"Cynicism"

I never thought much about the word cynicism until I met Pam. She is a vivacious, highly social woman who always had plenty of friends and even with adversity led a pretty happy life. When she became a busy practicing lawyer she'd take time to sit with AIDS patients. The old saw is that cynics are frustrated idealists. She was always saying "I'm too cynical."

Cynicism takes its name from an ancient school of philosophy best remembered by Diogenes search for an honest man. I don't think the world lacks for honest people. Even many hypocrites are honest. Or as honest as they can be. Honesty is easily compromised when you don't have insight into yourself and others. 

What passes for cynicism is a couple of things. There are the schemers and manipulators who use others for their own gain. It might just be the guy who lies to get a woman in bed. Or the corporate creep who lets many die in unsafe mines to boost his companies 'shareholder value.' And there are the unhappy folks who never recover from the world's failure to live up to their youthful expectations. 

The latter become among other things punks and goths. Constructing a colorful but conformist life that they feel puts them apart from the perceived shabbiness of the world at large. Add there's the thrill of epater les bourgeois. Nothing new. Regency rakes with their 'nostalgia for the mud,' Fin-de-siècle aesthetes, the flaming youth of the 20's, beatniks have all trod the path before them.

So, why am I babbling about this? Because sometimes I find the label applied to me. Nope, not me.

I simply prefer to not be surprised by bad. Can't see any reason to expect the unlikely. To use a grim example: I never felt a flicker of surprise by the events of September 11th. Millions of people in the Middle East feel with not a little justification that America has screwed over their lives. And many of those have a worldview that justifies an unconditional retaliation. I'd been waiting for the day that a small nuclear device or what the new cant word calls bioterrorism murdered millions.

But that is moving to too broad a field.

My father made my mother's and my lives hellish. He wasn't a sadist. He never understood destructive power of his acts. And he thought a simple apology would render his acts undone. How many people do you know that think an apologize assures absolution?

When I meet people I assume self-interest. But I know they probably aren't aware of how their selfishness ramifies. Like most of the rest of us he's just bungling along.

Idealistic people get enraged when another doesn't conform to their private ethics and anticipations. Idealistic people are unforgiving. If selfish people don't annoy or hurt me I just roll with it. If need be I tell them to get the fuck away. But I don't brood on it. That would give them power over me, wasting my inner-life. 
The horny, greedy, ethically dead people are always about. So are the good transgendered, women and men.

I know people whose work and spare time is taken up with good works. Much more so than the folks who are bitching about the bad people. The good folks help people to learn to read, show them how to get in school, build housing for the poor or maybe just always ready to help you move furniture.

Because I have a lively awareness of humane and kindly people I can't identify with cynicism. And I'm too much in touch with the joys of friendship, moments of clarity, laughter and aesthetic bliss to be continuously bitter.
(Should I be writing self-help books?)

And I often enough feel foolish when a friend points out a highly visible flaw in a story that some one told me and I believed. 

As my fingers trample the keyboard I'll have to say that I think it is the idealistic folks are bitter with disillusion. Trampling over the context of humanity, ignoring the inherently conditional nature of everyday life. To throw out what McLuhan used to call a 'probe': how many people feel injured by or harassed by life's inequities when their days aren't burdened by romantic longings?

My cynicism is sometimes put in opposition to something called innocence. I have a life to live, often a trying one. If I were naive how could I be able to live with the man I love? My days with Charles require that I'm ready for the bad moments. An innocent would be hurt, not ready to shrug off the black times.

I don't much like abstractions. This entry is ripe with them. But, hey, I've got to get some of you to stop telling me I'm a cynic.

Skimming back over this I see many things left unsaid. But I found out long ago if I reread these things I delete them instead of posting them.