Terminal Cynicism
How negativity erodes our institutions.
I believe that many have reached Terminal Cynicism.
Terminal Cynicism is a level of cynicism that leads one to perceive everything negatively, even obviously good things. It is cynicism so extreme that it renders one incapable of productive thought or action.
The most common instance is people refusing to engage with politics in any shape because “The System is corrupt”, thus neglecting it and leaving it to decay.
At a personal level, Terminal Cynicism is dangerous. It feeds on weakness and insecurity, and alienates people.
I also believe that Terminal Cynicism is not always natural and organic. Instead, that it is quite often caused by agitators who spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD).
And defeating FUD requires a lot of clarity. So let’s clarify things.
Examples
First, consider a couple of beliefs commonly intertwined with Terminal Cynicism…
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“Air Conditioning is bad.”
A plethora of articles explain at length how bad AC is: because of greenhouse gases and cooling fluids, because many poor people don’t have access to it, and how there are actually many great alternatives to it!
But these articles are taking the problem in the wrong direction. AC is good: it makes people’s lives better.
If there’s a problem with how much energy people use, we can tax or ration it. If there’s a problem with the greenhouse emissions coming from people’s energy consumption, we can tax or ration them.
Trying to manage problems that far upstream in the supply chain through individual consumption is more about moralisation than efficiency.
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“Doing Politics is bad.”
There are much too many smart people who believe that doing politics at all is bad. That all politicians are bad, that wanting to do politics itself is a red flag, and even that it is meaningless to want to do politics as everything is corrupted.
This is harmful and self-defeating. Our institutions rely on people actually doing politics. We need competent politicians, competent citizens, people invested in political parties, and more.
Erasing oneself from politics is the central example of Terminal Cynicism.
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“Vaccines are bad.”
The anti-vax movement has moved from a fringe conspiracy theory to a widespread belief. It ranges from the belief that vaccines do not work to claims of vaccines containing microchips that interact with 5G towers.
This is wrong. But beyond its wrongness, it is the result of escalating distrust. No honest investigation ends up with “5G microchips” as its conclusion.
The facts of the matter are fairly straightforward. Vaccines as a class have been a powerful tool to erase diseases and slow their spread. While not all vaccines are equally good, they are among the triumphs of medicine.
Let’s be clear: it makes sense to discuss the efficiency and the risk profile of a vaccine. This is why we have long and documented procedures to establish a vaccine as safe and useful.
Similarly, it also makes sense to discuss whether vaccines should be mandatory. This is a non-trivial public health question. Even though mandatory vaccines let us eradicate diseases in the past, it did come at the cost of personal freedom and bodily autonomy.
Overall though, vaccines have been a public health victory. There are many reasonable compromises and trade-offs that are meaningfully debatable. But not whether vaccines contain Bill Gates’ microchips. That one is just Terminal Cynicism.
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There are many more examples of this type of Terminal Cynicism.
Terminally Cynical beliefs are usually wrong, but not always. It has little to do with the philosophical intricacies of the underlying question or the sometimes subtle truth of the matter.
Instead, what makes it deeply wrong is that it stems from a cynicism so bad that it will take a thing that it itself thinks is good and frame it as bad on purpose.
Here are examples of Terminally Cynical beliefs, along with an example of the cynical justification.
Sometimes, I give two such justifications. I do so when Terminal Cynicism has led to both the typical far-left and far-right clusters to independently build their own cynical justification for why a given virtue is actually bad.
Other times, I give two pairs of beliefs. I do so when Terminal Cynicism prevents either side from looking for balance or a synthesis.
Consider:
“Science” is bad: it’s a white construct demeaning traditional wisdom. “Universities” are bad: they’re an institution that has been fully captured by wokes.
“A Strong Military” is bad: we should never enforce our version of the international order, and let others do so instead. “Opposing Russia” is bad: we should never enforce our version of the international order, and let others do so instead.
“Atheism” is bad: it may be factually correct, but atheists are responsible for the most destructive totalitarian regimes, and atheism doesn’t literally answer all questions. “Religion” is bad: it may help people live better lives, but religious people are responsible for many of the worst moral systems in the modern world, and religion is literally wrong on a bunch of factual questions.
