Cynicism Is Boring
Cynicism is Boring

After being ousted from the Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien gave a moving farewell speech that culminated in a specific request to his fans: please don’t be cynical. He said cynicism is his least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.



I remember liking that he said that, given how much grief his fans were giving Jay Leno over their very public time slot conflict. At the time I was 29 years old and approaching the peak of my own cynicism. Since then I’ve gradually adopted a more generous view of human beings. This is not because I’ve become a particularly more generous person, but rather because a cynical view of our species no longer strikes me as accurate.



I now think humans are mostly good, despite how reflexively we tend to disparage our own species. For example, when Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins died suddenly on tour in Colombia last month, I came across this very normal and predictable tweet:



”The first order of business when a bereaved family asks for privacy is of course to release a toxicology report. What a society.”



It’s not important that this thought came from local Winnipeg punk legends Propagandhi, because anyone could have said it, including me. But it is a perfect example of the common fallacy that humans can be fairly summarized as a mean and selfish lot.



Whatever you think about releasing toxicology reports after celebrity deaths, the fact that it happened here doesn’t say much about society at large. It might say something about the Colombian official whose decision it was – I can only guess at their motivation. However, the vast majority of people did give the bereaved family privacy, a fact which is not remarkable (or particularly tweetable) precisely because respectfulness toward the grieving is the norm among humans.



It’s tempting to define society by its exceptions, because that’s all we’re inclined to remark upon. Humans tend towards good, at least more than any other species I can think of (except maybe dogs, which are selectively bred for kindness by kindness-loving humans). You can observe them. Humans tend to feel concern for someone who’s visibly hurt. They will push a stranger’s car out of the snow without being asked. They’ll call out to a passerby who drops a glove or a scarf. They try their best not to embarrass others, take the last donut, or one-up someone’s story. When they end up helping a stranger with some small thing, they find it to be intrinsically rewarding. This is normal stuff.



If you scoff at this, you are probably only noticing the exceptions. People almost invariably don’t want to hurt other people and feel bad when they do. The fact that we can feel a lack of respect or kindness in a given social situation is evidence that those good qualities are the water we normally swim in.



Maybe slightly more good 



What Conan could have said, if he were a less diplomatic man, is that cynicism is boring. The “people sure are awful” take is the dullest of clichés. It isn’t original, it isn’t insightful, and it isn’t true. Unrestrained cynicism comes off like a fourteen-year-old writing edgy political rants on Reddit. Everything is so bad and wrong! Truly everything! What a society!



Cynicism is a kind of negative fairy tale, beloved by humans fourteen and up for various reasons. It’s the just-so story that humans are trash, a stain creeping over the globe, with a few glittering exceptions like Mr. Rogers and Dolly Parton.



The cynical fairy tale is beloved in politics for its rhetorical power. To push forward a political agenda with any efficiency, you need to cast the people who oppose it as bad. Not just incorrect, but bad. You have to get your supporters to picture them as legions of petty, selfish, scowling people who are nothing like themselves. Acknowledging that there might be reasons behind those other viewpoints – rather than just depraved impulses — is political suicide. Without invoking the fairy tale, your supporters might recognize that your beliefs, like all beliefs, are intrinsically debatable, and that the effects your policies would have on the world are complex and unproven. Politicians and pundits have trouble convincing people of anything without the cheat-code effect of the cynical fairy tale, and its ability to recast millions of morally-normal people as villains, rather than evidence that reasonable disagreement is possible. 



This reliance on the cynical fairy tale is what allows for the Great Myth of Politics we are currently mired in: that your opponents disagree with you because they are bad and wrong — not because social issues are actually very complicated and so fraught with tradeoffs that different people in different cultural bubbles will naturally arrive at different beliefs about them.



In other words, cynicism is a way of refusing to explore the complexity of real-world problems. As an everyday person with lots of important things to weigh in on, it’s hard not to rely on the easy out of cynicism, because the alternative – actively thinking about an issue, in good faith, from multiple perspectives — is profoundly uncomfortable and time-consuming. Few people do it, and if you’re one of them you know why. So much unpleasant emotional stuff bubbles up when you release your grasp on your familiar tribal line, even if it’s just for a moment to try to understand why anybody might think differently than you about pandemic policy, gender, free speech, or military spending. It’s much easier – as easy as slipping into a warm bath — to revert to the fairy tale that says your camp is categorically right on this one, and the only reason it’s even being argued about is the legion of morally defective humans on the other side.



A shining example



Since good-faith reasoning is so unpalatable to our tribally-oriented brains, cynicism is the direction of gravity in the sphere of public discussion. It pulls more strongly than anything else, on every part of the political spectrum, but it doesn’t point to the truth. It points to the fire exit – a route of escape from the unpleasant realities that few of our “solutions” account for everything important, that there isn’t a single issue any of us understands completely, and that the more you look into anything the more morally complex it gets. Whatever the issue in question, “people are bad” never explains anything, but it lets you off the hook.



Doing your best to entertain a variety of opinions in good faith is an extremely liberating exercise, but it is at least as unpleasant as other forms of exercise, so I wouldn’t expect most people to make a hobby of it. We can, at least, consciously adopt a basic distrust of cynicism, the way we’ve learned to distrust miracle diet pills and other too-good-to-be-true sorts of claims. We can notice how dull and unhelpful it is when someone summarizes a political controversy as their camp versus the bad people. Even if you enjoy your own cynical feelings, you have to admit that a cynical take is always a boring one.  



Swearing off the cynicism crutch is immediately rewarding in two ways. First, the world starts making a whole lot more sense, because your worldview is no longer underpinned by a fairy tale. Second, it no longer feels like the world is filled with horrible people. Not that it ever was.



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Photos by Hrustall Richard Brutyo, and Wes McFee

            

        				