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yeah. Now, Diagenes was not the first cynic and to
s Thinnes Roughly who live roughly four forty six through
three sixty six BCE, a pupil of Socrates and said
to be the teacher of Diagenese, is often considered the
founder of cynicism, though even in antiquity, Alan points out
it was thought that cynicism dated back to a time

(28:25):
before Heracles, connected to the cunning intelligence of the gods.
And I did find it interesting that Heracles was referenced
here because it seems like a good name to invoke,
even indirectly, because, as we've discussed on the show before,
the son of Zeus wasn't just raw muscle, you know,
throwing stones at monsters and so forth. He was also

(28:45):
clever and cunning. He used his I guess, his high
wisdom scores and overcoming the various obstacles. So they had
kind of bar kind of barbarian wisdom that you see
in some of these examples a figure from outside the
system that is opposed to the system, and inhericle is
this case, you know, often opposing mortal tyrants, and Alan

(29:09):
points out that this idea likely does extend pretty far
back in Greek thought as a kind of lifting up
of an outsider figure as a critic of society.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
So then, what actually are the tenets of cinic philosophy?

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah, this is interesting because I feel like a lot
of the tenets we can still recognize in the world
today in forms that we don't necessarily call cynicism. Like
I was thinking of various biker movies I've seen where
you see some version of this, and again couldn't help
but think of you know, various things from like the
punk scene, or like metal lyrics and so forth. We

(29:44):
often see some of these ideas, you know, idealized in
music and film. But the ancient cynics, again exemplified in
the figure of Diogenes, absolutely rejected conventional values and societal norms.
They absolutely did not care about your society, your obsession
with fame and wealth. They saw the absolute hypocrisy of

(30:06):
it all, and they openly dragged it like they they
were gonna you were gonna know they were a cynic
on site, and they were going to let you know
they were a synic because they would they would preach
to you about it. They would tell you about it.
They lived simple, self sufficient lives while also seeking to
expose the folly of the mainstream world.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
Yeah, so there's a tendency to UH, to simple living,
to asceticism, to and to calling out ostentation. And it's
interesting I think you point out that cynicism was often
a philosophy you could see embodied on the person in
the way they appeared and in the way they were living,
which is less true about some other schools of philosophy

(30:46):
in which you might have to like talk to the
person and like hear about what they think in order
to figure out what their their philosophy is.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, Like you wouldn't be going on a blind date
and then halfway through the day realize, oh, I think
this person's a cynic. Now you would know at first
sight because they're surrounded by dogs, they're wearing rags. Well,
oftentimes they were said to wear old cloaks and carry
a staff. But there would be there. You would know
immediately if you were about to go on a blind

(31:14):
day with a cynic. It wouldn't be like halfway through. Oh,
and then I realized that they were you know, you know,
a nihilist you know, came up in conversation like, No,
it would be very apparent in your face. So again
absolutely in your face anti establishment vibes here. But it
would be a mistake to assume that this was just
about young yucking the world and seeking to drag everyone

(31:35):
down into sort of a miserable nihilistic existence, which I
think is an easy mistake to make when you look
at some of these factors. But in reality, the ancient
cynics praised virtue above all else. They believe that true
happiness and peace could only be achieved by following a
virtuous path close to nature, an authentic, natural human life

(31:59):
full of truth that also exposed the lies of others.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
Okay, So, while I still think that cynic philosophy and
modern cynicism are pretty much totally different things, you can
start to see the connective thread here with like the
calling out of hypocrisy. You know, I think this would
be a common virtue aspired to by people who think
of themselves as cynical. Today, I am exposing hypocrisy. I'm

(32:23):
exposing how you know, you're not really as good as
you say you are, that there's something more base lying
underneath you.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Yeah. Yeah. Now one thing that Alan points out another
difference here, though, is that the ancient Cynics were also
thought to consider themselves rather a cosmopolitan They saw themselves
as citizens of the world rather than members of a
local society or group. I don't know. You might be
able to bin that in certain ways and make a
case for like modern cynics just thinking like that, but

