A man I know is one of the most cynical people I've ever met.
He said to me on more than one occasion, "I hate people." Despite the fact that the designation "people" includes his wife, children, the person he was talking to at the time (me)... and himself. He distrusts just about everyone, badmouths them incessantly behind their backs, and in his business micromanages everything to a fare-thee-well. As a result, he's lost customers, his staff might as well be processed through a revolving door, and has developed a well-deserved reputation in the industry as someone to be avoided both by potential clients and by employees.
His cynicism has, in fact, become his reality.
It's an awfully common phenomenon. My own mom was a fearful, suspicious person who thought the world was a deeply dangerous place, full of people waiting to take advantage of you, or even hurt you or kill you. While watching television she gravitated toward "true crime" shows -- Cops and CSI, that sort of thing -- which of course show you the seediest, most violent slices of humanity. This further reinforced her opinion about the horrible risks of stepping outside your own front door. I'll never forget the last phone call between us before I left on a month-long walking tour of the north of England, my first-ever trip overseas, when I was about thirty years old. I was ridiculously excited about it, but she was full of cautions about all the terrible things that could, and probably would, happen to me.
Her final words to me before we hung up were, "Remember, don't trust anyone."
In England. I mean, for cryin' in the sink, it wasn't like I was going to Turkmenistan or North Korea or something.
And, of course, I had a perfectly lovely time, met some wonderful people (several of whom are still friends, three decades later), and told her so when I got back. Didn't change her outlook; her attitude seems to have been that I'd simply gotten lucky, and don't count on it happening ever again.
It's not that I'm immune to this sort of thinking myself. I've written Skeptophilia for over twelve years, and the focus is frequently on pseudoscience. I've had to be on guard to stop my attitude going from "this person believes this particular piece of pseudoscientific rubbish" to "wow, everyone is really dumb." It's why I try to split my posts between pseudoscience and actual science; to say "look at the amazing things the human mind can achieve" at least as often as I say "look at where we've stumbled."
I used to tell my Critical Thinking students something that I still believe to this day is an essential truth: cynicism is as inaccurate as, and as lazy as, gullibility. We laugh at gullible people, call them fools, stooges, suckers, chumps, and a variety of other unflattering names. But there's nothing inherently smarter about disbelieving everything. Both gullibility and cynicism are excuses to stop thinking, to avoid doing the hard work of evaluating the facts and evidence and coming to a justified conclusion.
And yet, cynics have acquired an undeserved air of erudition and wisdom, as if they're the only ones smart enough to have "seen through" everyone. People are stupid and/or evil, the world sucks, everyone is dishonest, the government is hopelessly and thoroughly corrupt. End of story. No need to think about it any further than that.
The problem is, the actual facts and evidence don't support that conclusion at all.
The topic comes up because I'm currently reading Jamil Zaki's wonderful book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, which I heard about through the amazing podcast Hidden Brain a few weeks ago, and which should be required reading. Zaki's point, which he supports with tons of data from his own studies and those of other psychologists, is that not only is the default condition of humanity to be cooperative, kind, and compassionate, but that trusting others usually generates trust in return. Companies where the bosses trust their employees to work hard, be creative, and collaborate are not only happier places, they're far more productive than autocratic, micromanaged, competitive, factory-model sweatshops. Just like the examples I started with, of the nasty-tempered cynical business owner and my own frightened, suspicious mom, you create the reality you live in. If you look for ugliness, you're sure to find it.
What we often ignore, though, is the deeper truth that if you look for goodness, you'll find that, too. What we choose to cultivate in ourselves is what we ultimately find ourselves surrounded with.
Understand that I'm not recommending adopting a Panglossian attitude of "everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds." There is injustice, dishonesty, exploitation, bigotry, and true evil out there. It's just that defaulting to "everything sucks" is not only incorrect, it's lazy -- and it gives us a convenient excuse not to work toward fixing what is wrong about our society. Part of the problem, of course, is media; we're fed a continuous diet of bad news because it keeps our attention. (There's a reason it's called "doomscrolling.") As just one of many examples in Zaki's book, how many of you have accepted without question that violent crime in the United States is escalating? It's a major talking point, especially by one particular political party, and we accept it because it fits our mental model that everything is going to hell.
In fact, violent crime in the United States has fallen drastically in the last five years, with overall totals declining in 54 of the 69 largest cities, and rates for certain categories of crime going down between twelve and twenty percent.
But that fits neither with the political agenda -- "you're in danger" drives people to the polls, so they can vote for the person who says they can fix what they just now made you scared of -- nor with our self-congratulatory sense that maybe some people are stupid enough to get fooled by pollyanna-ish optimists, but at least we are smart and well-informed and admit the harsh reality.
Zaki points out, and I wholeheartedly agree, that the best approach is to split the difference between cynicism and gullibility. Neither trust everyone immediately nor reject everyone out of hand; base your opinions, and your actions, on facts. (And, it must be said, don't determine your "facts" with a three-minute Google search to locate a couple of websites that agree with what you already believed.) It's better to default to trust than to suspicion -- and, significantly, you're no more likely to be wrong if you do so. One of the more surprising studies in Zaki's book is about whether cynical people are better at recognizing when they're being lied to. Since they're inherently suspicious, you'd think so, wouldn't you? It turns out that both cynical and gullible people are bad at discerning liars from truth-tellers. It's the skeptics -- the ones who base their answers on careful consideration of what the person actually said -- who score the best.
All in all, cynicism not only poisons your own joy, it feeds you an inaccurate view of the world. And, like the people I started with, it creates a small, mean, toxic world in reality, which reinforces the cynic that they were right all along. It's like the quote by Ken Keyes: "A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror."
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