Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part five. The Political Cynic.

I grew up hearing about the lofty ideals of democracy, as enshrined in the American Constitution. I grew up thinking that politicians were actually statesmen who really wanted to do the right thing for their fellow citizens, who entrusted them with leadership. As incredible as it may sound, I actually believed this when I was a kid. It was not hard to feel this way. I first became aware of the world during the administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I remember where I was when the news of his assassination was broadcast. I was a first-grader, who heard it from the sixth-graders in my elementary school. I ran home for lunch and my mom confirmed the news. In upcoming years, I listened to recordings of Kennedy’s speeches, and they were very stirring. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That’s the most famous line. But even better is this one: “Here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own.” His assassination made me revere political leaders even more, since the official story (which nobody really believes anymore) was that the assassination was entirely conceived by a deranged man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

And I still revere Kennedy, even though revelations have come out since his death about some bad things he did, such as cheating on his wife. Even during the Vietnam War, I trusted our politicians to be telling the truth that North Vietnamese communism really was a threat to world peace and that we had to stop it, sort of, advance and retreat, advance and retreat, in which corporations that supplied the military got very rich over a war that seemed to never end and which was supported by an endless supply of federal dollars and conscripted lives.

Then came Watergate. I had been enthusiastic about Nixon, and I felt betrayed. I felt good about Gerald Ford, who took his place (the only president to not have been elected), because he projected an image of being clean. He said, “The national nightmare is over.” In Japan, which I visited about the time Ford took office, they referred to Gerald Ford as “Mr. Clean,” because Ford did resemble a little bit the white white white janitor on the cleaning supply boxes and bottles.

The presidency of Jimmy Carter was almost boring because of its lack of scandal. To this day, Carter remains about the only clean politician of which most of us can think. Then came Ronald Reagan, who inspired everyone with his words, but then did whatever the hell he wanted to, whether it was legal or not. He sold armaments to Iran, whom he had labeled an enemy of freedom, in order to get money to supply to “Contra” terrorists in Nicaragua so that they could kill civilians. Reagan once said, “I don’t like having to consult a committee of 545 every time I want to do something.” This committee, of course, was Congress, and he was required to obey them by this little tiny document that you may have heard of, the Constitution.

The rest of the story you probably know. I have filled in the 1960s through 1980s for my younger readers. Particularly noteworthy was the administration of George W. Bush, which was so filled with conservative corruption that John W. Dean (a Republican and Watergate whistleblower) wrote a book about it, Conservatives without Conscience. (Donald Trump recently called Dean a rat.)

It is even worse today. Not just the corruption, which we have always had, except for brief shining Camelot moments. But today the powerful conservatives are leading America in a direction of totalitarianism, and even a revival of respect for Nazis. Dean quotes Professor Bob Altemeyer: “If you think [the United States] could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that [Nazi sympathizer] David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in that state.” White supremacist Richard Spencer was taken seriously by Steve Bannon, who was the national security advisor for Donald Trump. Trump said that the white supremacists in Charlottesville and the diverse people who protested against them both deserved equal respect and equal blame, even though the only person killed was a young woman, by a car driven very fast into a crowd by a white supremacist. Trump said that the Congressmen who had not clapped for him at his State of the Union address were committing“treason.”  The link is to the Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, to show that Trump’s outrageous statement was taken seriously overseas.

In the political arena, then, it appears that the facts support a cynical point of view on the national level. On the state level (I live in Oklahoma), the legislature for a long time refused to allow public school teachers to receive a living wage, and instead of trying to solve the state’s fiscal crisis, they spend their time trying to enact creationist laws. The purpose of the state of Oklahoma, they think, is to make oil companies more profitable, even if it means the poverty and disease of the state residents. Is it any different in your state? Probably not.

I think I have made my point: cynicism is the only realistic summary of the political world. There is probably nothing you can reasonably imagine that can even come close to the reality of that world, only a little bit of whose corruption is visible to outsiders.

