November 26, 2023

For two millennia, cynicism was opposition to corruption, which of course generated opposition from corrupters; and then recently, corrupters won the battle due to modern media.

Cynicism began as a life-style oriented around a purpose, which was a common pattern in ancient history. The purpose was to make a statement about the corruptness of the social order. The concept was to demonstrate selfless rationality with the asceticism that usually went with causes.

The predictable result was a counter-reaction degrading the cynics and calling them dogs. That conflict is informative of the nature of corruption.

Even in ancient times, the promoters of corruption far outnumbered the critics of corruption. That salting out of positions is similar to the modern concept of demagoguery.

The position of corrupters is that easy-street must represent correctness, which draws in the unwary in addition to the criminally minded, while the opposite—opposition to corruption—is a demanding path that is difficult to comprehend, let alone adhere to.

In other words, cynicism and the reaction to it contained the elements of the conflict between good and evil being displayed in simplistic reactions. Of course, the meaning goes far deeper than the simple reactions. So the long history and rudimentary optics create a format for evaluating the conflict between good and evil.

First of importance in that conflict is that the criticism is evaluative, while the reaction is mindless. Is mindlessness superior to evaluation? All corruption implies that mindless reactions are superior to evaluation.

When Reagan said, if you need to explain, you are already a loser, he was assuming that the purpose in life is to be a winner and rationality is for fools. Rationality requires explanation of claims.

Reagan's assumption was that winning is in conflict with rationality. He couldn't be wrong about that. Corrupters place winning over rationality due to their self-centeredness and subjectiveness in their attempts to prevail through domination as the substitute for the rationality which exposes them as the incompetent corrupters that they are.

At the starting point of the subject, cynics were taking a morally justifiable position and their opponents were taking a destructive, self-defeating position, which characterizes corruption. Early on, cynicism was sometimes associated with Christ due to Christ's negativism in condemning corruption. Corrupters require positivism very dogmatically as the image for corruption.

Now stop the camera in that frame and look at what it says. Corruption has always been highly generalized in society being framed in a positive light which makes it convenient and compatible with simplistic and mindless purposes. Viewing corruption as wrong is unusual and negativistic. The original cynicism was taking the unusual and negativistic view of generalized corruption in society.

As the rationalizers of corruption attacked the negativists, the conflicting views persisted for about two thousand years. But as media increased the expression, the loudest voice came from the largest numbers which were trying to paint corruption with positivism, while negativism was despised.

The end result was to portray the criticism of corruption in cynicism as an attack upon what is good and normal. So now days, cynicism is assumed to mean someone attacking what is good, right and normal. An attack upon corruption became an attack upon all that is right, good and normal; and now cynicism has an opposite meaning of what it had for two thousand years.

Even as recently as the 1950s, the concept of cynicism often had the original meaning of there being wrongs on a broad and usual social scale. But now days, cynicism has the opposite meaning as the only sin mentioned in politics and mainstream media.

Now days a cynic is a no-good attacking what is good. There are still negativists that attack corruption on a broad scale, but less and less so. The difference is the pretense that the social order is good, right and constructive, while it disintegrates into fascism.

The conflict is not as much philosophical as personal. It is attitudes that evolve over time that shape the conflict between the two views. There is a very distinct difference in attitudes between personality types who either view corruption positively or negatively.

The terminology has become rudimentary in labeling evil as cynical. It no longer has a philosophical significance in conveying a broader implication on the extent of evil in society.

The opposing views on the extent of corruption in society was the basis for the hang-up on communism a few decades ago. A communist was someone with the wrong attitude; not someone promoting a governmental process. The wrong attitude was to view corruption negatively rather than positively.

You say you don't see how that adds up? It doesn't. The thought processes of corrupters don't add up. To understand the difference, the starting point is that corrupters believe in their corruption as the right and proper method of doing things. Then a communist was viewed as someone who tried to change the result of corrupters taking over their lives and imposing corruption onto them.

And abracadabra, the ancient concept of cynicism was the same attitude that was being viewed as communism by conservatives a few decades ago. Conservatives still have the same mentality; but they needed to find different terminology in recent times. So now they are trying such terms as "woke" or "cancel culture." Those terms don't work properly; but neither did communism—not the least reason being that corrupters are trying to pull something off that is total fraud.