I think cynicism is a natural response to growing up and learning that half the crap your parents taught you and a good part of what you learned in school wasn’t accurate. You know, there is no Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. George Washington didn’t walk on water. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was bullshit.
But, I think you have to take it to the next level. Once you’ve learned enough to earn your cynicism, you have to outgrow it and learn to believe in things again. That’s a maturation process, and some people never get there. They get stuck on the phoniness of everything. They see how the same bad actors keep prevailing time after time, and how our country seems to make the same kind of mistakes with disturbing regularity.
But cynics who check out because “what’s the point?” never accomplish anything. Maybe politics ain’t your bag. It’s too dirty. It’s too filled with lies. The truly good guys don’t have a chance. If that’s how you feel, then the best thing to do is stop paying attention to politics and find some way to do some good in your own little corner of the world. But, you can only make that decision because deep down you know that others will carry out the fight for you. Your side, your values, may not prevail, but some people will continue fighting for them. And, to turn around and mock them for believing, is a luxury for the smug and obnoxious.
As you grow older … and wiser, don’t lose those feathers of idealism. Take it along and get inspiration by spending time with the youth, it comes natural to them and they offer hope of a new generation.
It’s not a choice to make Martin, it’s inside you!
Wise words indeed.
“And, to turn around and mock them for believing, is a luxury for the smug and obnoxious.”
I believe a certain Mr. Reed addressed some of this in “Sweet Jane”…RIP
Obama Is on a Pro-Labor Roll
The president just signed the most important workers’ rights reform of the past 20 years.
By Emily Bazelon
If you’ve been following President Obama’s burst of enthusiasm for executive orders–I know it’s August, but hey, you’re reading this–you may have heard that he’s been flexing his muscle on behalf of labor. Last month, Obama banned federal contractors from discriminating against gay workers. For that one, he won liberal kudos and conservative scolding for refusing to exempt employers that object on religious grounds. Obama got similar attention for his order in January raising the minimum wage for new federal contractors to $10.10 an hour.
So it’s a little odd that the latest executive order in this bunch has gone virtually ignored (following a few dutiful daily news stories) even though it packs the biggest punch. “This is one of the most important positive steps for civil rights in the last 20 years,” Paul Bland, executive director of Public Justice, a public-interest law group, says of the July 31 order. The employer-side law firm Littler Mendelson calls it “the most sweeping order to date” that the Obama administration has aimed at federal contractors. The trade group Associated Builders and Contractors is “strongly opposed” and says the order could create a federal contractor “blacklist.”
What’s this about? Bear with me for a minute, because there’s a reason this one isn’t lighting up TV screens or Twitter. It’s important, but it’s also kind of technical. The order, called Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces, does two things. It requires companies bidding for federal contracts worth more than $500,000 to make previous violations of labor law public, if they have any to report. That’s a shaming device that the administration hopes will push companies to settle back wage claims and nudge them toward better behavior in the future.
The second part of the order is what Bland is so excited about. This provision says that companies with federal contracts worth more than $1 million can no longer force their employees out of court, and into arbitration, to settle accusations of workplace discrimination. “Here’s why this is so important,” Bland said when I asked him to explain. “For the last 20 years, the Supreme Court has been encouraging employers to force their workers into a system of arbitration that has been badly rigged against the workers. And so this order will result in millions of employees having their rights restored to them.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/08/obama_executive_order_on_manda
tory_arbitration_huge_news_for_workers_rights.html?wpsrc=sh_all_tab_tw_top
Forced arbitration is one of those things that really get to me. Some contracts say that even of the arbiter recommends court you still cant go to court. A step in the other direction is fantastic. Kudos Obama.
It’s pure laziness and lack of moral courage to claim “they’re all the same”, or there’s nothing we can do anyway, and it is this apathy which the bastards game the system are relying on to undermine even what little civil rights currently still exist.
It’s also a very seductive belief system. You can build a little shell around yourself inside which you are not obligated to act, because acting might force you to interact with other people, or do things you’re not comfortable with.
The internet rewards cynicism, as cynics love to gather and echo each other and support each other and now they have a fantastic way of doing that. Saying definitively “it won’t make any difference, they’re all the same” is an easy way to sound tough without having to even research the issues – and since a sensible discussion of most issues requires knowledge, it gets you off the hook for having to look anything up.
It’s a shortcut to social status, sounding tough and smart without actually being either, and it works.