“A Solid Police and Judicial System” is bad: they sometimes make mistakes, which means we should defund them. “A Solid Police and Judicial System” is bad: due process often lets criminals get away, which means we should completely bypass it.
“Hard Work” is bad: it’s a bourgeois fantasy, licking the boot and helping capitalism. “Hard Work” is bad: The Elites rig everything. Don’t be a wage-cuck, scam people and go all in on crypto.
“Power” is bad: being a victim is morally better.
“The System” is bad: because it is hegemonic, it is responsible for every bad thing that happens.
And one of the major endpoints of Terminal Cynicism… “Democracy” is bad: people are evil and stupid. Instead, people I like should force their will on everyone.
Mechanisms
Terminal Cynicism may seem contradictory. It is a complete reversal of what’s good and bad. And yet, as we see above, it’s everywhere. So many people will take obviously good things and say they are bad for very weak reasons.
It is both consequential (it has consequences!) and absurd: it makes little sense and is self-contradictory.
Thus, I think the phenomenon warrants the search for a solid explanation. My personal explanation features two parts.
The first one is Abstract Idealism, where people don’t care for the real world.
The second is Vice Signalling, when people commit bad actions specifically to be noticed.
Abstract Idealism
The first one is Abstract Idealism. I have written more at length about Abstract Idealism here.
Abstract Idealism is the phenomenon where people refuse to consider the real world. Instead, they waste most of their thoughts on imaginary worlds.
A popular imaginary world is the The Revolution. People who believe in The Revolution spend a lot of their time thinking about how great things would be there (or after it happens, depending on the person). They either fantasise about purging the world out of its corrupted people and systems, or about how everything will be perfect after.
Another popular imaginary world is When My People will hold all the Power. People who believe in it are willing to sacrifice a lot to get “their people” winning. This is all justified by the fact that once their people win, they’ll finally be able to reshape the world to remove all their problems.
Abstract Idealists are fond of many more epic imaginary worlds. The world where Everyone is Nice and Enlightened. The world of Ancapistan, the Anarcho-capitalist paradise. [Fill in your most disliked utopia.]
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Abstract Idealists are constantly disappointed by the real world. They compare the real world to their Ideal one, and feel it is never enough.
All the dirty systems that are necessary in our real world are unneeded in theirs. In the real world, we need ways to deal with our irreconcilable disagreements, our sociopaths, our vices, our traumas and our terrible mistakes. So we have armies, police forces, and prisons.
But to an Abstract Idealist, these are warts and blemishes that must be eliminated. There is no such need for them in their world. It is known in advance who is Right, so there is no need for armies: all must submit to the Right. It is known in advance who is Good and who is Evil: so we must simply purge ourselves of Evil, and rehabilitate the Mistaken.
In the real world, we face so many problems. We are not all as moral, productive or smart as each other; we must triage between the sick, the elderly, workers and children; we are not infinitely altruistic; we have little self-discipline and self-awareness; and so on and so forth.
These problems are far from being solved. The solutions we have collectively come up so far are all imperfect. Markets, states, psychology, social norms, culture, philosophies and religions.
These solutions may look good to us, because we imagine what our world would look like without them. But to an Abstract Idealist, they look utterly terrible. In their world, there never is anything so impure.
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Often, it gets to the point where the parts that derive meaning because we live in the real world are to be erased on the altar of their Ideals.
No one needs to have power. There is no one to defend against. Everyone is inoffensive and shares the same values, so there are never any fights.
No one needs to have children or to work. All our communities and all of our civilisation can be provided by AI and/or hyper-efficient communism.
No one needs to be disciplined and to respect any norms. People acting however they want naturally lead to good outcomes.
Vice Signalling
When it doesn’t lead to Extinction Risks from AI or Misanthropy, Abstract Idealism can be endearing. Anyone with an Artist or a Deep Nerd among their friends knows the feeling we get when we see a friend fully dedicated to their craft, completely disconnected from how useful or not it may be.
But the other mechanism at play in Terminal Cynicism, Vice Signalling, is the opposite.
Vice Signalling is bragging to others about one’s willingness to believe, say and do things that they know are bad.
Beyond its moral failure, it may seem self-defeating: why would one ever do that? But it can in fact be useful in many situations.
