We think of cynicism as being a poor reflection on the moral character of one who takes a narrowly transactional view of the world. “A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” A view in which principles and human bonds are overlooked as sentimental and naive.
It has occurred to me that I’ve only recently come to understand what cynicism actually means. I had previously thought about it as an extension or blurring of concepts like world-weariness and scepticism. Like Lord Darlington, I thought about it as an individual characteristic, which is how we as westerners are conditioned to think about most things.
As a student, I’d often come across the term “cynicism” in relation to Soviet society in its final decades, and it is again in gloomy dwelling on that unhappy country and its fate that I have been reconsidering its meaning. At the time, I had imagined it possibly being an imperfect translation of some deeper existential ennui, of the kind that various Russian ladies had convinced me that we, as foreigners, were incapable of understanding. Or possibly, it was another case of the Russians adopting a foreign loan word for an esoteric concept they had never seen fit to name themselves, and which foreigners had then re-translated back into their own languages at face value.
In any case, I thought of the cynicism that pervaded the late-stage USSR, and which bedevilled attempts to build a democratic Russia, as being the result of a people accustomed to nothing but disappointment. The moral collapse of a society that had been geared toward the creation of a utopia, based on impossible ideas and a fundamental misreading of human nature. Everybody was out for themselves, and everybody was lying to you. All of this was basically true, but there was something more profound beneath it all — a sense of the hollowing out of integrity, first at an institutional level, but which then seeped into people’s souls. It was difficult for most westerners to understand this, and those who could we have typically written off as being jaded to the point of defectiveness.
On the evening of Friday 1 November, Malala Yousafzai appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight programme. This was four days after the stabbing incident in Uxbridge in which a man from Afghanistan killed one local man, and wounded two others including a child; it was also, it turns out, a day before the machete rampage aboard an LNER train traveling between Doncaster and London. It was a week after a Sudanese tribesman was found guilty of the murder of a female member of staff at the hotel at which he was accommodated by the British Government as an asylum seeker.
It was two days after a Somali asylum seeker was sentenced to life in prison for the muder of a man in a bank queue in Derby, and an Egyptian asylum seeker was found guilty of a rape near Charing Cross station. It was the day before an Ethiopian would be sentenced for the same crime with added strangulation at Cardiff train station. It was the same day as a migrant from Egypt pleaded guilty to a rape in a York nightclub, and five Romanians were jailed for the wretched sexual exploitation of ten women in Dundee. And it was just shy of a month after a terrorist attack on a Synagogue in Manchester carried out by a man from Libya, who had claimed asylum as a youth.
Malala Yousafzai told us that the language being used in public discourse in Britain was making refugees feel vulnerable and stressed, and urged people to put themselves in the position of a person who had no choice but to flee their homelands. Such people, of course, really wanted to stay at home. Who wouldn’t?
Yousafzai herself has been a living icon since she narrowly survived a murder attempt by the Pakistani Taliban in 2012, which was in retribution for a supposedly anonymous blog on the BBC’s Urdu language website, which the Taliban were easily able to link to her family.
Subsequently, she has been an advocate and campaigner “alongside” various UN Organisations, and has been a UN “messenger for peace”, touring the ecosystem of global NGOs and grant making foundations, where she reads speeches; her name and image appearing alongside statements, each reflecting the carefully drafted and leaden view common across all of those organisations. In return, she has been endowed with every conceivable bauble, including an Oxford degree, an Oscar nomination and an academy award. A large grant-making foundation has been named for her, in which she serves as “CEO”, which distributes grants of many tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates and Google foundations.
Anyone can see that the knifemen and rapists in the news day after day are not in Britain solely because they had no choice but to flee
There might have been a time when a spectacle like this caused public anger. A youngster built up by a vast coalition of institutions who see themselves as our betters, wheeled out to deliver a sermon reflecting an official but absurdly warped view of reality. Certainly, there are people in Britain who have fled real danger and who have no bad intentions. But anyone can see that the knifemen and rapists in the news day after day are not in Britain solely because they had no choice but to flee. Yet Malala will read what she is expected to read, and Matt Chorley will nod along piously as he was expected to. Watching it, the feeling was not anger, but numbness and resignation. Neither Malala nor Matt Chorley are bad people; nor are the producers who booked her, nor the administrators who staff the NGOs who write the scripts or prepare the terms of reference for the grants that the foundations pass back and forth between one another. They are all simply playing their parts in the farce — as are we, the audience.