Applies to soooooooooooo many issues.
Both these comments are right on. We all know a certain poster (better off ingnored) who makes the same cynical assertion regardless of the topic. Obama has said that progress comes in fits and starts. The forces of inertia are powerful, and sometimes the ground that is gained seems much too small. But hindsight proves that those who fought for those valuable yards are the ones who often turned the tide.
Bitterness is another potential result. Being older and bitter is not pretty.
A recent study in the journal of Neurology found that cynical people were 3 times more likely to develop dementia. This was after adjusting for variables that affect dementia risk. There is nothing cool about dementia. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/277430.php
Interesting. Although depression is strongly linked to dementia, too, and it may be that depressed people are more likely to be cynical (and one may feed the other).
Come let us mock at the great
by W. B. Yeats
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked — and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
This sounds corny, but for me, seeing the world through the eyes of my children has always helped temper my cynicism. They have, up to a certain age, a level of idealism and purity that always gave me a boost. They saw Santa, not some fat guy in a rented red suit.
I remember my sons being idealistic and determined, and that’s where I want to be. Not blind, not ignorant, but hopeful and motivated again.
On a side note, my husband and I got a call from my oldest son, 27 years old. He called to tell us how much he loves us, and he appreciates everything we did for him. He said he had just seen the movie “Boyhood” and it really moved him. So yeah, there are still idealistic young people out there.
This is really good, Martin, as are the comments. I’m spreading news about this post far and wide. Thank you!
Excellent post – you’ve nailed this.
The only thing worse than passive and inactive cynicism is active and manipulative cynicism. The first feeds on clarity about the second.
People who have clarity on events and sensitivity to the moral implication and human consequences of events easily get paralyzed into inaction because the practical actions required to address those consequences and the cynical actions that cause it seem overwhelming and impossible. The narrative of passive cynicism counterbalances the tendency to hyperactive romanticism. The actual hard-slogging day-by-day grinding action to make a difference gets sidelined.
Cynicism about presidents allows the decay of local politics and its capture by cynical interests. It allows surrender to an ongoing bureaucracy that is moving contrary to the public interest. It allows money to take over the information and communications channels of politics.
But cynicism is not out biggest political problem despite its appearance on blogs.
The biggest political problem is the overwhelming distraction of making a living and the search for mental relief from the pressures in that in a society that has created an infrastructure to demand workaholism. If you don’t have the time to process the information because of multiple jobs and multiple kids, it is easy to draw the limits of your universe in to just your family. Then, politics becomes at best the obligation to show up at the polls and do something.
The cynicism that besets the left is that active cynicism of folks who get elected or get hired to some positions of power and who are seduced or coerced into acting contrary to their intentions for entering the political world to begin with. And the cynicism approaching battery that money unleashes on the public every election cycle.
It’s not the cynical clarity that hurts; it’s the passivity.
The process for creating the conditions for any meaningful social change is messy. Purity is something the left (especially my flavor of left) cannot afford. It struck me a long time ago that it was wise to hang on to some idealism along with a very long view of history. It didn’t hurt to have some mentors back in my student activist days (many themselves disappointed with the direction the New Left of their day had taken) to reel me in when my own initial disappointments set in. It also didn’t hurt to have mentors who understood what “false equivalence” was, and who were bound and determined to correct me every time I fell into that particular fallacy. It’s one thing to agitate for change, and quite another to actually be in a position to make some portion of that change happen. Not achieving it all at once is not a sign of selling out or failure. It merely means that the struggle continues.
Yes, what they said; thanks for this post.
Cynic (cynical, cynicism) is an odd word.
For example, the infamous Enron energy traders that boasted of ripping off Granny Millie were cynics:
Yet, if one generalizes from those Enron traders that all traders are cynics, that makes one a cynic:
That cynic isn’t short on belief but believes too much. And was rewarded with confirmation bias with the US financial meltdown.
Skepticism is the earned, possibly natural, response to learning that “all the crap one has been fed” is a lie. It doesn’t reject the old belief for a new one (people, or some group of people, are bad) which retains the belief schema in one’s mind that is no less difficult for others (cynics) to exploit. Nor does skepticism make one a cynic.
The believer (child) to cynic (young adult) to believer (adult) model of maturation may be common (explains the growth of US mega-churches and non-fact (or weak or distorted fact) based political affiliations and interpretations of major events, ie teabaggers, birthers, truthers, etc.) but it’s not psychologically healthy maturation. It’s also rooted in one’s original socialization by one’s parents teaching their children that Santa Claus exists (a good priming for religion) and later teachers.