(32:52):
I don't know. I would. I would imagine that a
modern lower case C cynic who is thinking about themselves
as a citizen citizen the world, is also thinking of
it in a very dreary sense.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
You know, yeah, a less universal brotherhood and more like, uh,
we're all you know, we're all going to the same place.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah. I think one of the big differences that Alan
points out is that the ancient cynics, again, they believed
in virtue. They believed that the world could become a
better place because they were preaching a philosophy that they
believed I proved human lives. And this is really key too.
He points out that it was a joyful ethos It

(33:33):
wasn't just like I'm sitting here in the dirt and
I'm miserable, be miserable with me, No, it was it
had a like radical, joyful energy to it.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah, So philosophical cynicism, big C cynicism was primarily practiced
from the fourth century BCE to around the fifth century CE,
though gradually declining after the third century BCEE. And this
of course leads to a question that I think we
may come back to a little bit more as well,
But what sort of transformation takes place from capital C

(34:06):
cynicism to lowercase cynicism from the ancient world and the
modern And to put it very briefly, to summarize some
of what Alan gets into, First of all, the transformation
involves a radical engage in an even joyful philosophy, becoming
this more corrosive, passive, and miserable way of looking at

(34:28):
the world. So again, you had to really be engaged
to be a capital C cynic You were making definite
life choices, going out in the streets and doing it.
Whereas lowercase C cynicism that we have today, it's in everybody,
it's ambient, it's just at what level is it going
to manifest in our worldview and our speech and our actions. Yeah, okay, yeah,

(34:52):
So it went from something that was very activated and
optimistic to something that just kind of festers, and they're
like a number I guess sort of lips and points
you can single out. The stoics later took elements of
cynic ideas and tempered. There are more radical elements than
much later on, during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, cynic

(35:13):
ideas were reinterpreted and utilized in ways that often eroded
their critical edge. And then in modern times you have
to also factor in the perceived complexities and failures of
modern systems, and this, you know, further squeezes some of
these ideas into the current ambient form. Though at the

(35:34):
same time, again, the energy of ancient cynicism continues to
thrive in other areas of rebellious thought. So you could again,
you know, I can think of numerous examples, certainly from media,
but also from the real world. People who are you
speaking out against societal norms and engaging sometimes in speech

(35:55):
that may feel at least like its lowercase cynicism.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
A lot of the best cases of that, I think
it actually is not cynical in the dispositional way we've
been thinking about, because it requires a lot of trust
and cooperation and belief in the possibility of good things
coming out of human nature and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah, So again, we may come back to more of
this as we go, but I think that is a
proper grounding in ancient capital c cynicism that allows us
to move forward into more discussions of where.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
We are now. Whichever way you come down on the
cynic versus the non cynics accuracy in modeling the world,
I think what is absolutely clear at this point, based
on a lot of research, is that there are tons

(36:49):
of straightforwardly negative life outcomes correlated with cynicism. You know,
I sometimes try to stay away from like strong normative
claims of this sort on the show, but I think
it's just like it's almost definite, like it is bad
for you in lots of ways to be cynical. It's

(37:09):
not good for your physical or mental health, it's not
good for your ability to attain goals. It's just like
across the board, pretty bad for you to be highly cynical. Now,
since we're about to look at some psychological and medical research,
I think it's worth a check in on how cynicism
is defined in this literature. It's usually treated as what

(37:32):
a couple of authors Stavrova and Ilibroct I'll come back
to them in a bit, call a quote cognitive component
of hostility. So, in other words, when a person displays
the character trait of hostility, cynicism is the cogni main
cognitive part of that. It's the thought patterns and belief
structures underlying hostility. So in these papers, cynicism is often

(37:57):
called cynical hostility. And I would say, based on my reading,
there seem to be three core beliefs defining cynical hostility.
Number one, other people have bad moral character and harmful intentions.
Number two, people are motivated primarily by self interest. And
number three people will ignore their moral values if given

(38:21):
the opportunity. So the very short way to paraphrase cynical
hostility is people are bad, people are selfish, and morals
are fake. So what effects do these beliefs have on
our lives and our bodies? Well, I'm going to run
through some commonly cited items. One is the well established
link between cynicism and various health outcomes. So For example,

