Speech delivered by 2026 Sir Kingsley Norris Orator, Andreas Allegos, Year 11
I’m 30 seconds into the video, and I already know what comes next. There’s the customary million dollars on the line. MrBeast grins at me through the screen; something is probably about to explode. I know the thumbnail is optimised, every second measured against the possibility that I might scroll away. And yet, I keep watching. Because beyond that strangely dystopian smile is a man who understands one rule of the internet better than almost anyone: extremity gets attention.
We know what this has done to entertainment. And gradually, the same incentive has crept into our public discourse. You can’t exactly blow up a Lamborghini in an opinion column. So, extremity changes form. If the extremity of video is spectacle, the extremity of ideas is finality.
Which helps explain why so much of what reaches us sounds like this: AI will leave you without a job – or the ability to think. You’ll never own a home. Your attention span is destroyed. Different subjects. Different anxieties. But underneath them all is the same remarkably seductive cynical message of defeat: Don’t even bother. It’s over.
Except it rarely actually is, at least not to the catastrophic extent we were promised. Which means the success of the cynical message reveals something uncomfortable about us: why are we so willing to consume it?
Cynicism has an extraordinary ability to masquerade as realism. When things go badly, believing the worst leaves us feeling uniquely aware, intelligent enough to have seen through the naïveté of the optimist all along. This impulse is hardly new. 2,500 years ago Aesop told the story of a fox who sees grapes hanging just beyond his reach. He jumps. Misses. Jumps again. Misses again. Eventually he walks away, reassuring himself that the grapes were probably sour anyway.
But I wonder what Aesop would make of us now. Because increasingly, the fox doesn’t jump at all. He has already been told the grapes are sour. He reads every day that he cannot reach them. So why bother?
That is what troubles me most about the cynical message, the apathy it fosters.
We’ve all heard the negative narratives surrounding AI and social media, even mentioning them exhausts me. But bombarded by constant negativity, we become overwhelmed into inaction, disengaging from the very issues we’re told to care about. And for young people like myself, growing up with a screen in our pockets offering a permanent window into society’s issues, that paralysis arrives at precisely the wrong moment. The angst of becoming is already, at times, suffocating. The sense that our future is beyond our control only gives us another reason to disengage from it.
Ironically, our modern understanding of “cynicism” is a distortion of what the word once meant. In modern discussion, cynicism has become almost synonymous with defeatism: the assumption that people are selfish, institutions corrupt, and attempts at change are probably futile. The original Cynics would barely recognise it. In ancient Greece, Diogenes, a founding Cynic, rejected wealth, status and social convention, famously living in a barrel to prove the good life needed none of these things. He was deeply sceptical of the world around him, but he used that scepticism to challenge it, to take action. That distinction matters.
Our public discourse has kept the suspicion of the Cynics, but lost their defiance. They questioned society to live differently, we increasingly question it only to conclude that nothing can change.
So where does this leave us? This isn’t an argument for blind optimism. Some grapes really are sour. Some problems genuinely deserve our attention. And perhaps the fact that even a speech against cynicism had to begin cynically, just to get your attention, says something about the world we’re navigating.
So perhaps we need to admit that we don’t know how the narrative ends. Perhaps we need to be a little more like the ancient Cynics. Be sceptical. Question the messages you’re given, but don’t let suspicion turn into resignation. Read and listen but see the overwhelming negativity for what it is, a tactic to gain eyes. Try to engage with public discourse rather than merely consuming it. And if you don’t like what is being created, create something yourself.
The cynical message tells us not to bother. The fox may have been wrong about the grapes. But at least he jumped. And I believe we owe ourselves the same chance.
