Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so I have
Speaker 1: a vault episode for you. This is going to be
Speaker 1: part three of four in our Cynicism series. This episode
Speaker 1: originally published four twenty two, twenty twenty five. Let's dive
Speaker 1: right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And today we are
Speaker 3: returning with part three in our series on cynicism, the
Speaker 3: tendency to believe that other people are selfish, untrustworthy, and immoral.
Speaker 3: In part one of the series, we defined cynicism in
Speaker 3: its modern usage along the lines I just said, and
Speaker 3: we distinguished it from other concepts like pessimism and from
Speaker 3: the cynic school of philosophy founded in ancient Greece, which
Speaker 3: was not defined by thinking about other people as morally
Speaker 3: bad and undeserving of trust, but instead by the idea
Speaker 3: that people should strive for self sufficiency and moral integrity
Speaker 3: based on living according to our nature, sort of throwing
Speaker 3: off the hypocrisies that are mandated by culture. And I
Speaker 3: think This goal of exposing hypocrisy is one of the
Speaker 3: few threads you might find between modern cynicism and ancient
Speaker 3: cynic philosophy, though still with some differences. It's not quite
Speaker 3: this simple. But I was thinking the other day about it.
Speaker 3: I think you could say cynic philosophy was like, hypocrisy
Speaker 3: is bad, and I'm going to try to get rid
Speaker 3: of it, whereas modern cynicism is more like everybody's a hypocrite.
Speaker 3: You can't trust them, So a decay from what was
Speaker 3: once a positive mission for truth into a kind of
Speaker 3: surrender to the idea that we're all living a lie.
Speaker 3: In Part one, we also talked about re search into
Speaker 3: the correlates of modern cynicism. So like, if I am
Speaker 3: highly cynical, what are the effects of that on my life?
Speaker 3: It turns out there's a lot of research on this question,
Speaker 3: and the answer is the effects are overwhelmingly negative. Cynicism
Speaker 3: appears to be bad for health outcomes, leading to things
Speaker 3: like cardiovascular disease, depression, substance abuse, and early death. It
Speaker 3: is correlated with lower quality relationships, a decreased tendency to
Speaker 3: pursue certain types of goals, and even contrary to the
Speaker 3: very familiar image of the cynical Machiavelian elite power player,
Speaker 3: and of course we can think of individual examples of
Speaker 3: this from the real world. On average, cynicism actually makes
Speaker 3: it harder for regular people to achieve even cynically coded
Speaker 3: material goals like money and positions of power, probably because
Speaker 3: in part, cynicism makes people less likely to cooperate with
Speaker 3: others and thus less likely to benefit from relationships of
Speaker 3: mutual trust. In Part two, we followed up on a
Speaker 3: number of tangents from the first episode, and we also
Speaker 3: took a detailed look at a paper on the so
Speaker 3: called cynical genius illusion. The short version of this is
Speaker 3: that while people don't necessarily like cynics, we do tend
Speaker 3: to believe, on average that cynics are more intelligent and
Speaker 3: more cognitively competent than non cynics. For example, people are
Speaker 3: more likely to assign a cynical person jobs like doing
Speaker 3: mathematical calculations or reviewing charts of scientific results, and this
Speaker 3: is in line with the long running archetype and fiction
Speaker 3: of the cynical genius, like Sherlock Holmes, someone who withholds
Speaker 3: trust and has a very low opinion of human nature,
Speaker 3: but also has superior knowledge, memory, and powers of reasoning.
Speaker 1: One thing that I neglected to bring up when we
Speaker 1: were talking about the Sherlock Holmes trope is that you know,
Speaker 1: there is a distinction to be made between skepticism and cynesism. Yes, now,
Speaker 1: you can imagine where the line begins to blur at
Speaker 1: some points, and certainly, as we've been discussing, you know,
Speaker 1: your cynicism level may not be constant throughout your life.
Speaker 1: You may drift back and forth, and so you can
Speaker 1: imagine a scenario where one is essentially a skeptic, but
Speaker 1: then that may sort of stray into cynical territory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I was thinking about the distinction there also.
Speaker 3: I was in fact talking about this with Rachel and
Speaker 3: I guess we never got into this in the previous parts,
Speaker 3: but I think there is a big difference between how
Speaker 3: I use the word cynicism and skepticism. For me, skepticism
Speaker 3: is an attempt to dole out your trust according to
Speaker 3: how trustworthy something is based on the evidence. It's essentially
Speaker 3: trying to overcome your natural biases to be more trusting
Speaker 3: or less trusting than the situation actually deserves. It's just
Speaker 3: trying to be as rational as you can. What reasons
Speaker 3: do I have to trust or distrust? Whereas is just
Speaker 3: a bias toward distrust.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things, though, is that someone who
Speaker 1: is truly cynical about a given topic may self label
Speaker 1: as skeptical, and that can lead to a fair amount
Speaker 1: of confusion.
Speaker 3: Right. Well, of course, if skepticism is defined as being
Speaker 3: as reasonable as you can with trust, the cynic always
Speaker 3: thinks they're being reasonable, or usually probably thinks they're being reasonable.
Speaker 3: They just think it is reasonable to have very low
Speaker 3: trust and think everyone's going to stab them in the back.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And in fact, that brings us back coming back to
Speaker 3: the recap of the cynical genius illusion, The question is
Speaker 3: are they correct in thinking that is the cynic in
Speaker 3: fact being reasonable and having correct insights that non cynics lack.
Speaker 3: The other half of the finding in that paper was
Speaker 3: that the cynical genius illusion is actually an illusion. Highly
Speaker 3: cynical people are not smarter or more knowledgeable on average.
Speaker 3: In fact, in the majority of scenarios tested, the association
Speaker 3: runs the other way, with education and intelligence being correlated
Speaker 3: with a greater tendency to trust. The big caveat here,
Speaker 3: of course, is that cynicism is warranted in some situations,
Speaker 3: in particularly corrupt situations and scenarios. So it seems like
Speaker 3: a common pattern the researchers found is that knowledgeable and
Speaker 3: intelligent people might be might be more trusting by default,
Speaker 3: but shift into cynical mode when they recognize that they
Speaker 3: are dealing with a corrupt and untrustworthy situation or environment.
Speaker 3: And in fact, that would sort of line up with
Speaker 3: how I just defined skepticism, right. It's sort of like
Speaker 3: detecting reliable signals from your environment, essentially paying attention to
Speaker 3: evidence of how trustworthy the situation you're in is. But anyway,
Speaker 3: this study and some studies cited by it helped us
Speaker 3: answer some questions we raised in Part one. First of all,
Speaker 3: I'll do cynics or nonsenics have a more accurate model
Speaker 3: of the world. Of course, it's hard to answer that
Speaker 3: question in a way that averages out all environments in
Speaker 3: all situations. It's kind of hard to say, like who's
Speaker 3: more correct overall, but at least in a bunch of
Speaker 3: experimental scenarios like random strangers are much more trustworthy than
Speaker 3: we tend to give them credit for. One example of
Speaker 3: this was that trust based investing game we talked about,
Speaker 3: where researchers give you an initial reward of money, So
Speaker 3: they give you five dollars, and then you have the
Speaker 3: option to either just keep the five or hand that
Speaker 3: money to a stranger, which quadruples the initial sum, turning
Speaker 3: five dollars into twenty dollars. And then the stranger has
Speaker 3: the option to either keep all the money or give
Speaker 3: you back half of the total sum, doubling your initial investment.