(38:47):
studies have repeatedly found links between high cynicism and poor
cardiovascular health. In fact, I even found one study arguing
for a particular causal link between cynical hostility and cardiovascular disease.
That paper was by Tyra at All in the journal
Psychophysiology from the year twenty twenty, and it's called cynical

(39:09):
hostility relates to a lack of habituation of the cardiovascular
response to repeated acute stress. So once I read this,
I thought this was really interesting. The study built on
a general finding that had been in the research for
years that if a person exhibits hostility to others, they
will be at an increased risk of heart disease over time,

(39:33):
and the authors here decided to probe more specifically into
what kinds of hostility, or what elements of hostility were
the most damaging, and they looked at emotional hostility, behavioral hostility,
and cognitive hostility. Emotional hostility is it's affective in nature,
and it's characterized by things like chronic anger, when you

(39:54):
feel the emotion of anger a lot. Behavioral hostility is
a tendency to react to situations with expressions of aggression
and cognitive hostility is about beliefs, meaning it is essentially
synonymous with cynicism. In the words of the lead author here,
Alexandra Tyra, it is quote negative beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes

(40:17):
about other people's motives, intentions, and trustworthiness. Hostility tends to
come along with a physiological stress response, including things like
increased blood pressure that can damage the cardiovascular system when chronic. Now, normally,
when we have a stressful experience, the body tends to

(40:37):
acclimate to that stressful experience by desensitizing us to the
stressful stimulus. So what really freaked us out the first
time is old news by the seventeenth time, and we
just don't have the same stress response anymore. You can
think about this. A common example used in these experiments
is like public speaking tends to be really stressful the

(40:58):
first time, but if you do it again and again
you get used to it, it becomes less stressful each time, apparently,
except when cynicism comes into play somehow. Cognitive cynicism, this
lack of trust in other is a belief that other
people are bad, that they're self interested, and that their
morals are fake. Cognitive cynicism seems to prevent the body

(41:22):
from chilling out about stressors upon repeat exposure. And here
I'm going to quote from the lead author, Alexandra Tyra.
She's quoted in a Baylor University press release about this research. Quote. Essentially,
when you're exposed to the same thing multiple times, the
novelty of that situation wears off, and then you don't

(41:42):
have as big of a response as you did the
first time. This is a healthy response, but our study
demonstrates that a higher tendency for cynical hostility may prevent
or inhibit this decrease in response over time. In other words,
the cardiovascular system responds similarly to a second stressor as
it did to the first. So a really interesting question is, like,

(42:05):
why is this Like when you believe everybody's in it
for themselves and people can't be trusted and everybody lies
and cheats to get ahead, It is apparently just harder
for people to relax about the things that are causing
them distress upon repeat exposure, even harder than it might
be for people who have other other kinds of issues,

(42:25):
like emotional issues with chronic anger, though of course those
things can and do overlap. But yeah, really fascinating to me, like,
why would that link be there? What exactly is the
causal connection? But apparently it's not just heart disease. Another
commonly studied example is depression. Cynicism is perhaps unsurprisingly associated

(42:47):
with increased risk of depression. One paper on this subject
is by Nabi at All from twenty ten in the
journal Psychological Medicine called Hostility and Depressive Mood Results from
the Whitehall two perspective cohort Study and so. This was
a longitudinal study of data collected by a survey of
a large group of civil servants in London beginning in

(43:08):
the nineteen eighties and then following up with the same
participants many years later. In this particular study found that
people with the most cynical hostility at ages thirty five
to fifty five, as measured by a couple of common
inventories such as the Cook Medley Hostility scale, also had
the greatest likelihood of depressive mood nineteen years later, even

(43:32):
after controlling for socio demographic variables and the presence of
baseline mental health struggles. And so the authors conclude that
cynicism on its own is a strong and robust predictor
of later depression. And the negative effects don't stop there.
There's also there are multiple studies going at least as
far back as the nineteen nineties, maybe even earlier, that

