Can We Unlearn Cynicism?: A Journey From The Scorpions to Black Lives Matter
I am going to admit up front that I was a “metal head” as a kid. Heavy metal seems to be one of those genres one must “admit to” in regular society, so there you go. While hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi were gateway drugs as a pre-teen, by high school I was a decent guitar player and focused on the fastest, thrashiest stuff I could find. To this day, I can recall every single note of every instrument on Megadeth’s entire album Rust in Peace. So I would never say I was a fan of the Hannover, Germany band The Scorpions, but any metal kid knew who they were. And everyone knew who they were at the end of the 1980s when the global order we all knew came crashing down.
Earnestness to Irony
Most of you know “Wind of Change,” even if you can’t remember it. There’s a lot of whistling. The song made a decent splash in the United States, but it was a freaking goliath around the rest of the world. You’d be hard-pressed to find a European of a certain age — especially a German or Russian — who doesn’t know the song on a “Stairway to Heaven”-level of familiarity. It was also written in the midst of great social upheaval. Meine wrote the song after playing the Moscow Music Peace Festival, the first time Western music acts were allowed to perform in the Soviet Union. He traveled down the Moskva River, watched Soviet soldiers dancing to his band’s music, and felt the rumblings of democracy behind the Iron Curtain. The song was released in early 1991; three months later, the Berlin Wall came down. The dissolution of the Soviet Union would soon follow. The song made Mikhael Gorbachev cry upon hearing it, and it was voted the song of the century in Germany back in 2005. “Wind of Change” was the soundtrack to life-altering events for millions of people on both sides of the Cold War.
The song itself is a pretty standard “power ballad” that was essential for any hair metal band of the era. And what stands out most today is its earnestness. The whistling, the double-track vocals, the soaring chorus. It’s a song meant to serve as an anthem without a whiff of irony, which is exactly what happened. Even today, people belt this song out, eyes closed, arms draped around each other, even if they don’t know English. For a culture drenched in self-referential postmodernism, built on deconstruction and derivation, using media as a tool for mocking, canceling, and exposing, it’s bracing to see people give in so fully to something so self-serious, to know that this is what they could have been humming in their heads as they climbed atop their prison in Potsdam Square, as opposed to some precursor of, say, Pepe the Frog. They were as serious as the stakes they faced.
Which makes it all the more enticing that maybe, just maaaaayyybeeee, “Wind of Change” was written by the CIA.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s recent podcast series Wind of Change exhaustively explores the urban legend that’s been rattling around intelligence communities for years, that this massively popular rock song was written by American spies in an effort to accelerate the dissolution of the Communist Bloc. There are many strange aspects about the song that make this plausible: the CIA’s long history of using popular music to advance U.S. interests, the band’s drug-kingpin-cum-manager who somehow escaped prison to stage a cultural coup for the West, the fact that Meine didn’t even write songs, but magically dreamt up The Scorpions’ biggest hit while in Russia. Since I highly recommend Wind of Change — it’s that perfect mix of esoteric, fun, and bingeable like all great podcasts — I won’t spoil the ending. Instead, I’ll focus on a small exchange toward the end of the show, between Keefe and their Russian fixer (and rock fan), Ksenia.
See, rock and roll really was an act of rebellion in the Soviet Union, and a state propaganda tool. It was illegal to listen to The Scorpions and other Western rock acts. Musicians played in underground house parties and, eventually, in sanctioned rock clubs that were constantly monitored by authorities looking to control this new music. To be a fan meant to subvert true authority (not just mom and dad), and an event like the Moscow Music Peace Festival was a blissful triumph, the collective memory of it mashing together with the collapse of their authoritarian regime. So when Keefe floated the idea that the iconic “Wind of Change” was written by the CIA, Ksenia’s reaction was not only one of disbelief, but real sadness and disillusionment. You could tell how disappointed she was to hear this American tell her that a pure, victorious artifact of her youth might be yet another trick by faceless apparatchiks. As someone who’s been bombarded with government gaslighting throughout her life, this felt below the belt.
As Keefe dutifully reflected on this, he contrasted the optimism of Russians in the early 1990s against our current American moment. “‘All this time, Russians thought we’d become more like you,’ [Ksenia] said. ‘But instead, you became more like us.’”