As outsiders looking in at dystopian or totalitarian societies, we tended to imagine that there was a simple trade-off between the bravery of the individual, and the ability of the regime to inflict harm. But this misses the intermediary stages by which a system can make dissenters seem annoying, or petty, or cringeworthy, or even slightly lunatic, before they go as far as actual suppression. The degree of absurdity and fatuousness of such systems acts as a kind of protection mechanism; like the slimy mucus from a hagfish, anyone who actually tries to get to grips with it will end up reeling and covered in it themselves. This is why dissident satire from the Eastern Bloc seemed so bizarre and oblique to Western observers — it was an attempt to reflect the same logic back at the regime, so that any suppression would itself appear ridiculous.
Twentieth Century regimes did this with things like state-orchestrated “demonstrations” that were supposedly spontaneous; initiation oaths into youth organisations which bound people to obligations that were mandatory for everybody anyway, and the use of absurd slogans. The people of Budapest during the 1950s were subjected to banners declaring “Every Artificially Inseminated Pig is One in the Eye For the Imperialist Warmongers”. These were insidious and deliberately humiliating, but impossible to oppose openly without seeming equally fatuous oneself, or at least as unnecessarily obstinate or curmudgeonly. (Readers will recall the all but mandatory frivolities of the early lockdown era.)
In our current era, we grow accustomed to “consultations”, in which the state goes through the motions of engaging with bodies that were created or directed with the purpose of advising it to do things it already wanted to do. We see “inquiries” established, which give the appearance of a legal process, complete with the right to summon and question witnesses, yet which in fact simply launder a pre-existing consensus or narrative into an official finding. Most gruesomely, we see the habitual ventriloquisation of innocence and victimhood; the use of individuals to front campaigns or statements who cannot be argued back with or disagreed with — at least not without looking a bit of a cad, or a “troll” — by virtue of their youth, or something that has happened to them.
Perhaps the most nauseating example of this in current public life is the Prime Minister’s selection of Kim Leadbetter to sponsor what looks very much like Government legislation on the legalisation of assisted suicide, under the guise of a Private Member’s Bill. It seems very possible that Leadbetter was selected for this controversial role because of her political naivety, and because her sister was a prominent murder victim, and as such she could draw on natural reserves of personal sympathy (now exhausted). As such, she has been induced to assume unquantifiable levels of personal moral responsibility, as she took upon her own shoulders the burden of being seen as the person who drove the Bill through the committee stage, with legislators never being made aware of specific hazards by individual specialists.
But we see the same logic played out far more regularly in the aftermath of atrocities or terrorist attacks, as survivors and bereaved relatives are wheeled out to urge us not to look back in anger, or to front absurd campaigns such as the one to blunt the tips of kitchen knives. As with state-mandated demonstrations in communist Europe, it doesn’t matter how transparent the illusion of spontaneity is; it is the fact that it is controlled that counts. The alternative would be uncontrolled spontaneity, and our governing classes’ nerves are no longer strong enough for that.
So, we have it that Malala Yousafzai was picked out as a target by the Taliban because they perceived the power of the message that she was articulating, and which had already made its way from the anonymity of her remote hometown in the Swat Valley to the BBC. But the attempt on her life only drew the attention of global institutions to her simple but authentic wisdom, and she was rightly elevated to the status of moral lodestar. From that position, she could advocate for things that, happily, aligned with the priorities not only of the administrators of grant-making foundations, legacy endowments and the leadership of UN agencies, but also with those of all right-thinking folk. And when necessary, she was there to reach down and suggest to her compatriots in her adopted homeland that they could maybe cool it with the anti-refugee rhetoric.
What sort of a mind could even conceive of anything so amoral, so transactional, so utterly ruthless as that?
How could anybody suggest that the innocent child victim of such an appalling act of primitive savagery was adopted by multilateral organisations to articulate their own corporate viewpoints, from a position that was beyond legitimate disagreement? What sort of a mind could even conceive of anything so amoral, so transactional, so utterly ruthless as that? It’s clearly absurd, delusional, and downright cynical. Certainly, any adult man who ventured that idea in a published piece of writing must be very petty indeed — annoying, childish and most probably hung up on his own dismal shortcomings. Such a person should surely shut up, give his head a wobble, and have a word with himself. If he didn’t, dozens of accounts on X.com would break themselves away from their usual focus on premier league football to suggest that he did.
Soviet man became used to wobbling his head and having a word with himself. He limited himself to knowing interjections and eye rolls among only the most trusted colleagues and family — or else to dry, oblique humour that was impossible to pin down. An individual may approach particular subjects in a cynical manner, but true cynicism as a way of being is something that a society immerses itself in collectively. Once it does so, it becomes impossible to conceive of any other way of thinking.