Speaker 3: So you started with five, you end up with ten
Speaker 3: if the stranger gives you the money back. And in
Speaker 3: these types of experiments, strangers tended to be cooperative and trustworthy.
Speaker 3: In the overwhelming number of cases people doubted them way
Speaker 3: too often. So again, that doesn't tell you about every
Speaker 3: situation in life, but it is a piece of evidence
Speaker 3: that people on average tend to overestimate other people's selfishness,
Speaker 3: and thus the highly cynical person is probably going to
Speaker 3: miss out on lots of opportunities to trust and to
Speaker 3: benefit from cooperation. But the other question that study shed
Speaker 3: some light on for us was since generalized cynicism has
Speaker 3: so many horrible downsides. It's like really bad for you
Speaker 3: in so many ways, not just for the people around
Speaker 3: the cynic, but for the cynic themselves. What are its
Speaker 3: upsides if any? And there were a few answers here.
Speaker 3: If you are not good at being able to recognize
Speaker 3: the difference between a corrupt situation and a trustworthy one,
Speaker 3: generalized cynicism may help you avoid catastrophic outcomes from misplacing
Speaker 3: your trust. But again, this comes at great cost. It's
Speaker 3: sort of you know, we have to destroy the town
Speaker 3: in order to save it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Or you can imagine, like a biological analogy would
Speaker 1: be some sort of an organism that has had to
Speaker 1: extend a great deal of energy into evolving some sort
Speaker 1: of like highly protective shell that also slows it down
Speaker 1: and restricts it restricts its range, or something to that
Speaker 1: effect exactly.
Speaker 3: I think that's a great analogy. And then the other
Speaker 3: thing being that cynicism may have, according to the cynical
Speaker 3: genius effect, the socially desirable effect of making you appear
Speaker 3: smarter and more competent to others. Again, this comes at
Speaker 3: great cost. Like Sherlock Holmes is cool, you might want
Speaker 3: to seem smart like Sherlock Holmes, but given all the downsides,
Speaker 3: the Sherlock gambit is probably not worth it, at least
Speaker 3: in my opinion. Anyway, we're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in this episode we're going to get a
Speaker 1: little bit into social media and politics, which shouldn't come
Speaker 1: as a surprise, right. Cynicism, social media, politics, these are
Speaker 1: all I think expected Waters.
Speaker 3: Wait, did you mean to sound cynical when you were
Speaker 3: saying that? Was that the joke?
Speaker 1: Probably? Probably? Yeah, I mean it's easy to feel cynical
Speaker 1: about all of this sort of thing, right, So just
Speaker 1: looking considering just say, cynicism and social media like this
Speaker 1: alone is a really big area to get into, and likewise,
Speaker 1: political cynicism is another huge topic. Both of these have
Speaker 1: been topics of discussion and analysis for years and years
Speaker 1: and years.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I would say, of course the relationship between
Speaker 3: cynicism and politics is especially important to understand within democracies.
Speaker 3: You know, within places of popular political participation and civil
Speaker 3: liberties and freedoms. You know, whether you are cynical about
Speaker 3: the political structures you live under matters a lot less.
Speaker 3: If you are like a peasant in medieval France than
Speaker 3: it does if you are somebody who is free to
Speaker 3: act within a democracy, free to vote and run for
Speaker 3: office yourself and engage in political rhetoric.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, because it means coming to believe that the
Speaker 1: thing that you can do that matters doesn't matter, and then,
Speaker 1: like the old saying, by doing nothing, you know, all
Speaker 1: problems are solved. So one of the books that I
Speaker 1: referenced in the first episode is the MIT Press book
Speaker 1: on Cynicism by anskar Allen and Alan digs into this
Speaker 1: topic a lot, and I want attempt to cover every
Speaker 1: point that he makes and every point that he brings
Speaker 1: up on the matter. But there's some really good nuggets
Speaker 1: of wisdom and observation in here related to the level
Speaker 1: of high energy, negative and critical rhetoric that you tend
Speaker 1: to find on the Internet and on social media, very
Speaker 1: much encouraged for profit by service providers and social media companies,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed in the past.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I've long been a fan of the La based
Speaker 1: artists collective known as Everything Is Terrible, Joe, I know
Speaker 1: you're familiar with them as well. They're slow is. If
Speaker 1: everything is terrible, then nothing is that's great.
Speaker 3: I think that statement is meant with a dash of irony.
Speaker 3: But but yeah, everything is terrible is great. You know,
Speaker 3: you may have seen videos of theirs, even if you're
Speaker 3: not familiar with the name of like super cuts of
Speaker 3: weird moments from old found media. One of my favorites
Speaker 3: of all times. I think everything is Terrible did the
Speaker 3: video of it was just moments from a video cassette
Speaker 3: that accompanied a Star Trek board game where there's a
Speaker 3: like a kling on guy who keeps like screaming at
Speaker 3: you to punish you. It was one of the one
Speaker 3: of those things where they were trying to do like
Speaker 3: mixed media board games I think in the late eighties
Speaker 3: or early nineties, where like I don't know, you'd put
Speaker 3: the tape in and then you'd have to roll stuff
Speaker 3: and anyway, this guy keeps Suddenly there's a klingon popping
Speaker 3: on the TV saying like you the one who is
Speaker 3: moving now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, they several different the individuals involved with that
Speaker 1: over the years, and the resurrect different bits of old
Speaker 1: media and now often super cut them into some sort
Speaker 1: of a presentation. If you ever get to get the
Speaker 1: chance to see them live, it's it's well worth it.
Speaker 1: So if everything is terrible, then nothing is. Alan brings
Speaker 1: up this exact point amid contemplations on the possible death
Speaker 1: of philosophy in modern times, citing German philosopher and social
Speaker 1: critic Peter Slaughterdyke, who frequently cites ancient cynic Diogenes is
Speaker 1: pooping in public in his evaluation of modern cynicism as well.
Speaker 1: So Alan now I should clarify though, Alan, in discussing
Speaker 1: Slaughterdyke's ideas, he sees them as an overstatement. But slaughter
Speaker 1: Dyke says that quote, because everything has become problematic, everything
Speaker 1: is also now a matter of indifference.
Speaker 3: So I'm not sure I understand the context of that, right,
Speaker 3: But the way I guess i'd inter but that at
Speaker 3: face value is like, because of our increasing sort of
Speaker 3: critical consciousness and awareness of the world, you can sort
Speaker 3: of find that there are flaws in literally everything, and
Speaker 3: thus if there are flaws in literally everything, nothing matters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and especially if you are just hyper aware
Speaker 1: of all of the negative stories. You know, and this
Speaker 1: has been this has been the case for a while.
Speaker 1: I mean it comes back to some of the you know,
Speaker 1: the very ancient ideas of how do you survive in
Speaker 1: the world by maybe focusing a little more on the dangers. Certainly,
Speaker 1: you know, if it bleeds, it leads and so forth.
Speaker 1: But the social media age, as we've discussed on the
Speaker 1: show before, you know, various social media algorithms have long
Speaker 1: favorite engagement over everything else. And engagement can certainly mean
Speaker 1: things like love and excitement, like look a cute cat
Speaker 1: or look, there's a new John Carpenter blu ray, but
Speaker 1: it can also just mean hate, anger, and disgust.
