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 is that a recurring pattern — feedback systems rewarding the performance of a virtue over its substance — helps connect the following cases despite their very different histories. This is the essay’s comparative thesis, not a claim that one empirically identical mechanism caused every case:

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 — one family of feedback-based training methods that can contribute to sycophantic behaviour when preference signals reward agreement or user approval. RLHF is not a single universal recipe, and sycophancy can have more than one cause.

The essay closes on an engineering claim: cultivating cheng in individuals is insufficient when the surrounding incentives reward its performance. The feedback loop must also make honest disagreement possible and valuable.

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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