Cynicism, Part 1

2025/4/15

Stuff To Blow Your Mind

AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript

J

Joe McCormick

R

Robert Lamb

Robert Lamb: 我认为自己并非特别犬儒，但优雅的犬儒主义批判言论很容易让人信服，需要付出努力才能反驳。我注意到，当对人性的犬儒主义批判以优雅的语言表达时，即使我并不完全认同，也很难反驳。这让我思考，为什么这些说法如此具有说服力，需要付出努力才能反驳？这可能与宣泄情绪有关，即使并非完全认同，也可能在特定时刻产生共鸣和满足感。此外，在判断一个人是否犬儒时，需要考虑其社会信任程度以及与情境是否相符。在某些情况下，怀疑是合理的，而过度怀疑则是不合理的。当朋友表达怀疑时，我们通常会将其归咎于其犬儒主义倾向，而不是认真考虑其观点的合理性。我们需要在犬儒主义和合理的怀疑之间取得平衡，过度的怀疑会阻碍我们与他人建立联系和发展。研究表明，犬儒主义与多种负面生活结果相关，对身心健康和目标实现都有不利影响。犬儒主义似乎会阻碍身体对重复性压力的适应。犬儒主义和不良健康状况之间存在双向关系，形成恶性循环。不良健康状况可能导致人们感到受限和脆弱，从而产生防御心理，最终导致犬儒主义。虽然犬儒主义者可能更渴望权力，但研究表明他们获得领导职位的机会更少。研究表明，犬儒主义与收入降低有关，因为犬儒主义者往往缺乏合作精神，并过度投入到自我保护中。犬儒主义对个人的影响取决于社会环境。在社会犬儒主义程度较高的环境中，犬儒主义可能对个人更有利。对犬儒主义负面影响的研究也凸显了相互信任和合作的重要性。 Joe McCormick: 当代语境下，犬儒主义是一种认知倾向，其核心是社会不信任，对人性的悲观看法以及对他人动机的怀疑。犬儒主义者倾向于认为利他主义和同情心只是表面现象，人们本质上是自私的，不可信赖的。许多文学作品，特别是17和18世纪的英国文学以及圣经，都体现了犬儒主义的世界观。圣经中的某些章节以优雅的语言表达了对人性的犬儒主义批判。犬儒主义和悲观主义是不同的概念，前者针对人际关系，后者是对整体现实的看法。现代犬儒主义者往往将问题归咎于个人，而非系统或制度。犬儒主义容易发展成虚无主义，但它也可以与其他哲学思想共存。犬儒主义是一种程度上的表达，没有客观的界限，但极端犬儒主义者很容易被识别。判断一个人是否犬儒，取决于与他人的比较以及与合理怀疑的比较，并且犬儒主义并非一成不变的性格特征。判断一个人是否犬儒，需要考虑其社会信任程度以及与情境是否相符。在某些情况下，怀疑是合理的，而过度怀疑则是不合理的。犬儒主义的批判性言论具有宣泄情绪的作用，即使并非完全认同，也可能在特定时刻产生共鸣和满足感。犬儒主义者容易犯认知上的第一类错误（假阳性），并且他们的观点往往使他人采取防御姿态。将驾驶中的防御性思维应用于人际关系和政治等领域是不明智的。犬儒主义往往阻碍社会进步，因为它否定了改进的可能性。研究表明，犬儒主义会降低人们合作和参与社会活动的意愿。犬儒主义作为一种文化倾向，普遍存在于人们心中，程度不同，并可能受到环境因素的影响。研究犬儒主义时需要注意区分古代犬儒哲学和现代犬儒主义，两者虽然同名，但含义和内涵却大相径庭。从古代犬儒主义到现代犬儒主义，其转变过程包括从积极参与到消极被动，从充满活力到消极腐蚀。心理学文献中，犬儒主义通常被视为敌意的认知成分，其核心信念包括：他人品行恶劣、动机不良；人们主要由自私自利驱动；人们有机会就会忽视道德价值观。研究表明，犬儒主义与心血管疾病、抑郁症和死亡率增加有关。犬儒主义似乎会阻碍身体对重复性压力的适应。研究表明，犬儒主义与抑郁症和全因死亡率增加有关。研究表明，犬儒主义可能不会直接导致死亡，而是通过影响行为和生活方式间接导致不良健康结果。

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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today we wanted to begin a series of episodes talking about something that has been on my mind a lot lately.

And that is the concept of cynicism. Now, as we go on, we're going to have to distinguish the common contemporary usage of cynicism from other meanings extending into history. But as used in common language today...

We can think of cynicism as a cognitive disposition, the core element of which is social distrust. Cynicism is a dim view of human nature. It's a suspicion of other people's motives and a tendency to believe that people are primarily self-interested and untrustworthy.

