Member-only story
Cynicism Is the Default Epistemology of People with Too Much Information and Too Little Power
Imagine standing in the center of a massive, ever-expanding library. Shelves stretch out into the horizon. But half the books are contradictory. Some are filled with blank pages, some are lie, some are half-truths. A few are correct, but you won’t know which ones until it’s too late. There’s no catalog. The lights flicker.
Now imagine you live there.
That’s what it’s like to be alive in the 21st century with a smartphone and a functioning attention span.
When you have too much information and too little power, cynicism becomes epistemologically efficient. You can’t investigate everything. You can’t trust anyone. You don’t have the institutional access to change the things you see are broken, and you don’t have the time to fact-check the machinery that’s delivering the news of that brokenness. So you develop shortcuts. You assume bad faith. You predict failure. You expect corruption, incompetence, grift. You learn to laugh at everything because laughter is cheaper than grief.
Cynicism is not apathy. It’s armor. It’s the body language of a species caught in a losing battle with signal overload. People used to pray. Now they quote tweet congressional hearings with nihilist memes. They don’t believe in revolutions…
