Cynicism is a Symptom

Presumably because I both hate myself and remain naively optimistic about being able to change the minds of others, I've been spending a decent chunk of my free time wallowing in the technical misery of Hacker News' comments sections. It's been quite insightful in many ways, discussing my highly-leftist perspectives with a technical cohort that's still broadly pro-Capitalist, finding common ground with people I considered a lost cause due to their penchant for freely guzzling the startup culture Kool-Aid, entrenched in their belief that they too are a Unicorn away from being as rich as Zuck or Bezos. It's also helped me realize that my willingness to question the necessity of things is a hostile attribute to have in a culture where you should never ask "why", only sell the problem - and your product as the solution to the problem you just invented.

In this cesspool of negativity and blind-boosterism, I noticed a recurring attitude towards negativity that equated it to cynicism, which itself equated to laziness, which was obviously the source of all ills in society. Normally I brush aside these suggestions as evidence of ignorance (an unwillingness to understand the other's perspective), but for whatever reason my neurons fired in a different direction today, one that directly lead to this blog post:

Cynicism is the symptom, not the cause.

Childhood Foundations

While I'm no biologist, I'm pretty sure that we all had some sort of childhood. Extrapolating further, I'm also fairly confident that during our formational childhood years, we all encountered a situation where someone violated the rules, and we informed a leader of some sort about this violation. From here, things become more subjective and Americentric, since I am a singular American who grew up in the American Educational System circa late 1980s to mid-2000s.

I was the class snitch, of a sort. I thrived in systems (likely because I may have been mildly autistic - another post for another time), and I loathed people who violated those systems for their own benefits. I am civically minded to a fault, in a country that very much ain't. So when a classmate would cheat, I'd raise the issue; when a classmate engaged in bullying, I raised my concerns; when a teacher broke the rules, I would inform another teacher, etc. In my youthful eyes (and complex mind), accountability was universal, and had to be in order for systems to remain functional. For someone to be unaccountable under a system, rendered the system itself wholly invalid.

Those of you who engaged in similar acts of compliance likely know what came next: ostracization, by both peers and leaders alike. My peers, more keen on selfish benefits than community cooperation, demoted me to the bottom rungs of their impromptu social ladders. The leaders, on the other hand, pushed me away from the other children and labelled me as "sensitive", an abnormal creature in an otherwise acceptably-selfish cohort, a red flag to others that I could not be trusted with sensitive knowledge. As a child, I could not appreciate the breadth of this cycle of harm; as an adult, I am incensed by the scars it left behind.

We like to believe that we teach our children good values, but my lived experience is anything but. We teach them to keep quiet, to not share, to hoard information and expertise, to harm others in order to help ourselves, and to betray our closest friends when beneficial to our selfish goals.

We're teaching children that everyone else is expendable, and they're behaving accordingly.

A Map of Scars

I never gained flexibility in my values. On the one hand, this has meant I adapt quickly to changing circumstances, capitalize on power vacuums to foster stability and growth, and that others look to me for guidance in times of crisis, all of which are things I'm glad I have or can offer. On the other hand, it means that in times of prosperity or in systems of exploitation, I am the single biggest threat: an honest, morally-inflexible person.

Honesty is not a value modern society cherishes to any actual degree. Our governments aren't honest about how our tax dollars are accounted for, with both sides of the aisle engaged in a duplicitous dance of "cost-cutting" and "accountability" while expanding debts, doling out welfare to the wealthy and corporate elites while imposing austerity on the working class. Corporations are no better, misleading the public on everything from climate change to worker shortages in order to boost share prices and executive compensation. This attitude is reflected in our entertainment, our sporting leagues, the rise of professional poker (a game where success is dependent upon dishonesty) and gambling, and even in college scandals. We bemoan the youth of today using AI to cheat on schoolwork or interviews, while simultaneously using those same tools to cheat workers and creators. This disdain for honesty now extends to identity itself, as persecution against honest authenticity surges against the LGBTQ+ (particularly transgendered persons), Jewish, Muslim, women, and immigrant communities. To openly and honestly be anything other than a cisgendered white Christian male of wealth and means, is to be a target for elimination by a dishonest society.

For those of us that remain staunchly honest in the face of such an overwhelming societal incentive to be dishonest, we gradually accrue scar tissue from every rebuke, every job loss, every demotion, every negative outcome attributed to our intrinsic honesty. It's no secret that whistleblowers, arguably the most honorable of workers, suffer the worst from their honesty. They lose entire careers, livelihoods, homes, and their very lives in the noble pursuit of honesty. The cost of honesty is staggeringly high, its rewards abysmally low.

Those of us who adapt to said society must find a way to cope with its toxicity toward our existence. Many of us enter the realms of non-profits or civil service in the hope of evoking societal change, only to find the same issues plaguing for-profit organizations or ineffectual government institutions; when dishonesty permeates the whole of society itself, there is no escape from it in even the noblest of professions. For the rest of us, our options are even more grim, if pragmatic: death or suffering.

Belonging to the latter group means a lifetime of accumulating scar tissue faster than the rest of our peers. By High School, I was already in counseling for the barriers I'd erected against socializing with dishonest or harmful people; yes, I had to be counseled to trust the demonstrably untrustworthy. While others spent college socializing, flirting, experimenting, and failing on the path towards growth and fulfillment, I was floundering in a Community College, struggling to rationalize the socially-internalized notion of parental trustworthiness even as my real world data screamed otherwise and harms piled up. My honesty cost me a retail job, then a government contracting role, while my forced dishonesty alienated me from a healthy sense of self. Forcing an innately honest person to lie in order to survive is incredibly stressful - to the point of putting on over 120lbs of added weight, stressful. Faultless honesty has stunted my growth professionally and personally, because society does not reward nor promote honest behaviors.