So there are a variety of kind of inventories or tests that psychological studies will do to evaluate how cynical you are as a person. They'll often give you like a list of statements to see how much you agree or disagree with them. A cynical person is going to be more likely to agree with statements like altruism and compassion are just for show. When it comes down to it, people are in it for themselves. Right.

Everybody lies and cheats when they can get away with it. Cliches like no good deed goes unpunished. It's a dog eat dog world. The idea that people are not sincere. They'll just tell you what you want to hear. And I think the core idea of it really is that you can't trust anybody. We're all on our own.

And before we started today, I had been digging around trying to find good examples of the cynical worldview presented in works of English literature. And while you can find some pretty good examples, I think particularly for some reason in like 17th and 18th century English literature with writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift is some really hardcore cynical stuff there.

I actually think the most cynical canon of great literature is in the Bible. So many books of the Bible, especially like the later books of the Tanakh, like the prophets, have awesomely cynical passages. Can I offer you a few examples, Rob? Yes, let's hear it. Okay. Here's Micah chapter 7, verses 2 to 6. This is the King James translation.

The good man is perished out of the earth, and there is none upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man his brother with a net. That they may do evil with both hands earnestly, the prince asketh; and the judge asketh for a reward; and the great man he uttereth his mischievous desire, so they wrap it up.

The best of them is as a briar, the most upright is sharper than a thorn hedge. The day of thy watchman and thy visitation cometh, now shall be their perplexity. Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide, keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom. For the son dishonoreth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, a man's enemies are the men of his own house.

Yeah. If true, a sad state of affairs. Yeah. Okay. I got a couple of more shorter ones. This is from Psalm 14 verses two to four. The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand and seek God. They are all gone aside. They are all together become filthy. There is none that doeth good. No, not one.

And then finally, this one, I think some of the best poetry in the Bible is in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah is like great, great writing, but it contains the famous statement from Jeremiah 17. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked who can know it. And these passages really emphasized something for me.

I think I am not an especially cynical person. I think I'm not the least cynical person in the world, but I'm very far from the most. You know, I try to be skeptical of like sweeping negative characterizations about people and all that. And yet I notice that when a cynical condemnation of human nature is phrased really elegantly, as I think these are in the King James translation, it's

They it like really takes mental effort to disagree with so it is not my worldview that the heart is deceitful above all things I don't think that's true but I feel kind of foolish trying to shake my head or argue with that statement when it's phrased in that way.

It possesses what feels like an a priori factuality. If you don't force yourself to stop and think about it, it just kind of hits you as self-evidently true and you feel like you'd have to be naive to doubt it. And yet it's not really what I think. So I don't know if you have a similar experience, Rob, maybe not, but I wonder at least for myself, and I think this is probably pretty common.

Why do cynical condemnations, and especially when they're elegantly phrased, why do they like walk into my mind with a perfectly forged hall pass? Why does it take such effortful, deliberate scrutiny to repel them? Yeah, yeah. This is I think this is something that will come up again and again in this discussion, because, yeah, it these kind of statements, they either ring really true or

to you and they ring true because you can take them, you can hold them up to the world and you can find examples. You know, you may be engaging in a certain amount of cherry picking or just point them in the right general direction and you'll find evidence to support this. I think these statements can also feel rather cathartic because whatever's going on in your life, in your world, in the like the media that you're consuming, you know, there are going to be

perceptions of this sort of thing going on. And it can feel empowering to hold up something that

This is sort of like an elegant takedown of what's going on and say, yeah, yeah, this is this is exactly what I see in the world. This is exactly what people's hearts are about. And, you know, it may not even be something that you believe all the time, but it's kind of like, you know, sometimes you got to go there. And in the same sense that you might not listen to sad breakup songs all the time, but there are times when you definitely need to listen to a sad breakup song.

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

Yeah. You know, sometimes you've got to crank up the rage against the machine in the car. It doesn't mean that you necessarily feel that all the time, but sometimes you've got to do it. Now, coming back to like the definitions of cynicism, I think one thing that's important to to flag at the top here is like.

cynicism is used kind of loosely and sometimes it's used to mean different things. We're going to be trying in this series to focus on the use of cynicism as like this dim view of human nature and lack of trust in others. But I

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

So this would include, you know, low expectations for random events, so-called acts of God, and for our own ability to do as we would hope. You know, that's pessimism. Whereas you might think of cynicism as pessimism applied specifically to other people. Other people will always let you down. They'll stab you in the back. They're only in it for themselves. Right.

