The problem with cynics

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.

[Image credit: Andy Lendzion]

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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An act of faith

Over the last couple of months I've been dealing with a health problem that is one of those collections of symptoms that falls somewhere on the spectrum between "mild inconvenience" and "I'm going to be dead in three months."  Fortunately, at the moment the doctor is leaning strongly toward the former.  (I won't go into further details because I hate it when People Of A Certain Age begin every conversation with what my dad called "the organ recital" -- telling everyone they talk to intimate details of their various health-related issues.)

In any case, this kind of thing absolutely plays hell with someone who has chronic anxiety.  Frankly, over the last two months the anxiety has been far worse than the symptoms themselves, and I have no doubt that it's actually made the symptoms more severe.  But it's put making any firm summer plans on hold, given that my brain keeps shouting at me that I might not be able to follow through on them on account of being incapacitated, hospitalized, or dead.

But it started me down a line of thought that, for once, was productive instead of irrational and paralyzing.  It brought to mind the word faith.  I realize this is not one you'd expect to hear from a skeptical atheist type.  But it struck me that faith is what's invoked any time we make plans -- faith that we and the ones involved will still be around when the plans come to fruition.

That seems pretty dark and pessimistic, but actually it's the opposite.  None of us are guaranteed another day, another hour, another minute, so the only option is to act as if we do, to be right here in the moment and let the future take care of itself.  It's like what Jean-Luc Picard -- then in the mind of the character Kamin -- said to his daughter in the beautiful episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "The Inner Light:" "Seize the time, Meribor – live now.  Make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again."

Being ill has made this thought come back to me again and again.  It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago when I bought a couple of tropical plants to replace some of the ones I lost this past winter when my greenhouse heater malfunctioned on one of the coldest nights in January, and I heard a sepulchral voice in my mind say, "Maybe I won't be around to see them flower."  When I saw the daffodils blooming in April and it occurred to me that this might be the last time I ever would.  When I was outside playing with my dogs and wondered how many more opportunities I'd have.

I know these thoughts are coming from my mental illness; I do trust the doctor that I'm probably going to be okay.  But really, isn't that the situation we're all in?  It's all an act of faith.  Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of faith.  We maneuver our way through this dangerous, unpredictable, endlessly weird world and plan for meeting some friends at the pub day after tomorrow, for a vacation this summer, for visiting with family during the winter holidays, simultaneously knowing that none of it might happen.  But that's what we have to do.  The only other option is to descend into panic now because of what might or might not occur later, to willfully destroy our present because our future isn't guaranteed.

My grandma used to tell me, "Worry is like a rocking chair; it keeps you busy but it doesn't get you anywhere."  I'd make it even stronger, though.  Worry wastes what we've got right here in our hands.  I'm not going to say it's easy to conquer; I've had anxiety disorder my entire life, and I'm not expecting it to go away magically.  But I have -- and so does everyone -- control over deliberately choosing to live life the best I can regardless of how much of it I have left.  It's all a risk; every action we take, or decide not to take.  As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, in The Fellowship of the Ring, "It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.  You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."

The question is not whether you want to take a risk; the question is which risk you want to take.  For me, I'd rather risk the possibility of my plans and aspirations not coming to fruition than risk giving in to my anxiety, then getting to the end of the path and realizing what I missed.

So my advice: carpe the absolute fuck out of every diem you've got left, whether it's one or ten thousand.  I'm completely agnostic about whether there's an afterlife; maybe there is, maybe there isn't.  But as far as what I know for sure, this right here, right now, is all I've got.  And right now the sun is shining and the weather is warm and pleasant and there are people who love me.  There's music to listen to and stories to write and dogs to play with and books to read.  Okay, it won't last forever.  But I'll hang on to the sweetness I've got right now for all I'm worth, and have faith that whatever happens tomorrow, I'll have made the most of today.

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Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many races without mishap, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die.  In this case, there was actually a significant chance of it, because it was about 93 F and the humidity usually found in a sauna.  More than one person collapsed on the course.  I made it to the finish line.  Then I collapsed.

