Cynicism, Part 3: Politics and Social Media

In part one of the series, we defined cynicism in its modern usage along the lines I just said, and we distinguished it from other concepts like pessimism, and from the cynic school of philosophy founded in ancient Greece, which was not defined by thinking about other people as morally bad and undeserving of trust, but instead by the idea that people should strive for self sufficiency and moral integrity based on living according to our nature, sort of throwing

off the hypocrisies that are mandated culture. And I think this goal of exposing hypocrisy is one of the few threads you might find between modern cynicism and ancient cynic philosophy, though it's still with some differences. It's not quite this simple.

But I was thinking the other day about it. I think you could say cynic philosophy was like hypocrisy is bad and I'm going to try to get rid of it, whereas modern cynicism is more like everybody's a hypocrite, you can't trust them, so a decay from what was once a positive mission for truth into a kind of surrender to the idea that we're all living a lie. In Part one, we also talked about research into the correlates of modern cynicism, So like, if I am highly cynical,

what are the effects of that on my life? It turns out there's a lot of research on this question, and the answer is the effects are overwhelmingly negative. Cynicism appears to be bad for health outcomes, leading to things

like cardiovascular disease, depression, substance abuse, and early death. It is correlated with lower quality relationships, a decreased tendency to pursue certain types of goals, and even contrary to the very familiar image of the cynical Machiavelian elite power player, and of course we can think of individual examples of this from the real world, on average, cynicism actually makes it harder for regular people to achieve even cynically coded

material goals like money and positions of power. Probably because in part, cynicism makes people less likely to cooperate with others and thus less likely to benefit from relationships of mutual trust. In Part two, we followed up on a number of tangents from the first episode, and we also took a detailed look at a paper on the so

called cynical genius illusion. The short version of this is that while people don't necessarily like cynics, we do tend to believe, on average that cinics are more intelligent and

more cognitively competent the non cynics. For example, people are more likely to assign a cynical person jobs like doing mathematical calculations or reviewing charts of scientific results, and this is in line with the long running archetype and fiction of the cynical genius, like Sherlock Holmes, someone who withholds trust and has a very low opinion of human nature, but also has superior knowledge, memory, and powers of reasoning.

You may drift back and forth, and so you can imagine a scenario where one is essentially a skeptic, but then that may sort of stray into cynical territory.

or less trusting than the situation actually deserves. It's just trying to be as rational as you can. What reasons do I have to trust or distrust? Whereas cynicism is just a bias toward distrust.

They just think it is reasonable to have very low trust and think everyone's going to stab them in the back, And in fact, that brings us back, coming back to the recap of the cynical genius illusion, The question is are they correct in thinking that is the cynic in fact being reasonable and having correct insights that non cynics lack. The other half of the finding in that paper was

that the cynical genius illusion is actually an illusion. Highly cynical people are not smarter or more knowledgeable on average. In fact, in the majority of scenarios tested, the association runs the other way, with education and intelligence being correlated with a greater tendency to trust. The big caveat here, of course, is that cynicism is warranted in some situations,

in particularly corrupt situations and scenarios. So it seems like a common pattern the researchers found is that knowledgeable and intelligent people might be might be more trusting by default, but shift into cynical mode when they recognize that they are dealing with a corrupt and untrustworthy situation or environment. And in fact, that would sort of line up with

how I just defined skepticism, right. It's sort of like detecting reliable signals from your environment, essentially paying attention to evidence of how trustworthy the situation you're in is. But anyway, this study and some studies cited by it helped us answer some questions we raised in Part one. First of all, do cynics or nonsnics have a more accurate model of the world. Of course, it's hard to answer that question in a way that averages out all environments in all situations.

It's kind of hard to say, like who's more correct overall, but at least in a bunch of experimental scenarios like random strangers are much more trustworthy than we tend to give them credit. For example of this was that trust based investing game we talked about where researchers give you

an initial reward of money. So they give you five dollars, and then you have the option to either just keep the five or hand that money to a stranger, which quadruples the initial sum, turning five dollars into twenty dollars. And then the stranger has the option to either keep all the money or give you back half of the total sum, doubling your initial investment. So you started with five, you end up with ten if the stranger gives you the money back. And in these types of experiments, strangers