Speaker 3: Yes, where you're emotions become a tech company's business model
Speaker 3: because your emotions are correlated to behavior on the app
Speaker 3: and your susceptibility. You know, how long you stay on
Speaker 3: the app, how long you scroll, you know whether you're
Speaker 3: likely to click on ads and things like that. And
Speaker 3: it turns out that certain emotions, I think positive and
Speaker 3: negative emotions, when manipulated in certain ways, have been found
Speaker 3: to increase people's engagement. But the negative emotions, it seems
Speaker 3: like those are really easy. That's an easy button to push.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And you know, it can often feel like
Speaker 1: you're just being bombarded by all of this. And I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a strong case to be made that this is
Speaker 1: weaponized to a certain extent by various players. Right, if
Speaker 1: there's just enough bad news coming at you, there's enough controversy,
Speaker 1: then you know, what are you going to respond to?
Speaker 1: You can't possibly respond to all of it, and maybe
Speaker 1: you end up responding to nothing at all.
Speaker 3: But you have to keep scrolling because what if there's
Speaker 3: something you don't know about yet.
Speaker 1: Now, Alan site that all of this is an overstatement because,
Speaker 1: according to him, for individuals to truly feel this way,
Speaker 1: their cynicism would have to be complete. And this reminds
Speaker 1: me a bit in theme of something that's come from
Speaker 1: the show before. The author R. Scott Baker had this idea,
Speaker 1: something he called the somatic apocalypse, in which quote, all
Speaker 1: the shoulds of a meaningful life are either individual or subcultural.
Speaker 1: As a result, the only universal imperatives that remain are
Speaker 1: those arising out of our shared biology are fears and hungers.
Speaker 1: So everything else just kind of shuts down, descends into
Speaker 1: chaos or entropy. So absolute widespread cynicism would, to paraphrase
Speaker 1: the words of Slaughterdyke, be a situation where everything is
Speaker 1: poop in the street and people are nauseated all the time.
Speaker 3: Okay, sounds bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, my understanding, as we would be talking about
Speaker 1: a world in which cynicism concerning the human experience at
Speaker 1: large becomes more absolute, and you know, basically we withdraw
Speaker 1: into individual and localized efforts. But Allen's counter argument here
Speaker 1: is that most people are not so absolutely cynical. He contends,
Speaker 1: quote modern cynicism is driven not by generalized apathy, but
Speaker 1: by incomplete disenchantment. In other words, his argument here is
Speaker 1: that modern cynics have not entirely submitted themselves to cynicism.
Speaker 1: They never hit rock bottom, the point at which they
Speaker 1: might be forced to confront their own cynicism. And so
Speaker 1: he mentions, how, you know, coming back to the idea
Speaker 1: of diogenies, you know again living in the streets among
Speaker 1: dogs and you know, and rags and shrouds, pooping in
Speaker 1: the streets. He brings up this public defecation as a
Speaker 1: shock tactic that's meant to make a point quote, how
Speaker 1: funny is it that you find this upsetting and that
Speaker 1: the modern cynic is just not nauseated enough by the
Speaker 1: reality they're faced with to the point where they make
Speaker 1: that big see cynic shift toward the pursuit of virtue. Hmm, Okay,
Speaker 1: so almost as if we're forever weightless in our cynicism,
Speaker 1: free falling toward a point a forced self recognition and
Speaker 1: revelation we never quite reach, like an imagined space vessel,
Speaker 1: inching ever closer to the speed of light, but unable
Speaker 1: to actually touch it. Or to quote Alan again, he
Speaker 1: refers to it as quote unembedded but is yet underdeveloped negativity.
Speaker 3: Interesting. Okay, wait, so am I interpreting this right?
Speaker 1: Then?
Speaker 3: Essentially that Allan is suggesting that maybe if cynicism were
Speaker 3: more intense and more total, that would actually lead to
Speaker 3: a kind of horseshoe boomerang into seeing value and virtue.
Speaker 1: Again exactly, Yeah, that is exactly the point I believe
Speaker 1: he's making is that, yeah, we're just with this incomplete
Speaker 1: disenchantment with the world, like we think things were bad,
Speaker 1: We've lost trust and establishments. We haven't completely bottomed out,
Speaker 1: like to the point where we actually look up and
Speaker 1: potentially begin scaling back up this ladder of virtue.
Speaker 3: Hmmm, I wonder I wonder about that. I don't know
Speaker 3: if it really works that way, but I'm interested in
Speaker 3: the idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting concept. And the idea here
Speaker 1: is that social media would be part of that equation.
Speaker 1: Alan writes the quote the visceral discomfort of a live
Speaker 1: audience gathered before the defecating cynic that's a capital cynic,
Speaker 1: as in the philosopher has been replaced by a virtual
Speaker 1: audience that turns indignation into profit. So an Internet ecosystem
Speaker 1: that thrives on bad sentiments and becomes characterized by just
Speaker 1: non stop righteous indignation.
Speaker 3: But one that is discouraged from actually going anywhere positive
Speaker 3: instead just kind of festering negative emotion.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now this made me think about past discussions of
Speaker 1: the ideas of Jaron Lanier, and I don't know that
Speaker 1: he ever directly invoked cynicism in any of his works,
Speaker 1: or not the ones I'm familiar with, but one of
Speaker 1: his basic observations was that social media companies reduce us
Speaker 1: to data and to a product that's sold to advertisers.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's an inherent modern cynicism to that
Speaker 1: view of people, like the people are the product and
Speaker 1: people are data. While at the same time realizing this
Speaker 1: can fuel individual cynicism towards the entire social media endeavor
Speaker 1: to the point that it's really hard to trust even
Speaker 1: you know, alternate decentralized social media alternatives, or at least
Speaker 1: that's how it seems to me now. There have been
Speaker 1: a number of papers about this over the years. Have
Speaker 1: been some studies. A recent study published in the International
Speaker 1: Journal of Press Politics by Hassel at all digs into
Speaker 1: this a little bit, and also there have been some
Speaker 1: pass papers by the lead author here, Ariel Hassel. The
Speaker 1: basic idea that I was reading about from this author
Speaker 1: is that in political is that political cynicism is on
Speaker 1: the rise in democracies around the world, as people increasingly
Speaker 1: use social media to access their news as well as
Speaker 1: additional political information, much of which is hostile and lacking
Speaker 1: in civility. This should come as no surprise. If you're
Speaker 1: not aware of this phenomena, then God bless you because
Speaker 1: you have stayed out of the mud of all of
Speaker 1: this over the past decade.
Speaker 3: I think this is broadly what's found by research in general,
Speaker 3: but Rob, maybe you can let me know what you've
Speaker 3: come across here. At least in myself, I've noticed that
Speaker 3: there is a huge difference in how I feel about
Speaker 3: the same news when I'm getting it from like reading
Speaker 3: articles in a newspaper or online newspaper versus seeing it
Speaker 3: by scrolling social media. Gigantic difference in how I process that,
Speaker 3: you know, even very bad and distressing news. When I'm
Speaker 3: reading about it in you know, in news articles, I
Speaker 3: feel like my response to it is more measured and productive.
Speaker 3: My mind tends to go to what would be things
Speaker 3: that could be done to fix this situation, well, you
Speaker 3: know that sort of thing, Whereas when I consume basically
Speaker 3: the same news events by like say, scrolling on a
Speaker 3: social media I tend to not do this these days,
Speaker 3: but you know, I can remember from other times, and
Speaker 3: I have done it a few times recently, profoundly different
Speaker 3: emotional experience, one that is much more distressing, and it
Speaker 3: just creates a feeling of despair and helplessness. Like I
Speaker 3: do not have a productive response to it, like thinking
Speaker 3: about things that could be done to make the situation better.
