A theory of cynicism and conspiracy

And how to challenge them

Twice recently, I have heard absurd, evidence-free conspiracy theories, one left-wing, one right-wing. I think they have the same root. So today, I’m going to write about something which I think is already accepted by smart, thoughtful people, but which hasn’t yet percolated widely enough:

Teenagers, ignorant people, and Generation Xers all think that cynicism is clever. No. Cynicism is stupid, and it will make you stupid.

My readers are smart, thoughtful people! You might know this already. I’m telling you because I want you to spread the word. I think we need to develop a clear elite norm about this, and spread it to the rest of the public. So I’m going to give you some useful talking points to respond to cynics and conspiracy theorists.

(The general thought here is that good ideas bear repeating and bad ideas are slow to die. It takes many, many repetitions of “social media is bad” and “polarization is a problem” before these ideas become cultural earworms. And something needs to be not just known but common knowledge — everyone knows that everyone knows it, i.e. it is a cliché — before a social group pays enough attention to do something about it.)

Why put cynicism together with conspiracy? Don’t these theories appeal to people’s credulity? I’ll say more about this below, but my basic idea is that both spring from too-strong prior beliefs. If you are convinced, and nothing will unconvince you, that people in power are amoral and self-interested, then you can use that to predict their behaviour, and again no evidence is needed. You can just imagine the terrible things they’ll do.

I should point out that I am going to ignore the big academic literature on misinformation. This has been a source of controversy recently, after the presidential debate revealed that “Joe Biden is getting old” was probably not misinformation. My view is that that literature probably grew up in response to a political demand:

and that it’s unlikely to generate real, replicable insights. So, I feel fine about putting forward my own views without deferring to it (or even reading much of it).

A model of political cynicism

A conventional take on cynicism is that it is a belief system of the powerless. Well sure, that cap fits teens, fools and Gen Xers. And there is an obvious logic to it: if you really cannot achieve much, you may as well embrace an idea that tells you not to try. But I think we can improve on this. Here is my simple model of the social psychology of political cynicism:

1. There is a social norm that you ought to be interested in politics, be an active citizen, be well-informed etc.

   Teachers tell you so in civics classes at school. Rich and influential people seem to act politically interested. Elite media focus a lot on politics, whereas low-status media are more focused on sports. Also, when you hear people talk about politics, they often seem pretty self-righteous, as if having political opinions makes them a good person. (And, from how people talk, what the opinions are doesn’t seem to matter: surprisingly, having either left- or right-wing opinions makes you better than the other side.)

2. But politics is boring and complicated.

   Politicians aren’t good looking like proper celebrities. Political debates are not as exciting as sports, and don’t have the emotional resonance of pop music. Political issues involve difficult, abstruse topics like public debt, housing policy, or what’s happening in Taiwan. Even if you try to understand all this, it seems like at least one person will always get mad at you for disagreeing with them.

3. Here’s a solution: invent a narrative where you know a lot about politics, without having to do a lot of work.
   The narrative should be low-effort: rather than needing to learn the motivations and beliefs of different players, you’ll need some simple generalizations like “they’re all the same”. This is the cynicism. It should have a plot which anyone can understand, like a conspiracy where a few powerful people are behind everything that happens. Better still, it should be entertaining — it needs cartoon villains, not real people with complex motivations. Even better if there are dark, mysterious forces at work. (This is another aspect of the link between cynicism and conspiracy theorizing. Both are forms of low-effort cognition.)

Not surprisingly, the demand for low-effort conspiracy theories creates its own conspiratainment industrial complex. Conspiracy shows on Youtube let people “do their own research,” which I guarantee you is a lot more fun than real political research.

But the important thing about my theory is the link between cynicism and the norm of taking part in politics. People will always want low-effort entertainment. The problem happens when this demand collides with the idea that it is good to be politically involved.