tended to be cooperative and trustworthy. In the overwhelming number of cases people doubted them way too often. So again, that doesn't tell you about every situation in life, but it is a piece of evidence that people on average tend to overestimate other people's selfishness, and thus the highly cynical person is probably going to miss out on lots

of opportunities to trust and to benefit from cooperation. But the other question that's study shed some light on for us was, since generalized cynicism has so many horrible downsides, it's like, really bad for you in so many ways, not just for the people around the cynic, but for the cynic themselves, what are its upsides if any? And there were a few answers here. If you are not good at being able to recognize the difference between a

corrupt situation and a trustworthy one. Generalized cynicism may help you avoid catastrophic outcomes from misplacing your trust, but again this comes at great cost. It's sort of, you know, we have to destroy the town in order to save it.

civil liberties and freedoms. You know, whether you are cynical about the political structures you live under matters a lot less if you are like a peasant in medieval France than it does if you are somebody who is free to act within a democracy, free to vote and run for office yourself and engage in political rhetoric.

all problems are solved. So one of the books that I referenced in the first episode is the MIT Press book on Cynicism by Anscar Allen and Alan digs into this topic a lot, and I won't attempt to cover every point that he makes and every point that he brings up on the matter, but there's some really good nuggets of wisdom and observation in here related to the level of high energy, negative and critical rhetoric that you tend to find on the Internet and on social media,

very much encouraged for profit by service providers and social media companies, as we've discussed in the past. Yeah, so I've long been a fan of the LA based artist collective known as Everything Is Terrible, Joe. I know you're familiar with them as well. Oh yeah. Their slogan is if everything is terrible, then nothing.

screaming at you to punish you. It was one of the one of those things where they were trying to do like mixed media board games I think in the late eighties or early nineties, where like, I don't know, you'd put the tape in and then you'd have to roll stuff and anyway, this guy keeps Suddenly there's a klingon popping on the TV saying, like you the one who is moving now punishment.

So if everything is terrible, then nothing is. Alan brings up this exact point amid contemplations on the possible death of philosophy in modern times, citing German philosopher and social critic Peter Slaughterdyke, who frequently cites ancient cynic Diogenes is pooping in public in his evaluation of modern cynicism as well, So Alan now I should clarify though, Alan, in discussing

Slaughterdyke's ideas, he sees them as an overstatement. But Slaughterodyke says that quote, because everything has become problematic, everything is also now a matter of indifference.

so forth. But the social media age, as we've discussed on the show before, you know, various social media algorithms have long favorite engagement over everything else, and engagement can certainly mean things like love and excitement like look a cute cat or look there's a new John Carpenter blu ray, but it can also just mean hate, anger, and disgust.

like those are really easy. That's an easy button to push.

either individual or subcultural. As a result, the only universal imperatives that remain are those arising out of our shared biology are fears and hungers. So everything else just kind of shuts down, descends into chaos or entropy. So absolute widespread cynicism would, to paraphrase the words of Slaughterdyke, be a situation where everything is poop in the street and

people are nauseated all the time. Okay, sounds bad, Yeah yeah my understanding, as we would be talking about a world in which cynicism concerning the human experience at large becomes more absolute. But basically we withdraw into individual and localized efforts. But Allan's counter argument here is that most people are not so absolutely cynical he contends, quote modern cynicism is driven not by generalized apathy, but by incomplete disenchantment.

In other words, his argument here is that modern cynics have not entirely so admitted themselves to cynicism. They never hit rock bottom, the point at which they might be forced to confront their own cynicism. And so he mentions, how, you know, coming back to the idea of diogenies, you know, again, living in the streets among dogs, and you know, and

rags and shrouds, pooping in the streets. He brings up this public defecation as a shock tactic that's meant to make a point quote how funny is it that you find this upsetting? And the modern cynic is just not nauseated enough by the reality they're faced with to the point where they make that big sea cynic shift toward

the pursuit of virtue. M okay, So almost as if we're forever weightless in our cynicism, free falling toward a point a forced self recognition and revelation we never quite reach, Like an imagined space vessel, inching ever closer to the speed of light, but unable to actually touch it. Or to quote Allan again, he refers to it as quote unembedded but is yet underdeveloped negativity interesting.

