The Cynical Genius Illusion

The early Cynics were Greek philosophers who, riffing on some ideas from Socrates, claimed that one can only achieve freedom from perpetual suffering by seeing through the fog of false-beliefs and culturally enforced nonsense, defying the demands of community and emotion, and thus achieving clarity of thought and behavior by (in essence) erring toward purity, asceticism, and shamelessness.

All of which, when put into practice, led to some very unusual (and often uncomfortable-for-everyone-else) conduct on the part of those who were attempting to live Cynicism-aligned lives (including but not limited to giving away all their wealth and possessions, and living naked on the streets of Athens).

The same is generally true, though to a far lesser degree, of modern (lowercase-C) cynics, who rather than attempting to pursue eudaemonia (a supposed highest-order flavor of happiness or fulfillment) through practical opposition to social norms and a focus on living “naturally,” in the sense of denying oneself the fruits (and shackles) of civilization, instead mostly demonstrate their beliefs by distrusting other people and the systems of which they are a part.

The general theme of contemporary cynicism, then, is that people can’t be trusted, that everyone’s out to get everyone else for their own, selfish purposes, and that this implies we should all do the same—because anyone who does otherwise is a bit of a sucker.

There’s some crossover between modern cynicism and nihilism, as both loose philosophies (or stances) are predicated on the assumption that people are generally selfish and corrupt (and corrupting), and we should consequently have as little faith in human beings and their systems as possible, lest we succumb to that corruption.

The primary difference is that cynicism generally assumes we shouldn’t trust anyone in order to avoid becoming the same, while nihilism says we shouldn’t trust anyone because it’s all sort of meaningless, anyway.

Interestingly, there’s some evidence that folks who present as cynics—those who claim to believe (and behave as if they believe) people are by nature untrustworthy, and because of this we should all act in our own best interest at all times—can come across as smarter than folks who have more favorable appraisals of their fellow human beings.

People who cleave to cynical perceptions of the world, in other words, tend to seem cognitively superior to, and more competent than those who are comparably community oriented and socially adaptable.

There’s reason to believe the cynical focus on self-interest—of putting oneself before one’s community or a sense of moral duty—might play a role in this perception, but other research suggests that generalized trust (presupposing that others will be trustworthy, rather than the opposite) might be the primary reason cynics can intuitively seem smarter and more capable than non-cynics, as generalized trust is sometimes correlated with morality and sociability, but can have a negative relationship with perceived competence.

This may be the result of a false-correlation between mistrust and life-experience: the idea being that someone who is less likely to trust others has seen more, been through more, and thus has more reason to be mistrustful.

But it may also be tied to cautionary heuristics associated with safety and security: those who are more wary of risks and more prone to seeing risks where others don’t may seem to have evolutionary advantages that other people (who fail to see such risks) lack.

Also interesting is that folks who rank high for cynicism also tend to be, on average, less successful (possibly because they don’t work well with others), less educated and intelligent, and while they may be on average more Machiavellian (manipulative and subtly abusive) than non-cynics, that doesn’t imply they’re any more capable or intelligent—just sneakier and more prone to taking advantage of others, when they can get away with it.

The “cynical genius illusion,” then, refers to the misinterpretation of signals we receive from cynics, who present as being more intelligent and capable than others, but who in reality are often less capable, less thoughtful, and less cognitively strong (not to mention socially pleasant) than their more-trusting peers.

Among other takeaways, this adds weight to other research suggesting that our ability to intuit real-deal traits from a person’s outward presentation of themselves may be less reliable than we tend to assume.