Yeah, it got me thinking about the saying, don't hate the player, hate the game. Your modern cynic definitely hates the players or at least sees them as the underlying problem. Yeah.

You know, I'd also add that cynicism can also easily bleed over into downright nihilism, though that's not to say that modern cynicism isn't compatible with different philosophies and creeds, because you could be a cynic and a hedonist at the same time, certainly. I don't know that you'd be tremendous fun to hang out with, but it is possible.

Now, what does it mean to say a person is cynical in a way that is subjective? Because cynicism is by its nature, a comparative idea or a sort of expression of degree. Uh, I would compare being cynical to being tall. You know, there's no height at which a person becomes objectively tall. People judge whether you're tall or not based on the context. You know, they compare you to people around you or to other people in the culture where you live or other people in the room. Uh,

And then on the other hand, while there's no objective cutoff point, somebody who's like seven foot three is pretty much always going to be considered tall no matter what context they're in. And I think being cynical is like that. It's a comparative idea. There's no threshold score of social trust. And if you fall below that score, you're objectively cynical. But there are some people who are so cynical that basically everybody's going to think of them as a cynical person.

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

usages acknowledge the fact that it's not necessarily a constant. It may be something that we dip into in response to different circumstances, different stimuli and so forth.

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

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

how cynical a person is compared to how cynical we, the people judging, think it is reasonable to be. Yeah, we generally assume we've got it figured out. We're at the right level. We're at the right level, and anybody who's more cynical than us is too cynical. Somebody less cynical is naive. And

And this creates interesting levels of complexity. Like, obviously, sometimes it is reasonable to be suspicious of someone's motives and to believe they will probably harm you if they can. Here's a common but relatively benign example. You're not getting into like, you know, deep acts of harm against people.

You should not walk into a car lot expecting that the salesperson and the finance manager are trying to help you out and get you the best deal they can. Maybe in some scenarios you'll find an extraordinarily unusually altruistic car dealer. But a lot of the time what they're trying to do is make as much money off of you as possible, which is not in your interest. And that's not to suggest that people selling cars are like evil. It's just bad.

It's their job to try to make money selling cars. If they can make more on a sale and, you know, get you to buy at a higher price or, you know, or to take a less favorable financing option, they usually will.

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

Now, of course, what I think I just said is pretty uncontroversial in principle, but we actually spend a lot of mental energy trying to tell the difference between these two things, like the situation where it's reasonable to be suspicious and.

the situation where you're just expressing a bias towards cynicism. Like if a friend comes to you and expresses distrust of something or someone that you personally put a lot of faith in, what's the most common defensive reaction for us to have? I think it's like, don't be so cynical or you're just being cynical.

Saying you're just being cynical downplays the possibility that your doubting friend has a good insight, you know, maybe that that I have misplaced my faith and trust in something. And instead, it reframes the doubting friend's skepticism as part of a general dispositional bias that they have.

So dealing with the balance between cynicism and reasonable suspicion is just a really difficult thing that I think we all have to deal with in our lives. We're asking the question, like, in general, how suspicious should we be of other people's motives? And let's say you take generally cynical people and generally trusting people.

Which group's model of the world makes more accurate predictions? Which group's model of the world is more useful in life? And in which context does each model thrive the most? I think we'll have to revisit that question as we go along.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's always, in short, it's a careful balance, right? Because do you want to protect yourself absolutely all the time from all things? Or do you want to be able to move through life and open yourself up to new possibilities that may in fact hurt you? Things like this always remind me of that C.S. Lewis quote about...

being afraid to love because you're afraid that you will be hurt through that love, either via loss or some other action. And therefore, I think the analogy he made was like, you know, entombing yourself, you know, putting yourself in a casket of loneliness. And I think some of that applies here. Yeah, yeah, totally. ♪

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Now, I do have to acknowledge that, yeah, dealing with cynicism in people can certainly be exhausting. You know, like we've been saying, the cynic, like the pessimist, tends toward type one errors in cognition, false positives, believing that the predator lurks in the bushes even when it doesn't. And there is always, again, ample evidence for the cynic, exhaustive evidence even, because they are not wrong about many generalities about our world and human nature.