(43:54):
have found a link between cynicism and all cause mortality,
so on average, cynical people tend to have earlier deaths.
One example of this research is a study by Susan
Everson and co authors in the American Journal of Epidemiology
in nineteen ninety seven. This investigated a group of twenty
one hundred and twenty five men between the ages of

(44:14):
forty two and sixty over a period of nine years,
and it found that men in the top quartile, so
the top twenty five percent of cynical hostility scores, were
more than twice as likely to die in the next
nine years as men in the bottom quartile, the lowest
twenty five percent of cynicism scores. And in this case,

(44:35):
the authors found that the correlation with all cause mortality
disappeared when the analysis factored in behavioral risk factors things
like smoking and levels of alcohol consumption, and some other
risk factors, which suggests that at least within this sample
the way they looked at it here, it might not
necessarily be that cynicism kills you directly, but that cynicism

(44:59):
is a associated with behaviors and lifestyle and conditioned responses
that worsen health outcomes and lead to earlier deaths. And
so of course you could factor in things like the
later finding that cynicism does appear to be bad for
your cardiovascular health. Now here's another question. There appears to
be a wide consensus among experts cynicism it comes with

(45:22):
bad health outcomes. But are we sure which way the
effect goes? Like does poor health make people more cynical
or does cynicism lead to poor health? Well, I found
a paper looking into that, and it seems like the
effect probably goes both ways, creating a vicious cycle. So
this paper was by Olga Stavrova and Daniel Elibracht called

(45:45):
Broken Bodies, Broken Spirits How poor health contributes to a
cynical worldview in the European Journal of Personality from twenty nineteen.
A note that we'll encounter these author names repeatedly in
the series. That seems like they've done a lot of
research on cynicism. Stavrova is a professor of psychology at
Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Daniel Elibracht is at

(46:06):
the University of Cologne in Germany. Now this one I
thought was pretty interesting. This paper opens with a little
historical anecdote that I don't think I'd ever come across before.
It's talking about King Henry aka Robert Barathian. Yeah, Henry.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
So.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
On January twenty fourth, fifteen thirty six, the English King
Henry the Eighth was knocked off of his horse during
a jousting event at a tournament, and he lost consciousness
for a few hours. And as a result of this fall,
he sustained a number of injuries, which essentially led to
pain and various downstream health problems for the rest of

(46:46):
his life. I think he lived another ten or eleven
years after this. And what's interesting is that around this time,
records and chronicles of Henry's reign note a shift in
the king's personality. It seems that sometime around here Henry
really started to become more paranoid and suspicious and increasingly tyrannical.

(47:08):
Now there are multiple historical hypotheses to explain what was
going on with Henry.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Here.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
I found another paper. I was just looking around and
found another paper that was like, well, what if there
was like a lead poisoning thing, you know, who knows,
But so what they're about to say is not the
only possible explanation. But the authors discussed the idea that
what if Henry's injuries and the pursuant health problems in
the years that followed made him into that type of person,

(47:34):
made him into a person who quote believed everyone, including
his court members and close ones, were untrustworthy and mean spirited.
So coming to the actual experiment here, we already have
evidence that cynicism tends in multiple ways to lead to
poor health. But to read from the author's abstract quote,

(47:56):
the present research proposes that poor health might represent both
a consequence and a source of cynicism. Using cross lagged
path analyzes, we documented bi directional associations between health and
cynicism in a nationally representative sample of Germans study one
and a large example of the American Elderly Study two.

(48:18):
Cynical individuals were more likely to develop health problems, and
poor health promoted the development of a cynical worldview over time,
and so these health status evaluations were done both with
self report surveys and with objective physical measures by third
party administrators, and they found the effect was robust even
when the author is controlled for the effects of depression.

(48:42):
So in their analysis, the authors actually propose a mechanism
by which cynicism and poor health ratchet one another up
in a vicious cycle. So cynicism tends to lead to
your health getting worse. When your health gets worse, it
imposes constrains on your life. You know, this is a

(49:03):
I think a lot of people probably like when you've
had a medical condition or something. It's not just like
the direct pain caused by the condition, it's also the
way it limits your freedom to do what you want
to do. That can be so frustrating and so painful. So,
you know, medical medical problems can directly limit your freedom.

