Idealized

For someone who has no problem identifying as openly cynical, I'm actually pretty bad at it. If, as Wikipedia says, "Cynicism is an attitude characterized by a general distrust of the motives of 'others.' A cynic may have a general lack of faith or hope in 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," I'm not particularly good about maintaining said attitude.

Not that I'm a trusting sort, or have a lot of faith in people, or even deal much in hope, but I don't find the motivations of others to be worthy of ridicule or admonishment. Regardless of what they're doing, people do them for reasons that strike them as worthwhile and "meaningful." (In accordance with whatever a person finds meaningful.) I think I started falling down as a cynic when it occurred to me that my perceptions of people's motivations are irrelevant. This is part of why I retired the label "Rampant Idiocy" for posts a few years back. Who am I to call people out as stupid?

About the only way I really qualify as "cynical" is in a lack of belief in people's statements of high-minded ideals as day-to-day practice, rather than as luxury goods that are nice when people can get them. There are social norms that dictate what reason are, and are not, appropriate for actions, and

In any event, Hank Green, one of YouTube's Vlogbrothers. posted a video entitled "What if a lot of the Cynicism is Unjustified???" In it, he opens with the following:

What if people are all pretty good, and they're just trying to make things better for themselves and the people they love in a world that has a whole lot of directional inertia?

And a bit later he asks:

And what if, this might be a stretch, those people are mostly big bags of well-meaning worry, trying to do the right thing, when it's never clear what the right thing to do is?"

Not being the sort of nasty cynic who has nothing nice to say about those they disagree with, or avoiding a perception of people as consistently deserving ridicule or admonishment for their greediness, grasping, vanity or power-hunger, requires making peace with that last bit; the idea that it's never clear what the right thing to do is. I would go further and say that it needs the understanding that there is no such thing as the right thing. Faced with an endless set of choices, the idea that one of them is clearly the one correct choice may feel true, but the world simply isn't that black and white of a place. Why would it be?

I waded into the comments of Mr. Green's video, just to have a look around, and it was immediately evident who was okay with that premise, and who was not. And it makes sense that many people weren't. I've mentioned Thomas Nagel before, he of the opinion that "I think that most people, unless they're crazy, would think that their own interests and harms matter, not only to themselves, but in a way that gives other people a reason to care about them too." And for Hank Green, I suspect that cynicism is the understanding that other people know they have a reason to care, but willfully decide not to.

What's right, or what's wrong, to do in a situation tends to be a matter of faith, because the world is bad about providing unambiguous feedback. And sometimes, people believe that what's right is worth bad outcomes in the short term for a promised better outcome later that may or may not materialize. One of my takeaways of being raised Roman Catholic was that God had a penchant for collective punishments. And a lot of Christians see the world through this lens, which posits that God judges places, nations or even humanity as a whole on the basis of certain, specific, actions of individuals. That leads to a very different understanding of what the right thing to do is, when compared against a Moslem, or a Hindu or an atheist.

And while I disagree with a lot of people on their understanding of what a good course of action might be in a given situation, I understand the sincerity of their beliefs. I understand that they are attempting to make things better, and are not intentionally indulging in injustice. I'm told that this means I'm not paying attention, or that I'm ignoring obvious harms. But to the contrary; the only thing is that little voice that seeks to tell me that I can know what's in another's mind, simply based on how their actions land in the world around me.