Speaker 3: It's more just like I want to surrender and curl
Speaker 3: up in a ball, you know. It's much more disempowering
Speaker 3: and horrifying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that's that's not an uncommon experience. Now,
Speaker 1: coming back to this study from the International Journal of
Speaker 1: Press Politics, this is basically what they found out based
Speaker 1: on a panel survey of eighteen hundred American American adults
Speaker 1: during the twenty twenty election. They found that the more
Speaker 1: a person was exposed to political attacks on social media,
Speaker 1: the more politically cynical they became. Yeah, okay, exposure led
Speaker 1: to anger with increased political cynicism. Thus it became this
Speaker 1: kind of like rodent wheel of exposure, anger, rising cynicism,
Speaker 1: then more exposure, more anger, more rising cynicism. And to
Speaker 1: be clear, they characterized this not as a kind of
Speaker 1: healthy cynicism in response to corruption or failure, which they acknowledge.
Speaker 1: You know, when the system is corrupt, when they're failures,
Speaker 1: it's right to have like some response of cynicism. But
Speaker 1: this is the sort of cynicism that is much more
Speaker 1: dangerous and it can ultimately lead to the delegitimization of
Speaker 1: democratic process.
Speaker 3: I might make the distinction we talked about earlier between
Speaker 3: skepticism and cynicism, like that it can be very health
Speaker 3: healthy to be skeptical of politics, to not just take
Speaker 3: politician's word for it, you know, to look for evidence
Speaker 3: of claims and things like that, versus cynicism where you
Speaker 3: just have a bias toward negative emotion and low opinions
Speaker 3: of moral character.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And and what's interesting here too is that
Speaker 1: it ultimately goes beyond the sort of like you could
Speaker 1: frame it as positive political fear mongering or you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of anxiety fueling messaging that does get people
Speaker 1: to the polls, that does inspire some sort of action,
Speaker 1: But instead we're getting to like the level where it
Speaker 1: can result in cynical inaction, where it's it's not like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm revved up, I'm going to go do something about it.
Speaker 1: It's I'm revved up, but I can do nothing about it,
Speaker 1: because thus is the world world now. To go back
Speaker 1: to that discussion of cynical poop in the streets again,
Speaker 1: it's not that you're fed up with all the poop
Speaker 1: and want to do something about it or in response
Speaker 1: to it. Rather, you're just generally nauseated by all the
Speaker 1: poop you see and you dis engage from seeing it
Speaker 1: all together.
Speaker 3: So that is one type of response to political cynicism.
Speaker 3: I came across a paper talking about talking about it
Speaker 3: a little bit differently that I think has some interesting
Speaker 3: insights here. So I was looking for research that study
Speaker 3: the particular characteristics of how cynicism is expressed in political behavior,
Speaker 3: and it turns out there's a decent amount of research
Speaker 3: on this going back many years. Actually, there's a long
Speaker 3: running link in the literature between high cynicism and a
Speaker 3: preference for authoritarian rhetoric and governance. Authoritarianism being the concentration
Speaker 3: of power under a central authority, under a figure or structure,
Speaker 3: often a single person, and the repression of individual freedoms,
Speaker 3: especially the for full suppression of dissent. So I wanted
Speaker 3: to look at one pretty highly cited paper on the
Speaker 3: subject of cynicism in politics, and this was published in
Speaker 3: the year twenty twelve in the European Journal of Personality
Speaker 3: by Svin Patten, Elaine van Heil, Christoph Daunt and Emma
Speaker 3: Onrit and it's called Stripping the Political Political cynic a
Speaker 3: psychological exploration of the concept of political cynicism. Now, this
Speaker 3: was a study of how cynicism manifests in politics in
Speaker 3: multiple samples, specifically from Western Europe, and the authors note
Speaker 3: multiple times that some of these results could be culture specific,
Speaker 3: and so cynicism could manifest differently in one culture than
Speaker 3: it does in another, or differently in one type of
Speaker 3: political system than it does in another but at least
Speaker 3: looking at these samples in Belgium and the Netherlands, they
Speaker 3: found some interesting results. And now I'm not going to
Speaker 3: be able to get into everything the study found, but
Speaker 3: a few bullets that stood out to me. The authors
Speaker 3: were able to detect political cynicism as its own variable,
Speaker 3: which was distinct from just generalized social cynicism, which we've
Speaker 3: been talking about throughout this series, and from a somewhat
Speaker 3: distinct from what they call political distrust. Now, what would
Speaker 3: be the difference there. Political cynicism is cynicism applied specifically
Speaker 3: to politics and politicians. So if general cynicism is the
Speaker 3: belief that people are bad, people are selfish, and morals
Speaker 3: are fake, political cynicism is the belief that politics and
Speaker 3: politicians are bad, they're motivated by self interest and are
Speaker 3: unbound by professed morals. Political cynicism is also differentiated here
Speaker 3: from simple distrust of politicians and of politics, And I
Speaker 3: think a simple way of explaining this slight difference is,
Speaker 3: if I have political distrust, I am cautious about believing
Speaker 3: politicians and what they say. I think that politicians and
Speaker 3: political institutions may in some cases have incentives to lie
Speaker 3: or to make promises they can't keep. So I am
Speaker 3: skeptical of what they say and I try. You know,
Speaker 3: I am withholding some trust. So there is this withholding
Speaker 3: trust element. But if I have high political cynicism, I
Speaker 3: not only treat their claims skeptically and withhold trust, but
Speaker 3: I also think politicians and political institutions are bad, corrupt,
Speaker 3: and in it exclusively for themselves. So it's like more
Speaker 3: of a negative emotional and moral judgment against politics, not
Speaker 3: just caution or skepticism about the claims emanating from it.
Speaker 3: Does that distinction makes sense?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: So in this study, the authors found evidence that political
Speaker 3: cynicism was its own thing, and while related to general
Speaker 3: social cynicism and political distrust, it had its own distinct
Speaker 3: predictive characteristics separate from those other two categories. Political cynicism,
Speaker 3: in particular, was a predictor of a bunch of other
Speaker 3: variables in a person. It tended to be related to
Speaker 3: feelings of political powerlessness and political normlessness, so kind of
Speaker 3: there's nothing I can do, and also there is no
Speaker 3: right or wrong in politics, just power. The authors also
Speaker 3: find that people high in political cynicism do not always
Speaker 3: just sit out of politics, and we've talked about, or
Speaker 3: we mentioned at least in previous parts some other studies
Speaker 3: finding that people high in general cynicism were less likely
Speaker 3: to vote, less likely to be involved in the political process.
Speaker 3: But in this study they did not find that political
Speaker 3: cynics were always sitting things out with at least within
Speaker 3: the context of the samples from Belgium and the Netherlands.
