Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue of TRO is about cynicism. There is an article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner, from a paper he presented at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “Does a Man’s Cynicism Make Him Stronger or Weaker?” Our subject, cynicism, is very immediate. As one sees injustice seeming to succeed, democracy itself in peril, lies having large power on a national scale, and a pandemic continuing, it is very easy to go for cynicism. But it’s also very foolish. And I am happy to say: Aesthetic Realism shows there is an alternative to cynicism, an alternative that’s honest, intelligent, efficient, and, in fact, beautiful—while cynicism is dishonest, unintelligent, inefficient, and ugly.

What is cynicism? What causes it? You’ll see, Jeffrey Carduner quotes Eli Siegel speaking greatly on the subject. But for now we can say: cynicism is the feeling that, fundamentally, evil is stronger than good, and will win.

People think the cause of their cynicism is the facts. Aesthetic Realism shows that the cause of one’s cynicism is one’s desire for contempt, the desire to get “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” And contempt is the most hurtful thing in every human mind.

The Components of Cynicism

There are certain elements to cynicism, components always present in it. We can state them in four points.

1. In order to be cynical you have to dislike—this is obvious. You have to feel there are things that are evil and against you. Your notion that something is unlikable may be legitimate or illegitimate. That is, there are plenty of bad things in this world, things that should be disliked; but people also dislike things that do not deserve their displeasure. In either instance—even if you dislike something that’s truly unlikable—if you’re a cynic you use the dislike in an inexact, phony way, described in the next points.

2. You get a sense of power and self-importance being against things. You “find” injustices that don’t exist, or you misuse real injustices, in order to feel you’re superior to so many people and to the unworthy world you somehow got into.

3. A cynic does not want to keep thinking, trying to know and understand. A cynic does not want to ask and keep asking, What is true? To do so either does not occur to him or her, or seems hugely unattractive.

4. A cynic, who feels important through disliking, puts tremendous limits on what he or she can find likable and of value. So much that could honestly please is met with suspicion or a sneer or anger or indifference or numbness.

People in every walk of life and of every political viewpoint have been cynical. And, because it is against knowing and valuing, cynicism always weakens one’s mind and stifles one’s possibilities of kindness. (The unkindness of cynicism can sometimes be present in horrific ways: a person who enters a school to shoot people there, was first a cynic.)

Cynicism was a prerequisite for something now in America: the readiness of thousands of individuals to embrace horrible, ridiculous conspiracy theories and other lies. These appeal to a person (we’ll call him Craig) because they seem to ratify a large disgust he has built up, and because he does not want to think, and because they make him feel superior and triumphantly “clear.” Craig is attracted to public figures who make non-thought, selfishness, and massive contempt seem powerful.

Meanwhile, whatever form one’s cynicism takes, every cynic is also ashamed, because he or she has been untrue to what Aesthetic Realism shows to be our deepest desire: to like the world through knowing it.

We Need to See What Art Does

To be against cynicism, we need to see the attractiveness of trying to know. And we need to see the difference between how a cynic deals with the ugly and how art does. In all art, there is pleasure in knowing, in trying to be exact about what things and the world are—no matter how lovely or not lovely one’s subject matter. A true artist, in seeing and showing the repellent, terrible, cruel, is seeing and showing structure, form, beauty too. This is so in Picasso’s Guernica. It’s so as Shakespeare presents the words of the murdered Hamlet dying.

Aesthetic Realism explains that the beauty we feel, hear, see in all good art is the structure of the world itself, as described by Eli Siegel in the following principle—“The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” That is so whether the subject is a flower or a slaying. Even as the artist is presenting ugliness, and having us feel it, we feel beauty too: a oneness of reality’s rest and motion, continuity and surprise, power and gentleness. I’m sorry to write so briefly here about a tremendous matter, how art deals with evil. But I’m glad to describe a little, at least, this fact: art has been the great refutation of cynicism. And Aesthetic Realism has made the logic of art learnable at last.

Here, in a moment, you can read 8 maxims by Eli Siegel very relevant to cynicism. They’re from his book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims and are, themselves, art. They are at once playful and most serious, have nuance and point, vividness and mystery.

But first, I quote a question asked by Mr. Siegel. I discussed it in issues of this journal at the start of the pandemic. It embodies the grand, utterly practical, and urgent opponent to cynicism. The answer to it is Yes.

