Isn’t it cynicism (or idealism) just a survival strategy which happens because of your experiences? I know I tend to be more cynical than most of my peers but I always attributed that to growing up in poverty unlike them. Sometimes it seems a lot of people think others can apply their way of thinking or seeing the world and it will make their life instantly better. But I don’t think it can happen if they don’t live in the right context.
That is a really sad outlook to me. After decades in Enterprise IT, many in the public sector of Scandinavia you’d probably expect me to be a cynic, and if you go through my post history you’ll see very recent examples of what looks like it, but I’m actually always rather optimistic.
The healthy survival strategy in a world of shit isn’t to give up, it’s to fight on and hope for the best. It’s to come to the conclusion, that even though the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the fact that there are good intentions mean that the people actually wanted to succeed.
So while I’m very pessimistic, I’m also experienced enough to know that everyone is working for a better world.
In all my decades of working close to the political leadership and the top level decision makers, I can’t remember once meeting someone who wasn’t working for what they believed to be a better tomorrow. Maybe that’s a uniquely Danish trait, but I doubt it. What that good is, isn’t always what you or I would consider good, but my point is that even very evil decision makers are working for what they think is right.
The moment you become a cynic is the moment you lose your connection and with it, your ability to impact things. Because a manager who has the wrong view of your corporate culture, isn’t going to change unless you inspire them to be better and that applies to everyone.
Of course it’s hard to be optimistic as well. 98% or something like it of public IT system implementations fail to some extend, and if you expect them to succeed then I imagine it’ll be quite soul crushing. The key, to me at least, is to not let your pessimism turn into cynicism, because you don’t want to be the constant no-sayer either, you want to make your points and reservations clear, but then roll with the decision that gets made.
>The healthy survival strategy in a world of shit isn’t to give up, it’s to fight on and hope for the best.
The best survival strategy is to fight to improve your situation, not fight to change the world.
>The moment you become a cynic is the moment you lose your connection and with it, your ability to impact things. Because a manager who has the wrong view of your corporate culture, isn’t going to change unless you inspire them to be better and that applies to everyone.
Being realist or cynical would help you recognize the situation as it truly stands without looking at it through tainted glasses. It gives you more power, not less. Also, as a cynic, your goal won't be to inspire the manager to change, because that won't be a fight you are going to win. Your goal as a cynic would be to put yourself in a better position in that company.
As a cynic, I didn't try to fight the way things are laid in the company. The moment I found a position which seemed reasonably better at another company, I gave my resignation.
> The best survival strategy is to fight to improve your situation, not fight to change the world.
Individually, this is probably so. Collectively, it leads to the world becoming more and more shitty, year after year. It's a trap, and no one has figured out a way out.
> Being realist or cynical would help you recognize the situation as it truly stands without looking at it through tainted glasses.
I couldn’t disagree more. To me that is the lie that cynics fool themselves into believing is true.
I have no issue with the Socratic methodology, but the point of it is not to break the systems apart for the sake of finding flaws. It is to break them apart so that they can be reassembled better.
It’s that last part the modern cult of cynics forget too often in my experience. You’re not useful if all you can do is predict the doom and then say “I told you so” when you are proven right. Predicting where things will go wrong is easy, optimists do it as well, what sets them appear is that they try to move past their mistakes and learn for them.
To me no one is either an optimist or a cynic, labelling yourself as being only one is just too limiting, but in my anecdotal experience the people most likely to “make themselves” into just one category are the self-proclaimed realists.
Maybe my experience and opinions are wrong, but I have never come across such an individual who benefitted from their world view. At least no in the privileged world of Scandinavian software.
> In all my decades of working close to the political leadership and the top level decision makers, I can’t remember once meeting someone who wasn’t working for what they believed to be a better tomorrow.
The cynic in me thinks that people who tend to rub shoulders with The Powerful tend to (for the most part) see them as well-intentioned (although perhaps flawed) people rather than to be critical of them. Because it’s better for your own self to have friends in high places than to truly look at what they do with dispassionate eyes.
I don’t even need to get into how The Powerful are viewed by most people (who are more of at a distance) who don’t have such incentives.
I think it comes from the magic being dispelled. They are just ordinary people and they’re almost never well equipped to fill their functions in any meaningful way because of the complexity of the decisions they make.
There is a part of it about friendship, but it’s more because the world stops being black and white at those levels. Two politicians who come from the opposite sides will have more in common with each other than they will with any of the people who vote for them so it’s only natural that they remain faintly friendly with each other. They have to work together after all, as most things come down to compromises.
I think you attribute a causality where none necessarily exists. Some of "The Powerful" are indeed absolute bastards "always looking out for n.1", but a lot of them are sincere in their motives - it's just that they often happen to be ideologically misguided or forced into backfiring compromises by circumstances or greater powers.
Arguably, the most visible ones are often very sincere - because otherwise they couldn't sustain the drive necessary to reach certain heights.
A good friend of mine is a very senior civil servant in Ireland, and he says similar - most politicians are smart people sincerely trying to make the world a better place. I believe him. What's the alternative? Believing that all the world's problems would be fixed if only someone good-hearted would attempt to solve them?
Conversely, Ireland is also a major centre of global tax avoidance and civil servants are helping mega-corporations avoid European privacy legislation.
I might be wrong but it seems to me you're mixing cynicism and pessimism. With cynicism you distrust other intentions, but you can still fight to improve your situation or the situation of others.
The cynicism we see is a product more of the boredom of an upbringing in white suburban affluence. Some peoples’ lives in the past half-century were devoid of the struggles of other times and places. Lacking any contrast for anchoring, that homogeneity is interpreted as “everything is terrible” rather than “everything is fine”. Throw in a bit of aimless masculinity or status anxiety, and people start believing a bit of paintball-but-with-real-guns could fill that craving that’s been bothering them.
Others express their total disdain of even the concept of trust by jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon, or by believing TOR can do more for them than robust civil rights legislation. It’s all just aspects of the same sentiment, which is why there’s so much overlap.
I can see how cynicism is a valid strategy in certain contexts, but both you and author don't live in that situation anymore and a different strategy might be optimal in the respective contexts.
I guess the main thing here is to become aware through inspection of your current strategy and evaluate if it needs to be adjusted.