Clearly, the momentum of politics right now is toward Trump demanding, and getting, personal adoration. And slightly fewer than half of Americans are eager to give it to Him.

But we can’t stop on such a depressing note. Otherwise you will be exactly like the miserable man I described in an earlier essay. But knowledge is power. As a cynic, you know that politics is thoroughly corrupt. The practical result is that you know it is hopeless, utterly hopeless, to try to solve any of our major problems by working through existing political channels. At least, cynicism can keep you from wasting a lot of time and resources, only to get your heart stomped into a quivering mass of protoplasm on the Rotunda floor. Find something else to do to make the world better. But, as a good cynic, you should not expect any of your efforts to make a difference in the end.

This will leave you lots of time to do things that make the world better and that you enjoy. I mean, WWGCD? What would George Carlin do? Take, for example, the fact that Trump used a ceremony that supposedly honored the Navaho Code Talkers as a chance to insult both liberals and Native Americans by calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and by holding the ceremony right underneath the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who broke the law in order to steal Native American land in the 1830s. What can you do in the face of such an insult from the highest office in the land? Humor, of course. A political cartoonist depicted a Native American saying to Trump, “You could learn a thing or two from us. We know how to run casinos that don’t go bankrupt.”

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part four. Protect Yourself from Road Rage

Many drivers in America carry guns and are often willing to use them in road rage shootings. According to this article, there were 1,319 road rage shootings from 2014 to 2016. This resulted in 354 people being wounded and 136 being killed. The rate seems to be increasing, from 247 in 2014 to 620 in 2016. Official statistics do not keep separate record of road rage incidents; these numbers were gleaned from published reports by the organization that published the above article.

These numbers are low compared to the population as a whole. Do not fall into the half-full half-empty trap, telling yourself that, any time you use your car, there is less than a 50 percent chance that you will be the victim of road rage. Over time, the odds accumulate that you might be a victim. The figures are large enough to justify thoughtful and continual precaution while driving.

Moreover, the number of road rage gun incidents is under-reported. I know this for a fact because one of my students told me of an incident in which an enraged driver followed another and shot his car. The incident, not involving any injury, went unreported.

One reason they often go unreported is that the victim may place him or herself at risk of further attack. A policeman once told me that a man at a stop sign got out of his car and used a baseball bat to smash the windshield of the car behind. The victim started to report it, but the police discouraged the victim from taking action. The reason is that, if you report or sue someone who commits violence against you, your name and address become a matter of public record, and the perp may track you down. You lose the protection of anonymity.

One way, you might think, to get around the problem of revealing your identity to the attacker is to let your insurance company pursue a suit against the attacker. However, this will not work: before an insurance company can act, they need a police report, which contains your personal information and to which the attacker may also have access.

Statistically, you are unlikely to be injured or killed by road rage. But the numbers are great enough to justify a cynic’s wariness: if there is a pickup truck nearby, you can assume the driver is armed and angry, and you should take precautions. Under no circumstances should you make that driver angry or angrier.

From an online search, I found a story about a road rage shooting in France. See, they aren’t all in America. But the article was published in 2013. America stands out among industrialized countries in the frequency of road rage.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part three. More Cynicism for Drivers

In 2016, 27,461 Americans died in traffic fatalities, which is about 11.6 per 100,000 population. This number is actually lower than in most previous years, going all the way back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of these deaths were caused by other drivers. The world average is 17.4 fatalities per 100,000 people. The American traffic fatality rate is almost exactly double that of France (5.1 fatalities per 100,000). In both America and France, traffic fatalities would be vastly reduced if cautious people were cynics. Wait four seconds, not just two. That’s all it takes. I was always a little annoyed at Tulsa drivers, who would not move for four seconds when the light turned green. After my experience, I have become one of them.

I share now some further thoughts about cynicism and driving. This is important, since so many of us spend so much time doing it.

Guys who drive big trucks are more likely to demolish small cars, and their drivers, than are other motorists. There are several reasons for this.