Speaker 3: The rate of voting among political cynics is not very
Speaker 3: different from that of less cynical people, but people high
Speaker 3: in political cynicism tended to view their vote more as
Speaker 3: a prote or as a rebuke of the political system,
Speaker 3: rather than a means of advancing a specific policy agenda. Quote,
Speaker 3: political cenics boost parties not for their ideological program per se,
Speaker 3: but rather because of their supposed integrity, you know. So
Speaker 3: it's like it's not so much about the policies that
Speaker 3: the party they're supporting is proposing, but more often about like,
Speaker 3: this is the only party that really tells it like
Speaker 3: it is. The authors say, political cynicism can be found
Speaker 3: all across the political spectrum, but in this context, in
Speaker 3: these Western European democracies, it tended to manifest most in
Speaker 3: support of extreme right wing protest parties that use anti
Speaker 3: establishment rhetoric, and the authors say it's possible that this
Speaker 3: link is specific to Belgium and the Netherlands. At this time,
Speaker 3: the study was from twenty twelve, and it's possible that
Speaker 3: in a different political environment, cynicism could be more left
Speaker 3: wing coded or maybe even centrist. More research would be
Speaker 3: needed on that. However. Another dimension is that the authors
Speaker 3: here also found a link between high political cynicism, racial prejudice,
Speaker 3: and intolerance. This is in line with previous findings in
Speaker 3: political psychology, and the research was only able to establish
Speaker 3: a correlation, not to determine if there was a causal
Speaker 3: effect between these variables, and so it invites the question,
Speaker 3: if there is an effect, which way does the effect go.
Speaker 3: Does racial prejudice tend to cause people to become politically cynical,
Speaker 3: or does political cynicism tend to cause people to become
Speaker 3: more racist. It could be thought, of course, that political
Speaker 3: cynicism serves to support racist assumptions if the racist believes
Speaker 3: the political system is working to the benefit of racial
Speaker 3: groups they dislike. But it also could be that racial
Speaker 3: prejudice itself is maybe a particular variety or expression of
Speaker 3: underlying cynicism. So ultimately, political cynicism, it seems, is certainly
Speaker 3: a thing that is distinct in itself. It's related to,
Speaker 3: but distinct from, general social cynisism, and its expression is
Speaker 3: a very important factor in understanding how democracies work. So
Speaker 3: if you're involved in political science or political psychology and
Speaker 3: you want to understand and be able to model and
Speaker 3: predict predict democracies, you need to understand political cynicism. It
Speaker 3: is a factor. But another way I was thinking about
Speaker 3: the expression of political cynicism is actually related to what
Speaker 3: we talked about last time, to the cynical genius illusion.
Speaker 3: The cynical genius illusion study found that while people don't
Speaker 3: necessarily love cynics or think that they are the best
Speaker 3: at everything, remember, people were less likely to trust cynics with,
Speaker 3: say a social task like cheering up a depressed friend
Speaker 3: or taking care of a stray animal or something like that.
Speaker 3: It found that, you know, so we don't love cynics
Speaker 3: for everything. We do tend on average to assume highly
Speaker 3: cynical people are smarter and more cognitively competent. And you
Speaker 3: know who doesn't want to be seen as smart. So specifically,
Speaker 3: I was thinking about how this applies to conversations about politics,
Speaker 3: where I've had this thought for a while that I
Speaker 3: think people often selectively deploy cynical rhetoric in political conversations,
Speaker 3: whether or not they really believe it all that strongly,
Speaker 3: in order to look like they know what they're talking
Speaker 3: about without having to get into specifics, so like broad
Speaker 3: sweeping statements of political cynicism. I think last time we
Speaker 3: mentioned the example in all politicians they're all the same,
Speaker 3: you know, it's just they're all liars, they're all the same.
Speaker 3: It allows you to sound like you know what you're
Speaker 3: talking about and sit up on a high horse about
Speaker 3: the subject without having to know anything or read anything
Speaker 3: or follow the news. You can loftily condemn others without
Speaker 3: having to do any homework.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and yeah. I think we've seen some very
Speaker 1: strong examples of this over the past ten years, and
Speaker 1: sometimes sadly you see it puppeted in say comedy, in
Speaker 1: mainstream rhetoric. One of the main examples being in any
Speaker 1: case where someone is just talking about a given election
Speaker 1: and saying it's just a choice between two bad choices.
Speaker 1: You know, it was like both of the choices are
Speaker 1: just as bad. I mean, that's just like, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a great example of lowercase the cynicism, where it's
Speaker 1: like it doesn't matter, everything's just as bad. It doesn't
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter if I vote for one or the other.
Speaker 1: But it also means you don't have to get into
Speaker 1: actually comparing the two if you just assume they're all
Speaker 1: just as bad, which I mean, is there ever a
Speaker 1: case where two bad choices are exactly as bad? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're given a choice between two different
Speaker 1: toxic mushrooms, there are going to be different symptoms, there
Speaker 1: are different dosages and so forth, Like, they're not exactly
Speaker 1: the same, even if yes, in this one cherry picked example,
Speaker 1: the end result is the same for you, the consumer
Speaker 1: of the toxic mushroom.
Speaker 3: I think that's a great analogy. And it's not to
Speaker 3: say it is illegitimate to say in a you know,
Speaker 3: in a two party democracy to dislike both major parties
Speaker 3: or can today it's and you know that's fair, but like, yeah,
Speaker 3: the statements like they're all the same, Like if you
Speaker 3: if you really meant that, that would be absurd. It
Speaker 3: couldn't be all exactly the same. Maybe neither is to
Speaker 3: your liking. But but but if you phrased it that way,
Speaker 3: that might invite people to ask follow up questions like, well,
Speaker 3: in what way you know, Yeah, like.
Speaker 1: What's your scoring method? And is it a scoring method
Speaker 1: where yeah, you reach an absolute zero, but you can't
Speaker 1: get underneath the zero, so you can just have have
Speaker 1: them bottomed out an equal I guess, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like a great scoring mechanism.
Speaker 3: And you know what I want to say also that
Speaker 3: I think there is a more innoxious version of this
Speaker 3: exact thing. I mean, I've been framing it in a
Speaker 3: kind of like I'm framing this hypothetical person in a
Speaker 3: kind of unfriendly way, like they're trying to seem smart
Speaker 3: without doing any homework. But there's also a more common,
Speaker 3: you know, you might say, at least seemingly benign version
Speaker 3: of it, where you're just trying to like sort of
Speaker 3: get through a tense moment in a conversation, or like
Speaker 3: get through something quickly I don't know, with a relative
Speaker 3: or something like that, just by making a kind of
Speaker 3: quick sweep it all under the rug conversation, you know,
Speaker 3: statement about politics, just to like avoid having a difficult conversation,
Speaker 3: go on, do you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, just as an escape hatch for an unpleasant conversation,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: I think people do that sort of thing all the time,
Speaker 3: even if they're not like trying to look like a
Speaker 3: cynical genius, and to an extent that functions the same
Speaker 3: kind of way. It's just like it's a defense mechanism.
Speaker 3: It's a way of using cynicism to to avoid uncomfortable specifics,
Speaker 3: whether that's like revealing that you don't have as much
Speaker 3: knowledge as you would like to appear to have, or
Speaker 3: you know, revealing sort of uncomfortable tensions and differences between people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think also we have to ignore knowledge
Speaker 1: that this sort of cynicism can arise, and certainly in
Speaker 1: response to the very sort of social media bombardment so
Speaker 1: we've been talking about, but also as a direct result
Speaker 1: of manipulation and disinformation that can force you into this mode.
Speaker 1: So I want to be not to completely forgive cynicism
Speaker 1: as it manifests, but we have to acknowledge the complexity
Speaker 1: of its manifestation in a given person as a response
Speaker 1: to streams of information and their overall media, political, social environment.
