Our default setting has shifted lately - from skepticism, which can be healthy, to cynicism, which has a habit of corroding everything it touches.

I want to be clear about what I mean by cynicism: I'm talking about the reflexive assumption that everyone’s stated motivations are false, that institutions are irredeemably corrupt, that idealistic projects are either scams or delusions, that there is no hope, and that anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or complicit.

The appeal of cynicism is that it makes you sound smart without asking for a whole lot of independent thought. It's easier to tear down than build up, to assume the worst than to evaluate evidence, to sneer than to engage, to smirk rather than smile.

The cynic is never embarrassed by having believed in something that failed.

They're never caught looking foolish for having trusted.

It’s an insurance policy against disappointment, and in a world that regularly disappoints, who can blame people for wanting coverage?

But cynicism only protects you from loss by preventing you from taking risks in the first place. It protects you from the pain of betrayed idealism; but it does so by making it impossible to believe in anything at all.

The cynic achieves invulnerability by shooting for sterility. You can't be disappointed by a cause you never believed in, a movement you never joined, a man you never trusted, an idea you never gave the time of day.

George Orwell knew better. He spent years documenting the crimes of totalitarianism and the failures of political movements, but he never stopped believing that democratic socialism was possible and worth fighting for. He was capable of holding both "Stalin's regime is monstrous" and "a more just economic system is achievable" in his head simultaneously.

What Orwell resisted, powerfully and against the modern grain, was the slide from "this thing was corrupted" to "all things must be corrupt." His ability to stay idealistic while being clear-eyed about human failings is one of the things that makes his writing still relevant in 2025.

But isn't the historical record pretty damning? Aren't most grand projects failures? Don't most movements get co-opted, most institutions captured, most idealists revealed as hypocrites?

Sure.

There are (as I’m fond of saying) many such cases.

The French Revolution did eat its children. The Soviet Union did become exactly the kind of tyranny it claimed to be overthrowing. Politicians who campaign on reform do get swallowed by the system they promised to change.

But notice what happens when we make this the whole story: we miss every case where things actually worked.

The Marshall Plan did help rebuild Europe. The Civil Rights Movement did end Jim Crow. Smallpox was eradicated through an international coordination effort. The Montreal Protocol did address the ozone hole. Are these perfect success stories? No, they all happened through a series of shitty compromises, through flawed execution and with unintended consequences.

But they happened.

And the world is different // better for them.

The universal cynic treats these successes as either flukes or propaganda, which is a hell of a position to maintain. If every apparent success must be reinterpreted as either a lucky accident or a cover for something dark and shadowy, you've made your worldview unfalsifiable. You've created a theory that explains everything and nothing.

The cynic claims to be the only one willing to see the world as it actually is, while everyone else is indulging in comforting fictions. But this is backwards. The cynic has simply chosen a different set of axioms, filtering out just as much reality as naive optimism. If the optimist sees only the good, the cynic sees only the bad, and both are blind to the messy, complicated, mixed up // fucked-up reality in front of them.

Yes, there are replication crises and publication biases and perverse incentives that reward flashy findings and ignore hard work. The cynic uses this to conclude that we can't trust any scientific findings & expertise is just credentialism, & peer review is pay-to-play. Which makes it impossible to distinguish between fields with severe problems and fields with minor issues, between studies that are deeply flawed and those that are merely imperfect, between experts who are pushing an agenda and those trying to uncover the truth.

When everything is a scam, nothing is a scam. When everyone is motivated by hidden selfish interests, we lose the ability to distinguish between someone who is genuinely public-spirited and someone who is genuinely grifting.

The cynic might say "see, that's the point, there's no difference."

This is just giving up.

And I’m no quitter.

I suspect part of what drives modern cynicism is information overload. We're exposed to an endless stream of stories about corruption, failure, and betrayal. For every heartwarming story about a charity doing good work, there are three exposés about charity fraud. For every effective policy intervention, there are ten failures. And all of this is more visible than ever before. It's easy to look at this flood of information and conclude that the ratio of failure to success means we should default to assuming failure.

As a journalist, trust me when I tell you - this is a sampling problem. Bad news is more newsworthy than good news. Failures are more interesting than success stories. The charity that effectively distributes malaria nets for twenty years gets one story about it; the charity that collapses in a scandal gets dozens. Our information environment is biased toward making the world look worse than it is, and the cynic is either blind, arrogant or dumb enough to mistake this biased sample for objective reality.

Add to this - cynicism actually functions as a status marker in certain communities. The asshole who can explain why a proposal won't work sounds smarter than the person who suggests it might work if we adjust these three parameters. And the person who questions everyone's motivations sounds more sophisticated than the person willing to take stated intentions at face value.

So we get a ratchet effect where each generation of intellectuals tries to be more cynical than the last to prove their superior insight. The Enlightenment thinkers questioned traditional authority; the Romantics questioned Enlightenment rationalism; the modernists questioned all grand narratives; the postmodernists questioned the possibility of truth itself. Each step seemed like deeper insight, but at some point the questioning turns into a parlor trick.

The cynic will object that I'm attacking a strawman // nobody is really a universal cynic in practice // everyone makes exceptions for things they care about. And this is partly true. Most people who adopt cynical postures are inconsistently cynical. They believe their own chosen causes are legitimate while dismissing everyone else's. They trust their own preferred experts while assuming everyone else's are compromised. They think their side's institutions are basically functional while treating the other side's as irredeemably corrupt.

But inconsistent cynicism might be even worse than the universal. It adds motivated reasoning and tribalism to an already problematic POV. At least the universal cynic is evenhanded in their dismissiveness. The selective cynic is just using cynicism as cover, applying it when convenient and setting it aside when their interests are involved.

Pure optimism is clearly not the answer here. Naive trust leads to exploitation, blind faith leads to cults, and uncritical acceptance leads to bad decisions.

What, then?

William James wrote about the will to believe; that in some situations, believing something can make it more likely to become true. IE, democracy only works if people believe democracy can work and participate accordingly. Scientific communities only function if people believe intellectual honesty is possible and work for it.

The cynic responds that this is just motivated reasoning, that we're believing things because we want them to be true rather than because they are true. But social institutions and movements and norms have only ever existed to the extent that people believe in them and act as if they're real. The cynic who treats all institutions as corrupt helps make all institutions corrupt by withdrawing the good-faith engagement that makes them not corrupt.

Universal cynicism is moral cowardice, the unwillingness to stick your neck out or invest your hopes in anything because that would be admitting you care about something enough to be wrong about it. The cynic gets to feel superior while contributing nothing, to critique while building nothing, to be right about failures while never risking failure themselves.

This is the real case against cynicism: it protects the ego at the expense of the world. It makes you feel smart while making you comfortingly useless. It shields you from disappointment while shielding you from accomplishment. And it does all this on the cheap, at bargain-bin prices, while claiming to be the only honest position, the only realistic stance.

And it’s bullshit.

Seeing things as they are is seeing both the failures and successes, both the corruption and integrity, both the self-interest and altruism that exist in the world.

The cynic's invulnerability is really just another word for impotence.

And impotence might protect you from failure, but it guarantees you'll never succeed at anything either.