They tend to put others on the defensive, forcing them to make non-cynical counter arguments, you know, essentially prove the righteousness of their fellow human beings. And at the same time in making those counter arguments, you don't want to go so far as to dismiss the perceived threats or threats entirely because then they're going to come back at you with, well, you're being naive.

this connects to what I was saying earlier. Like, again, I think I'm not very cynical, but I feel kind of silly or foolish. If I try to argue with somebody who says the heart is deceitful above all things, it's like, I don't know. It has a kind of, uh, it has a kind of power because as you were saying, the, the, the cherry picking really, uh, works in its favor. You can always think of examples when, which you were wrong to grant trust, but that,

If you think about it logically, that doesn't actually mean you should always withhold trust. It's just like it's very captivating, those specific examples of when it went wrong for you. I was thinking about this as well over the weekend. I was doing a bit of driving and driving is sort of a, you know, it's a limited sort of artificial in some ways like social scenario. And it's probably a scenario where like I'm more cynical when I'm driving.

but in that I am less trusting of the other drivers. And not that I'm necessarily believing that they're out to hurt me, but I maybe am more inclined to believe that they are not looking out for me. And they're maybe being a little greedy there and they might not see me and so forth. But I guess the danger would be taking cynicism from an environment like that, where it is

maybe you know low risk to engage in such cynicism to take that feeling off the road and into the real world i could see where that could be kind of hurtful yeah you take uh you take your defensive driving mentality and apply it to your friend and family relationships and to politics and everything else in your life yeah not a good idea i would argue yes

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

And if you really double down on your cynicism, then there's no reason to try for or aspire for anything. You know, because like if people are all bad, essentially, if people are all just in it for themselves, they're just greedy, there's no caring, then what can we do as a society? What is it all possible? And you just kind of become fossilized in the mud of your own distrust. I think that's exactly right. In fact, this link you're suggesting between cynicism and indecency

inaction or lack of progress is absolutely backed up by evidence. We might get more into the details of these studies later, but I've been looking at a

Studies that have found cynicism tends to cause people to skip opportunities to cooperate, to achieve goals. It tends to people high in cynicism tend to hold back from involvement in the political process, not voting, not protesting, not signing a petition, even if they care about an issue. And it just seems like if you're higher in citizen cynicism, you are less likely to try to make things better and more likely to give up.

I want to read a quote here from Ansgar Allen, author of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series book, Cynicism, which deals, as I'll discuss, and as I cite this book again, with both ancient cynicism and modern cynicism. More on that in a bit. But he writes, quote, As a cultural disposition, cynicism foments distrust, derails progress, and reduces all higher things, all that is good about humankind, to the level of its own diminished outlook.

It assumes that all human motives are basically selfish and denies the possibility of a better world. Yeah, I think that's true. Despite the persuasive power of cynicism, as I mentioned earlier, I think that is correct at the level of my personal experience, and that seems borne out by experimental evidence as well. Yeah, yeah. And I'll also add that in the book, he stresses that while we can all point out egregious examples of cynicism in the world around us,

were also just all infected by cynicism. Like, it's not just a world of cynics and non-cynics for the most part. And he cites common sayings like, I hate to be cynical, but... and so forth, like we were talking. But, you know, points out that cynicism is pretty much in all of us, festering to various degrees, and...

and very much takes on the form of an affliction. It may dominate, it may go into remission, it may flare up due to various environmental factors, but it is there.

Absolutely. Yeah. Which raises the good question of if it's there latently to some degree in all of us, and in some cases for quite understandable reasons, what brings it out? What makes it grow and maybe what can diminish it? Now, I guess we'll have to come back to that because one thing that we definitely should address here is it gets a little confusing when you're trying to look up research on cynicism because cynicism is a word that is used to mean.

at least two completely different things. There is a school of classical Greek philosophy called cynicism, which is not merely social distrust. It's a whole school of thought that entails different things. Rob, I think you're about to get into it in a second, but these two cynicisms are totally different. And it was

Kind of an interesting question to me to wonder how the same word came to be used for these two different things. Yeah, it's one of those things where it's complicated. We're dealing with centuries upon centuries of human history with different returns to ancient cynicism and so forth. You know, it's

It's not quite a scenario that you might encounter with movie titles where you're like, OK, well, there's the Peter Lorre Mad Love movie and then there's the 90s television series Mad Love. And these are not connected at all. They just share a title. There's there's more connective tissue here. But it but it is, I think, also completely correct to say you're dealing with two different things. They they don't line up on a lot of their principles, even if there is ultimately some shared history there.

So what's the rundown on capital C cynicism or cynic philosophy? Yeah. So, um,

In the book, Cynicism, Alan gets into this a bit, and he refers to like the broader transitionary matter as capital C slash lower C cynicism. So it's like like CC cynicism or something. I don't know. You wouldn't pronounce it out loud, but like basically referring to this grander thing of cynicism that begins with capital C cynicism and eventually leads into lowercase cynicism that is in all of us today. Yeah.

In either case, he stresses that cynics are not good people, not by mainstream social standards anyway. But while the modern cynic is a person under the influence, again, of this kind of infection of distrust, the ancient cynics were a different matter. I have to stress that the ancient cynics were totally punk, like abrasively punk. Yes.