fuel individual cynicism towards the entire social media endeavor to the point that it's really hard to trust even you know, alternate decentralized social media alternatives, or at least that's how it seems to me. Now, there have been a number of papers about this over the years. Have been some studies. A recent study published in the International Journal of Press Politics by Hassel at All digs into this a little bit, and also there have been some past papers by the

lead author here, Ariel Hassel. The basic idea that I was reading about from this author is that in political is that political cynicism is on the rise in democracies around the world, as people increasingly use social media to access their news as well as additional political information, much of which is hostile and lacking in civility. This should

come as no surprise you. If you are not aware of this phenomena, then God bless you because you have stayed out of the mud of all of this over the past decade.

distressing news. When I'm reading about it in you know, in news articles, I feel like my response to it is more measured and productive my mind tends to go to what would be things that could be done to fix this situation, well, you know that sort of thing. Whereas when I consume basically the same news events by like say, scrolling on a social media I tend to not do this these days, but you know I can remember from other times, and I have done it a

few times recently. Profoundly different emotional experience, one that is much more distressing, and it just creates a feeling of despair and helplessness. Like I do not have a productive response to it, like thinking about things that could be done to make the situation better. It's more just like I want to surrender and curl up in a ball.

response of cynicism. But this is the sort of cynicism that is much more dangerous, and it can ultimately lead to the delegitimization of democratic process.

because thus is the world now. To go back to that discussion of cynical poop in the streets again, it's not that you're fed up with all the poop and wants to do something about it or in response to it. Rather, you're just generally nauseated by all the poop you see, and you just engage from seeing it all together.

for authoritarian rhetoric and governance. Authoritarianism being the concentration of power under a central authority, under a figure or structure, often a single person, and the repression of individual freedoms,

especially the forceful suppression of dissent. So I wanted to look at one pretty highly cited paper on the subject of cynicism and politics, and this was published in the year twenty twelve in the European Journal of Personality by Svin Patten, Elaine van Heil, Christoff Daunt and Emma Onrit and it's called Stripping the Political cynic A psychological exploration

of the concept of political cynicism. Now, this was a study of how cynicism manifests in politics in multiple samples, specifically from Western Europe, and the authors note multiple times that some of these results could be culture specific, and so cynicism could manifest differently in one culture than it does in another, or differently in one type of political system than it does in another. But at least looking at these samples in Belgium and the Netherlands, they found

some interesting results. And now I'm not going to be able to get into everything the study found, but a few bullets that stood out to me. The authors were able to detect political cynicism as its own variable, which was distinct from just generalized social cynicism, which we've been talking about throughout this series, and from a somewhat distinct from what they call political distrust. Now, what would be the difference there. Political cynicism is cynicism applied specifically to

politics and politicians. So if general cynicism is the belief that people are bad, people are selfish, and morals are fake, political cynicism is the belief that politics and politicians are bad, they're motivated by self interest and are unbound by professed morals. Political cynicism is also differentiated here from simple distrust of

politicians and of politics. And I think a simple way of explaining this slight difference is, if I have political distrust, I am cautious about believing politicians and what they say. I think that politicians and political institutions may in some cases have incentives to lie or to make promises they can't keep, So I am skeptical of what they say and I try, You know, I am withholding some trust.

So there is this withholding trust element. But if I have high political cynicism, I not only treat their claims skeptically and withhold trust. But I also think politicians and political institutions are bad, corrupt, and in it exclusively for themselves. So it's like more of a negative emotional and moral judgment against politics, not just caution or skepticism about the

claims emanating from it. Does that distinction makes sense? Yes, So in this study, the authors found evidence that political cynicism was its own thing, and while related to general social cynicism and political distrust, it had its own distinct predictive characteristics separate from those other two categories. Political cynicism, in particular, was a predictor of a bunch of other

variables in a person. It tended to be related to feelings of political powerlessness and political normlessness, so kind of there's nothing I can do, and also there is no right or wrong in politics, just power. The authors also find that people high in political cynicism do not always

just sit out of politics. And we've talked about, or we mentioned at least in previous parts some other studies finding that people high in general cynicism were less likely to vote, less likely to be involved in the political process, But in this study they did not find that political

cynics were always sitting things out. At least within the context of the samples from Belgium and the Netherlands, the rate of voting among political cynics is not very different from that of less cynical people, but people high in political cynicism tended to view their vote more as a protest or as a rebuke of the political system, rather than a means of advancing a specific policy agenda. Quote. Political cynics boost parties not for their ideological program per se,

but rather because of their supposed integrity. So it's like, it's not so much about the policies that the party they're supporting is proposing, but more often about like, this is the only party that really tells it like it is.

