Between a year and 18 months ago, I was a pretty cynical person.
You can ask my friends, and they’ll probably tell you that I’m one of the most cynical people they knew. I hated both the world and its people. The world because it is so full of suffering and injustice and uncertainty. Its people because we are so weak and deluded. I wished for nothing more than the instantaneous ending of them both. Once, after passing by the umpteenth animal corpse left to rot on the road, I stared into the bright autumn sun with a hateful rage and said, “fuck you”. I was so, so angry.
I could not have been more innocent of a child. Around most of my memories there is something of a golden halo, a warm glow of sorts. I remember things like playing on the playground, building legos with friends, and curling up with a cozy book. There was a wonder in everything, in the dust motes in a patch of sunlight, in the trees waving in the wind, in the way dew glinted off the grass on a cool summer morning. The life of then was such a sweet, pleasant dream. In retrospect, the cracks began to appear long before I noticed them.
One of the first movies I ever watched was the Matrix. Even though I was probably four at the time, I saw through the special effects and macho one-liners to the real point: reality isn’t safe or fair or honest, and you had a choice. Either you could see things for what they were and struggle against the world, or you could resign yourself to a false reality. I made up my mind then that, were I confronted with the choice, I would choose the Red Pill. Like Neo, I didn’t understand the significance of my choice until it had already been made.
Fast forward to my senior year of high school, and I begin to dig into the truth of where our meat comes from. I learn that we torment not thousands or millions but billions of animals every year for our gustatory pleasure. I look around at my parents, my peers, my teachers, and society itself, all complicit in this horrible atrocity. Of course by this point I already know about the many genocides, about oppressive regimes, about racism and sexism and homophobia. But this is real. It’s right in front of me, day in and day out. There are real dead bodies on that plate. And people just act like there’s nothing wrong, that we aren’t in the process of committing the worst evil in history. And just a few years later, awakening to the massive suffering present in the wild. Numbers so large that we didn’t even really have names for them. And so many of them dying in agonising ways. It hadn’t been enough that we were evil. The world felt the need to personally tell me that it was evil, too.
We idealists tend also to be cynics because our ideals are inevitably broken by the world in this way. We hold so strongly to the idea that the world is a fundamentally good and just place that when this notion is finally shattered, we feel immensely betrayed. The entire world changes such that the average person becomes a murderer, thief, and liar; respected morals become hollow gibberish; and a peaceful woodland becomes a dark forest. But the change goes still deeper. For now, having been betrayed, we no longer trust the new world which we see before us. Our feeling of temporary betrayal leads to the feeling of eternal betrayal; our feeling of temporary despair is the source of eternal despair.
There’s a popular concept called “Stockholm Syndrome”, which describes a supposed condition where a captive becomes enamored with their kidnapper, defending them and avoiding attempts at rescue. I don’t know how real this supposed condition is in the most literal sense, but I see it all the time in a more figurative way. So many people ignore the evils of the world, or else justify them. So many people love the world, or God, or whatever representative they have for the universe without really engaging with the thorniest problems that come with loving the world. Basically, I think most responses to the evil in the world either ignore it altogether or end up being some kind of weak-ass copium bullshit. You probably share that thought to some degree.
So instead of surrendering, we become defiant. At our worst, we are Nietzsche; at our best, Camus. We base our existence on resistance against the world. We refuse to be the captive who desperately loves her captor, no matter what torment or threat is applied. We have been wronged, and we will hold onto that truth, even if it kills us. This is the feeling I held in my darkest and most cynical moments. I’m sure some of you have felt it too. And I understand why we become cynical. Cynicism is the father who says to the son, “that’s just how the world works, kid”. To really feel the anxiety of immense suffering and the outrage of immense injustice is incredibly soul-crushing. Cynicism is the armor we wear to protect ourselves against that pain. No matter how heavy and rigid it is, it is still better than having the weight of the world on your shoulders.
And there’s something incredibly wrong about the way the alternative is framed. I don’t want to love the world because of the consequence it will have to me or “because I have to”. That’s not a love of strength, but a love of weakness. I want to be persuaded that the world is worthy of being loved. I want to love the world because I want to love the world. But how can we love something so horrible without being coerced?