Speaker 3: So in this series, I think at several points it's
Speaker 3: clear I'm coming down somewhat normatively against cynicism in a
Speaker 3: lot of scenarios. But I also think it's very important
Speaker 3: to understand and be sympathetic to the pressures that give
Speaker 3: rise to cynicism, and to understand how we're all susceptible
Speaker 3: to it, even people who are not high in cynicism,
Speaker 3: like you've talked about, we have cynical moments, and we
Speaker 3: might well become more cynical over time if we sort
Speaker 3: of water those little cine instincts and let them grow.
Speaker 3: But anyway, coming back to that idea raised of trying
Speaker 3: to leverage expressions of cynicism to make yourself look better
Speaker 3: or to come off more favorably in conversation, I did
Speaker 3: find a study on this, so it wasn't just a hunch.
Speaker 3: There's a study in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four by Hillary K's Style called Impression Management
Speaker 3: and Expectations of Political Cynicism, and this found that cynicism,
Speaker 3: specifically with reference to politics, was a means that people
Speaker 3: use to try to control how others perceive them. To
Speaker 3: read from the abstract quote. In three studies, I demonstrate
Speaker 3: that people report they are cynical in order to avoid
Speaker 3: giving the impression they do not know much about politics.
Speaker 3: Political cynicism is not a socially desirable characteristic. People do
Speaker 3: not believe cynicism is normatively good. At the same time,
Speaker 3: many see value to cynicism in politics, fine, which carries
Speaker 3: broad implications for the relationship between cynicism and perceived knowledge
Speaker 3: in political discourse. And so I think that's important too,
Speaker 3: like recognizing that you might not be overall a highly
Speaker 3: cynical person, and yet you might still deploy cynicism specifically
Speaker 3: with reference to politics, maybe because of a response to
Speaker 3: how you perceive politics. You know, maybe you think you're
Speaker 3: just rationally responding to politics being very corrupt and something
Speaker 3: that is not worthy of trust, or investing the time
Speaker 3: and energy to figure out who is worth trusting within politics,
Speaker 3: or maybe you're trying to manage the impressions you make
Speaker 3: on other people. Which, again, despite the kind of unfriendly
Speaker 3: way I was phrasing it earlier, I mean that's something
Speaker 3: we're all always trying to do. I mean, let's be real,
Speaker 3: everybody's always to some extent, even if you're a very
Speaker 3: authentic person or you think you are, you're somewhat trying
Speaker 3: to control how other people think about you. And it
Speaker 3: seems that people often think cynicism is one way of
Speaker 3: avoiding coming off as dumb or not knowing anything about politics.
Speaker 1: Right right, and perhaps a way to express neutrality, but
Speaker 1: kind of like a hard edge neutrality that keeps people
Speaker 1: from poking at you, because if you're just like, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know yet, I'm just kind of in a
Speaker 1: fact finding area right now, then the people might want
Speaker 1: to understandably help you with your fact finding. But if
Speaker 1: you're like, no, I've already figured it all out and
Speaker 1: everything is horrible, then that kind of pushes people away
Speaker 1: and they'll be like, okay, fair enough.
Speaker 3: But though, another thing that is interesting, going back to
Speaker 3: the previous study is you might assume at first glance
Speaker 3: that if you express generalized political cynicism that is politically neutral,
Speaker 3: but it turns out that is not the case. In fact,
Speaker 3: people who express generalized political cynicism were often fans of
Speaker 3: extreme parties. There actually were supporters of people within the
Speaker 3: political system very often what are can considered by most
Speaker 3: people the extreme wings of the political spectrum, especially at
Speaker 3: least within the Western European sample here the extreme right
Speaker 3: wing anti establishment parties. But also coming back to the
Speaker 3: idea of impression management and these little moments in conversation
Speaker 3: where we might use cynicism to paper over something or
Speaker 3: try to come off a certain way to kind of
Speaker 3: get through a tough spot. I had to wonder to
Speaker 3: what extent these little acts of performative political cynicism, which
Speaker 3: again may seem harmless enough because you're just trying to
Speaker 3: get through a conversation without revealing you don't know much,
Speaker 3: or trying to get through some tension, to what extent
Speaker 3: these actually contribute over time to genuine generalized political cynicism,
Speaker 3: which is sometimes linked to these toxic attitudes like racism
Speaker 3: and intolerance, which can erode the legitimacy of democracies, can
Speaker 3: lead people toward authoritarianism or make them submit to it
Speaker 3: more easily, even if they don't love it. You know,
Speaker 3: I think most people listening will probably agree these are
Speaker 3: like bad outcomes, And I don't have a way of
Speaker 3: proving that these little, more harmless seeming moments contribute to
Speaker 3: that snowball effect overall, but I have to suspect that
Speaker 3: they do, And it makes me think that I, at
Speaker 3: least personally want to be more careful about having these
Speaker 3: little harmless seeming moments of cynicism, even in passing, because
Speaker 3: I think they do kind of add up when you
Speaker 3: hear things like that over and over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I feel like on a personal level, you're
Speaker 1: just kind of going into that cynical mindset more and
Speaker 1: potentially going into at the very least that area of
Speaker 1: no hope and no action. But then perhaps in our
Speaker 1: social interactions you're kind of like greasing the shoot of
Speaker 1: cynicism for everyone else. Like everyone if someone has like
Speaker 1: a cynical trajectory going on in the way they're viewing
Speaker 1: the world and interacting with others, if they come, if
Speaker 1: they interact with you, and you're just kind of like,
Speaker 1: carry on, let me actually speed you up a little
Speaker 1: bit as you head down that huot, Like, obviously that's
Speaker 1: not helping anyone, and we don't want to find it out.
Speaker 1: What is it the end of that shoot? Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: at this point I wanted to turn our attention not
Speaker 1: completely away from this topic because it's actually rather related
Speaker 1: to it, and that is to the interactions between cynicism
Speaker 1: and conspiracy theories and conspiracy thought.
Speaker 3: Ah, yeah, I think this is going to be some
Speaker 3: fertile ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We of course, we've talked about conspiracy theories quite
Speaker 1: a bit on the show before, generally and often discussing
Speaker 1: the dangers of following their siren song to easy wonder,
Speaker 1: to prejudice, endorsement, and more harmful worldviews and studies have
Speaker 1: indeed linked belief in conspiracy theories to not only distrust
Speaker 1: of authority, but also general political cynicism and just general
Speaker 1: cynicism as well. One paper I was looking at on
Speaker 1: this topic is from twenty thirteen by Einstein and Glick
Speaker 1: titled Scandals, Conspiracies, and the Vicious Cycle of Cynicism, and
Speaker 1: this is from the annual meeting of the American Political
Speaker 1: Science Association, and the authors here describe a cycle of
Speaker 1: cynicism that goes as follows quote political scandals, diminished trust
Speaker 1: in government. This lower confidence, in turn spurs higher levels
Speaker 1: of conspiracy belief, even in claims unrelated to ongoing scandals.
Speaker 1: So the idea of being you know, I think we
Speaker 1: can all sort of imagine the scenario here. There's some
Speaker 1: sort of sex scandal here that you're hearing about some
Speaker 1: sort of you know, money scandal here with other politicians,
Speaker 1: and it kind of like, in your viewpoint, like muddies,
Speaker 1: the water makes them for a cynical political environment, and
Speaker 1: in that cynical political environment, it seems more likely that
Speaker 1: they're perhaps covering up UFO or what have you.
