As Byron Shire goes to the ballot box this week, it’s a fair bet there’s some cynicism around the council elections.
Who among us is not guilty of feeling a little unbelieving, when we hear the latest promises on housing, or environmentally-friendly development?
For any of us uncomfortable with our negativity, an explosive new book out this week is recommended reading. Hope for Cynics, by a young Stanford professor is a potent antidote to the darkness of cynical despair.
The book is a call to fuse hope with fury.
Not just to make us feel better, but to help us work more effectively against rising inequality, technological imperialism, and sea levels.
The book’s author, Professor Jamil Zaki, is a psychologist with a lot of expertise in the science of hope.
He and his Stanford lab have run studies finding most people value compassion over selfishness, and that helping others helps us.
‘There is good in us, and it does good for us,’ he writes.
Hope for Cynics seamlessly combines storytelling and scientific evidence, and it opens with devastating statistics about dramatic drops in levels of trust.
Stats in declining trust
Fifty years ago in the United States, nearly 50 per cent of people agreed with the notion that ‘most people can be trusted’.
Today that’s fallen to 33 per cent, with evidence of decline around the world.
Exploring the complex reasons for falling trust, Zaki cites the rising influence of big tech, with its conspiracy-theory rabbit holes like QAnon, and its assault on our self-confidence from ubiquitous comparison culture.
He describes what he calls ‘market creep’, arguing that networks formed via social media platforms are often ‘markets dressed up as communities’, which focus far more on quantifying connection rather than building genuine trust.
One of the people featured in the book is a young woman who felt trapped inside the quantified world of Instagram.
Luddites club
She decided to deactivate her account, trade in her iPhone for a turn-of-the-century flip-phone and create a local ‘Luddites club’ who met, read and connected, away from the digital world.
The story underscores the joy that can come from simple face-to-face connections.
Whether at farmers’ markets, community choirs, school bands, landcare plantings, environmental protests, sporting events, dance classes or a host of other hands-on, off-line experiences that are so abundantly available in this region.
Scepticism not cynicism
One of great things about Hope for Cynics is that it does not claim the moral high ground.
Despite being an expert on hope, this Stanford star admits to being a lifelong cynic.
We learn how the loss of a close and inspiring friend, in the midst of the pandemic, helped the author confront the cynic within, using a new-found healthy scepticism.
‘If cynicism was a pill, its warning label would list depression, heart disease and isolation,’ he writes. ‘In other words, it’d be poison. So why do so many of us swallow it?’
One reason is that so much culture has sought to glamorise the smart cynic – essentially an oxymoron. Zaki includes a beautiful quote to help make his point.
‘The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven’t got it,’ wrote the Irish playwright and activist George Bernard Shaw.
Using scepticism to examine evidence, rather than the knee-jerk negativity and naivety of the cynic, is this psychologist’s key message.
Hope and fury
One of the book’s closing chapters is titled ‘The Optimism of Activism’. In it, we hear the words of 1960s civil rights champion Martin Luther King, attacking the widely accepted psychological imperative to be ‘well-adjusted’.
King argued that ‘we must never adjust ourselves’ to injustices, such as racial discrimination, militarism and economic inequality, but rather fight for alternatives.
Zaki echoes King’s call to activism and argues that joining social movement protests of today, whether against domestic violence or climate change, is actually good for us and our communities.
None of this will be news to all the activists in this region. Those who use the fuel of hope to work tirelessly to right past wrongs, and to try and improve the lives of people and the planet.
‘It actually is hope – the sense that things could improve in the future – mixed with fury, that inspires people to fight for progress,’ Zaki writes, ‘even when victory seems well out of reach.’
Yet victories do come. Street protests across Australia just a few short months ago helped deliver hundreds of millions more dollars to tackle domestic violence, announced in Canberra last week.
It’s not enough, but it’s a hopeful sign.
And so is the opportunity to vote for trusted candidates at this weekend’s council election.
♦ Dr Ray Moynihan hopes, and he votes.
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