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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this patreon.com philosophizesthis philosophical writing on substack. Philosophizethis on there as well. Been writing totally new to the point philosophy articles on topics I think really matter on there. About to post a second one here in a couple days. Thanks for supporting if that's something you're interested in reading. But either way, I hope you love the show today. So if you've been a fan of philosophy for a while now, maybe at some point you've heard the stories about a guy named Diogenes who used to live in a tub on the streets of ancient Greece. Maybe you've even heard the stories of all the wacky stuff he used to get caught up in over the years. Like the time Alexander the Great came to town and when he asked specifically to meet Diogenes in the street, and he asked him if there was anything he could do for him, as the most powerful person in the world at the time, Diogenes says to him, yeah, there is one thing you could do for me. Can you move about four feet to your left? You're a block in the sun for my sunbathing right now. Maybe you've heard the story of the time that he plucked a chicken and then he held it up to the faces of Plato and all the rest of the philosophers in the academy just to show them how wrong they were about their definition of a human being is. Maybe you've even heard the stories of his, let's call it public self flagellation, because he was a bad Diogenes that day, apparently. My point is, no doubt you've heard about this guy that had a pretty bizarre form of protest towards the world, someone part of one of the four big schools of Hellenistic thought. There was, of course, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism. And Diogenes was the prime example of someone in the school of cynicism. Now, cynicism at the time was something centered around a rejection of social norms and meaning, the kind of things that otherwise guide most people as they go about their everyday life. The cynics might ask, are these things that are holding people back in important ways? But this definition of cynicism would not be a very good one if you wanted to describe what we usually mean when we talk about a cynic in today's world, what you might call a modern cynic, the kind of cynic your uncle is, the kind of cynic that looks out at a world they see as corrupt and totally broken. And then for any number of reasons, say it's pointless to even try to change anything about how horrible they think it all is. Well, there's a good reason why this attitude is something we see during this time we're living in, in particular, and there's good reasons why this wasn't such a common attitude during the time of Diogenes. In fact, by the end of all this, the example of Diogenes is going to show us a lot of what's missing from this modern form of thinking about it. By the end of this episode, we're going to have talked about a couple different things here. One, the reasons why the modern cynic is not at all crazy. How they're actually right about certain realities of the world we live in. The reason that cynicism like this becomes a pretty insidious trap that in practice, a lot of people never find a way out of. We'll talk about the greater effects of widespread cynicism when it begins to infect things like our language and our institutions. We'll talk about how cynicism can exhaust a society in ways that lead to things like fascism, with the Weimar Republic in Germany being a very clear example of this in the recent past. All of this laid out through one of the gold standards when it comes to this whole line of conversation going to be going through Peter Slaughterdike's book Critique of Cynical Reason. And I think cynicism during our time is something far more than just your cynical uncle that thinks he's got the whole world figured out. Modern cynicism has become the primary mode of operation for our world in ways that are difficult to see if it's the only thing you've ever known. Let's get into it, though, out of respect to your time. See, most of us in the modern world exist on something like a spectrum of cynicism. Everyone's a little cynical every once in a while. And before we get into some of the less obvious forms it can take, it's definitely useful to look at the version of a cynic that you might run into on any given day. It's a person whose whole ethos when it comes to world events, government, corporate, world, love, relationships, whatever it is. Their whole approach can be summed up by the mantra that they love to repeat to themselves, that things are really messed up out there. But hey, what can you really do about it? That's just the way the world is. Again, starting with the most visible example here, because it's kind of fun too. It's very possible in today's world. Slaughter Dike thinks that run into someone who uses cynicism as a kind of psychological defense mechanism in their own life. The idea is, I've looked out at the world around me, and unlike all these other people, I see through how compromised everything truly is. Once again. Government's corrupted by power, corporations are greedy, doesn't really matter what the specific theory is. The point for the modern cynic is that the problems we're dealing with are so massive and the system to even potentially fix them is so broken, that any of these morons out there that are still trying to do things to make the world a better place, they're either uneducated about how bad it really is, naive about the impact their personal efforts can actually bring about. Mainly, though, the big crime of most people in the eyes of a cynic, is that they just aren't ready to be as realistic as I'm being, that this is