• First, I refer primarily to guys in big trucks. Gals are a little more cautious, and a little more thoughtful about other people. This is because, in general, women are more empathetic than men. This is not a fundamental difference, but a difference of degree.
• Second, the driver of a big pickup truck has a sense of invulnerability. Many big pickup trucks have lots of defensive armor, such as deer-catchers on the front, and the cabin of the truck is much further above ground level than that of the typical automobile. A big pickup truck really can run into and over almost any other vehicle with little risk of harm to the truck or driver. My previous car was demolished by a pickup backing up at full speed into the road. The damage resulted entirely from the hitch at the back of the pickup, which was not even scratched. This sense of invulnerability is part of the psychology of most guys in pickups. I notice that, where I live, many houses have lots of unrelated people living together, since they cannot afford to each live in their own place. This is because they are poor. But why are they poor? Outside of many of these houses—I can think of three such houses in the half mile near where I work—several pickup trucks are parked. I have checked the prices of pickup trucks, and each of these trucks costs about as much as my house and property are worth, here in rural Oklahoma. They cannot afford a good place to live because they spend their money on a truck instead. It seems to me that, here in rural Oklahoma, there are many shacks that could easily blow away in a wind storm; the residents could tie their shack down to their pickup truck to save it.
• Third, by looking down on us, they often feel superior. They feel that this gives them the freedom to proclaim their superiority. Where I live, it is not uncommon to see Confederate insignia on trucks. For a while, when we had a black president, several trucks displayed full-sized Confederate flags from struts that took up the entire truck bed.
• Fourth, by driving a big truck, these drivers feel that they really own the road. The rest of us have to move to the side for them, whether they are in our lane or in the oncoming lane. This would simply not happen in, for example, France, where the roads are too small. I saw two pickup trucks, both small, in France. One was broken down and used to store firewood. The other was very old. While French drivers are not noted for their courtesy, they at least have less dangerous weapons to use against other drivers. According to counts that I have kept (though the study is ongoing), patrolmen pull over cars disproportionately often in comparison with how common they are, compared to pickup trucks. In rural Oklahoma, about one-third of vehicles are big pickup trucks, but I have not yet seen one of them pulled over during my study period. They seem to own the road here in Oklahoma, with official approval.
• Finally, many drivers, especially those of pickups, assume that you have no momentum. They assume that you can stop for them in literally no time at all. Part of their feeling of invulnerability is to think themselves exempt from the laws of physics. “Stopping distance” is not just a good idea; it’s a law of nature. The cynic assumes that other drivers do not even know the simplest laws of physics.

None of these things needs to be a conscious decision on the part of the pickup driver. They do, however, make these assumptions, even without intending harm.

I have long made the assumption that drivers of commercial trucks are very cautious and are unlikely to do anything that might put other drivers at risk. This is because their trucks are well marked, and the company that sponsors the drivers (even if they are owner-operators) can get sued as a result of the truck drivers’ negligence. I still believe that this assumption is largely correct, although some people who know truck drivers tell me that my optimism is frequently unwarranted.

I also drive with my lights on (the driving lights, not full headlights) even in the day, in order to increase my chances of being seen. I also drive with my right hand ready to honk, and my left ready to flash my bright lights. While I have only had to use these tactics three times in the past year, it might have saved my life.

I also sometimes use my flashers. Usually, flashers indicate that the vehicle is going significantly under the speed limit. But where I live, almost everybody speeds. If I am driving merely at the speed limit, in dense traffic, I often use my flashers, since to the other drivers I represent a slow-moving hazard. I do this infrequently and only in dense, rapid traffic.