(49:23):
They can take away your sense of control over your
own fate. They can make you more dependent on others.
And this constrained status, the authors think, may in turn
activate quote self protection strategies including suspiciousness and hostility, contributing
to the endorsement of a cynical worldview. So in this model,

(49:45):
health problems make you feel constrained and vulnerable, which makes
you defensive, which in some cases makes people cynical and
of course, the increased cynicism will tend on balance to
make health outcomes even worse.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
And I'm doing some of the other part of that then,
is yet you're not going out then and like making
new friends, engaging in friendships and you know, family relationships
that you already have.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
Yeah, we're taking part in activities that make you feel fulfilled.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yeah, and so yeah, it becomes this visious feedback loop.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
I say, even apart from the health consequences, I think
this is very interesting to find this association between cynicism
and a perception of constraint. That cynicism seems to bloom
when it is watered by the feeling that you are
not free to do what you want and do not
have control over your life.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:47):
There's one more thing I want to talk about before
we have to wrap up this part today, and that
is cynicism and other life outcomes. So here's a kind
of irony. If you were to ask me, is there
any realm in which is correlated with better outcomes for
a person? Does cynicism ever like help you? I might
have guessed without reading anything, maybe in like material success

(51:11):
in career and business, you know, because there's like an
archetype character we all have in our heads, the cynical
materialist shark, like a business leader or career ladder climber
who trusts no one, has a dark view of human
nature and who will do anything to succeed.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
Yeah, this is like the TV reality show trope of
that I'm not here to make friends guy.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
Right exactly, So you imagine that guy that I'm not
here to make friends guy gets ahead because that's how
they present themselves. Right now, there is no doubt you
will find individual examples of quite cynical people who have
found material success. But is this correlation generally true? Is
it true on average most of the time according to
the research I was reading. Nope, not at all.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
So.

Speaker 3 (51:57):
One study by Stavrova, Ilibract and Dungning Wren called cynical
people desire power but rarely acquire it, exploring the role
of cynicism in leadership attainment. This was in the British
Journal of Psychology twenty twenty four. This found that cynical
people have a greater desire for power than non cynical
people do they tend to seek dominance, however, quote a

(52:21):
study of virtual teams showed that more cynical individuals were
less likely to emerge as group leaders, and a perspective
study of about nine thousand employees followed for up to
ten years showed that cynicism predicted a lower likelihood of
attaining a leadership position in organizations. So in these experiments,

(52:41):
cynicism means you want power more than the average person,
but you're actually less likely to acquire it. Okay, that's power.
How about money? Money and power, that's all anybody cares about,
maybe in the cynical worldview. But Stavrova and alebract found
in a study called Cynical Beliefs about Human Nature and Income,

(53:02):
Longitudinal and Cross Cultural Analyzes in the Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology in twenty sixteen. This looked at surveys
that were conducted over time, and the authors here found
that Americans who endorsed cynical beliefs about human nature think
you can't trust anybody. They're all going to stab you
in the back. These people actually made less money over time,

(53:23):
measured at intervals of two years and at nine years.
And then research on German workers also found cynicism undermined
income potential over a period of nine years. Now, why
would cynicism cut into a person's earning potential? You have
this idea that like the cynical person will you know
that they're not here to make friends, and so they'll

(53:45):
get the raise and all that. The authors here say
that it seems to be because cynicism, of course, is
characterized by low trust. So people high in cynicism miss
out on opportunities to cooperate, you know, they miss out
on opportunity to achieve mutual benefit by working together with
other people. And they also, I thought this was interesting

(54:06):
quote over invest in monitoring, control, and other means of
protection from potential exploitation. So when you're very cynical, you
not only miss out on chances to work together for
mutual benefit, you also waste a lot of your resources,
your time and energy and money on excessive efforts to