The authors say political cynicism can be found all across the political spectrum, but in this context, in these Western European democracies, it tended to manifest most in support of extreme right wing protest parties that use anti establishment rhetoric, and the author say it's possible that this link is specific to Belgium and the Netherlands at this time the study was from twenty twelve, and it's possible that in a different political environment, cynicism could be more left wing

coded or maybe even centrist. More research would be needed on that. However, another dimension is that the authors here also found a link between high political cynicism, racial prejudice, and intolerance. This is in line with previous findings in political psychology, and the research was only able to establish a correlation, not to determine if there was a causal effect between these variables, and so it invites the question, if there is an effect, which way does the effect goes.

Racial prejudice tend to cause people to become politically cynical, or does political cynicism tend to cause people to become more racist. It could be thought, of course, that political cynicism serves to support racist assumptions if the racist believes the political system is working to the benefit of racial groups they dislike. But it also could be that racial prejudice itself is maybe a particular variety or expression of

underlying cynicism. So ultimately, political cynicism, it seems, is certainly a thing that is distinct in itself. It's related to, but distinct from, general social cynicism, and its expression is a very important factor in understanding how democracies work. So if you're involved in political science or political psychology, and you want to understand and be able to model and predict democracies, you need to understand political cynicism. It is

a factor. But another way I was thinking about the expression of political cynicism is actually really to what we talked about last time, to the cynical genius illusion. The cynical genius illusion study found that while people don't necessarily love cynics or think that they are the best at everything, remember, people were less likely to trust cynics with, say a social task like cheering up a depressed friend or taking

care of a stray animal or something like that. It found that, you know, so we don't love cynics for everything, we do tend on average to assume highly cynical people are smarter and more cognitively competent, and you know who

doesn't want to be seen as smart. So specifically, I was thinking about how this applies to conversations about politics, where I've had this thought for a while that I think people often selectively deploy cynical rhetoric in political conversations, whether or not they really believe it all that strongly, in order to look like they know what they're talking about without having to get in to specifics, so like

broad sweeping statements of political cynicism. I think last time we mentioned the example in all politicians they're all the same, you know, it's just they're all liars, they're all the same. It allows you to sound like you know what you're talking about and sit up on a high horse about the subject without having to know anything, or read anything or follow the news. You can loftily condemn others without having to do any homework.

like it doesn't matter, everything's just as bad. It doesn't it doesn't matter if I vote for one or the other. But it also means you don't have to get into actually comparing the two its assume they're all just as bad, which I mean, is there ever a case where two bad choices are exactly as bad? Yeah? I mean, if you're you're given a choice between two different toxic mushrooms, there are going to be different symptoms, there are different dosages and so forth, Like, they're not exactly the same.

Even if yes, in this one cherry picked example, the end result is the same for you, the consumer of the toxic mushroom.

without doing any homework. But there's also a more common, you know, you might say, at least seemingly benign version of it, where you're just trying to like sort of get through a tense moment in a conversation, or like get through something quickly I don't know, with a relative or something like that, just by making a kind of quick sweep it all under the rug conversation, you know, statement about politics, just to like avoid having a difficult conversation.

Go on, do you know what I'm talking about?

So I want to be not to completely forgive cynicism as it nanifests, but we have to acknowledge like the complexity of its manifestation in a given person as a response to streams of information and their overall media, political, social environment.

to it. Even people who are not high in cynicism, like you've talked about, we have cynical moments, and we might well become more cynical over time if we sort of water those little cynical instincts and let them grow.

There's a study in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly in twenty twenty four by Hillary K's style called Impression Management and Expectations of Political Cynicism, and this found that cynicism, specifically with reference to politics, was a means that people use to try to control how others perceive them to read from the abstract quote. In three studies, I demonstrate that people report they are cynical in order to avoid giving the impression they do not know much about politics.