the way the world really works. It's in this way that cynicism in someone often pretends on the surface like it's a kind of maturity, like I'm the one willing to be the adult in the room or while the rest of you go around and cosplay, like you're actually going to change something. But for Slaughterdyke, this is far from being the mature, well thought out way of seeing the world that they think it is. And the reality is what this take is really good at doing. The true reason the Senate continues to live in this place is because it often becomes a way that someone can feel intellectually superior to everyone else around them without having to do the work of continuing to critique their own positions. They get to live their life every day, rejecting the whole system as a lie. Most mock anyone who still approaches life in a sincere way about it. And then the real modern cynical move he thinks that's different than how Diogenes lived, is that after doing all this, they get to wake up the next day and still go back to work and participate, benefiting from the whole thing they think is broken and not feel utterly ridiculous while they're doing it. So to be clear here, for Slaughterdyke, a modern cynic's far from someone who's just nihilistic. After all, they still live their life based on values that they call a kind of realism, where apparently there's no alternative way for them to be living. And being a cynic isn't just simply being a pessimist for him, because pessimism is just a negative expectation about where things are headed. No, the modern cynics doing something far more specific here, they take that negative view of where things are going, then they turn it into a survival strategy, then they use it to justify functioning inside the world they claim to see through. And then they call the whole thing, they're doing their maturity like they're the smartest person in the room for noticing what's wrong and like any hope about the world is naive. In other words, cynicism allows for someone to feel like they're a morally serious person when if you just look at their actions, they're really doing next to nothing. They're just describing what the problems in the world are. And as Slaughterdike puts it, these are people that are usually pretty well off in life, but they're miserable. And they may be right in a sense that there's a lot of things that are messed up out there, but these become people whose legitimate knowledge about how bad the system is gets turned into the very thing that keeps them assisting it and reproducing it in the world every day. Real quick though, for whatever it's worth here, this isn't how earlier versions of ideology critique expected this whole situation to go down. I mean, it's a fair question. Why is this attitude so common to come across in the 20th and 21st centuries in particular? See, throughout history, people have always lived in messed up situations. And for a lot of thinkers, the hope over the centuries has been that if we can just find a way to educate people about it, you know, if we can show them the corruption, expose the illusion that they're living in every day, well, once they have that knowledge, they'd have no choice at that point but to find a way to stop living in the illusion. Thinking is you show people how the institution actually works and the truth will have to spark some kind of liberation from it, maybe even a revolution in the eyes of some of the more optimistic thinkers here. But Slaughter Deck makes the point that this is not the problem we're dealing with anymore. That this particular reaction of modern cynicism that we're talking about shows us a brand new modulation of ideology that we never knew existed until very recently. It's the rise of the person in the modern world who knows they're living inside a lie, feels the contradiction firsthand, and then still finds a way to keep living inside of it every day. And for whatever it's worth, this will be the same general move we're going to see when cynicism exists at other scales of reality, like when it becomes embedded at the level of institutions. We'll talk about that in a minute. But this is why. Modern cynicism, he thinks, is something that could be best understood as both a great success of the Enlightenment and a failure of the Enlightenment going on at the exact same time. It's a success because modern people have learned how to see through things better than ever before. We've never lived in a time where more people have had access to strong critiques of the institutions they're living in. And even beyond institutions, a lot of the old ideals people used to live by just don't hold up in the same way they used to, either. Religion, power, morality, the self, even the very concept of the truth. Slaughterdike says the Enlightenment's given us a world where an educated person understands, understands how shaky the foundations of these things really are. And the cynic becomes somebody that's certainly educated to an extent. They know the critiques that unmask, as he says, all the different ideals of the modern world. And the problem, he thinks, is they do that just enough to see through pieces of them. But then they get stuck in a place where they don't keep applying that same level of critique to the lie that they're living in every day, that they're completely powerless, with nothing they can possibly do to affect the world. He says. Because of this, the best way to describe what modern cynicism actually is is that it's, quote, enlightened false consciousness. Again, it's a modulation of ideology for him, Meaning, if ideology is something that makes the world seem more stable and obvious than it really is, if it simplifies the true complexity of things, then these are people