Dick Cheney is a cynic, but so too are all those that believed Saddam and Muslims are evil and need to be destroyed.
That’s not to say that one can function without some beliefs because life and the world we live in has more unknowns than knowns. However, if those metastasize into impervious to change or new information than that’s harmful. (Not many Catholics were unwilling to accept that it was no longer a sin to eat meat on Friday, and limbo no longer exists.)
Especially when you’re talking about politics, there’s one critical fact that we should never lose sight of. We really do have elections every two years. And every election, however corrupt, really does offer at least a sliver of hope for something better.
And the thing is, the mature idealist and the cynic see the exact same things, they just see them in a different perspective. Cynics think people who haven’t given up on the system are just naive, but we aren’t blind to all the lies and stupidity and downright evil that we’re up against. We’re just looking forward to the next election and trying to figure out how to overcome all the obstacles that stand in our way.
Thanks for nudge, Martin. Your timing is quite coincidental. I have been feeling pretty low about politicking around here recently. Things in our state have been pretty depressing for a while for Democrats, and I have had a real hard time keeping any sense of optimism. I have been sloughing off on my activism and my enthusiasm has been kind of lagging. I had a conversation recently with a fellow Dem and cynicism was seeping out of every pore in my body. But he pretty much told me the same thing you said here. It clicked at the time, but it didn’t stick with me. And as I sit here and read what you say it makes me realize that it is the fight that matters. I am not just a single person fighting a solitary fight. I am part of a larger group that is made powerful by the sum of the efforts of all its disparate parts. That is something which is often very easy to forget.
Like my friend told me, “If we don’t fight them, then no one will. If we truly care about all this, we really don’t have a choice, do we?”
Lily said it best:
Hoping to avoid the disillusionment, I taught my kids that Santa Clause is a representation of the spirit of generosity. He is real, because people truly are generous at Christmas, but like all spirits, he needs human helpers to do his work. It’s true, and it helps them realize that they can be Santa, by giving to others, and that the real joy is found in the giving. It worked beautifully.
I also taught them that gods are archetypes, real in the sense that you can find the qualities they represent in nature and people. And that sometimes historical figures become more mythology than reality because of what they meant to their time. You don’t have to lie to kids to maintain a sense of wonder.
We talk about politics a lot, and my children have a sophistication about the topic that is rare for their ages, but we always discuss how many people are fighting to do the right thing, and expressing our faith in our ability to overcome. The truth can bring cynicism. But it can also bring hope.
I love this website because Martin’s fundamental optimism mirrors my own. There’s much in the world that doesn’t work and yet I believe that over time things get better and better in small, incremental steps. It’s not a linear path. There are things about earlier times that I prefer to today. But on balance, I wouldn’t want to go back in time to any earlier era because whatever was better is far outweighed by what was not.
Moving forward, progress will be slow and fitful. There may even be times of great darkness when it seems like all goodness is lost. But goodness cannot be lost. It is the world’s essential nature.
When I was a young man, I had a deeply spiritual experience. My first. It’s hard to describe because there aren’t really words for such things. I felt the presence of an immense intelligence. I felt love and joy and laughter which was not my own. And I saw in that moment that in this world there’s good and bad. But when one pulls back the outer veneer of this world, there’s a place beyond where everything is far beyond wonderful.
When I try to share about such things, people often think me a fool. All I can say is one has to see it for himself. That experience and those that came later (including LSD experiences in college) changed my life. It led me to become a spiritual seeker and ultimately to find practices that allow me to tune into God consciousness without drugs.
There’s a spiritual aspect to my work as an attorney because I have to give up any thought of being in control. I can only do my best and let the chips fall where they may. Same is true with politics. We can do our best and keep doing our best no matter what. Frankel wrote about how hope and God can appear even in the most unlikely of places. Light is channeled through the human heart. Acts of generosity create an opening that allows yet more light to pour through.
It’s our wounds that cause us to lose hope and get cut off from the light. Darkness is nothing more than an absence of light. And yet light is everywhere and one need do nothing more than open to it, turn toward it and ask it to pour forth.
Here’s a wonderful Rumi poem on cynicism and idealism:
“Love Dogs”
One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing
you express is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
very beautiful, thank you