The terrible weight of seeing the board

I've decided to start putting some of my blog posts from Philosophy Bear here as well, particularly those with special relevance to this community.A curious fact about the English language In the English language, cynical means both seeing the imperfections of the world, and being ruthless (“he acted cynically” said of someone who accepted a bribe). Innocent encodes the opposite dyad.I have no idea how far beyond English this pattern goes. I would guess it is a deep tendency given that the tree that putatively caused the fall was that of the knowledge of good and evil. A brief search suggests that the pattern probably is common in Indo-European languages and appears to crop up in Chinese.The underlying theory, presumably, is that when you see the nonsense everyone else is up to, how predatory the soul is, you feel free to break norms yourself. Another facet may be the simple fact that when you have more options for effective mischief and getting away with it, you’ll probably get up to more mischief. Finally, for some kinds of awareness, a greater capacity for rationalisation may be present, as well as more charitably a greater capacity for more sophisticated ethical views which might appear like licence to those of greater simplicity.There is little empirical evidence that people of greater awareness, either generally, or of the faults of others, are more likely to behave anti-socially, even when doing so is to their advantage. There is evidence that a general belief that people are bad is negatively correlated with cognitive ability and bad behaviour, but this is not the same thing. We might usefully distinguish between epistemically justified cynicism - being cynical when the evidence calls for it - and general moderate edgelordism that is not epistemically justified.There’s a concept in the psychological literature: Machiavellianism. If one looks at the question inventories, it runs together a bunch of conceptually distinct things including A) Cynicism, in the sen