Is this true: No matter how much of a case one has against the world—its unkindness, its disorder, its ugliness, its meaninglessness—one has to do all one can to like it, or one will weaken oneself?

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

8 Maxims by Eli Siegel

1. A pessimist is a person who finds an oyster in a pearl.

2. The victory of birth shouldn’t be changed into a drawn battle.

3. Spelling the word terrible right shows what you can be right about.

4. Her better self was a poor relative much too often.

5. We never disliked a thing in the wrong way without disliking ourselves, too.

6. A pessimist is a person who wants the half-truth, the half-truth, and nothing but the half-truth.

7. When she spoke to him insincerely, he helped.

8. Making the world less than it is, is unfair to ourselves; its magnitude is our well being.

Cynicism—Wise or Foolish?

By Jeffrey Carduner

If you’d seen me walking down the street years ago, you would have thought I looked confident, as if all were going well for me. But what I felt was very different: I was unsure of myself—and disgusted with things. “Yeah,” I’d think, “when push comes to shove, everybody’s selfish.”

Then, while still in my twenties, I had the good fortune to learn about Aesthetic Realism; and in a class early in my study, Eli Siegel asked me, “Can you be smilingly cynical?”

Jeffrey Carduner. I am, yes.

Eli Siegel. You have two moods: there’s a person who sees things with some depth; and there’s a person who’s cynical and above everything. When you see things as wrong, don’t you feel intelligent?

JC. Yes!

Mr. Siegel explained that people do associate cynicism with intelligence. He said, “If everything is wrong and you see it, aren’t you superior?”

Yes, that’s what I felt. I didn’t call it cynicism but my keen insight: the world was a mess and I was one of the few discerning persons who saw that.

I did have deeper feelings as I taught third-grade children in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. I was angry that these boys and girls had to endure poverty, and some even hunger. I wanted to be useful. Yet I’d also think, “Some are born lucky, some aren’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it!” About people who worked for economic justice—I thought, “So naïve! What suckers.”

I made no connection between how smart I thought I was in seeing everything as a big sham, and how bad I felt. Often I didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, had to take long naps in the afternoon, and looked at the future with dread.

My gratitude to Aesthetic Realism is without limit because it showed me my cynicism was really a hope that the world and people flop, so I could have contempt and feel important. “Cynicism,” said Mr. Siegel, “is a belief that evil is the real thing in the world, while good is what sometimes interrupts the strongest thing. The fakers get the palaces.” Here was a person who could describe this so trenchantly but who wasn’t a cynic himself and showed the world could be liked honestly, with clear logic!

I learned the alternative to cynicism, the purpose that makes a person really strong. It is good will. In TRO 1019 Ellen Reiss explains:

A person…becomes powerful through showing the power and beauty of reality other than himself. This strengthening of self through justice to the world is good will.

When you passionately want a person to be as good as he or she can be, you respect yourself. You’re a critic, too, of that in people for which they cannot like themselves. You feel, “I want this person to be stronger, to succeed, and I want to use my keenest thought to encourage that to happen.” Then you can look in the mirror and feel proud.

Cynicism—& Reveling in It—Begins

Every person, I learned, is in a fight, early, between our deepest desire, to respect and see meaning in people and things, and a desire to have contempt for them. When, as a boy, I visited Fort Ticonderoga and learned of how outnumbered, ill-equipped American patriots defeated the well-trained, well-armed British soldiers, I was filled with awe. I tried to envision the courage of these men in the face of such odds, and I had enormous respect. And when I read what the 21-year-old patriot Nathan Hale said just before he was hanged by the British—“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—it thrilled me.

But I remember that at age 10, another feeling was growing in me: that everyone was really out only for themselves. My family was in the electronics business, importing record turntables from England. Growing up, I heard intense, angry, worried conversations about the people from England who sometimes came to our house and had the power to “put us out of business” by not renewing our contract. As there was outward friendliness, as there were exclamations of “This Yorkshire pudding is superb!,” I felt the knives underneath.

I reveled in thinking all those adults were such hypocrites, insincere fools. In Eli Siegel’s poem “Monologue of a Five-Year-Old,” a child says:

That is what I did.

