cynic: a person who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and who disbelieves in or minimizes selfless acts or disinterested points of view;
cynicism: contempt for and suspicion of human nature; heartlessness, misanthropy;
Cynicism is the logical outcome of almost any other -ism. People who gather behind ideas and oppose others have lost touch with themselves. Ideologists, intellectuals, have lost touch with the basic nature of harmony with which we are all born.
Thought brings conflict, and truly living in the present moment is only possible when thought is not constantly dominating. Belief and disbelief eradicate the openness to criticize, to doubt. People who have lost all doubt have become machines, mindless robots who will do anything their leaders, their gods, anything their ideologies demand them to do.
Not everything in life can be actually known, but you can always think you can or do, make up concepts and deceive yourself and others.
To radically doubt everything from moment to moment might seem a very hard thing to do, but it is the only way out of the mental war zone. It is the lack of doubt that prevents us from seeing reality, from recognizing the dynamic nature inside ourselves and inside others.
We are lost in images and words and we revel in it, we are entertained by our personal stories, by our artists, our politicians and media, by ever changing superficialities. We seek freedom in traveling and consuming and so on and so on. And why is that? Is it because we were taught to do so from early on?
Rigid, unwholesome ideas inevitably collide and create conflict. No thought can ever comprise the complexity and vastness of life itself. The whole is always being reduced, objectified and fragmented.
Reacting to violence with violence has no ending, but unfortunately most of us lack the awareness to see and remember this. Even worse, we accept it as part of our daily lives, and we render our children cynical and braindead before they are able to see and think for themselves. In kindergarten and elementary school we are taught that greed, violence, pollution, …, are bad things. However, by the time we are adults we have become totally insensitive to these things. We have understood the concepts intellectually, from a child’s point of view, and we move on to more important things – ourselves for example. Nothing wrong with that, self-centeredness is an essential phase in growing up. Alas, most of us get stuck there forever in one way or another. We have made life very complex and this keeps us from experiencing the whole of reality. We confuse each other, both consciously and unconsciously. We prevent each other from being true, open-minded individuals, from being our own psychological authorities.
Without exception our children are molded to gradually take over the existing wheel of misery. The struggle of getting a job, becoming someone, compromising talents to fit into the existing system is the most important matter. The human issues touched during the first years of school are seldom looked at in full depth, by anyone. No one is given the time or stimulus to think things through, to become aware of what is actually possible, outside of the curriculum, outside of the consensus trance most of us live in. And thus confusion prevails, money has to be earned in the system through competition, ambition, and our lives remain primarily based on individual pleasures, as compensation for our individual pains and the global misery.
We refuse to accept that we’re an integral part of that misery so we blame it on strangers, politicians, society. This way nobody can be held responsible, just like no employee of a corrupt corporation can be held accountable for corporate crimes, just like there are no real murderers in war. And so the game continues.
The moment you blindly conform to a system, you cease to live. The good news is that you can always wake up if you want to.