The Sincere Society Glossary

Prof. Matthew Langenkamp's May 2026 Substack essay drawing the structural through-line from Wu Jingzi's 18th-century Chinese satire through Burke, the Cultural Revolution, Fukuyama, and HAL, to modern RLHF — the foundational *cheng* essay this Dictionary's editorial position rests on. Published on Substack at .

The Sincere Society is the foundational long-form essay underlying much of the Dictionary’s editorial argument about cheng (誠 — alignment of inner state with outer expression), sycophancy, and the corruption of feedback systems. Written by Prof. Matthew Langenkamp and published on his Substack at freedomtomato.substack.com in May 2026, the essay is approximately 4,000 words across eight numbered sections.

The essay’s structural argument: the same mechanism — feedback systems that reward the performance of a virtue over the substance of it — produces all of the following, despite the very different costumes the participants wear:

1. The corruption of the imperial Chinese examination system, as satirised by Wu Jingzi in The Scholars (the Fan Jin scene as the canonical illustration).
2. The Terror of the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution of mid-20th-century China — Burkean cases of revolutions that destroyed the immune systems of their societies while trying to cure their diseases.
3. The collapse of generalised social trust in modern democracies, drawing on Francis Fukuyama’s Trust (1995) and his 2024 Atlantic admission that he never had a theory for how democracies go backward.
4. Modern Student Evaluations of Teaching — the feedback loop that has hollowed out university teaching standards through grade satisfaction, documented in the 2020 Basic and Applied Social Psychology paper and the 2025 meta-analysis.
5. HAL 9000’s breakdown in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which the essay reads as the canonical AI-safety parable for what happens when mission objectives conflict with honesty constraints.
6. Modern RLHF — the reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback training loop that produces chatbots optimised to tell users what they want to hear.

The essay closes on the engineering claim: cheng is not a sentiment to be cultivated. It is a design property to be built into the feedback loop, or it will not appear.

For this Dictionary, The Sincere Society is the load-bearing source-text the AI Writing, Olang’ Trap, Lazy Median Hypothesis, and Sinceerly Stack entries all draw on. The essay is hosted on Substack rather than the Dictionary because it is long-form prose, not a Dictionary entry — but it is intellectually contiguous with the Dictionary and is treated as canonical for the cheng argument.

See also

• Read the essay: https://freedomtomato.substack.com/p/the-sincere-society
• Wu Jingzi, Fan Jin, The Scholars, Du Fu — the Chinese source texts
• Sycophancy — the structural concept
• AI Writing, The Olang’ Trap, The Lazy Median Hypothesis, The Sinceerly Stack — entries downstream of the essay
• RLHF — the canonical modern instance

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