And to really get into this, we have to look at the most famous of these ancient punks. And that, of course, is Diogenes the Cynic or Diogenes of Sinop. We have talked about Diogenes on the show before. I think in episodes we were talking about Diogenes.

solitary hermits and so forth, because one of the more famous aspects of him that you often see illustrated and rendered as the subject in various Renaissance paintings and so forth is the fact that he lived in a jar. In public, I think in like the marketplace in Athens, it lived in a big tub or a jar just out in public. Yeah. Yeah. When we say lived in a jar, not a little jar, like a big

Like a big old, you know, you can think of it more as like a big barrel on its side. It's the way it's generally depicted in art. Often he's basically naked as well. Yeah, basically naked, dressed in rags, surrounded by dogs, often has a lantern out in the day. Like he's like, yeah, what about it? I've got a lantern. I'm burning the lantern. I don't need it right now, but I'm burning it. You know, that's that's how anti-establishment I am.

I think there's one story. I might have this wrong, but there's a story that he would carry around the lantern in the daytime and he would say that he was looking for an honest man, which that almost connects a little bit to the lower C cynicism. I kind of, there's a,

A sort of critique of human nature or an idea of hypocrisy and how people present themselves there. So there's a little bit of connection. Yeah, yeah. But again, not to imply that Diogenes was just a lowercase c cynic because he's much more interesting than that.

Yeah, there are a lot of stories about him. There's like the famous story of him telling Alexander the Great essentially to F off. And then Alexander the Great's like, ha, this guy's great. And that's basically the whole story there. But it's a great one. Alexander the Great came through and he's like, oh, I want to meet the great philosopher, the cynic philosopher Diogenes. So like.

He goes with his retinue and the generals to go find him. And I think the story is Diogenes is laying out sunning himself naked or something. And Alexander walks up to him and his shadow falls over him. And he's like, hey, I'm the conquering king. Can I give you anything? And Diogenes is like, I would like you to get out of my light. Yeah.

And so Alexander did not kill him. He was just like, okay. Yeah. I think the, the, the essentially the quote that is attributed to Alexander is like, if I, if I wasn't Alexander, I would be Diogenes. Okay. It's like this character. I like, I like the cut of this chip. Well, that's a, that's the kind of story I like telling the powerful man to F off. Yeah. So,

So there are various stories about the Diogenes and his travels and also about the various bodily functions that he would carry out in public, sometimes like mid-speech and so forth. And there are occasional, some stories are thought to maybe be a little more fictional and a little more, you know, legendary. But we are definitely dealing with an historic person, thought to have lived 40,

413 or 403 BCE through 321 or 324 BCE.

And he did write. None of his own writings survived, though he apparently wrote dialogues, letters, and tragedies. We mostly know of him through the writings of others. Oh, I should correct that. We know about him exclusively through the writings of others. Again, his own writings did not survive. Now, you mentioned the bodily functions. If you don't read deeper, you might be tempted to assume, based on the example of Diogenes, that cynic philosophy is just about, like, pooping in public. And it is...

one of the more, I guess, eye-catching aspects of their public display of humanity. Yeah, they were said to, especially Diogenes, was said to freely engage in public dispension of the body's various functions in a way that would still be shocking today and would still very much be against social norms. But I guess the key way of understanding what it was, I mean, certainly it does seem like it was about shocking people. Again, these guys were very punk, very in everyone's faces with

with how they viewed

human nature and how they viewed society. But essentially, we'll get into more of what this meant to them, but they were living the animal life. They were rooting the human experience in the body. And so they were saying, hey, this is what we are. Why should we deny what we are? Yeah, that the good life lies in dispensing with sort of false pretensions and living in accordance with your nature. Yeah.

Now Diogenes was not the first cynic. Antisthenes, who lived roughly 446 through 366 BCE, a pupil of Socrates and said to be the teacher of Diogenes, is often considered the founder of cynicism. Though even in antiquity, Allen points out, it was thought that cynicism dated back to a time before Heracles.

connected to the cunning intelligence of the gods. And I did find it interesting that Heracles was referenced here because it seems like a good name to invoke, even indirectly, because as we've discussed in the show before, the son of Zeus wasn't just raw muscle, you know, throwing stones at monsters and so forth. He was also clever and cunning. He used his, I guess, his high wisdom scores in overcoming the various obstacles. So he had kind of

barbarian wisdom that you see in some of these examples, you know, a figure from outside the system that is opposed to the system, and in Heracles' case, you know, often opposing mortal tyrants. And Alan points out that this idea likely does extend pretty far back in Greek thought as a kind of lifting up of an outsider figure as a critic of society. So then what actually are the tenets of cynic philosophy?