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology a friend sent me, suggesting that my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent.  They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt...  They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my running performance lately, especially since just last week I finished a 400-mile virtual run, a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, in 88 days.  Unfortunately, because of COVID, I've been mostly running alone, so no one was around to give me a high five afterward except my dog, and he would probably have been equally enthusiastic if all I'd done was walk to the end of the driveway and back.

Even if pessimism may make your athletic performance better, I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

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If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Cockeyed optimism and the Gospel of Barnabas

I suppose that it's only human to be optimistic.  A 2009 study at the University of Kansas found that 89% of people predicted that the world was going to be as good or better than it is now in five years -- and this pattern held irrespective of ethnic, religious, and national identification.  (Source)

Of course, what "better" means can differ fairly dramatically from person to person.  Witness the recent pronouncement from the powers-that-be in Iran.  (Source)

The whole thing started in 2000, when Turkish authorities broke up a gang that was involved in the illegal acquisition and sale of antiquities.  Amongst the haul was a leather book written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic.  Turkish scholars analyzed the book, and announced that it was a copy of the lost Gospel of Barnabas, one of the early Christian converts and a companion of St. Paul.  The document, the Turkish linguists said, could date from the 5th or 6th century.  Its value to the field of archeology was obvious, and the book was transferred under armed guard to Turkey's National Ethnography Museum in Ankara, where it has been under lock and key ever since.

All of this was well and good, and of interest only to religious historians, until the recent announcement that a line in Chapter 41 had been translated as follows:  "God has hidden himself as Archangel Michael ran them (Adam and Eve) out of heaven, (and) when Adam turned, he noticed that at top of the gateway to heaven, it was written 'La elah ela Allah, Mohammad rasool Allah' (Allah is the only God and Mohammad his prophet)."

When I read this, I did an immediate facepalm, because I knew what was coming next.

The Turkish linguists lost no time at all in proclaiming that this manuscript predicted the rise of Islam and the role of Mohammad as its chief exponent, and that it proves that Islam is the One Correct Religion.  Catholic authorities quickly responded, "Now, wait just a moment, here," or words to that effect, and demanded to see the book, a request that is being "considered."  Prominent Catholics rushed to shrug the whole thing off as a non-issue -- Phil Lawler of Catholic Culture calling it a "laughable... challenge to Christianity."  So, basically, all of the people who weighed in on the story reacted with optimism -- proclaiming that circumstances would vindicate whatever view of the world they already had.  But no one had as inadvertently amusing a reaction as did Iran's Basij Press:

"The discovery of the original Barnabas Bible will now undermine the Christian Church and its authority and will revolutionize the religion in the world," a press release from Basij last week states.  "The most significant fact, though, is that this Bible has predicted the coming of Prophet Mohammad and in itself has verified the religion of Islam."

Basij goes on to predict that the "Gospel of Barnabas" will result in the downfall of Christianity.

Okay.  So, what do we actually have here?  A book that only a few people have seen, and whose provenance has yet to be demonstrated conclusively.  That book may have a line that seems to predict the coming of Mohammad, but this has only been verified by people who have a serious vested interest in its being true -- and in any case, the fact of its being a prediction is highly doubtful given that we don't know how old the book actually is.  And now, a government that has shown itself to be relentlessly hostile to Christians throws the whole thing into a press release -- and seriously believes that their pronouncement is going to cause a worldwide exodus from Christianity.

I mean, really.  Pollyanna is one thing, but those folks at Basij really have turned the whole Cockeyed Optimism thing into performance art.   I have this highly amusing mental image of Fred and Vera Fuddle of Topeka, Kansas calling up their minister and saying, "Sorry, Brother Steve, we won't be in church this Sunday -- we read about those folks in Turkey who found a book that says that over the gateway to heaven, it said something about Allah and Mohammad.  No offense, but I'm thinkin' that kind of undermines the church's authority, know what I mean?  Give my regards to Sue Ellen and the kids.  Oh, and one other thing... you know of a nice mosque in the area?"

So, anyway, I think that the Gospel of Barnabas will have little to no effect on anyone, even if the Vatican isn't allowed to send in their experts.  And that's just what we should expect.  89% of people think that the world is going to be as good or better in five years than it is now -- so the Iranians will continue to predict the downfall of all the people they despise, and the rest of us will just go on believing what we've always believed.