Speaker 3: I was just thinking about this and about how this
Speaker 3: type of thinking I think benefits from what to use
Speaker 3: mathematical terms, might be sort of like the transitive property
Speaker 3: of distrust, where it's like if if one politician or
Speaker 3: political institution, government, or whatever has done something to earn
Speaker 3: your distrust, that therefore is evidence against all of them
Speaker 3: or all objects of that class. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: a politician A lied, therefore we know politician B is lying.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And my own tendency here is also to
Speaker 1: think about, you know, the desire for we've talked about
Speaker 1: the desire for for there to be aliens, for there
Speaker 1: to be UFO visitations, and uh, you know, and this
Speaker 1: this is a pretty you know, rich area as well.
Speaker 1: You know, in some levels, perhaps it's most pure form.
Speaker 1: There is the idea of like I want aliens to
Speaker 1: be real because I want them to come here and
Speaker 1: solve our problems. Oh yeah, or you know, or it's
Speaker 1: somehow you drop aliens into all of this and everything
Speaker 1: makes sense. It's going to be a way to understand
Speaker 1: a confusing world, a confusing and troubling world. But if
Speaker 1: you want to believe strongly enough, and the scientific world
Speaker 1: is saying there's no evidence for this, and the government
Speaker 1: or various government agencies and different governments are saying there's
Speaker 1: no evidence for this, then one response, one way to
Speaker 1: keep the dream alive is to just assume that all
Speaker 1: of these voices that are telling you no are doing
Speaker 1: so because they are covering something up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they must all be evil, otherwise why would they lie.
Speaker 1: Now. Of course, this is not to say that a
Speaker 1: government or some sort of governmental body wouldn't have reason
Speaker 1: to keep the discovery of alien technology or alien existence.
Speaker 3: Secret exactly, But you know, hypothetical incentive to lie is
Speaker 3: not evidence for the underlying premise. It's like how I
Speaker 3: could say, if my wife had actually been replaced by
Speaker 3: the thing from John Carpenter's The Thing, it would make
Speaker 3: sense for her to lie and say she was not
Speaker 3: the thing and was in fact still a human. But
Speaker 3: that is not evidence that she has in fact been
Speaker 3: cloned by an alien.
Speaker 1: That's a good point. That's a good point. So I
Speaker 1: was looking around for some additional thoughts in all of this,
Speaker 1: and I found a twenty twenty four article for Proceedings
Speaker 1: of the International Astronomical Union from philosopher Tony Milligan. And
Speaker 1: this is interesting because Milligan argues that belief in UFO
Speaker 1: visitation may well at this point constitute a true societal problem.
Speaker 1: And while he contends that certainly low level belief and
Speaker 1: stuff like this, and you know, fringe belief and enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for stuff like this is nothing to get bent out
Speaker 1: of shape about, his point is that is it edges
Speaker 1: closer to like mainstream belief. Three major problems emerge, one
Speaker 1: of which is central to our discussion here, and the
Speaker 1: other two I think are also interesting in their own right.
Speaker 1: One of them is that UFO narratives can sometimes infringe
Speaker 1: upon and even overwrite, indigenous storytelling. I found this interesting because,
Speaker 1: of course, we see examples of this in popular conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: where they link indigenous beliefs and stories to UFOs and
Speaker 1: cryptids and so forth, reinterpreting those traditional stories as a
Speaker 1: kind of proof and potentially corrupting those stories in the process.
Speaker 3: And not letting those stories just be what they actually are.
Speaker 1: Right, And you know, it's you know, you can note
Speaker 1: that we do see this with all aspects of history,
Speaker 1: myth and religion. But I think the kicker here is
Speaker 1: the power imbalance and the appropriation involved. Milligan also says
Speaker 1: that it all generates noise that distracts from genuine science
Speaker 1: quote background noise which impedes science communication. So you know,
Speaker 1: we've talked about this before, like putting scientists on the
Speaker 1: defensive regarding something like the UFOs and so forth, instead
Speaker 1: of you know, actually highlighting legitimate scientific efforts that can
Speaker 1: improve our world.
Speaker 3: Well, right, because the kind of UFO conspiracy ideation we're
Speaker 3: talking about is always engaging in motivated reasoning. I mean,
Speaker 3: you can hypothetically imagine a you know, just a sort
Speaker 3: of a maximally unbiased, skeptical UFO researcher who's like, I'm
Speaker 3: just going to look into these claims and see what
Speaker 3: I find. But there are people like that, and in
Speaker 3: my experience, they always find that, like, yeah, there's no
Speaker 3: good reason to believe any of these stories and so
Speaker 3: and so what you're left with among the UFO believers
Speaker 3: is people who are highly for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 3: motivated to believe already that yes, UFOs are real, yes
Speaker 3: they're being hidden. And thus the fact that you do
Speaker 3: not agree with me is evidence that you are at best,
Speaker 3: you know, woefully naive, and at worst you're part of
Speaker 3: the conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the number one point that Milligan makes is
Speaker 1: that it can lead to erosion of trust in governments
Speaker 1: and institutions, because again, if you want to believe, if
Speaker 1: this is your like core belief, then you just you
Speaker 1: just assume that everyone else is covering the aliens up.
Speaker 1: So of course you're not going to trust governments, you're
Speaker 1: not going to trust institutions, you're not going to trust experts,
Speaker 1: and you know, yeah, if you're a true believer, it
Speaker 1: seems to me one of the problems here is you'd
Speaker 1: never be able to one hundred percent shut off the cynicism.
Speaker 1: You know, like if the government or institution said tomorrow, okay,
Speaker 1: you got this alien life exists, but they say, here's
Speaker 1: the kicker though it's only microbial or it, you know,
Speaker 1: or even if they were just to go even further
Speaker 1: than that and say, all right, here's the deal, gray,
Speaker 1: aliens absolutely real, but like Nordic aliens, green aliens and
Speaker 1: reptilians are totally not real. Would that that would not
Speaker 1: please everyone? There's no way you could please everyone, like
Speaker 1: there's I'm you know, I'm certainly willing to admit that
Speaker 1: it's possible that some of what's out there in the
Speaker 1: ufology world is real, but is all of it one
Speaker 1: absolutely not, There's no way it could be. So you're
Speaker 1: always going to have like some level of conspiracy thinking
Speaker 1: and no matter what could conceivably be revealed.
Speaker 3: I think this is actually a good point that in
Speaker 3: some cases could get through to people who are fond
Speaker 3: of this type of conspiracy ideation, because I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people in that situation and I'm trying to
Speaker 3: be sympathetic to people with whom I disagree about a
Speaker 3: lot of things, but I think a lot of them
Speaker 3: would recognize if you bring it up that there really
Speaker 3: isn't a plausible scenario they could imagine where they would
Speaker 3: be satisfied, right Like what, Okay, imagine you know to
Speaker 3: them that actually we had not been visited by aliens.
Speaker 3: I know that's not what you think, but imagine it
Speaker 3: turns out you're wrong, and that is the case, what
Speaker 3: what would satisfy you of that fact? What piece of evidence? What?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: How would you be like, Okay, I'm convinced now.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean it's like it's it is. It becomes
Speaker 1: a worldview, right, I mean, and the conspiracy is part
Speaker 1: of the worldview. So you would have to like it
Speaker 1: would completely turn everything on its head if you were
Speaker 1: able to do that. So instead, it just seems like
Speaker 1: it would be a case where you would have this revelation,
Speaker 1: but it wouldn't please everyone, and so everyone would just
Speaker 1: assume some greater revelation is possible and that some cover
Speaker 1: up is still in place, like Okay, they told us
Speaker 1: about the Grace, Why are they not telling us about
Speaker 1: the Greens?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And coming back to your point about the erosion
Speaker 3: of trust, I mean, one problem with this sort of
Speaker 3: the fondness for conspiracy narratives is really it makes trust impossible.
