Monday, July 20, 2015

Thoughts on Cynicism

The following definition is a fairly clear view of “cynicism”:
”Cynicism is an attitude or state of mind characterized by a general distrust of others' motives.[1] A cynic may have a general lack of faith or hope in the human species or people motivated by ambition, desire, greed, gratification, materialism, goals, and opinions that a cynic perceives as vain, unobtainable, or ultimately meaningless and therefore deserving of ridicule or admonishment”
Wikipedia
There are other definitions, too, none of which vary much from the above. Note that the word, “irrational”, does not occur in this or any of the definitions of cynicism.

It is not sufficient to declare that cynicism exists in a person; it is not reasonable to say that cynicism is irrational; it is meaningless to attempt to refute cynicism without contrary evidence in hand. What is reasonable is to examine the reasons for being less than delighted with the situation about which the person is cynical.

When is cynicism warranted? When the cultural path is toward chaos and moral destruction? Could there have been times in Greece or Rome when cynicism would have been the single rational attitude? In China? Russia? Cuba? Cambodia? Venezuela? Of course.

In fact, it is the Left as a category which is the most cynical, if one actually uses the definition above. The Leftist premise is that there could be a utopia on earth, but that it must be forced onto the masses. The masses are classes of intellectual failures and moral inferiors. The Leftist sees only vast racism in every white non-Democrat; one out of five women raped, and a culture of rape everywhere; white males as automatic patriarchy privilege enemies; discrimination against all their Leftist New Rights; vast Right Wing Conspiracies; the destruction of Gaia; bitter clingers to religion and guns; counter-revolutionaries under the bed (check government activity in China in the past weeks); a hideous American South filled with stupid cretin racists; attempts to squelch the dismemberment of (primarily minority) preborns humans; Right Wing Conspiracy for seduction of a few blacks who they have failed to radicalize, and who have escaped their control; racist attempts to hold the president to his constitutional oath; racist attempts to prevent non-citizens from voting and citizens from voting in multiplicity. Racist causes for ghettos and ghetto violence and crime. There is hardly any end to the list, because fear is their currency, and they generate it as necessary for the particular audience.

The Left deals in cynical fears by creating untruths regarding the normal citizens who exist outside their Messiah/Victimhood classes.
Biden: “Republicans want you back in chains”.

” In American political discourse, it is perfectly acceptable for anyone on the Left to accuse Republicans of seeking to place African Americans in shackles. In 2000, the NAACP actually ran an ad against George W. Bush which depicted a pick-up truck pulling chains through the dirt. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, both given legitimacy as Democratic presidential contenders, repeatedly accuse Republicans – the party of Abraham Lincoln – of seeking a return to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes. Both men also, by the way, have their own history of anti-Semitic slurs. ”

” 'Much of what sets the United States apart from other countries today is actually Southern exceptionalism,” Politico contributor Michael Lind wrote this month in an essay called “How the South Skews America.' 'I don’t mean this in a good way.'

This argument recapitulates an old, tired motif in American journalism that the South is the source of our nation’s social ills. It has been blamed for our obesity problem (“Why Are Southerners So Fat? ” Time asked in 2009), persistent poverty (“The South Is Essentially A Solid, Grim Block Of Poverty,” the Huffington Post asserted in 2014) and general stupidity (“What’s Wrong with the South?” the Atlantic scoffed in 2009). This time, in the wake of the church shooting, the states of the old Confederacy have become a national scapegoat for the racism that underpinned the massacre. If only they would secede again, Lind and others suggest, the nation would largely be free from endemic prejudice, zealotry and racist violence.”


In the news today, Obama is trying to use Social Security to restrict gun rights. They just never stop. Never.
I have always been somewhat chary of people who run after power, be it in business, politics, journalism or NGOs. If this translates into cynicism, so be it. If reality is congruent with skepticism, then skepticism is rational. The question becomes, "which cynical view represents reality: the news of the day, the direction of the world and western culture, the statements and actions of the power players? Or Leftist rhetorical fear mongering? Which cynical view is closest to being empirically observable and supported? Both cynical views cannot simultaneously be true; one is observable and the other is purely ungrounded rhetoric.

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