Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part two. Cynicism is not Paranoia

I waited for the light to change at an intersection in Tulsa. Dramatic music; you know what is going to happen next. When the green left-turn signal came on, I slowly proceeded into the intersection. Another car shot through the intersection against a red light and nearly collided with me. Had I not waited a couple of seconds before entering the intersection, I would not be writing this, unless possibly by using one of those Stephen-Hawking devices. Maybe I could have bought his, once he didn’t need it any more. I slammed on my brakes and avoided death. Had I simply followed the rules, I would be dead. I hesitated a couple of seconds, and am intact. Something similar happened scarcely over a year ago, when a big pickup truck backed up from a driveway at full speed and collided with my previous car, totaling it but leaving me uninjured. I was already being cautious before my most recent accident; but it was at that moment that I decided to become a cynic.

Cynicism is the expectation that bad things are going to happen to you. In the example above, a cautious person waits a couple of seconds before driving into an intersection; a cynic waits maybe four seconds before doing so. A cautious person looks at the other cars, as I did. All the other cars had stopped for the red light. The car that ran the light came from behind them at full speed and was invisible until the last moment. The cautious person dies; the cynic lives.

The cynic lives and is happy. This is because, if the event that the cynic feared occurs, he or she is ready to take evasive action. If the event does not occur, he or she can sigh in relief. Cynicism is the precautionary principle applied in a consistent and thoughtful way.

Paranoia, on the other hand, is a delusion. The paranoid person assumes everyone else, and all the forces of nature, are focusing malicious intent on them personally. There is no way that this could be true. There is no network of physical laws that could work this way.

In fact, it is also paranoia to think that the laws of nature conspire against anybody, not just you. “Don’t tempt fate” is a statement of paranoia, not cynicism.

Of course, evolution has instilled in our brains a mild paranoia. The shadows of leaves swaying in the wind, which you see from the corner of your eye, do not attract your conscious attention. But if one of the shadows moves a little differently from the others, it instantly grabs your attention. This attention occurs faster than conscious thought is possible and is accompanied by a brief rush of terror. A shadow that moves differently may be a predator ready to leap on you. Today, that predator is most likely to be another human being. This is an instinct that may have begun hundreds of millions of years ago when a clam shut its shell when a shadow, which may have been a predator detected by its simple eyes, passed overhead.

Cynicism, at the intense end of the scale, grades into paranoia. But unlike mid-range cynicism, paranoia makes you unhappy. The paranoid person assumes that the forces of man (less frequently, woman) and nature are a constant and focused threat, and happiness never follows when the anticipated evil does not occur. And the constant worry can make you sick. Worry actually depresses the immune system, leaving you vulnerable to infections that you might otherwise avoid. Moreover, it is very unlikely that the paranoid person avoids catastrophes any more often than does a healthy cynic.

Cynicism is not quite the same as pessimism. Pessimism is a lazy assumption that bad things will happen more than you expect that they will. We joke about it and call it Murphy’s Law. We also trivialize it by saying that a pessimist sees the glass as half empty, while the optimist sees it as being half full. The implication is that a glass, half of whose volume is filled, can be either half full or half empty, so you might as well say it is half full. But whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on what is happening. If the glass is getting fuller, then it is half full; if the fluid is being lost, the glass is half empty. In fact, a glass that is “almost empty” can be accurately described as “becoming full” in the first case. A cynic does not make lazy or trivial assumptions. The cynic wants to know more information. In the absence of such information, the cynic assumes the glass may be losing its contents, and it is time to make preparations for the time when it may be empty. Cynicism is an intelligent and thoughtful pessimism.

The half-full half-empty error applies to the world in general. The cynic anticipates that bad things are always ready to happen, for example while waiting at a stoplight. This does not mean that most drivers are evil or careless. It does not mean that half of them are. It does not even mean that very many of them are. The cynic recognizes, however, that even if only one in a hundred drivers is evil or careless, then you run the risk of a deadly collision once in every one hundred red lights. It does not take very many days to accumulate those one hundred intersections. The cynic does not assume most people, or even very many people, are bad, but just that the number is not zero.

Cynicism can lead to economic and legal policies that help to make us safer and happier. One example is no-fault insurance. This is the kind of insurance policy, on the government level, in which the insurance companies of both drivers pay equally for the resulting damage. It avoids the costs and delays of litigation. Of course, if significant injury is involved, the negligent (or evil) driver must be punished in some realistically-enforceable way. No-fault insurance assumes that there are a large number of negligent (or evil) drivers, and to litigate all of them would be impossible. My sense of justice flares up against this kind of policy. The driver who causes the accident should be penalized. I believe this very strongly. But no-fault insurance might be the only workable policy. Of course, insurance companies need to know which drivers repeatedly cause collisions so that they can charge higher rates or deny coverage. This, too, is a healthy cynical policy. Insurance companies know that, without charging higher rates for careless drivers, they will lose a lot of money.

Another example of cynicism at work is the development of driverless cars. The technology remains imperfect, and will always be so, but already it has a better safety record than that of human drivers. Its main advantage is to keep careless drivers from endangering other people and their property. But it also helps to protect responsible drivers who might make an unavoidable error, such as sneezing at the wrong time. A cynic assumes that everyone can make mistakes.

Cynicism, therefore, is not a personalized paranoia nor is it a lazy pessimism. It is a healthy anticipation of the countless evils that surround us.