Todays’ young people—everywhere I go—they’re so excited and empowered. We’re listening to their voices. That gives us a reason to hope. Jane Goodall
Last evening one of my sons sent me a text with a link to a podcast. I recognized that the podcast was an interview with Jamil Zaki. As I mentioned to my son, I happened to be reading his latest book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. I am familiar with Zaki, a psychologist and the director of The Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He’s also the author of The War for Kindness.
Zaki’s work interests me for a lot of reasons, but one of them is I recently had a close relationship go wrong. I was stunned by this person’s behavior. As I noticed my feelings and thoughts about the person, I realized I was quite cynical about not only him, but it was affecting my thoughts about people in general.
Cynicism is a theory about people. When we start heading toward thoughts and stories about people that highlight their selfishness, greed, and dishonesty, we are moving toward dangerous and unrealistic ground.
But I have some warm-heartedness toward cynics. Often if you scratch a cynic’s soul, you’ll find a discouraged and disappointed idealist underneath. Something has happened that made him or her ratchet up, to be hyper focused, even beyond our common negativity bias, attention on the worst acts of human beings. Then they mentally rehash and share the worst moments of humanity. They make unwise generalizations.
Unfortunately, cynicism is on the rise and it’s not good for anything that I can think of. When we are cynics, we think no one cares much about us. We think most people dislike helping others. We think people are only honest because they fear getting caught.
It should shock no one that cynics tend to suffer more from depression, anxiety, and loneliness. They are more likely to develop diabetes and heart disease. Their relationships tend not to go so well.
Somewhere along the line, we started thinking that cynics are smarter. Cynics actually perform worse on cognitive tests. Cynics also see all the problems of society, but are not good at imagining solutions. We don’t find many cynics involved in making the world a better place. They vote less, they generally give up quickly on fighting for a better future. Cynicism harms us not only as individuals, but also harms our communities. I saw a meme lately where Gen Zers were calling out the cynicism of boomers (particularly about the future) with, “Ok, Doomer.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not promoting ignoring our problems and I’m okay, as is, Zaki with skepticism (which is basically about looking around for plenty of solid evidence). Naïve trusters only focus on other people’s kindness and ignore that people can also do harm. Both the cynics and the naïve trusters ignore the evidence.
And here’s the evidence. Study after study demonstrates that average people are often quite kind, open-minded, warm, and compassionate.
What Zaki promotes is skeptical hope. Hope? Is hope to be encouraged? Is it a naïve approach to life, does it ignore problems?
According to research, hopeful people tend to be happier, more resilient, and even more effective. Hope has huge benefits for both individuals and societies. Hopeful people pursue goals skillfully and tenaciously, but not rigidly. They pay attention to evidence and can see when a course correction is necessary. Hope is a way off taking of “mud colored glasses.”
For me and for those of us who sometimes see ourselves headed toward cynicism about people and society, here are a few tips from Zaki.
First, fact-check your thinking. Next time you find yourself thinking that people are generally terrible or making judgments about someone, ask yourself, what evidence am I basing this on, and is there better data that I could collect to figure out whether I’m right? (I’ll be writing more about this in a future blog because this is the basis of working with our cognitive distortions in general)
Second, act differently. One way to do this is to take small, calculated leaps of faith in other people, giving them chances to show us who they are. I’m going to try this with the person I’ve seen myself becoming quite cynical about and I do believe it’s wrong-headed. I’ll let you know how it goes, once I screw up my courage.
Third, share differently. We tend to talk a lot about the worst things that people do, and that type of gossip is understandable, but we might try positive gossip sharing instead. Tell someone the kind and wonderful things you see people doing.
Find trustworthy examples of hopeful people and hang out with them either in person or follow their work – read their books, listen to podcasts or read articles (Try Zaki’s books, the hope book is primarily about him working with his own cynicism).
One of the standard protocols we have in our weekly compassion circle is to share stories of compassion we have either been involved in ourselves or compassionate acts we have witnessed. It keeps us alert for the good in ourselves and others. Zaki calls that looking for moral beauty in the world. It elevates us and helps us see that goodness is all around us.
Here's my quick compassion story. Sunday, a squirrelly, hands and arms flying, attention-all-over-the-place, nine-year old boy raised his hand. He wanted to share a story. He said, "There was a new kid at my school this week." (I noticed a little niggling worry in my head at this point...perhaps some cynicism coming out...is this going to be a story about a "bad" kid, a bully for example or will it be about how this nine-year-old beat him up?). So what happened? The nine-year-old said, "I made a new friend." When I asked him what had motivated him to reach out to the new boy, he said, 'I remembered what it felt like when I moved schools, when I was six. I was scared and lonely. So I decided to talk to him."