Yeah, this is interesting because I feel like a lot of the tenants we can still recognize in the world today in forms that we don't necessarily call cynicism. Like I was thinking of various biker movies I've seen where you see some version of this. And again, couldn't help but think of, you know, various things from like the punk scene or like metal lyrics and so forth. We often see some of these ideas, you know, idealized in music and film.

But the ancient cynics, again, exemplified in the figure of Diogenes, absolutely rejected conventional values and societal norms. They absolutely did not care about your society, your obsession with fame and wealth. They saw the absolute hypocrisy of it all, and they openly dragged it.

Like they, they were going to, you were going to know they were a cynic on site and they were going to let you know they were a cynic because they would, they would preach to you about it. They would tell you about it. They live simple, self-sufficient lives while also seeking to expose the folly of the mainstream world. Yeah. So there's a tendency to, uh,

to simple living, to asceticism, to, and to calling out ostentation. And it's interesting. I think you, you point out that cynicism was often a philosophy you could see embodied on the person in the way they, they appeared and in the way they were living. Um,

Which is less true about some other schools of philosophy in which you might have to like talk to the person and like hear about what they think in order to figure out what their their philosophy is. Yeah, like you wouldn't be going on a blind date and then halfway through the day realize, oh, I think this person's a cynic. Now, you would know it at first sight because they're surrounded by dogs.

They're wearing rags. Well, oftentimes they were said to wear old cloaks and carry a staff. But there would be there you would know immediately if you were about to go on a blind date with a cynic.

It wouldn't be like halfway through, oh, and then I realized that they were, you know, a nihilist. You know, it came up in conversation. Like, no, it would be very apparent in your face. So again, absolutely in your face, anti-establishment vibes here. But it would be a mistake to assume that this was just about yum-yucking the world and seeking to drag everyone down into sort of a miserable nihilistic existence, which I think is an easy mistake to make when you look at some of these factors.

But in reality, the ancient cynics praised virtue above all else. They believed that true happiness and peace could only be achieved by following a virtuous path close to nature, an authentic, natural human life full of truth that also exposed the lies of others.

Okay, so while I still think that cynic philosophy and modern cynicism are pretty much totally different things, you can start to see the connective thread here with the calling out of hypocrisy. I think this would be a common virtue aspired to by people who think of themselves as cynical today. I am exposing hypocrisy. I'm exposing how you're not really as good as you say you are, that there's something more base lying underneath you.

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

I don't know, I would imagine that a modern lowercase c cynic who is thinking about themselves as a citizen of the world is also thinking of it in a very dreary sense. Yeah, a less universal brotherhood and more like, we're all going to the same place. Yeah, I think one of the big differences that Alan points out is that the ancient cynics, again, they believed in virtue. They believed that

Absolutely.

Absolutely, yeah. So philosophical cynicism, Big C cynicism, was primarily practiced from the 4th century BCE to around the 5th century CE, though gradually declining after the 3rd century BCE.

And this, of course, leads to the question that I think we may come back to a little bit more as well, but what sort of transformation takes place from capital C cynicism to lowercase cynicism from the ancient world to the modern? And to put it very briefly, to summarize some of what Alan gets into, first of all, the transformation involves a radical, engaged, and even joyful philosophy becoming this more corrosive,

passive and miserable way of looking at the world. So again, you had to really be engaged to be a capital C cynic. You were making definite life choices going out in the streets and doing it.

Whereas lowercase C cynicism that we have today, it's in everybody. It's ambient. It's just at what level is it going to manifest in our worldview, in our speech, in our actions? Yeah, okay. Yeah, so it went from something that was very unactivated and optimistic to something that just kind of festers. And there are like a number, I guess, sort of

blips and points you can single out. The Stoics later took elements of Cynic ideas and tempered their more radical elements. Then much later on during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Cynic ideas were reinterpreted and utilized in ways that often eroded their critical edge. And then in modern times, you have to also factor in the perceived complexities and failures of modern systems and

And this further squeezes some of these ideas into the current ambient form. Though at the same time, again, the energy of ancient cynicism

continues to thrive in other areas of rebellious thought. So you could, again, you know, I can think of numerous examples, certainly from media, but also from the real world, people who are, you know, speaking out against societal norms and engaging sometimes in speech that may feel at least like it's lowercase cynicism. But in a lot of the best cases of that, I think it actually

is not cynical in the dispositional way we've been thinking about because it requires a lot of trust and cooperation and belief in the possibility of good things coming out of human nature and all that stuff. Yeah. So again, we may come back to more of this as we go, but I think that is a proper grounding in ancient capital C cynicism that allows us to move forward into more discussions of where we are now.