Speaker 3: No matter how trustworthy you know an institution has a
Speaker 3: track record of being institutions are actually of variable trustworthiness.
Speaker 3: Some lie more than a there's some I think of,
Speaker 3: you know, overall or quite trustworthy institutions. Others are not
Speaker 3: very trustworthy, And so like a skeptical person as opposed
Speaker 3: to a cynical person would try to evaluate the track
Speaker 3: record of an institution or of an individual spokesperson and say, like,
Speaker 3: you know what, do we have reason to trust them
Speaker 3: or not. But if you take a sort of a
Speaker 3: conspiracy cover up as a starting point, and you start
Speaker 3: with that conclusion, you will always have evidence that anybody
Speaker 3: who doesn't agree with you has already violated your trust.
Speaker 3: They've already lied to you. So you're taking instead of
Speaker 3: the thing we talked about earlier, with the kind of
Speaker 3: applying a you know, a distrust inducing incident from one
Speaker 3: politician to another. What in that example, we use something
Speaker 3: that really happened, like so and so politician lied about something,
Speaker 3: you know, assuming that lie was real. Now I can't
Speaker 3: trust Politician B because Politician A lied. What if the
Speaker 3: initial thing was not even actually a lie, it's just
Speaker 3: something you were your assuming they're not telling you the
Speaker 3: truth because they don't agree with you that we're hiding
Speaker 3: an alien spacecraft somewhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's this like imagined original sin that prevents any
Speaker 1: kind of legitimate trust to ever take place. Another thing
Speaker 1: I was thinking about in all of this. You know,
Speaker 1: we've talked a good bit in over the past year
Speaker 1: or so about low res ambiguous data. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like it could be visual, it could be some other
Speaker 1: kind of information. And certainly we can get even get
Speaker 1: out of the realm of recorded information and into just
Speaker 1: sightings and observations, you know, cases where you can make
Speaker 1: a case for it. It's blurry. It could be a
Speaker 1: UFO it's blurry, or you know, or we don't know
Speaker 1: exactly what we're looking at. It could be an antenna
Speaker 1: on the bottom of the ocean floor. And this is
Speaker 1: interesting because I was looking back and there were various
Speaker 1: headlines several years ago talking about an end of UFO
Speaker 1: ology that arguing that, Okay, we're getting in this information
Speaker 1: age full of you liquid as visual data gathering. You know,
Speaker 1: we're just we're just going to see this stuff dry
Speaker 1: up and go away. But I don't see that happening,
Speaker 1: Like there's always going to be low res ambiguous data.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, that's right. I mean one thing you might
Speaker 3: have assumed that as like everybody's got a camera in
Speaker 3: their pocket, and the cameras have become sharper and they
Speaker 3: get clearer images and stuff, You're not going to see
Speaker 3: all these like blurry kind of like what is that
Speaker 3: in the sky. No, it turns out like as the
Speaker 3: resolution gets better and these images, in fact, they'll just
Speaker 3: capture things that are further away, yeah, or they're like
Speaker 3: still ambiguous, just like what's that dot? And you know,
Speaker 3: in some cases people actually can figure out like oh,
Speaker 3: you know, that's a star. You know you're or that
Speaker 3: is a mylar balloon or something like that. In other cases,
Speaker 3: like you can't figure it out. There's just a dot
Speaker 3: on your image of the sky and you don't know
Speaker 3: what it is. And it's in those situations where it's
Speaker 3: low resolution and there's not enough image, there's not enough
Speaker 3: information to really reach a solid conclusion, where this kind
Speaker 3: of these thoughts can always bloom. There's always still the
Speaker 3: possibility you don't know what it is, so why isn't
Speaker 3: it aliens?
Speaker 1: Or it's just the information is complex and you don't
Speaker 1: have the background to understand it, or you don't have
Speaker 1: the additional insight and layers to understand it. And therefore
Speaker 1: it allows you to apply the script of the paranormal
Speaker 1: to it in order to interpret it. The script that
Speaker 1: is very malleable. It can be shifted and applied to
Speaker 1: any ambiguous data to produce the desired result.
Speaker 3: But it's funny even in this area of vieufology. I mean,
Speaker 3: this is something I read about sometimes. I mean, cynicism
Speaker 3: plays in here too, because often people will be able
Speaker 3: to come in and say, oh, you know this image
Speaker 3: that you were very excited about of like a thing
Speaker 3: moving in the sky, I was able to calculate this
Speaker 3: is actually an artifact created by the camera system used,
Speaker 3: and I can show you how, Like, you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of times people just be like, you know, why
Speaker 3: would I believe you. You've been part of the UFO
Speaker 3: cover up for years, You've been posting articles like that,
Speaker 3: and so like, there is a kind of cynicism that
Speaker 3: just prevents you from accepting a what looks to me
Speaker 3: like a pretty good explanation of a weird looking image.
Speaker 3: What this is really getting into, I think is that
Speaker 3: we've just sort of, for a few minutes now, been
Speaker 3: dancing around this. But I think another big thing about
Speaker 3: cynicism is that it functions as an excuse. Cynicism functions
Speaker 3: as an excuse to excuse bad behavior on your own part.
Speaker 3: For one thing, we've been mentioning this less but I
Speaker 3: think this is absolutely true that if you get caught
Speaker 3: doing something wrong that you really know is wrong, you
Speaker 3: can't really make a defense of what you did. What
Speaker 3: do people say? They say, everybody does it. Yeah, cynicism
Speaker 3: is just like projecting cynicism onto others excuses your undeniable
Speaker 3: bad behavior because it's just what everybody does. Everybody's like
Speaker 3: this this, So, of course, in the realm of politics,
Speaker 3: this happens all the time. When somebody's favorite politician, it's
Speaker 3: really undeniable. You know, they get caught on camera doing
Speaker 3: something really bad. If they can't deny it. What people
Speaker 3: say everybody does it, they're all you're so naive, you
Speaker 3: think the other ones are better than this, So it
Speaker 3: excuses bad behavior. But then the other way it's an
Speaker 3: excuse is that it excuses poor epistemic practices. When you
Speaker 3: don't have you want to believe something and you don't
Speaker 3: have good reasons too, and in fact people are giving
Speaker 3: you very good reasons not to believe the thing you believe,
Speaker 3: you can resort to cynicism so that you don't have
Speaker 3: to pay attention to that. It's like, well, you're just
Speaker 3: all part of it. You're all just all lying. Why
Speaker 3: should I believe anything you say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like it lowers the horizon of like the
Speaker 1: moral universe around us to the level of the of
Speaker 1: whatever fallen star we're looking at.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, we have gotten into a lot of dark
Speaker 3: territory today. But next time we do want to focus
Speaker 3: on the topic of how to avoid and combat cynicism.
Speaker 3: So I think coming a little bit back into the light.
Speaker 1: All right, so join us on Thursday for that. Just
Speaker 1: a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
Speaker 1: core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode on
Speaker 1: Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
Speaker 1: to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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Speaker 1: Nations later,