(54:27):
avoid being a sucker.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Yeah, it's like you're you're always on the defense, right,
You're like, nice, try trying to get me to go
out to lunch with you coworkers. You're just stealing my
lunch break from me, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (54:41):
I mean, yeah, yeah, what are they trying to get
out of me? Yeah? Okay, they want to be friends? Yeah,
so however, here I there is also an interesting example
in this study that illuminates the question of wind as
being cynical actually benefit a person, and the authors say
quote using survey data from forty one countries, it revealed

(55:04):
that the negative effect of cynical beliefs on income is
alleviated in sociocultural contexts with low levels of pro social behavior,
high homicide rates, and high overall societal cynicism levels. Holding
cynical beliefs about others has negative economic outcomes unless such
beliefs hold true. And so this connects to something that

(55:27):
we may have to explore as we go on. But
I think there's some truth to this idea. Cynicism is
harmful to the cynical individual in a cultural environment that
is less cynical, But cynicism appears to be more or
less harmful or maybe even helpful to the cynical individual
in a cultural environment that is more cynical, which should

(55:51):
obviously trouble us if we like, since increasing cynicism within
the culture that's bad in itself for lots of reasons,
but it also puts real pressure on each individual person
to be more cynical to adapt to the cynical environment,
so trust just ratchets down and down in one direction.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
Yeah, so like the more life becomes the movie RoboCop. Yeah,
it's not just in terms of you know, technology obviously
and the you know, the crime that is a that
exists in that view of a futuristic Detroit, but also
just like it's a very cynical world and it seems
like the kind of place where where I mean we

(56:32):
see examples of this where the cynic rises and yeah,
you can imagine cynicism perhaps would protect you a little
bit from like random robot murders. Ah.

Speaker 3 (56:42):
That's kind of interesting though, because on one hand, yeah,
it's like in reality, you might have to be more
cynical to get by in OCP controlled Detroit, but in
the movie you do really see people like benefiting from
mutual trust and cooperation.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Like yeah, yeah, like I feel like you do see,
I feel like in many of your more cynical worlds
in a work of fiction. And to be clear, there
are works out there that are just like ultimately very
very cynical and maybe very nihilistic in their vision. But
a lot of times, like ultimately, I mean, you've got

(57:17):
to invest the viewer, the listener the reader in some way,
and so therefore they often involve a cynical figure coming
out of their cynicism a little bit, you know, like
maybe it's a noir you know, hard boiled detective story.
You have a very like world weary, cynical detective. Like
there's there's often got to be something, some light that

(57:39):
is bringing them out of that darkness at least for
a little bit.

Speaker 3 (57:43):
Yeah, unfortunately, I feel not unfortunately, I guess, I mean
I like these stories too, but oh, I think the
shape of a lot of these noir stories is like
somebody is cynical at the beginning, they put their trust
in someone, there's a light at the end of the tunnel,
and then the light is snuffed out and they end
up even more cynical at the end.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah it's Chinatown.

Speaker 3 (58:03):
But hey, can I can I offer I think an
actually really positive spin on a lot of this research
about all these negative effects of cynicism. There is an
implied inverse in most of these which is that it
really emphasizes how much mutual trust and cooperation benefits our lives.
That like, when you cut these things out, here is

(58:25):
all of the negative consequences that flow in mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
Yeah, and so these are these are things we need
to value while we have them, and and nurture them
while they're in our lives and seek them out of
there if they're missing.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
Yeah, and try to grow them where they're where they
are faltering.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
Don't skip game night this week or whatever is game
night in your life, you know. Yeah, these these are
things worth holding on.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
To by God, trust somebody this week. Yeah, Okay, Well
should we cap part one there? We're definitely going to
come back for more.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Yeah, there's a lot more to discuss, so we'll be
back in part two. But I think already there's a
lot of food for thought here, so already feel free
to write in if you have thoughts on capital C cynicism,
lowercase C cynicism, or anything else that's come up in
this episode. We'd like to remind everyone out there that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays,

(59:20):
we do a short form episode, and on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on weird house cinema. Of note, if all
goes according to plan, This Friday we will discuss the
two hundred film selection for Weird House Cinema. We picked
out quite a doozy, so tune in for that if
that interests you.

Speaker 3 (59:40):
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 stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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