The Evolved Cynic

Just as scar tissue accumulates on the body after serious wounds, so too does cynicism result from repeated scarring of the psyche. Honest people become cynics because of a lifetime of experience demonstrating the lack of value of said honesty, and the harms associated with it. We are viewed as miserable, lazy, jaded, or otherwise willfully alienated from society, with those assumptions never being questioned by those making them. To ask why an assumption is being made is to ask if there is a problem you can solve, and if there's one thing we honest people know better than anyone else, it's that most people have no desire to proactively change anything.

Cynicism in technology is a particularly nasty beast, I'll admit. A lot of us went into tech as an industry because the proposed narrative was "the whole package", as it were: promotions and growth based on merit rather than politics, compensation that would enable us to live comfortably in the middle class, colleagues who were just as nerdy and transparent as we were, and a shared value system that wasn't just a thin veneer to mask making immense sums of wealth. In a lot of ways, that's exactly the environment we cultivated at our startups or employers when we joined - only to find them snuffed out in favor of the societal impetus towards infinite growth through shades of dishonesty. We saw technology shift from solving tangible problems or offering meaningful improvements to quality of life, to fabricating new problems to justify "new" technologies. We even saw our hard work perverted into addiction machines or autonomous weapons, linking our efforts with definitive harm.

As time marched onward, we watched our early pillars of industry rot and collapse from within, and then without. Productivity gave way to politics, merit was redefined to promote sycophants over contributors, and stability was solely for those at the top while everyone below SVP was gradually outsourced and laid off.

When layoffs happen, the honest ones get let go first. We were the ones who raised concerns that diverted attention from immediate profit motives, or undermined executive vision. We were the ones pointing out the hypocrisy of our climate goals and outsourcing labor abroad while also mandating RTO policies for domestic workers in the name of "productivity". We decried the immense waste of modern AI, or the grift of NFTs and Blockchains, or the unreasonable cost of sovereignty through private to public cloud migrations. Honesty is inconvenient at the worst of times, and a threat to prosperity in the best of times; it is no wonder we are tossed aside as soon as practicable in favor of a share price bump or an executive parachute.

That doesn't stop the honest folks, though, because we all have our breaking points and we all grow at our own pace. Look no further than the recent waves of protests against government contracts or the development of surveillance and weapons systems for authoritarian regimes. The honest ones are speaking up even today, and being thrown out just as fast. Perhaps it was this environment that helped those neurons connect and inspire this blog post, the realization I'm not alone in this mood, this feeling. At the very least, it certainly catalyzed in me a sense of righteous anger at the those who dare call us names while doing nothing of their own accord to improve the state of affairs.

A Symptom of What?

At the start of this post, I posed that cynicism was a symptom of illness, rather than a cause of it. That naturally bears the follow-up question of, "a symptom of what?" The easy answer is that cynicism is the brain's response to repeated harm from engaging in a system in the designated way; in other words, scar tissue to mitigate further wounds while operating within the same system's boundaries. To reduce cynicism is to meaningfully change how these systems work, their incentives and their consequences, their rules and their boundaries. It's hard, grueling, high-risk work, something modern society seems adverse toward and yet work that always requires doing.

The harder answer is that cynicism is a symptom of societal failure itself. Cynics exist within any period of history, but seemingly grow in number and attitude during times of crisis or collapse. While the American 1920s are called the "Roaring Twenties" as if a sign of prestige or prosperity, the reality is that they're very similar in tone and crisis to our 2020s: staggering wealth inequality, rising labor tensions, and a culture war between Conservatives and Progressives dominate the headlines in both eras, and both had their outsized share of cynics compared to eras before or after. When a society disciplines honesty and rewards duplicity, it is a sign of a cancer most foul and destructive that has metastasized throughout its body. Those honest folk-turned cynics are simply society's early warning system, although history shows that society will neither heed their warnings until the crisis has run its course, nor will they reward said cynics for their efforts once the crisis has passed.

Honest Cynicism

I do not believe cynicism to be a dirty word or a negative attitude to have, following some reflection during the writing of this post. It is simply a state of being, a disappointment that society has ceased trying to be better, or has failed to take up the fight needed to create real change. I see it in protestors cynical at those on the sidelines who claim to share their ideals, waiting for the "right time" or "right moment" to get out and support them. I see it in workers angry that their labor is being used to massacre civilians while their colleagues shrug it off as "just business". I see it in critics, writers, and journalists who migrate increasingly to the fringes, disgusted with the complacency of the majority as Rome burns around them.

Honest people become cynics because society and its members continuously, over long periods of time, choose not to address problems. We become cynics after repeated harm inflicted upon us after demonstrating objectively good values. Cynicism is both fatigue and determination, a demonstration that we are tired, but we have not given up the fight.

That said, cynicism does not last forever. On any long enough timeline, the inevitable outcome of all life is death - and cynicism is the last, loudest warning that death fast approaches for the honest among us, as fatigue claims their will to fight and society leads a campaign against their outspoken critique of its faults.

And should the honest die out, the monsters will roam freely.