Dogging Democracy

A research project at the London School of Economics has discovered that "people are getting more cynical with the messages we get from government, from businesses, from the media", and that this cynicism is "infecting the very fabric of our society". Fifty-one per cent of fellows of the Royal Society of Arts - evidently a representative sample of our social fabric - were cynical about politics; thirty per cent were cynical about business; and thirty-seven per cent about the media. The LSE cynicism team is worried that this may not be good for democracy, and I am inclined to agree. Any society which has forty-nine per cent trust in its policitians, seventy per cent trust in its kleptocracy and sixty-three per cent trust in the likes of Rupert Murdoch can hardly call itself a healthy democracy.

The LSE cynicism team are worried about "people disengaging from politics, turning away from major media, or boycotting products" or, worst of all, becoming sufficiently cynical about their disengagement to join pressure groups or resort to direct action. The solution, according to the LSE cynicism team, is to create a "cynicism index" which "would measure the emotional responses of cynics according to their age, race, religion, gender and socio-economic backgrounds", thus enabling "all communicators to ... be more credible with the public", without being forced to do anything so rash as changing their ways. In order to minimise cynicism about the cynicism index, the LSE cynicism team have given it a catchy name - the Cyndex, which makes it sound like a brand of female sex doll - and are planning to develop it commercially, in case anyone thought they were acting purely out of concern for our democratic well-being.