that critique some of those ideological structures. They're fine critiquing ideology at the level of government or corporations, for example, but then after critiquing them, they understandably feel a bit disillusioned. And then the place they decide to settle in their thinking is to turn their new vision of what the world is back into something far more static than it actually is. A world where this is just the way the world works, always going to be that way. Nothing you can really do about it. Again, a modulation of ideology, not an escape from it. So cynicism in practice becomes a convenient rest stop in a person's education when where someone can criticize everything and everyone else around them with impunity, like they're on the high school debate team, but they never have to critique themselves anymore. And for Slaughterdike, this becomes the image of how most modern Conversations break down and never end up leading to real change, he's saying. Notice how conversation itself now in the modern world, starts to resemble the same internal logic of the individual cynic we've been talking about so far. For example, like the cynic, a liberal may go into a conversation with a Marxist, and the Marxist already knows what the liberal's going to say, and the liberal already knows what the Marxist is going to say. If a militaristic person argues with a pacifist, same sort of thing. Everybody already has an explanation for why the other side of the conversation will never understand what they know. And like the cynic, the whole game continues to go on. People still have conversations under the pretense that something will come out of them, but nobody's ever really changed by them because they don't really believe in the premise of it all anymore. For Slaughterdyke, then, criticism itself has become something that's captured by cynicism. People approach the other side of a big conversation the same way that a repairman approaches a broken cable box, where I already know not only that you're broken in some way, but I can now diagnose you, and I know all the hidden mechanics of the world that produce a person like you. So then, once criticism becomes a way of diagnosing everybody else from a safe distance like this, conveniently, the one person it never asked to explain is the cynic themselves. This is why a lot of the time you find cynicism in people at this really visible level. It's often people that have been hurt in the past. To Slaughterdyke, a modern cynic is really something like a disappointed optimist. They used to believe that changing the world for the better was possible, but then they were likely hit by something, some event that frustrated them about how it's more complicated than they first thought. And then, in a crying attempt to not have to feel that disappointment ever again, they throw their hands up and make the claim that all change is impossible. And anyone who doesn't see that is just an idiot or a child slaughterdeck would say, though, that this likely says a lot more about their own personal fears than it does anything about what's possible when it comes to change in the world. I mean, things do change historically, and it often comes from small changes made at a very diffuse level. And the scary thing is, if someone was ever caught in this trap and didn't know about it, their situation is made even more difficult by all the benefits they get from staying in this place. For example, consider how comfortable a Cynic can feel every day when it comes to their worldview. And it's a level of comfort that most people don't have the luxury of feeling if they want to keep growing in their understanding of things. I mean, if you're a modern cynic, somebody brings up some problem that's going on in the world and you get to effectively win the whole conversation with anyone without really offering up anything of substance. You can always just say something like, yeah, well, that's capitalism, or yep, both sides are bought and paid for. What? You're just hearing about all this for the first time. In other words, at the most extreme end of this, there is nothing that anyone can ever tell you about the world. No further piece of information that would motivate you to change the way you act about anything. Because as Slaughterdike says, the cynical viewpoint comes preloaded with its own defense against being changed by anything that it learns. If someone says, hey, that company over there is lying to people, the cynic says back to them. Yeah, obviously they are. Someone says, look at how this person screwed me over the other day. Cynic says, right, yeah, people are inherently selfish. That's just how people are. Someone says, look, look, you're participating in the very system that you claim to hate, Mr. Cynic. The Cynic says back to them, yeah, welcome to adulthood. Nice that you finally arrived. Again, any further critique just gets absorbed before it can change anything about them. More than that though, when you never have to be morally accountable either, again, because your whole worldview is centered around this idea that you're just doing what you have to do to survive in a messed up world, well then, wallowing in cynicism like this gives you a pre figured answer to any moral dilemma you might potentially face too. And this allows for the cynic to feel brave while they're actually just avoiding risk all day. It allows them to sound like they're a bold person to other people just because they're willing to say harsh things about the world. It allows the cynic to sit around and watch videos or to read stuff that critiques the world even further. And from their own cynical perspective, this all just gets to be pure entertainment for them. They, they get to laugh at how bad the