Political cynicism is not a socially desirable characteristic. People do not believe cynicism is normatively good. At the same time, many see value to cynicism in politics, a finding which carries broad implications for the relationship between cynicism and perceived

knowledge in political discourse. And so I think that's important too, like recognizing that you might not be overall a highly cynical person, and yet you might still deploy cynicism specifically with reference to politics, maybe because of a response to

how you perceive politics. You know, maybe you think you're just rationally responding to politics being very corrupt and something that is not worthy of trust, or investing the time and energy to figure out who is worth trusting within politics, or maybe you're trying to manage the impressions you make on other people, which, again, despite the kind of unfriendly way I was phrasing it earlier, I mean that's something

we're all always trying to do. I mean, let's be real, I mean, everybody's always to some extent, even if you're a very authentic person or you think you are, you're somewhat trying to control how other people think about you. And it seems that people often think cynicism is one way of avoiding coming off as dumb or not knowing anything about politics.

extreme parties. There actually were supporters of people within the political system, very often what are considered by most people the extreme wings of the political spectrum, especially at least within the Western European sample here the extreme right wing anti establishment parties. But also coming back to the idea of impression management and these little moments in conversation where we might use cynicism to paper over something or try to come off a certain way to kind of get

through a tough spot. But I had to wonder to what extent these little acts of performative political cynicism, which again may seem harmless enough because you're just trying to get through a conversation without you know, revealing you don't know much, or trying to get through some tension, to what extent these actually contribute over time to genuine generalized political cynicism, which is sometimes linked to these toxic attitudes

like racism and intolerance, which can erode the legitimacy of democracies, can lead people toward authoritarianism or make them submit to it more easily, even if they don't love it. You know, I think most people listening will probably agree these are like bad outcomes. And I don't have a way of proving that these little, more harmless seeming moments contribute to that snowball effect overall, but I have to suspect that

they do. And it makes me think that I, at least personally want to be more careful about having these little harmless seeming moments of cynicism, even even in passing, because I think they do kind of add up when you hear things like that over and over.

of cynicism for everyone else. Like everyone if someone has like a cynical trajectory going on in the way they're viewing the world and interacting with others, if they come, if they interact with you, and you're just kind of like, carry on, let me actually speed you up a little bit as you head down that hut, Like, obviously that's that's not helping anyone, and we don't want to find

it out. What is it the end of that shoot? Yeah, Now, at this point I wanted to turn our attention not completely away from this topic because it's actually rather related to it, and that is to the interactions between cynicism and conspiracy theories and conspiracy thought.

cynicism as well. One paper I was looking at on this topic is from twenty thirteen by Einstein and Glick titled Scandals, Conspiracies, and the Vicious Cycle of Cynicism, and this is from the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and the authors here describe a cycle of cynicism that goes as follows, quote political scandals, dominion is

trust in government. This lower confidence, in turn, spurs higher levels of conspiracy belief, even in claims unrelated to ongoing scandals. So the idea of being you know, I think we

can all sort of imagine the scenario here. There's some sort of you know, sex scandal here that you're hearing about, some sort of you know, money scandal here with other politicians, and it kind of like, in your viewpoint, like muddies, the water makes them for a cynical political environment, and in that cynical political environment, it seems more likely that they're perhaps covering up UFOs or what have you.

aliens into all of this and everything makes sense. It's it's going to be a way to understand a confusing world,

a confusing and troubling world. But if you want to believe strongly enough, and the scientific world is saying there's no evidence for this, and the government or various government agencies and different governments are saying there's no evidence for this, then one was response, One way to keep the dream alive is to just assume that all of these voices that are telling you no are doing so because they are covering something up.

societal problem. And while he contends that certainly low level belief and stuff like this and fringe belief and enthusiasm for stuff like this is nothing to get bent out of shape about, his point is that as it edges closer to like mainstream belief, three major problems emerge, one of which is central to our discussion here, and the other two I think are also interesting in their own right. One of them is that UFO narratives can sometimes infringe

upon and even overwrite indigenous storytelling. I found this interesting because, of course, we see examples of this in popular conspiracy theories, where they link indigenous beliefs and stories to UFOs and cryptids and so forth, reinterpreting those traditional stories as a kind of proof and potentially corrupting those stories in the process.

background noise which impedes science communication. So you know, we've talked about this before, like putting scientists on the defensive regarding something like the UFOs and so forth, instead of you know, actually highlighting legitimate scientific efforts that can improve our world.

what I find. But there are people like that, and in my experience, they always find that, like, yeah, there's no good reason to believe any of these stories, right and so and so, what you're left with among the UFO believers is people who are highly for a variety of reasons, motivated to believe already that yes, UFOs are real,

yes they're being hidden. And thus the fact that you do not agree with me is evidence that you are at best, you know, woefully naive, and at worst you're part of the conspiracy.

