Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and today we wanted to begin a series of episodes talking about something that has been on my mind a lot lately.

And that is the concept of cynicism.

Now, as we go on, we're going to have to distinguish the common contemporary usage of cynicism from other meanings extending into history.

But as used in common language today, we can think of cynicism from other meanings extending into history. But as used in common language today,

we can think of cynicism as a cognitive disposition, the core element of which is social distrust.

Cynicism is a dim view of human nature. It's a suspicion of other people's motives and a tendency to believe that people are primarily self-interested and untrustworthy.

So there are a variety of kind of inventories or tests that psychological studies will do to evaluate how cynical you are as a person.

They'll often give you like a list

of statements to see how much you agree or disagree with them. A cynical person is going to be more

likely to agree with statements like altruism and compassion are just for show. When it comes down to it,

people are in it for themselves. Everybody lies and cheats when they can get away with it.

C cliches like no good deed goes unpunished. It's a dog-eat-dog world. The idea that people are not

sincere, they'll just tell you what you want to hear. And I think the core idea of it really is that

you can't trust anybody.

We're all on our own.

And before we started today, I had been digging around trying to find good examples of the cynical worldview presented in works of English literature.

And while you can find some pretty good examples, I think particularly for some reason in like 17th and 18th century English literature with writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, there's some really hardcore cynical stuff there.

I actually think the most cynical canon of great literature is in the Bible.

So many books of the Bible, especially like the later books of the Tanakh, like the prophets, have awesomely cynical passages.

Can I offer you a few examples, Rob?

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