While I often saw my father worried about money, I also saw him swagger and act as if he were on top of everything—including as to women. He’d profess love for my mother, yet he acted as if women didn’t have the intellectual power to understand how the world was run. I remember bitter fights, when my mother said she wanted to get a job and my father said, “Absolutely not! No wife of mine is going to do that! I’d look like a fool!” But for company, they’d present themselves as the ideal couple.

I never asked why people were so ill at ease, why enormous amounts of liquor were consumed in our house, why the laughter became shriller and louder as the evening went on. That there was something deeper in people than they seemed to show, I wasn’t interested in seeing. For example, I had no idea then, but would later learn, that my father had loved photography, and had even set up a darkroom in our house.

My cynical thoughts made me mean and sarcastic, even cruel. I was reckless with myself—and others. Once, I urged a young woman to ski with me down a mountain in terrible conditions, and she broke her leg. I was ashamed. But increasingly I felt, “What does life come to anyway?” I felt disgusted with everything.

A New Way of Seeing

Then, I had the greatest good fortune: I began to attend classes taught by Mr. Siegel. As I heard him talk to people about their hopes and questions, I saw that people were deeper than I’d ever imagined. This included women, who, I had felt, were put on earth to keep men guessing and to pain me.

I had had everyone pegged as a phony. I’d thought that with everyone, in a pinch, self-love and self-importance would take over. But this was not true about Eli Siegel. I saw that he really wanted to know a person; he was honest, and didn’t have a hidden agenda. Through his knowledge about art, literature, science, humanity, he showed that people have possibilities I had never seen.

And I began to learn what good will is. In a class on ethics, Mr. Siegel asked me, “Do you want every person to be better, or do you hope they stagnate and are objects of your satire?” I said I didn’t know. And he explained:

The question is, which will make you important? Good will is a situation and a purpose. With good will, we hope that our bad opinion is proved false. Do you hope to like more a year from now, hope the facts will warrant it? That is good will. Ill will is getting a satisfaction in having a bad opinion.

I tested what I was learning and saw it was true. I began thinking about what people felt, and wanting to know a person—including where that person didn’t like himself or herself. I tried to encourage the best in a person. And I learned to see the deep, intellectual hopes of women, and the pain a woman had when she didn’t meet her own hopes. I came to love a woman, Devorah Tarrow; for the first time, I asked questions in order to see who this person was and also to learn from her. I am very grateful that she became my wife.

Aesthetic Realism Consultations

Grady Hatton is an executive at a non-profit that works to protect the environment. But in a consultation he told us he didn’t like his thoughts about people: he could call them “jerks” in his mind, and saw them as hypocritical. After he gave some examples, we asked whether there was any pleasure he got in seeing people that way.

“I don’t think I feel pleasure,” he answered: “I’m angry.” But when we asked whether there can be pleasure feeling we have high standards and others won’t measure up to them—Mr. Hatton said, “Oh, yeah!”

Grady Hatton. I also want things to be resolved quickly. I don’t like to linger on a situation.

Consultants. Is that a form of contempt? Is there something to know about people, about what goes on inside them? Are you at ease when you don’t know something?

GH. I’m not. I don’t like it when I’m not in control.

Consultants. Do you want to see that people have an opinion of themselves for everything they do? And also that there are causes behind how they act, which it would be good to understand?

GH. I think—not really.

Consultants. Do you feel you need your disgust?

GH. I think so.

Consultants. But does your disgust make you like yourself?

GH. No!

Consultants. So if you don’t like yourself for it, does that mean you feel it somewhere makes you weaker?

GH. Yes, that’s logical.

Consultants. What do you think would combat your cynicism?

GH. I’m not sure.

Consultants. We say it’s a steady desire to know.

Grady Hatton asked us what it would mean to think more deeply about a person. And we were very glad to tell him this:

Consultants. You want to ask, Who is this person? Does he or she have, as Aesthetic Realism explains, the structure of reality in him or her—the opposites? What are the opposites this person is trying to make sense of? Is he sure and unsure? Is she for herself and also against herself? Does this person want to make sense of pride and humility?

If you see there’s a sensible and even beautiful structure in a person—the opposites—will you be less cynical?

GH. Yes, definitely.

In a later consultation, Mr. Hatton told us, “I’m seeing that my cynicism hurts me. Now when difficult situations come up, I want to know more and have a good effect. It’s making me happier and stronger!”