The Anti-Wisdom of Cynicism

Cynicism appears to be intellectual because it seems insightful. If bad things will happen then one can apply bad outcomes to any event. When everyone has a platform from which they can be seen as, it's no surprise that these conclusions seem to be on the rise. It looks like wisdom and who doesn’t want to avoid being tricked by the inevitable? 

It's not hard to point out the stupidity and destruction people are capable of. History is full of examples. Because of this it's easy to assume that this is merely what people are. Yuval Noah Harari is noted for his take on a "useless class" (of which it seems he doesn’t consider himself to be part of), because of our past and a suspicion of the future. Highlighting parts of humanities story can feel ontologically indicative of something when projecting. People seem to be a bane to existence despite existing themselves, which can, ironically, only be analyzed through an anthropocentric lens. We, by our own measure, are immoral creatures that don't deserve this world, despite our evolutionary presence. Amoral life forms, from sharks to amoebas, hold a higher ethical place. "Everything would be better off without us", is the logical conclusion of the anti-natalist. "We would be closer to utopia without "those" kinds of people", whoever those kinds of people are. "We need a metric to figure this out", is the next ponderance. If you’re not deeply afraid you must not be paying attention.

It shouldn't be hard to see where all this leads. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are the only way these philosophies can be actualized.. "Drugs and computer games", as Harari has said, may be the only options. If bad things are inevitable because of human fallibility, then blanketing everything in the cozy embrace of despair looks like insight, but is more related to astrology. The conclusions come from a lack of knowledge and imagination about what’s possible and what people are capable of, and, therefore, have nothing to do with reality. They’re more vague than a weather forecast since we don’t know what people will decide to do next. Theorizing about a useless class is like wondering if a bunch of people will one day prefer to walk on their hands instead of their feet. I don’t know if they will, but I guess it’s possible?

Suppressing imagination by convincing people that they're not capable of meaningful change is the most powerful way to keep meaningful change from happening. If we're serious about existential threats, whether man made or acts of god, then people are the only hope in the most extreme, yet statistically inevitable, cases. And even if other animals were more worthy of saving than people (in some strange twist of reason) life would still need us. This is because it's only human knowledge that could keep an asteroid from wiping out the earth, or jumpstart the sun before it collapses into a supernova. Further, since we don't know what people would be critical for creating the knowledge capable of fending off a cataclysmic event, trying to determine who's not a worthy person is immoral. Life solves the problem of entropy and humans hold answers that no other known creature does. Each person is a force of nature, which may explain the anxiety and reflex to control them. Curiously it’s never us that really need controlling though.

There is no wisdom in cynicism precisely because it prophesies and claims to know the unknowable (the future) as well as solve the unknowable by means of arbitrary restrictions. Adopting and institutionalizing lazy and antirational beliefs is more likely lead to the destruction we fear rather than help us avoid it. Cynicism is anti-wisdom because it separates us from insight and maximal creative problem solving. It separates us from being human.