Those – like myself – suckled at the breast of Perfidious Albion especially see the public expression of vulnerability as anathema. Straightforward people are very much in the minority, and in today’s world where idealism has become unfashionable and the concept of self-sacrifice unfathomable, they are in all likelihood an endangered species.įor the rest of us, lying and deception is a necessary social skill. Those more experienced in the ways of the world view them as easy marks, such stuff as the con-man’s wet dreams are made on. They see life essentially through childlike eyes and, because of that, the more cynical members of the human race often consider them foolish and unsophisticated.
Such individuals possess a naïveté which is both striking and humbling, and which inspires trust in others because these people are themselves trusting. Their words have no subtext and their hearts are open. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity.
#Cynic philosophy quotes how to
I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. How do they break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. As a generalisation, we had better hope it is false. Let’s hope that’s not true since we are broke, let’s hope that’s false.
And Marcuse doesn’t give the pat Marxist answer, which means economically, and we ought to be glad that that pat Marxist answer is false because if a society could be driven to ruin by debt, you know, the way a lot of people said the Russians – the Soviet Union – fell because it was broke. How does a way of life break down? How does it break down. The real question I am asking here is the one Marcuse asked in the sixties.
Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters? We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt32 with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. By other men's labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us for us they have prepared a way of life. They annex ever age to their own all the years that have gone ore them are an addition to their store. Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. Which means it was the right choice to hang on to the desire, even when it hurt so much. But I wanted it to add my voice to the Great Conversation, to reply to Diderot, Voltaire, Osamu Tezuka, and Alfred Bester, so people would read my books and think new things, and make new things from those thoughts, my little contribution to the path which flows from Gilgamesh and Homer to the stars. But there are a lot of reasons one can want to be an author: acclaim, wealth, self-respect, finding a community, the finite immortality of name in print, so many more. I'm a good student of philosophy, I know my Stoics, Cynics, their advice, that, when a desire is so intense it hurts you, the healthy path is to detach, unwant it, let it go. Sometimes I would cry, not because I was sad, but because it hurt, physical pain from the intensity of wanting something so much. So much sometimes it felt like I couldn't breathe.
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