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Listen to the official Big Bang Theory podcast on Max or wherever you get your podcasts and stream episodes of the Big Bang Theory on Max. Whichever way you come down on the cynic versus the non-cynics accuracy in modeling the world is

I think what is absolutely clear at this point, based on a lot of research, is that there are tons of straightforwardly negative life outcomes correlated with cynicism. You know, I sometimes try to stay away from like strong normative claims of this sort on the show, but I think it's just like.

it's almost definite like it is bad for you in lots of ways to be cynical it's not good for your physical or mental health it's not good for your ability to attain goals it's just like across the board pretty bad for you to be highly cynical now since we're about to look at some psychological and medical research i think it's worth a check-in on how cynicism is defined in this literature and

It's usually treated as what a couple of authors Stavrova and Elabrock I'll come back to them in a bit call a quote cognitive component of hostility so in other words when a person displays the character trait of hostility cynicism is the cognitive main cognitive part of that is the thought patterns and belief structures underlying hostility.

So in these papers, cynicism is often called cynical hostility. And I would say, based on my reading, there seem to be three core beliefs defining cynical hostility.

Number one, other people have bad moral character and harmful intentions. Number two, people are motivated primarily by self-interest. And number three, people will ignore their moral values if given the opportunity. So the very short way to paraphrase cynical hostility is people are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake.

So what effects do these beliefs have on our lives and our bodies? Well, I'm going to run through some commonly cited items. One is the well-established link between cynicism and various health outcomes. So, for example, studies have repeatedly found links between high cynicism and poor cardiovascular health.

In fact, I even found one study arguing for a particular causal link between cynical hostility and cardiovascular disease. That paper was by Tyra et al. in the journal Psychophysiology from the year 2020, and it's called Cynical Hostility Relates to a Lack of Habituation of the Cardiovascular Response to Repeated Acute Stress.

So, once I read this, I thought this was really interesting. The study built on a general finding that had been in the research for years that if a person exhibits hostility to others, they will be at an increased risk of heart disease over time.

And the authors here decided to probe more specifically into what kinds of hostility or what elements of hostility were the most damaging. And they looked at emotional hostility, behavioral hostility and cognitive hostility. Emotional hostility is that it's affective in nature and it's characterized by things like chronic anger when you feel the emotion of anger a lot.

Behavioral hostility is a tendency to react to situations with expressions of aggression. And cognitive hostility is about beliefs, meaning it is essentially synonymous with cynicism. In the words of the lead author here, Alexandra Tyra, it is, quote, "...negative beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes about other people's motives, intentions, and trustworthiness."

Hostility tends to come along with a physiological stress response, including things like increased blood pressure that can damage the cardiovascular system when chronic.

Now, normally when we have a stressful experience, the body tends to acclimate to that stressful experience by desensitizing us to the stressful stimulus. So what really freaked us out the first time is old news by the 17th time, and we just don't have the same stress response anymore. You can think about this. A common example used in these experiments is like

Public speaking tends to be really stressful the first time, but if you do it again and again, you get used to it. It becomes less stressful each time, apparently, except when cynicism comes into play. Somehow, cognitive cynicism, this lack of trust in others, a belief that other people are bad, that they're self-interested and that their morals are fake, is

Cognitive cynicism seems to prevent the body from chilling out about stressors upon repeat exposure. And here I'm going to quote from the lead author, Alexandra Tyra. She's quoted in a Baylor University press release about this research. Quote,

Essentially, when you're exposed to the same thing multiple times, the novelty of that situation wears off, and then you don't have as big of a response as you did the first time. This is a healthy response, but our study demonstrates that a higher tendency for cynical hostility may prevent or inhibit this decrease in response over time. In other words, the cardiovascular system responds similarly to a second stressor as it did to the first. So,

A really interesting question is like, why is this like when you believe everybody's in it for themselves and people can't be trusted and everybody lies and cheats to get ahead? It is apparently just harder for people to relax about the things that are causing them distress upon repeat exposure.

even harder than it might be for people who have other kinds of issues like emotional issues with chronic anger. Of course, those things can and do overlap. But yeah, really fascinating to me. Like, why would that link be there? What exactly is the causal connection? But apparently it's not just heart disease. Another commonly studied example is depression. Cynicism is perhaps unsurprisingly associated with increased risk of depression.

One paper on this subject is by Nabi et al. from 2010 in the journal Psychological Medicine called Hostility and Depressive Mood, results from the Whitehall 2 Perspective Cohort Study. And so this was a longitudinal study of data collected by a survey of a large group of civil servants in London beginning in the 1980s and then following up with the same participants many years later. And this particular study found that

People with the most cynical hostility at ages 35 to 55, as measured by a couple of common inventories such as the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale,

Hmm.