Look in the mirror

To put it another way, cynicism and conspiracy theories are the dark side of an impossible demand made by the religion of democracy. Think of the advance of democracy not as an inevitable side effect of modernization, but as a great mass movement. The creed of this movement was “power to the people”, and its first commandment was that the people had to organize to get it. Not being interested in politics was a sign of selfishness. And sure, how can democracy work without this norm?

After admitting this, we may as well also accept that there is no bright line between cynics and the rest of us. After all, nobody has an adequate understanding of politics. (Imagine you were given one job: to pick the next President or Prime Minister. How much should you spend to learn about the different candidates, their characters and their policies? Surely you should hire an army of experts and pay for reams of research. That is what would constitute an adequate, collective-welfare-maximizing understanding of politics. Obviously we all fall far short.)

In fact, all our political ideas have an element of entertainment about them. They rarely come from disciplined effort. They use shortcuts and simplifications. They typically treat the other side as one-dimensional villains. Some of us, who are really politically motivated, might read one or two books a year about politics; the rest get their information from the media, our personal experience, or our mates down the pub.

Think how much media attention US politics gets in the UK. That’s obviously not because we can influence their politics in any way. This November, we will have no vote. But their politics is so much more entertaining.

Cynics just do this a bit more than the rest of us. Our ideas of politics are dumb and lazy; theirs are dumber and lazier.

Cynicism is bad

Having said all that, cynicism is bad and stupid, and we should have a norm against it.

Here is why:

• Paradoxically, cynicism makes you vulnerable to political hucksters.

There are two routes to this. First, if you start from the position that all politicians are as bad as each other, then you will never develop the art of distinguishing between better and worse. So you accept the open bullshitter and liar, or the shameless crook.

Part of the electoral effectiveness of Trump is that he made everyone else look like hypocrites. He didn’t pay hypocrisy’s tribute to virtue.

Imagine a world where politicians offer a certain amount of jam today, and promise a certain amount of jam tomorrow. If you don’t believe their tomorrow promises, then you will vote for the politician who offers most jam today. So, low trust leads to short-termism.

The second route to hucksterism is almost the opposite. It builds on the social psychology of cynicism. Cynicism says that they, the people in power, are utterly self-interested. This is something almost nobody says of themselves or the people around them. No – they are not like us, the ordinary guys. So now you have the lure of the out-of-system saviour. He’s a decent person, one of us, who isn’t part of the corrupt system.

This is also part of Trump’s appeal. He’s both a charming rogue, and an anti-system hero. But the idea of running against Washington long predates Trump. As in many cases, the groundwork for populism was laid by mainstream politicians, long before populism arrived.

• Cynicism is collectively disabling.

Cynicism comes with a self-image of toughness and street smarts. Individually, sure, it’s wise to be on your guard. But in politics and life, almost any worthwhile goal has to be achieved collectively. And collectively cynicism is crippling, because collective action requires people to trust each other. Here is a good picture of the modern West: a world of individual “tough guys” who, faced with any group that can successfully work together, are a herd of sheep ready for shearing.

• Conspiracy theories sidetrack you from political engagement.

My account of conspiracy theories is that they are busywork. They are a way of pretending to be an expert about politics, and thus conforming to the norm of political interest, without actually needing to make an effort. The norm is there for a reason! A self-governing society needs an active citizenry. So when somebody is pretending to be active, they should be called on it, just like companies that greenwash instead of genuinely improving their environmental record.

How to talk to a cynic

These reasons explain why cynicism is harmful and we need to start developing a norm against it. This will be a long process, because elites have actually contributed a lot to the slow decline in political trust over the past fifty years, and now they have to turn the tanker around. For example, in the UK, Jeremy Paxman popularized the idea that anyone interviewing a politician should ask himself “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” More generally, negative partisanship — cultivating hatred and contempt of the other side — was central to political campaigning long before the coming of populism.

Here are some arguments you can use to persuade someone that cynicism and conspiracy theorizing are stupid.

• To believe a conspiracy, there has to be evidence for it.