As a cynical driver, I find it nearly impossible, except on a lonely roadway with few other drivers, to relax and enjoy the drive. I have to be constantly alert, anticipating the possible recklessness of other drivers.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part two. Cynicism is not Paranoia

I waited for the light to change at an intersection in Tulsa. Dramatic music; you know what is going to happen next. When the green left-turn signal came on, I slowly proceeded into the intersection. Another car shot through the intersection against a red light and nearly collided with me. Had I not waited a couple of seconds before entering the intersection, I would not be writing this, unless possibly by using one of those Stephen-Hawking devices. Maybe I could have bought his, once he didn’t need it any more. I slammed on my brakes and avoided death. Had I simply followed the rules, I would be dead. I hesitated a couple of seconds, and am intact. Something similar happened scarcely over a year ago, when a big pickup truck backed up from a driveway at full speed and collided with my previous car, totaling it but leaving me uninjured. I was already being cautious before my most recent accident; but it was at that moment that I decided to become a cynic.

Cynicism is the expectation that bad things are going to happen to you. In the example above, a cautious person waits a couple of seconds before driving into an intersection; a cynic waits maybe four seconds before doing so. A cautious person looks at the other cars, as I did. All the other cars had stopped for the red light. The car that ran the light came from behind them at full speed and was invisible until the last moment. The cautious person dies; the cynic lives.

The cynic lives and is happy. This is because, if the event that the cynic feared occurs, he or she is ready to take evasive action. If the event does not occur, he or she can sigh in relief. Cynicism is the precautionary principle applied in a consistent and thoughtful way.

Paranoia, on the other hand, is a delusion. The paranoid person assumes everyone else, and all the forces of nature, are focusing malicious intent on them personally. There is no way that this could be true. There is no network of physical laws that could work this way.

In fact, it is also paranoia to think that the laws of nature conspire against anybody, not just you. “Don’t tempt fate” is a statement of paranoia, not cynicism.

Of course, evolution has instilled in our brains a mild paranoia. The shadows of leaves swaying in the wind, which you see from the corner of your eye, do not attract your conscious attention. But if one of the shadows moves a little differently from the others, it instantly grabs your attention. This attention occurs faster than conscious thought is possible and is accompanied by a brief rush of terror. A shadow that moves differently may be a predator ready to leap on you. Today, that predator is most likely to be another human being. This is an instinct that may have begun hundreds of millions of years ago when a clam shut its shell when a shadow, which may have been a predator detected by its simple eyes, passed overhead.

Cynicism, at the intense end of the scale, grades into paranoia. But unlike mid-range cynicism, paranoia makes you unhappy. The paranoid person assumes that the forces of man (less frequently, woman) and nature are a constant and focused threat, and happiness never follows when the anticipated evil does not occur. And the constant worry can make you sick. Worry actually depresses the immune system, leaving you vulnerable to infections that you might otherwise avoid. Moreover, it is very unlikely that the paranoid person avoids catastrophes any more often than does a healthy cynic.

Cynicism is not quite the same as pessimism. Pessimism is a lazy assumption that bad things will happen more than you expect that they will. We joke about it and call it Murphy’s Law. We also trivialize it by saying that a pessimist sees the glass as half empty, while the optimist sees it as being half full. The implication is that a glass, half of whose volume is filled, can be either half full or half empty, so you might as well say it is half full. But whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on what is happening. If the glass is getting fuller, then it is half full; if the fluid is being lost, the glass is half empty. In fact, a glass that is “almost empty” can be accurately described as “becoming full” in the first case. A cynic does not make lazy or trivial assumptions. The cynic wants to know more information. In the absence of such information, the cynic assumes the glass may be losing its contents, and it is time to make preparations for the time when it may be empty. Cynicism is an intelligent and thoughtful pessimism.

The half-full half-empty error applies to the world in general. The cynic anticipates that bad things are always ready to happen, for example while waiting at a stoplight. This does not mean that most drivers are evil or careless. It does not mean that half of them are. It does not even mean that very many of them are. The cynic recognizes, however, that even if only one in a hundred drivers is evil or careless, then you run the risk of a deadly collision once in every one hundred red lights. It does not take very many days to accumulate those one hundred intersections. The cynic does not assume most people, or even very many people, are bad, but just that the number is not zero.