you know, yeah, if you're a true believer. It seems to me one of the problems here is you'd never be able to one hundred percent show off the cynicism. You know, like if the government or institution said tomorrow, okay, you got this alien life exists, but they say, here's the kicker though it's only microbial or it, you know, or even if they were just to go even further than that and say, all right, here's the deal. Gray aliens absolutely real, but like Nordic aliens, green aliens and

reptilians are totally not real. Would that that would not please everyone. There's no way you could please everyone, Like there's i'm you know, I'm certainly willing to admit that it's possible that some of what's out there in the ufology world is real, but is all of it one absolutely not, There's no way it could be. So you're always going to have like some level of conspiracy thinking and no matter what could conceivably be revealed.

isn't a plausible scenario. They could imagine where they would be satisfied, right, Well, Like, what, okay, imagine you know to them that actually we had not been visited by aliens. I no, that's not what you think. But imagine it turns out you're wrong and that is the case. What what would satisfy you of that fact? What piece of evidence?

able to do that. So instead, it just seems like it would be a case where you would have this revelation, but it wouldn't please everyone, and so everyone would just assume some greater revelation is possible and that some cover up is still in place, like, Okay, they told us about the grace, Why are they not telling us about the Greens?

And so like a skeptical person as opposed to a cynical person, would try to evaluate the track record of an institution or of an individual spokesperson and say, like, you know, what, do we have reason to trust them or not? But if you take a sort of a conspiracy cover up as a starting point, and you start with that conclusion, you will always have evidence that anybody who doesn't agree with you has already violated your trust,

they've already lied to you. So you're taking instead of the thing we talked about earlier with the kind of applying a you know, a distrust inducing incident from one politician to another. What in that example, we use something that really happened, like so and so politician lied about something, you know, assuming that lie was real. Now I can't trust politician B because politician A lied. What if the

initial thing was not even actually a lie. It's just something where you're assuming they're not telling you the truth because they don't agree with you, that we're hiding an alien spacecraft somewhere.

case for it. It's blurry, it could be a UFO it's blurry, or you know, or we don't know exactly what we're looking at. It could be an antennae on the bottom of the ocean floor. And this is interesting because I was looking back and there were various headlines several years ago talking about an end of UFO ology that arguing that, Okay, we're getting in this information age full of ubiquitous visual data gathering. You know, we're just we're just going to see this stuff dry up and

go away. But don't I don't see that happening, Like there's always going to be low res ambiguous data.

just like what's that dot? And you know, in some cases people actually can figure out like oh, you know, that's a star, you know, or that is a mylar balloon or something like that. In other cases, like you can't figure it out. There's just a dot on your image of the sky and you don't know what it is. And it's in those situations where it's low resolution and there's not enough image, there's not enough information to really reach a solid conclusion, where this kind of these thoughts

can always bloom. There's always still the possibility you don't know what it is, so why isn't it aliens?

would I believe you. You've been part of the UFO cover up for years, You've been posting articles like that, and so like, there is a kind of cynicism that just prevents you from accepting what looks to me like a pretty good explanation of a weird looking image. Yeah, what this is really getting into, I think is that we've just sort of, for a few minutes now been dancing around this. But I think another big thing about

cynicism is that it functions as an excuse. Cynicism functions as an excuse to excuse bad behavior on your own part. For one thing, we've been mentioning this less but I think this is absolutely true that if you get caught doing something wrong that you really know is wrong, you can't really make a defense of what you did. What do people say? They say, everybody does it? Yeah, Yeah, cynicism is just like projecting cynicism onto others excuses your

undeniable bad behavior because it's just what everybody does. Everybody's like this. This of course in the realm of politics, this happens all the time. When somebody's favorite politician, it's really undeniable. You know, they get caught on camera doing something really bad. If they can't deny it. What people say, everybody does it. They're all, you're so naive, you think the other ones are better than this, So it excuses bad behavior. But then the other way it's an excuse

is that it excuses poor epistemic practices. When you don't have you want to believe something and you don't have good reasons too, and in fact people are giving you very good reasons not to believe the thing you believe, you can resort to cynicism so that you don't have to pay attention to that. It's like, well, you're just all part of it. You're all just all lying. Why should I believe anything you say?