This is the most essential line of defence. Someone who can’t be persuaded of this is a hopeless case.

To put it another way, what makes a conspiracy theory is not its implausibility. Lots of them are perfectly plausible. What makes a conspiracy theory is lack of actual evidence. Yes, there are sometimes real conspiracies! They are discovered by actual investigative journalism, not by imagining stories that “just make sense”. Sure, the US faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident! That does not provide a license to believe that 9/11 was an inside job.

The simple idea that you need actual evidence shuts the door to an infinite number of plausible-sounding, but evidence-free theories. If someone rejects it (“of course we’ll never find the evidence!”) try offering them an equally plausible but evidence-free theory, preferably one that goes against their political prejudices.

• There is no grand conspiracy behind the curtain, because nobody is in charge.

Chaos rules. Again, most people recognize this from their personal experience in organizations, where failure and cock-up are far more salient than wickedness and exploitation.

The idea that everything is driven by a conspiracy of the powerful is a form of political immaturity. It imagines society like a family with Daddy in charge, and then blames Daddy for everything that goes wrong.

• If people hide conspiracies, they must also sometimes not do conspiracies.

Most conspiracies are supposed to be hidden. This suggests that conspirators have an incentive not to be found out. But an incentive not to be found out is also an incentive not to do a conspiracy. In other words, a free society and press provide some incentives to keep people honest, even if they are self-interested.

• How many people are in on this thing?

It’s surprising how many wacky ideas fall to this simple question. Companies and bureaucracies do many bad things, but they do so usually by lying to themselves, not by engaging in massive cover-ups. They outsource bad behaviour to their suppliers and cover their eyes, or they convince themselves it is for the greater good, or they ignore the evidence. Any story that requires whole departments or companies to collude in something obviously wicked is not plausible. First, there would be too many people to pay off; second, it only takes one honest person to turn whistleblower.

There are reasonable exceptions to this rule for organizations whose job is to do undercover stuff, like intelligence agencies.

• Politicians are just like you, a mix of ideals and self-interest.

Most people recognize that they are not perfect. Yet they are also somewhat invested in a self-image as a good person. It should not be hard to understand that people are like that in general. A retort to this is that “only the scum rise to the top”, that political and economic power structures select for selfishness. But again, this doesn’t really correspond to most people’s experience. There are both bad bosses and also good bosses. Some people probably do get on by ruthless backstabbing, but in many environments, those people are eventually found out. Boris Johnson lost power partly because he lost the trust of his own colleagues. Other people get on by being competent and nice.

(I don’t really believe that social science can provide “answers” to this kind of debate, but for what it is worth, the evidence on whether elites are better or worse than the rest of us is extremely mixed — as you’d expect if there is no hard-and-fast rule.)

Cynicism is the underlying problem

I think this last argument is more important than the other ones, because it gets at the underlying problem. The idea that everyone in power is uniformly bad is dangerous and damaging for politics, even if we shut down all the conspiracy theories that arise from it. Cynicism without conspiracy theories just leads back to apathy. All democracies have to survive with a lot of apathy, because democratic participation is not goal-oriented rational and will always be undersupplied. And scepticism about our leaders is probably a human universal, for good reason. But by the same token, because participation is undersupplied, its marginal benefit is probably large, so we need to minimize apathy; and cynicism is really not the same as scepticism, because scepticism is open-minded and cynicism is closed.

Right now there is a strong elite norm against conspiracy theorizing. There are lots of academic papers and media articles about conspiracy theories on the right, and some people are even turning the mirror on themselves and talking about Blue MAGA. But cynicism gets more of a pass. We’re used to it, and elites of my generation kind of rose to power in an age of it. This is not actually good, and we will find it hard to repair democracy until we have got that clear in our heads, have repeated it to each other until we know it, and have started to tell everyone else.

Diogenes the Cynic in his tub

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If you liked this, you might enjoy my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.

I also write Lapwing, a more intimate newsletter about my family history.