Cynicism can be a great first step but it’s not the final step

It sometimes brings me to despair when I observe how much cynicism permeates through our society. Comment sections across the internet are bombarded by it.

Trivial behaviors are debated as to whether they are self-motivated or not. Those claiming self-motivation do it pretentiously while flexing their psychiatry muscles. They are so sure that the person is self-motivated it’s as if they were living inside the other person’s head.

Cynical thoughts may have popped into your head before reading this. Many are cynically pondering my motives for writing in general. (if so, read why here.)

To dispel this despair, I try to remember that cynicism is only the first step in the journey.

Let’s quickly align on definitions:

• Cynicism can be defined as — A general distrust of others’ motives. A disbelief in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions.
• It is often mixed up with skepticism, which is — a questioning attitude towards new ideas on the pursuit of knowledge. I’ll let Carl Sagan explain skepticism: “Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff.”

Cynicism can be a great first step because as we progress through the world, we continually run into people who have ulterior motives that aren’t in our best interest. We become deceived, and this becomes imprinted in our minds forever. These deceptions add up until they take a disproportionate amount of space in our brains.

To give you an example:

• In 2007, I was on Spring Break and our first stop was a Walmart to gather supplies before we checked into our hotel. As I was leaving the store, someone came up to me offering a pass that would get me free cover into many events that week. He said he was heading back home and would offer it for only $20 ($80 regular price).

I’m sure you can guess what happened next. This pass was expired and I would have to buy another one for full price. This isn’t the point. The point is — it has been 13 years and I remember every detail about that experience. That same week undoubtedly had many positive experiences with strangers, that far outweighed this bad one, but I don’t remember a damn one of them.

It is a well known psychological concept (e.g. Negativity Bias) that negative experiences like these are much easier to retrieve from memory than positive ones. We are also more motivated to avoid negative situations rather than pursue positive ones.

This makes evolutionary sense, too. In tribal bands of hominids, cooperation and trust were of the highest virtues. Selfish behavior was quickly weeded out because it was antithetical to the group’s survival. (reference: Tribe by Sebastian Junger)

This is where cynicism can show its ugly head. If we go around assuming every person and every behavior is self-motivated, then we begin to isolate ourselves and miss opportunities that require cooperation.

In social psychology, they call this naïve cynicism and it results in the following negative outcomes:

• Over-thinking the actions of others.
• Making negative attributions about others’ motivations without sufficient cause.
• Missing opportunities that greater trust might capture.

Cynicism is also the easy way out. It doesn’t require any work. You don’t have to seek out information for whether the other person is self-motivated or not. You just observe and jump to conclusions. Seth Godin explains this phenomenon in a business setting:

• Criticizing hope is easy. And in the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy. Managers are the cynical ones…they’ve seen it before and they believe they’ve already done it as well as it can be done. Leaders, on the other hand, have hope. Without it, there is no future to work for.

The interesting thing about cynicism is that it cannot exist in an environment of complete humility or empathy. In a humble environment, instead of assuming you know, you’d seek to learn.

In an empathic state, it’s antithetical to empathy’s definition:

• Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from their point of view.

Where do we go from here?

I think we have to approach every person and every situation with empathy first. We can’t assume malice (e.g. Hanlon’s razor). We have to seek to understand instead of assuming.

Our initial cynicism has to be overcome so it can bring us together instead of setting us apart.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Jordan Peterson that succinctly summarizes:

“First, you’re naive and you trust everyone. Then, someone cuts you off at the knees. So, you get traumatized by betrayal. Then, you become cynical. And, you think, “I’m a lot smarter now that I’m cynical.” And, you are because cynicism is actually a move up on naive. But, it’s not the last move. The last move is to transcend cynicism and to say, “even though I know there are just as many snakes in your heart as there are in my heart, I’m going to hold out my hand in trust”, because that’s the best way to elevate both of us.”