Cynicism is a Dead End
Cynicism is an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest. If that’s not always true, it certainly seems to be true often enough to provide a good starting point to determine people’s motivations. In fact, it might apply to most people’s motivations most of the time, even if people are genuinely altruistic some of the time. Cynicism is useful but depressing as a philosophy of life.
Many beliefs that are called conservative seem to be motivated by cynicism. For example, we might assume that welfare programs will be abused because people will generally try to minimize burdens on themselves and maximize benefits for themselves. Seeing work as a burden, and receipt of a SNAP card as a benefit, we determine that many (if not most people) that are eligible for a SNAP card would prefer to take advantage of the benefit without having to work for it. We might create a program establishing work as a requirement for eligibility to counter this presumed motivation.
Are the motivations that we ascribe to others through cynicism true of ourselves? Or do we imagine that we are better than average, part of some minority that would prefer to work for what we receive? How do we reconcile such a belief about ourselves with the beliefs about others that we form through cynicism?
Perhaps cynicism provides a reasonable starting point for evaluating the motivations of others, but we can’t assume that it’s always the right one, especially if we understand cynicism to be based on pure self-interest. Certainly, there are instances where people are motivated by a benefit to family, as opposed to themselves personally. We might regard pursuing the interests of our family members as identical to pursuing our own personal interest, but such a pursuit broadens our interest at least a little bit.
Beyond family, we might imagine instances in which people are motivated by the interests of their close friends. Do they pursue their friends’ interests only when they expect something in return for themselves? Does cynicism require a purely transactional view of friendship? Instead, can friendship based on some true connection between people? Is philios real? Some of our experiences might inform us that it is.
If we can experience connections with family and close friends, we should be able to connect to others outside of those circles. Friendships don’t happen spontaneously. Before any bond develops between two people, they are strangers to one another. If it is possible to go from stranger to friend, is it possible to have a connection with the greater world that might motivate our interests? Is agape real?
While cynicism may be useful to evaluate motivations, it also seems to promote lazy thinking. Even if people are motivated by self-interest a majority of the time, focusing on that may cause us to miss the times that they are motivated by something else. Moreover, even when people are motivated by self-interest, their interests may be more complex than we understand. They may not be motivated by minimizing their burdens or maximizing their benefits in some simple sense. Instead, they may be motivated by a need for self-actualization, pride, humility, or love. This may not be true in the majority of cases, but if we presume that these motivations don’t exist, we can never recognize them.
Cynicism leads us to presume that people are motivated only by their own worldly interests and not some greater desire. In that sense, cynicism leads us to stop looking for some other more complex motivation in others. In addition, our personal worldly interests will die with us. In that sense, cynicism is a true dead end.