When I walked through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I was bombarded by scenes and stories of horror that were all too familiar, and it was enough to break one’s hope. But what was so miraculous was that even in the darkest moments, when their friends had been tortured and killed and they feared for their lives, the people gathered together and sang their holy songs. Imagine that! In the moment that they must have been gripped by maximal fear, despair, resentment, and fatigue, they found it within themselves to bring out the very best and highest. They refused to relinquish their compassion and dignity when all reasonable people would have.
More personally and far more mundanely, I was once on a flight which got severely delayed. Everyone had boarded the plane, but it wasn’t able to take off safely because the engines had frozen. We waited on the plane for several hours. It was stuffy and uncomfortable. Babies cried and screamed. A few people started to blow steam. It was 2 or 3 in the morning when we were finally told to de-plane. We would not be making the flight today, an attendant announced apologetically. I would call myself a fairly patient and even-tempered person, but by that point, even I was starting to get antsy and irritated. I fully expected the majority of people to be upset, to lash out in some petty way, to be harassing the staff. Instead, when I walked off the plane, I found that people had spread blankets and pillows over the carpets. They were comforting their babies and children and each other. Some people went so far as to express support and kindness towards the airline staff. It was a beautiful moment in which all of us strangers came together to make the best of a bad situation
I now think that that’s what life generally is. Making the best of a bad situation. We shouldn’t lie to ourselves—we don’t really need to. Or if you are the type to believe we always lie to ourselves, then I remind you that cynicism is a lie too. The world sucks in so many ways, and there is so much suffering, injustice, unfairness, and lack of caring. We fall short of the standard in so many ways. Everything worth doing is hard. We are all very small and limited beings; thin sheafs of thoughtfulness surfing on deep oceans of primeval desires and fears. We are so limited.
But in the same move that these limitations bind us, they also liberate us. The anecdotes I mentioned above set the bar for what we are capable of. The fact that suffering, injustice, unfairness, and uncaring exist as concepts implies the existence of the attractors of liberation, justice, fairness, and compassion. We are capable of so much less than we dream, but so much more than we think. All the people in my anecdotes—perhaps especially the people I was on the plane with—were just ordinary folks. I don’t doubt that most of them generally just went on with their lives, doing a typical 9-to-5 job and living in typical families and having typical interests. But within all that ordinariness and spiritual sleepiness, there was something waiting to be awakened, something they themselves were painfully unaware of. I’m not saying we need to go full Jigsaw to force people to awaken their inner love of life or whatever his philosophy was. But maybe there is some way in which we can be consciously willing to make what we can of the world and of ourselves, and maybe we can find it if we try.
The world is a bad mother. We are born helpless and completely devoted to her, reliant on her for nourishment and warmth. It is only as we grow older that we see her cold and indifferent manner. There is no rhyme or reason for the way she does things, at least not that we know of. So we tell ourselves stories. Some of us plunge ourselves into distraction from the truth. Some of us redouble our slavish devotions in hopes of earning her approval. And some of us fill our hearts with rightful anger. But there is a fourth path: that of true love. True love is not slavish devotion, and neither is it conditional in any way. True love is not submission or sublimation, nor is it isolation. True love does not hate the bad, nor does it praise the good. True love is not a condoning of or devotion to the object of love. To truly love Hitler, for example, is not to condone all that he did nor to be devoted to his every whim. We can and should still pragmatically want him dead or jailed. We can and should still be horrified at his ideology and actions. And, I claim, we can and should still wish to make things better, both for him and within him. For the world, to truly love its suffering and injustice is to wish for its speedy nonexistence. And true love for the world is the continued wish for it to be better, no matter how evil and miserable it is today.
I’m a young adult now, and I often pass by my old elementary school, sometimes when the children are playing there. I see them on the park which I once played in, running across the fields I once ran in, and swinging on the swings I once swung on. And I think, what would I give to be that innocent child again, so free of the cares of the world? And I’m sure in my worst moments, I really would give anything for that relief. But there is something teleologically greater, something transcendent, about the person I’ve become and the people I now know. I see authenticity and courage and willingness and goodness day after day, and it’s so incredibly inspiring and gratifying.
For those kids, I feel a bittersweet too. I’m so grateful and happy that they can have this time in their lives to live in innocence, and they remind me of the world that could be and which I work towards. I’m also a bit sad, because so many of those kids will be hurt and betrayed by the world, and will grow to be cynical, heartbroken adults. But for the vast majority of them—and us—I believe that there is something better.
And I hope you can believe that, too.
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