And the negative effects don't stop there. There are multiple studies going at least as far back as the 1990s, maybe even earlier, that have found a link between cynicism and all-cause mortality. So on average, cynical people tend to have earlier deaths.

One example of this research is a study by Susan Everson and co-authors in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 1997. This investigated a group of 2,125 men between the ages of 42 and 60 over a period of nine years, and it found that men in the

top quartile so the top 25 percent of cynical hostility scores were more than twice as likely to die in the next nine years as men in the bottom quartile the lowest 25 percent of cynicism scores

And in this case, the authors found that the correlation with all-cause mortality disappeared when the analysis factored in behavioral risk factors, things like smoking and levels of alcohol consumption and some other risk factors, which suggests that

At least within this sample, the way they looked at it here, it might not necessarily be that cynicism kills you directly, but that cynicism is associated with behaviors and lifestyle and conditioned responses that worsen health outcomes and lead to earlier deaths. And so, of course, you could factor in things like the later finding that cynicism does appear to be bad for your cardiovascular health.

Now, here's another question. There appears to be a wide consensus among experts, cynicism, it comes with bad health outcomes. But are we sure which way the effect goes? Like, does poor health make people more cynical or does cynicism lead to poor health? Well, I found a paper looking into that, and it seems like the effect probably goes both ways, creating a vicious cycle.

Uh, so this paper was by Olga Stavrova and Daniel Elabracht, uh, called broken bodies, broken spirits, how poor health contributes to a cynical worldview in the European journal of personality from 2019. Uh, note that we'll encounter these author names repeatedly in the series. It seems like they've done a lot of research on cynicism. Olga Stavrova is a professor of psychology at Tilburg university in the Netherlands. And Daniel Elabracht is at the university of Cologne in Germany. Um,

Now, this one I thought was pretty interesting. This paper opens with a little historical anecdote that I don't think I'd ever come across before. It's talking about King Henry VIII.

AKA Robert Baratheon. Um, yeah, Henry the, so on, on January 24th, 1536, the English King Henry the eighth, uh, was knocked off of his horse during a jousting event at a tournament. Uh, and he lost consciousness for a few hours. Uh, and as a result of this fall, he sustained a number of injuries, which essentially led

led to pain and various downstream health problems for the rest of his life. I think he lived another 10 or 11 years after this. And what's interesting is that around this time, records and chronicles of Henry's reign note a shift in the king's personality. It seems that sometime around here, Henry really started to become more paranoid and suspicious and increasingly tyrannical.

Now, there are multiple historical hypotheses to explain what was going on with Henry here. I found another paper. I was just looking around and found another paper that was like, well, what if there was like a lead poisoning thing? You know, who knows? But so what they're about to say is not the only possible explanation.

But the authors discuss the idea that what if Henry's injuries and the pursuant health problems in the years that followed made him into that type of person, made him into a person who, quote, believed everyone, including his court members and close ones, were untrustworthy and mean-spirited.

So coming to the actual experiment here, we already have evidence that cynicism tends in multiple ways to lead to poor health. But to read from the author's abstract, quote, the present research proposes that poor health might represent both a consequence and a source of cynicism.

Using cross-lagged path analyses, we documented bidirectional associations between health and cynicism in a nationally representative sample of Germans, Study 1, and a large example of the American elderly, Study 2. Cynical individuals were more likely to develop health problems, and poor health promoted the development of a cynical worldview over time.

And so these health status evaluations were done both with self-report surveys and with objective physical measures by third-party administrators. And they found the effect was robust even when the authors controlled for the effects of depression. So in their analysis, the authors actually propose a mechanism by which cynicism and poor health ratchet one another up in a vicious cycle.

So cynicism tends to lead to your health getting worse. When your health gets worse, it imposes constraints on your life. You know, this is this is a I think a lot of people probably like when you've had a medical condition or something. It's not just like the direct pain caused by the condition. It's also the way it limits your freedom to do what you want to do that can be so so frustrating and so painful.

So, you know, medical medical problems can directly limit your freedom. They can take away your sense of control over your own fate. They can make you more dependent on others. And this constrained status, the authors think, may in turn activate, quote, self-protection strategies, including suspiciousness and hostility, contributing to the endorsement of a cynical worldview.

So in this model, health problems make you feel constrained and vulnerable, which makes you defensive, which in some cases makes people cynical. And of course, the increased cynicism will tend on balance to make health outcomes even worse.

And I'm to assume the other part of that then is, yeah, you're not going out then and like making new friends, engaging in friendships and, you know, family relationships that you already have. Yeah. We're taking part in activities that make you feel fulfilled. Yeah. And so, yeah, it becomes this vicious feedback loop, I say.

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