I'm going to keep this story front and center in my mind when I start to make ungenerous assumptive predications about nine-year-old-squirrelly-boy behavior. And I'm sharing it with you. That's what Zaki calls positive gossip. And it's contagious.
Most of us have brains designed to notice the worst. We click on that outlandish headline of someone doing an awful thing (like Haitian-immigrants-eating-cats sorts of things - that’s one I’m skeptical about; nevertheless I checked it out, sheesh); it’s that negativity bias I have mentioned many times, and we all know about.
When we think hopefully, we entertain the idea that things could turn out well. We look for people who are making a difference, the helpers as Fred Rogers talked about. Jane Goodall is one of those people I listen to when I want to screw my hopeful head on. She keeps telling us that she has hope…in the enormous kindness and creativity of humanity.
How might we journey together to The Good Life by fact checking our cynical thoughts, by taking small hopeful risks, sharing stories of the best of humanity, and hanging out with hopeful folks?
And here is a note from a reader. I was honored by his comments, a big thank you to people who take the time to share comments and especially one so encouraging as this one. It gives me HOPE! And I also want to follow up on one of his comments (several others had made comments which I will follow up on at some point too):
I continue to enjoy your blog posts. The one today was excellent. They’re ALL EXCELLENT in one way or another. I had the opportunity to attend two or three Community Dinners at the Church. I enjoyed them very much. So I have a pretty good idea of the "dilemma" (challenge) you outline in today’s post.
You do a VERY interesting job of linking “kindness” and "leadership". And two or three of your paragraphs do a very nice job of stimulating thought about the “boundaries” and “skills” of leadership. To paraphrase you write: “… it’s not about being overly lenient” …. Or “…. Avoiding difficult decisions”. It’s about “… handling decisions and people with thoughtfulness and respect”. As an MBA student years ago at Michigan State Univ I had many management courses and I very much enjoyed reading various management books and publications … I especially enjoyed Peter Drucker, a “management guru”: “The Practice of Management” (1954) years ago, and of course the Wall Street Journal. Over the years I’ve thought about some of these issues, and, of course working as a middle manager in various roles at General Motors.
You lay out the Church Dinner dilemma extremely well. As parents we understand the necessity of disciplining “rambunctious” children. And as an oldster now I know we all appreciate the ability to communicate, somewhat quietly, with friends in a dinner setting.
I find your idea of a “Clear Note on each table … “ a good and innovative start. That will lay out the issues, at least to those who take time to read it, and allows each person or group to “self select” what they do. It will be interesting to see how that works out.
You amaze me, June, with all the reading and research you do for your posts. I read books, but nothing like you. I walk for a half hour every day and I listen to Audible books, played from my phone blue toothed through my hearing aids. I get through a lot of books that way …. But nothing compared to you. And I have many many many paper books accumulated through the years, though many are more for reference than cover-to-cover reading: books on engineering, business, the stock market and other topics (okay, this was my favorite part;-)
The note is on the community meal tables. We'll see how it goes! Also a comment about who the reader mentions, the great management guru, Peter Drucker. He's really a wonderful, still very relevant (in addition to leadership and management, he wrote some very valuable articles about choosing vocations... still available articles through the Harvard Review). Several of his articles mention the best CEO in the country - it was Francis Hesselbein, the CEO of Girl Scouts. Peter talked about the first thing Francis did when you came to meet with her is offer cookies and tea, chat a bit. She was way ahead of her time on the importance of relationships. She also had a strong desire to raise the level of everyone's game. She found the money to send her whole staff to Harvard for classes in leadership. Ultimately she became the guru herself at Drucker's own school of leadership which tells you a lot about Drucker. Great reading for those who want to hear more about kindness and leadership from the legends.
Thank you, again to this reader ...and to many of you from whom I have gained insights and encouragement and hope. PLEASE DO share YOUR stories of moral beauty with me and let's start a finding moral beauty craze which will pump up all of our hope and help us see the goodness of humanity.
And on a final note, I will be giving a Faith-based, Braver Angels based workshop/facilitation/message this Sunday at Cashmere Community Church during the regular service. The title is Discerning the Diamond of Agreement Among the Rubble of Disagreement. I will let you know how that goes. I do believe this beautiful, messy country can be held together. Yes, we do need to learn some good communication skills (stop the ridiculing, dismissiveness, contempt, and counter our stereotyping) and work with our inner polarizer and cynical attitudes AND pump up our hope. And we're doing it right here in the compassion capital of the world, Cashmere, Washington.
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