corruption has gotten, feel smarter than everyone else for knowing about it, but then they continue on in their life completely unchanged. Because again, I already know how bad everything is. None of this stuff is new to me here. He calls us in the book a kind of quote enlightened prevention of enlightenment. The important thing at this point to recognize then, for Slaughterdike is that this is an attitude people tend to fall into in the modern world because ultimately this is something that helps them survive in the modern world. See, the cynic isn't simply a bad person to slaughter Dyke. It's not that simple. They're often a person that for one of several reasons, lacks an ability to see alternative ways to live, and then usually is using this whole strategy to navigate conditions in the world that are truly damaged. I mean, that's the thing, you know. Taking a break for a second from pointing out all the mistakes of modern cynicism, it's worth noting. It's not like the cynics are just pulling this whole worldview out of their proverbial keisters. The problems the average person has to have thoughts about today are just of a different magnitude than most problems people have had to deal with in the past. The example he gives when he writes the book in 1983 is of the reality of the nuclear bomb. Modern people, he says, have to find a way to keep on living when they face something like the threat of nuclear weapons every day. A threat that one could have worldwide consequences in an instant. Two, it could happen at any moment with no warning ahead of time. Three, it's not like this is something that's an easy enemy for you to take action against if you wanted to. And in fact, fighting against this kind of problem requires coordination at a level that a single person could never do themselves. And his point is this is the scale of problem we sometimes have to face these days, from climate change, bioterrorism, mass surveillance. I mean, take your pick of any number of modern problems like this, and it's at least understandable why a single person would gravitate towards feeling a little helpless about ever having an effect on them. But see, the nuclear bomb matters for Slaughterdijk, not only because it's a big problem, it also matters to him because it shows the cynical logic of modern life and something like its ultimate form. He says, think about it. Everyone knows the whole arrangement that's going on is absolutely insane. Everybody knows this is likely leading to our own self destruction, and yet everybody who's making these nuclear weapons would say that not participating in it is hardly even a real option to consider, much like the modern cynic and their ongoing participation in society. And for him, this becomes a great example of enlightened false consciousness going on at the scale of civilization. And just so we don't got to interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today, this episode sponsored by NordVPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It's a service that helps protect your Internet connection by encrypting your Internet traffic and it makes your time online more secure as a result of it. NordVPN, the fastest VPN in the world, can help protect your private information like passwords, banking details, and it even helps shield your activity from being monitored by hackers or your Internet service provider. 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There's no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box. Last but not least, today is sponsored by Coveron. Coveron is identity and financial protection for people who live a lot of their lives online. Every day. Personal information can show up in data breaches, old accounts you have. There's also the reality that with generative AI becoming better scams, start looking more convincing to people than they used to be. Coveron is a service that monitors for your exposed personal information. Then if it finds any, it alerts you when it sees suspicious activity across your accounts. And for whatever it's worth, that's the reason I like it. I got so many accounts with many different 20 digit passwords. It's just, it's just nice to have something that's watching them so I don't personally have to log into them and check them as often. And look, in the event that something does happen to one of your accounts, Cover on gives you recovery support as well. It's always from real people who, in case something happens, help guide you through all the smart next steps to take. They do this all the time. It also includes coverage for any losses you might experience, including up to $1 million for identity theft, recovery costs, up to $10,000 for scams or online fraud, and up to $50,000 for cyber extortion or threats that are leveraged against you anyway. One scam can cost you everything. Use code philosophizethis for up to 76% off@coveron.com philosophizesthis these details can be found in the Episode description box. That's C-O-V-E-R-O-N.com philosophizesthis and now back to the podcast. How about another reason though? The cynics, far from crazy. The fact they're absolutely right when they notice that modern institutions do in fact go against the ideals they claim to live by on the surface, and that this can very quickly appear like the whole operations a complete lie. To use an example from the book. How about the military? The military may tell people on their commercials and their commemorative bumper stickers that they do everything they do every day in the name of honor and defense of the innocent and courage for standing up for what's right. But if you just looked at the behavior of most modern militaries, I'll speak for the United States here because it keeps us easy. Is this really a group