Most notably, when you’re a teenager, among other equally underdeveloped teenagers. To show that you’re cool, one common strategy is to go against all the things that authorities say are good. You’ll incur risks of accidents, you’ll disturb other people, you’ll violate norms, you’ll damage public property.
That all of these behaviours are bad and costly is the point. You are demonstrating how bad you are willing to be cool. If it was good for you and others, then it would be a worse signal: you’d already have other reasons to do it. It wouldn’t demonstrate how cool and disregarding of authority you are.
Among adults, there is another common cluster of Vice Signalling. It is known by many names: Rage Baiters, Drama Queens, Clout Chasers, Engagement Farmers. The principle is the same, they aim to get more attention by being shocking. And thus the worse the things they say or do, the more they gain.
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However, I have found that the type of Vice Signalling that leads to Terminal Cynicism is a bit different from the ones above.
From a Vice Signalling standpoint, the main engine of Terminal Cynicism is Contrarianism.
Contrarians love to contradict. They consistently go against the status quo, common sense, norms, and consensus.
That way, they can signal their uniqueness, their willingness to entertain thoughts everyone else deems taboo, and their superiority to mundane morals.
Nowadays, Contrarianism has become fashionable.
Everyone is against The System.
Everyone is against our Institutions.
Everyone is against Politicians.
Everyone is against the norms and traditions that have made things better.
Everyone is against everything.
Vice Signalling lets one signal how contrarian they are. The more vicious, the more contrarian, the more special they are.
“Oh, you are on the side of people who find good things good? How quaint! How mundane! What are you? An NPC? A sheeple?”
“So you think that AC is good? That Vaccines are good? What, that Science is good? Nay, that Education is good? Please!”
“Oh, so you hate Racism? Well, I for one hate Whiteness! I even hate Civilisation!”
It’s constant race to the bottom. Who will be the most offensive Contrarian and get away with it?
Abstract Idealism meets Vice Signalling
The worst lies at the intersection of the two.
Because the real world does not matter to an Abstract Idealist, they don’t even feel bad when Vice Signalling. It is purely beneficial; only gains, no cost!
They denigrate and worsen the real world, without care for how much worse they are making their own environment.
It is the entire point of The Revolution. Any damage to the existing order is progress toward the Liberation of everyone.
It is the entire point of Accelerationism. Everything is justified when you’re trying to Change The World as fast as possible.
It is a Vicious Circle. As they commit more visibly bad actions, they gain the image of a bad person, which alienates them from the people who don’t tolerate it. This in turn gets them to only interact with people who tolerate such actions, to have it become a central part of their identity, and ultimately to commit even worse actions.
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If you’ve never met any, it is hard to tell you how damaging their demeanour and behaviour can be.
They take pride in dissing institutions, functioning economies, elites, civilisation, science, and all that is good.
They know they look smart to their peers when they come up with a counterintuitive reason for why something good is actually bad.
They think it is cool to cheat The System and defraud it, because The System is bad.
They think everything is corrupted, and that The System is full of bad intents. As a result, they should also never interact with The System from a place of good faith: nothing good would result from that.
They are agitators, saboteurs, troublemakers. They often spend their energy thinking of ways to make things worse.
Not only in conversations, but often through actions. They’ll use whatever modicum of power they get for nefarious purposes. Ultimately, they’ll subvert the existing institutions for their political goals.
They may even ally themselves with terrible people, just to cause chaos. Demagogues, conspiracy theorists, political islamists. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” And when The System is your enemy, every defector is your friend.
Terminally Cynical Art
I believe Art is a strong sign of how pervasive Terminal Cynicism has become.
There’s so much fiction about breaking the mould. I think it’s been a long time since I have seen a piece of art praising the mould as good, efficient or beautiful.1
Similarly, there’s so much fiction about dystopias. The “Black Mirror”-ification of everything.
So many stories are about framing the protagonist’s unhappiness and suffering as the fault of The System, about framing most people’s perceived happiness as shallow and corrupt, this type of theme.2
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It may sound strange, but I view this type of art as a fantasy.
It posits that The System is independent of people, that people have no agency over their fate, and thus that The System’s inability to make people feel happy is unfair. It considers that people deserve happiness by default.
