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Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb, and it is Saturday, so we have a vault episode for you.

This is going to be Cynicism Part 1, which originally published 415, 2025. This is going to be cynicism part one, which originally

published 415, 2025. It's going to be part 1 of 4. What's it going to consist of? Well,

we're going to get into psychological cynicism, philosophical cynicism. There's a lot to discuss here.

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

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

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

...