of people that are striving for ideals like this every day? Like, is that the best way to describe what they do? And to be fair, there's tons of people in the military that do think about their service that way, no doubt. But Slaughterdi thinks the institution itself in the modern world has become captured by something far more cynical, where it's not about honor really anymore. It's much more driven by a kind of survival oriented realism where look, may not be honor we're doing, but we still got to protect ourselves in this world, right? The world's a dangerous place and we got to survive. Which means that sometimes we got to act in our own strategic interest. We got to secure the budget for future operations. Sometimes we got to attack here in this place, so it serves as a kind of deterrent for our enemies elsewhere. And the point here for Slots Slaughterdeck is to notice how this is also doing something very similar to the individual cynic in their personal life as well. The institution continues to function on the surface like the ideals behind it are true, but in practice it becomes something entirely different and it keeps participating in this lie every day, benefiting from the illusion that other people believe about it. And for Slaughterdike, this applies to all sorts of things we have in the modern world, from medicine to the justice system, sexuality, journalism. Everything has at one level, an ideal that supposedly drives it, but then it continues to actually operate in the world with a cynicism that keeps the compromised version of it going. So what he's saying is when a cynic hears the official language that these institutions peddle to people every day, and then they open their eyes and notice that the way it's really functioning is something totally different than what they say it is, he thinks the cynic's not crazy for sensing that there's something pretty fake about all this. In fact, he thinks some institutions in the modern world have become so captured by cynicism that he introduces an important concept in the book to be able to explain it, that he calls master cynicism. It's essentially the cynicism of the individual, but it's being administered at the level of the leadership positions across the world. He compares it to the famous Grand Inquisitor from the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Shout out to the episode we did on it where, if you don't remember, the Grand Inquisitor in Ivan's story in the book was a religious leader who was in charge of how the word of God was going to be delivered to people. And when he makes an assessment of what the best way is he could do that, he decides that even though he knows the truth of Christianity, he decides that ordinary people can't possibly handle the level of freedom offered to them by someone like Jesus, Lord of the tap dancing. And so at that point, the institution takes over for people. The church decides that they're going to manage people's experience through stories of miracles and illusions. The whole point being I know better than the people do about what version of the world is best for them. The comparison Slaughterdike's making here is that modern institutions, when they don't live up to these ideals that they claim are what they're all about, sometimes that's something that's done on purpose, that there's a master cynicism that's driven by this idea that ordinary people need an illusion to be able to function, and that what I am as somebody that's a leader in this institution, is somebody that's at least mature enough or realistic enough to be able to give it to them. And I guess it's important to recognize here that for Slaughterdike cynicism mostly goes on in the modern world at levels that are not as obvious as the sort of cartoon of a cynic that we've been talking about so far. Cynicism becomes, for him, even for otherwise sincere people, one of the most basic modes of operation that's even available for modern people. Fact is, most people, most everyone listening to this has at least pockets of their life where they survive in it by adopting a version of modern cynicism. Think of the doctor that knows the mission statement of the hospital she works at isn't actually how everyone's operating there, but she keeps showing up every day because she feels like there's no alternative. Or the person that stays in the relationship that they know isn't really about the love it's supposedly based on, but they keep on going anyway. Or the technician that builds something, some piece of technology for a job they have when they know this thing they're building is probably going to go on to be used to manipulate or control people in the future. See, it'd be a mistake to think of any of these as bad people overall, simply because they survive in a pocket of their life with a cynical attitude. And this is a good moment to reiterate one of those key points Slaughterdike wants to make in this book. That a messed up system doesn't require naive false consciousness for it to be able to continue operating anymore. Tons of modern people know the official story they're being told every day is a lie. They know institutions are selfish, that media is manipulating them, whatever the example is. And understanding the modern world we live in is to understand this move that's being done where someone can be totally aware of the bad stuff going on and not be driven to change their actions in the slightest bit. But somebody could say back to all this, how exactly am I supposed to be changing my behavior anyway? What are all these alternatives Slaughterdike's been talking about that supposedly are available to people that know how messed up the world is? Well, this is the point in the episode where we circle back to