That’s the fantasy. That we are all innocent, and that The System is doing this to us.
In reality though, The System is us. We are the ones currently failing to build ourselves a better life, despite centuries of technological improvements.
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Reconciling our reality with the fantasy takes vision. One must come up with a world where people are both agents and subjects of The System. In this fantasy, through their action, people would improve The System and thus their lives.
This requires far more creativity and understanding of the world than coming up with “lore”. Any creative artist can come up with a new species of humans with 4 arms, blue skin, supernatural abilities, a different language, or whatever change that doesn’t suggest anything interesting for The System.
This lack of vision leads to the “We live in a Society” syndrome, where artists make ignorant shallow societal commentary, by pointing to a necessary evil like prisons.
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Sometimes, they do this out of convenience. Artists often need to raise the stake of their stories, and having a character fight with The System is a common trope that doesn’t require much imagination.3
More often than not though, artists are genuinely not self-aware. Very few (artists or not) have been in a position to Govern a large group of people. And if one is the type of artist to not deeply research topics for weeks or months, they will never interact with people who do govern, nor study the history of those who have.
As a result, they do not even realise what type of experience is relevant to the conversation. They truly believe that their personal voice is something special to bring. Thus, we keep being fed an endless supply of shallow Art telling us The System Is Evil.
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Art has discovered a formula that works for anti-system stories. The Hero sees a problem, tries to solve it within The System, fails, and decides to fight The System instead.
The Game is to make people feel catharsis and vindicated when they recognise a flaw of The System in the “work of art”.4
This is similar to how Social Media found its formula. There, The Game is to feed people a bunch of slop 90% of the time, so that they feel a dopamine hit when they unearth a “gem” the remaining 10%. In both cases, the experience makes the “consumer” worse off.
Art should inspire, and Social Media should connect. I believe that in both cases, Terminal Cynicism explains why their creators are not doing better, and we are not demanding better from them.
Conclusion
Terminal Cynicism is a serious problem.
I hope this article helps some of my readers immediately recognise Terminal Cynicism for what it is, develop an aversion to it, and notice when people spread it.
I have already written a follow-up, focused on who instigates it. Here though, I wanted to just show how it works.
On this, cheers!
An exception may be The Path of Ascension. It’s a nice book series, available on Amazon Kindle.
Womp womp. Never mind it being wrong, it is so meek.
It is one thing to feel bad and like The System has it for us.
It is another to spread this sentiment to everyone, as if to reassure oneself by having others confirm they feel similarly.
It may erode trust in The System and make people less inclined to improve it, but who cares?
Evil behaviour often comes from laziness and negligence, rather than bad intents.
I tend to perceive it as formulaic slop. While the first few I watched as a teenager were inspiring (“Wow! You can in fact go against The System!”), I am now disgusted by their omnipresence.
I don’t believe in that diagnosis of Vice Signaling.
To me, Vice Signaling is at its core a Declaration of Loyalty. One acknowledge that One Cannot Serve Two Masters, and abjure any loyalty to any non-True Master. It’s still in the end Virtue Signaling, just phrased as a negative (I don't care about good-thing-X (because I primarily care about even-better-thing-Y)).
This is a very old move, and not just in immature adolescents. “Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” : this is not bragging "I don't care about the world", this is signaling "My One True Master is Justice".
It is also about defusing trick questions and loyalty test. Let’s not beat around the bush : if Vice Signalling has entered the mainstream discourse, it’s because of Current US Administration. Where various officials won’t blush saying things in the vicinity of "those immigrants died ? I’m going to dance on their tombs".
This is still Virtue Signaling : "My One True Master is the American People. Don’t dare you try loyalty-test me with other concerns" (because, let’s be honest, right-wing politicians have been trained by their environment as seeing all concerns as a loyalty-test and concern-tricking : "You’re opposed to a wealth tax ? That means you’re in favor of poor African children dying, right ?" There’s one point when this game is sufficiently repeated that the correct move is to answer "Yes and Yes", and it has absolutely nothing to do with the politician True Feelings about poor African children. This btw generalize to "how your social environment deal with subtle tradeoffs and split loyalties ?")