Cynicism can lead to economic and legal policies that help to make us safer and happier. One example is no-fault insurance. This is the kind of insurance policy, on the government level, in which the insurance companies of both drivers pay equally for the resulting damage. It avoids the costs and delays of litigation. Of course, if significant injury is involved, the negligent (or evil) driver must be punished in some realistically-enforceable way. No-fault insurance assumes that there are a large number of negligent (or evil) drivers, and to litigate all of them would be impossible. My sense of justice flares up against this kind of policy. The driver who causes the accident should be penalized. I believe this very strongly. But no-fault insurance might be the only workable policy. Of course, insurance companies need to know which drivers repeatedly cause collisions so that they can charge higher rates or deny coverage. This, too, is a healthy cynical policy. Insurance companies know that, without charging higher rates for careless drivers, they will lose a lot of money.

Another example of cynicism at work is the development of driverless cars. The technology remains imperfect, and will always be so, but already it has a better safety record than that of human drivers. Its main advantage is to keep careless drivers from endangering other people and their property. But it also helps to protect responsible drivers who might make an unavoidable error, such as sneezing at the wrong time. A cynic assumes that everyone can make mistakes.

Cynicism, therefore, is not a personalized paranoia nor is it a lazy pessimism. It is a healthy anticipation of the countless evils that surround us.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit Part One.

I here begin a series of essays about the philosophy of cynicism—not necessarily the same as the ancient philosophy by that name, and certainly not in the general sense with which the word is used today. These are episodic thoughts rather than a reasoned argument such as I will develop for my eventual book on the subject.

When you think of a cynic, you probably think of a person who assumes the worst about anyone he or she does not personally know well, that is, about almost everybody else in society, and assumes that the world is out to get them, and that the worst thing that can possibly happen always will. This person, you assume, must be sad and depressed, certainly someone you would not want to know.

Well, there are cynics like that. But that is not what I here propose. What I will now describe is empowerment through cynicism: how cynicism can make you live better and be happier.

Really.

The first step is to recognize that cynicism is the correct interpretation of the facts of daily life, politics, and the economy. Without cynicism, when the inevitable catastrophes come, you will be shocked off of your feet and incapacitated with impotent anger, followed by dejection, and probably by wild drunkenness. If you are a cynic, you will not be taken by surprise. Whatever you need to do next, whether it is important work or truly refreshing recreation, you will be ready to do it right away.

The second step is to use the knowledge conferred by cynicism to make preparations to keep yourself safe. If you know that our politicians are leading us toward a white supremacist totalitarian state, you can make preparations; some people can make more, some less. You might want to move out of a red state if you live in one, or even out of the country, while you have plenty of time to make the transition smoothly, rather than waiting until you have to be a refugee. A cynic knows not to trust anything a major financial corporation says. Most of us already drive defensively, but a cynical driver knows that a small but significant number of other drivers would just as soon kill you as not. If you drive like a cynic, you are less likely to be their victim. By letting cynicism forewarn you of even just a few of the nearly infinite number of evils that await you, you can be able to instantly react to them in a constructive fashion.

The third step is that, by acting pre-emptively, you can feel more in control. A great deal of modern suffering comes with feeling that you have no control, utterly no control, over the circumstances of your life. A cynic, acting pre-emptively, avoids this feeling precisely because he or she IS more in control of the circumstances of life.

The fourth step is that, by feeling more in control, you can stop worrying about all the things that might happen. You know they are going to happen; you are ready for them; you are in control, as much as any wretched weak human being can be; now you can focus on the big picture—getting the most out of life, enjoying every day. Take a walk. You know that dozens of dog walkers have left piles of dog shit on the path; so, you frequently look down, and that way you don’t step in them. There’s nothing like a steaming pile of dog shit on your shoes to ruin a nice walk. A cynic would never let that happen. We all know that a lot of people let their dogs poop in public parks; but here in Tulsa I have seen people scooping dog poop out of their yards into public parks. This is a deliberate insult against one’s fellow citizens. But the cynic smiles and says, “I was expecting this.”