that sunbathing, chicken plucking, self flagellating guy named Diogenes, where his version of cynicism can't help but to reveal many of the mistakes of this more modern version of rejecting society. And the reason Diogenes is going to be such a great counterexample here is because one of the big problems with modern cynicism that Slaughterdyke spends a bunch of time on in the book is that Enlightenment style critique of modern institutions has become something that's pretty cold and distant, all things considered. Like the picture of the modern cynic is somebody sitting in a nice comfy chair at home. They're asked about something, and in a cool, rational way, they dismantle whatever it is they're asked about from a distance. Distance. At which point the entire conversation they had just sort of evaporates. And once again they fall asleep in that comfy chair. So they can make sure they get a good night's sleep to wake up and go to work the next day. Diogenes is going to be much closer to the opposite of this. See, he didn't keep going along passively in a system that he thought was toxic to people. No, again, he lived in a tub, in a sense, playing his own game within the game. And it was a lifestyle that, simply by embodying a totally different way of living, it exposed the absurdity that everyone else is living in without even considering it. Take even the couple stories we began the episode with today. You know, instead of sitting around arguing with people about the ridiculous nature of power, when someone like Alexander the Great comes to town, when he offers Diogenes anything he could possibly desire in this whole wide world, Diogenes just models a totally different way of viewing power, where it makes the person participating in the set of assumptions like it's real, notice the absurdity of what they're doing. It is a lived, embodied form of protest he's using when Plato and the rest of the philosophers in the room are discussing what a human being is. And in the moment they feel pretty satisfied with the idea that it's a bipedal, featherless animal. That's what a person is. Instead of going up to the podium and rationally breaking down all the wrong assumptions that they're making there, he just plucks a chicken, holds it up and says, hey, guys, look, it's a person. See, ancient cynicism, the kind that Diogenes was an example of, it always had at its core, a kind of positive ethics as well. They were all about self sufficiency, fearlessness, saying what you mean in the moment. It was about reflecting on life and really distinguishing between genuine needs you have versus ones that are just manufactured by society. There's also a shamelessness that goes along with ancient cynicism, where you refuse to let other people dictate what you do with normal bodily stuff. And once you're someone that's living like this, how impressive to someone is having unlimited power like your Alexander the Great? If the only thing that Someone desires in a moment is sunlight really forces you to think about the nature of power, which was his entire point. And you'll notice that an important piece of the kind of protest that Diogenes used was humor. He wanted to get people laughing about stuff because the thinking was sure, one way you can show how messed up something is is to rationally take it down from a distance, like the person in the comfy chair from before. But it's very cold way to take it down, you might say, because it lives and dies in the world of critique. But there's a warmth, Slaughterdike thinks, when criticism returns to something that's being lived by the body, where you're laughing at the thing that's broken while you're immersed in it, not needing to take the thing so seriously anymore. And I think a common place that people like to go when they hear this is to think, oh well, if we're looking for a modern day Diogenes, then look no further than the people that get us to laugh about the absurdity built into things. In other words, look no further than all the stand up comedians out there. But I think Slaughterdike might say to be careful when you make that sort of assumption. Simply making jokes about the world is not going to be enough for him here. In fact, in some cases, a comedian could be doing the exact opposite when they make jokes about stuff. And this is yet another example of how cynicism can start to infect the way we communicate with each other, where it becomes part of the language that we use. Consider the fact that it's entirely possible and even common in the modern world for someone to make a joke that isn't really trying to change anything. It's just trying to placate the people who find themselves in a broken situation. You know, imagine someone who's working 80 hours a week during the holidays, that they look tired at work. So someone asks them how they're doing and they say back, hey, you know, I'm just enjoying all these policies this company has against overtime. Really glad they're protecting me from myself here. Wouldn't want to be overworked or anything. See, a joke can just as easily be the thing that gets people commiserating about how messed up things are. The whole goal being so that they can talk about it, process it, and then continue on participating like it never happened. So this becomes important. When you're looking at someone like a stand up comedian, you gotta look at their act and ask whether they're someone that's truly living in Opposition to the absurdity, like a Diogenes? Or are they more like just a modern cynic making jokes about it, cashing a check at the end of the week and then continuing on in the world, changing nothing? It becomes important to pay attention to the relationship between the comedian and and the audience that's receiving