Irony to Cynicism
The American Year 2020 seems to have a lot in common with the Soviet Year 1990. We have a sclerotic federal apparatus that cannot mobilize a response to any great threat, from COVID-19 to climate change to police brutality, and whose only talent appears to be self-maintenance through threat of violence. We are in love with conspiracy theories, from Bill Gates deciding to bypass the smart phone in your hand to implant RFID chips directly into your brain, to “crisis actors” who secretly travel to school shootings to inflate the number of wounded victims. We have rock-bottom trust in our institutions, and anemic participation to change them. We have a leader who’s admiration of authoritarians like Putin and Kim borders on the homoerotic, and whose stated strategy since Day 1 has been to “flood the zone with s**t,” a nihilistic tactic to designed to render shared truth irrelevant by saturating and overwhelming media channels with deliberate misinformation and manufactured outrage. What you’re left with is an American population that resembles the Russian one before it all came down: exhausted, aggressive, disengaged, constantly afraid, conspiratorial, partisan. This is not an argument that America is going to disintegrate like the Soviet Union; it’s an observation that they’re lubricated with the same fuel: cynicism.
I think it’s quite clear how people “learn” cynicism. More than anything, it emerges as a self-defense mechanism against further disappointment, but it often originates from uncomfortable feelings about oneself. And the reward system it establishes — Hey, I’m not disappointed because the world sucks amirite? — very easily calcifies from an instinct to a worldview. It is far easier and less painful to be cynical than to, say, organize against systemic government oppression. Furthermore, it’s often glorified as the only sane choice in popular culture, from the hard-boiled cop who’s seen too much to the politician who trades a moral compass for career advancement. Cynicism is not only easy and understandable, funny and cool, but an at-the-ready slingshot for the disempowered. Hard combination to beat! But as In Media Res publishes through the lens of education, training, media, and technology, I hope we don’t have to work too hard to make the point that cynicism in real life sucks. It undermines any useful project. Have you ever achieved a big team goal, looked back and thought, “Wow, the cynic really came through at the end there!”? It does not build things, nor does it help change cultures. It’s a very chic security blanket, the older brother of wisecracking irony, and a protective layer against having to be human.
The more important question to ask is: can we unlearn cynicism?
I think the answer is yes, and my Exhibit A is what’s going on outside your window in June 2020. The murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor (and now, Rayshard Brooks) have sparked global protests against police brutality and systemic racism. The reaction to those murders have taken form in howls of fury, worldwide organization, panicked threats to restore law and order, unchecked looting, super uncomfortable discussions at work, and good faith efforts to make systemic changes in fundamental parts of civic life. What none of these responses have been, is cynical. Everyone is working unfiltered from the rawest ranges of their emotional spectrum, regardless of where they stand on the issue. But why? Why are these injustices different, why have people foregone the easier and more common act of slipping into jaded cynicism and trench warfare about police brutality, race relations, and political polarization?
I attribute it to timing and one secret ingredient, the ingredient that is the antidote to the cynicism rotting our institutions and norms, and gives us the tools to unlearn this self-defeating habit. First, the timing: these murders extend 2020 annus horribilis. We’ve just emerged from a noxious impeachment process that seemed to accomplish nothing. COVID-19 has killed hundreds of thousands of people and plunged the world into a recession (at least), and the manner in which it did so was particularly wicked. Forced to stay inside, forbidden from interacting with each other, distanced from loved ones and ailing grandparents, while entrepreneurs and employees waited for their businesses to fail and mortgages to pile up (and to watch the stock market float blissfully along). These murders have toppled everything into a catalyst of rage against a very messy knot of anxieties that had been bottled up for years.
Cynicism to Nihilism?
But the timing is only what got us into the streets. I’d argue another, more important factor has changed: our relationship to being online. The fact that, over the past decade-plus, we have radically altered our environment through online consumption is a criminally underreported fact, and my hope is that we are finally rebelling. Through virtually all of human experience, your environment was in some direct relation to your physical presence: you knew where your food came from, you saw your children almost every day, you knew which warlord or king was in power. This is not to say you had control of your life — you could be killed on the whim of some prince! — but there was a tangibility around the forces that shaped it. The emergence of mass media over the last few centuries greatly expanded our view into the world; we could read about and look at places we’ll never visit, and even the early days of the internet gave us a sort of superpower to search anything and transact with minimal risk.¹ But something changed around the end of the ’00s…
The internet became a two-way gate: not only could you peer out into the world, the world could peer back…and touch you. When we joined MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, they were billed as platforms for expression and connection. What they did in reality was expose us to an environment that overwhelms our biology. Our brains are not designed, from an evolutionary standpoint, to build trust from the hyper-efficient connections we make online.² They’re not wired to handle thousands of online trolls who could actually show up at our door because you pointed out sexist tropes in video games. They can’t reconcile the direct causation of expressing an opinion — virtuous or grotesque — and showing up at work the next day to get fired because the post went viral while you slept. We cannot enter into those spaces in good faith the same as we cannot lightly saunter into a pitch black room filled with billy clubbed assailants. The only natural responses are defensiveness and mob participation; the best learned responses are canceling, doxxing, pwning, misdirection, and dehumanizing. Very simply, we are resorting to the most basic self-defense cognitive techniques to stay online, in order to gain the benefits it affords us. Is that necessary?