You can even enhance your sense of humor. Think about some of the most lovable, and the most effective cynics: Lewis Black, Paula Poundstone, Dave Barry, and the late George Carlin. They knew or know how to make cynicism work for them. (And earn them some money too. Please buy my book on this topic when it comes out.)

Fifth and last, if there is a God in Heaven, it must be a kind of God Who does nothing to prevent all these evil things, large and small, from happening. Back before I was a cynic, when I expected the world to make sense and God to help us out, even just a teeny weeny little bit, I spent a lot of time in agony over the evils of the world. Now I seldom think about it, except when I am writing essays like this.

In upcoming essays, I am going to focus on some specific and, I hope, interesting examples of cynicism at work.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (2). Agnosticism from the writer of Ecclesiastes

Today’s Bible Reading: Ecclesiastes 1: 1-11; 11: 13-14.

I am amazed that the Book of Ecclesiastes ever made it into the Bible. I can count with the fingers of one foot the number of times Ecclesiastes was ever deeply studied in any of the conservative churches to which I once belonged. Occasional quotes out of context, no more. Not something on any kid’s Sword of the Lord Bible Verse Memorization Chart.

The agnosticism expressed in this book is breathtaking. It is also very cynical, which is about all you could be if you did not believe that God rewarded good people on Earth and you had no alternative. Yet it made it into the Bible, along with the very sexy Song of Solomon which follows it.

And it is blazingly obvious that the last two verses were written by somebody else, which I paraphrase: “Okay, this has gone on long enough. So just get this straight. Don’t listen to all that stuff you just read. Just be afraid of God, be very afraid. Do what the priests tell you God wants you to do, for that is your entire purpose in life. God will announce every secret thought in your brain on judgment day, and everybody is going to know what you were thinking, you little wishy-washy doubters, and then you’ll be sooooooory!” But if you leave off those last two verses, the book of Ecclesiastes is the most heart-wrenchingly eloquent work of agnosticism that the ages have ever produced.

The writer (unlikely to have been Solomon, or a king at all) begins by describing the cycles of the universe. The sun goes around the Earth (from our perspective). The winds blow around the Earth. One generation of humans after another comes and goes. This could be made into an inspiring overview of the universe, but the writer made it cynical instead. All is vanity—that is, everything is a waste of time. He asks, what does a person gain from all of his work? And as the sun and the wind and the water go around and around, it is just such unutterable weariness! Modern historians debate over whether history is one damn thing after another or is the same damn thing over and over again. The writer of Ecclesiastes chose the latter. Not only is there nothing new under the sun, but nobody remembers what came before! This remains true today, when almost every detail of recent history is recorded; it is just that most of my students do not remember any of it.

In my youngest days, I found the hydrological cycle of the Earth (evaporation, condensation, rainfall, groundwater) to be inspiringly beautiful. Ecclesiastes has made it sad. But this was a necessary first step. Many religious people in that day (probably before 500 BCE) believed in a short history of the cosmos, from Eden until the day when God would establish his kingdom on Earth. Come to think of it, hundreds of millions of people still believe this. They do not believe that “what has been is what will be.” They do not believe that humans have been a very recent blip in the long history of the universe and the Earth. If we are now in the middle of the history of our universe—if the present were located at the pedestal of rocks near Smith Center, Kansas, which claims to be the geographical center of the United States—then a hundred-year lifespan is the width of a finger compared to the width of the North American continent. To the writer of Ecclesiastes, this realization was very humbling, and there was no scientific insight to replace it.

I find beauty and inspiration in the study of science, and in the slow work of doing things that help other people and the world. I am inspired by the fact that evolution has produced a human species capable of altruism. Alas, the writer of Ecclesiastes did not make it that far. I will have several more entries, in upcoming weeks, about Ecclesiastes.