I believe this is why those outraged by the recent spate of police brutality did not simply start another GoFundMe or make another viral meme or tweet their senator, but instead resorted to protest tactics we would have seen a century ago, and that those tactics have been startlingly sustained and effective. Maybe we are beginning to understand that we must be in tangible connection to our environment to feel empowered to change it. Maybe we’re finally starting to intuit that being able to endlessly gorge on palace intrigue in Washington, or getting into flame wars on some subreddit, is not the same as meaningful participation on an important issue. Cynicism seems to take root as a coping mechanism around the things that we care about, but feel helpless to influence. So if we stop caring about certain things, can we unlearn cynicism?
I would argue that the key to unlearning cynicism is to do less, consume less, and to do it more slowly. Care about less things. Have less opinions. Read fewer things more deeply. Say less. Let more things go. Get smaller, not bigger. Be quieter. This is not an argument to become less engaged, but a plea to become more engaged about less things. What modern communication has done is give us a slew of powerful platforms that we’re not sure what to do with, stuff us with “connections” for whom we have to perform but don’t nourish us from any biological standpoint, and then shame us for not using the platforms more. This leaves us in the worst possible position: maximally stimulated, minimally effective. What this past month has shown, I hope, is that we don’t have to be this way. We can back away from the nihilism that is seeping from the deepest recesses of the internet. But you’re going to have to ask yourself three questions. What do I really care about? Who do I want to serve? Where am I spending my time? And if you look into the third question to find the answer is not aligned with the first two, you’ll have a fourth question: Why is that?
We took this tortured path — from a funny anecdote about a hair metal ballad to the life-or-death stakes around the recent protests — to show how our disengagement through media innocently begins as 24/7 irony (“I’m kidding lol!”), matures to institutional cynicism (“What Can You Do?”), and curdles into nihilism (“Nothing Matters, Anyways”). I’d argue that a society is on the brink of cultural nihilism when there is no common agreement on what is true and valuable, and no interest to hammer one out. But we can’t control “society,” we can only control ourselves and, by extension, our communities. When we stop engaging with the outside world from a perspective of detached cynicism — when we focus on what’s important — things happen. In just the past few days, the city of Albuquerque has created a first-in-nation “civilian public safety department” that will have social workers respond to some calls instead of police. The Louisville, Kentucky Metro Council passed Breonna’s Law, outlawing the type of no-knock raid that killed Ms. Taylor in her home. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, in a stunning about-face, now “encourages” a team to sign quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was blackballed from the league after his 2016 on-field protests over police brutality. Regardless of your opinion of the merits, this is a tiny sample of real, substantive changes that have happened in the span of three weeks; social media amplified the cause, of course, but it was live, in-person, dangerous³, un-cynical action that instigated and sustains it.
We cannot take to the streets for every systemic ill that we face. What we can do is opt-out of systemic communication dynamics that convince us that change is not possible. We can unlearn the cynicism that undermines us. If these tragedies can convince us of that, their gifts to our current moment may be bigger than we even realize.
[1] Obviously, we’ve been wringing our hands about the effects of mass media on the human psyche since the printing press. But this ain’t a book…
[2] We’ve written about this before, but trust is really a function of oxytocin, from the brain’s perspective, a chemical that is released when we form connections. While social media releases other chemicals (e.g., dopamine), this activity doesn’t release much oxytocin. We therefore have a lot of trustless relationships that consume our time, but don’t satiate us.
[3] Dangerous not just because of police action. There’s still a pandemic going on!
Justin Wolske is the Founder of CASEWORX, and the Co-Founder of GRID110. He has left Facebook (yay!), and is partnering with Saturn Leadership to offer the first course of Leadership 101 (focused on managing difficult conversations at work and home better) for free with no strings attached. Black Lives Matter.