them. So, some basic questions to ask as a bit of a cynicism test here. Does the joke that's being told by the comedian truly expose them to some kind of risk they're taking, like Diogenes insulting Alexander the Great? Or are they just pretending like they're being risky? Does the joke really change the relationship between the audience and something they see as an authority? Or is it just the comedian agreeing with the audience, who agrees with the comedian, who agrees with the audience, and we're all just sort of sitting around basking in how smart we are for noticing what's wrong in the world? Does a comedian actually offer up some sort of lived alternative, like an ancient cynic? Or are they just up on stage ranting about how bad things are? Once again, it's not enough to just make jokes about things. For Slaughterdike, jokes become a type of language that can become hijacked by cynicism as well. Now, it needs to be said up front. Nowhere in this book does Slaughterdike present to people some obvious path to follow to make your approach to things less cynical. You know, five rules for opposing the world. In a way that's actually how you should be living. He doesn't think that's possible. And for whatever it's worth, he does not think that the solution to all of this is to try to restore people's faith in the ideals that they now see through. He doesn't think that's possible either. As he says, enlightenment is irreversible. We shouldn't be trying to go backwards to fix the problems of right now. The thing he does offer us, though, is Diogenes as an example of a totally different mode of being that remains highly critical of society. But it's more centered around allowing all the critique about things that you're deeply aware of to actually have an impact on you in a way that's embodied at the level of your life. And what that will look like is not just merely knowing that pieces of the world we live in are fake. It's not just going to be describing the contradiction. It's likely going to involve you changing something about yourself at the level of what you need every day, which then changes how easy you are to buy as a person, which then hopefully will change what parts of the world you're willing to be insolent towards and laugh at. And that if you're willing to make small changes where, look, maybe you don't blow up your whole life, but if you take a chance to refuse to do something in a funny way that points out the absurdity of it all, then that's at least a step in an alternative direction where your knowledge of how bad things are actually becomes something that you're living out. In other words, it becomes a more active, life affirming form of cynicism, rather than just sitting in an armchair pretending to be completely powerless. Which brings us to the sort of culmination of all the arguments in this book, Slaughterdijk, showcasing the Weimar Republic as an example of what we're talking about, which for anyone unaware was the name of the society that existed in Germany during the interwar years between World War I and World War II. And Solderdeck makes the claim that a society that's in a chaotic situation like this became something like a modern laboratory. Were tons of different cynical forces fused together into something that's become much more familiar to us towards the end of the 20th century, yet a country that had just gotten out of a horrible war, they were surrounded by mass death on a scale that had never really been processed by the people. You had a republic that existed on paper, a democracy, but in practice it was one that many of the people participating in it never really believed in. You had failed revolution, political parties that were all criticizing each other, calling everyone else a complete, complete fraud. And you had sort of brewing underneath all of this a desire for somebody, anybody, that could finally cut through the whole experiment that clearly wasn't working very well. For the last time in the episode, I just want to pause here for a moment and notice how this collective attitude going on at the level of society has very clear parallels to when the cynicism goes on in the mind of an individual person. He called this whole political climate in the book a quote republic, as if, end quote, where people live every day in a republic that supposedly is driven by the ideal of democracy, but the people living in it act as if they support it, while actually they're just waiting around for something else to come along. And the point of all of this is something that any real fan of philosophy needs to take very seriously. He says philosophy often operates at a level where it tries to make ideas better, but it always tries to begin from a place where it's critiquing Coherent, well thought out ideas that are usually produced in good faith. And he says what happens when something like fascism comes along, though, is that it's not something that's even trying to be a coherent worldview. Fascism's much more of a strategy that's trying to capture people's emotions more than anything, meaning it doesn't need real principles at the base of it. It's just about giving people a target for their anger, then a story about why everything feels broken to them, and then it gives them permission to act on all the feelings they're having that they've been carrying around for quite some time. And this point is because. Because of that, it's very easy for philosophy to look at examples of fascism and not really take it seriously in the moment. Someone can think that they're not even going to take the time to dignify an obvious appeal to emotion like this with a serious argument against it. It's not worth it. That is, Slaughterdyke thinks, until the strategy works and fascism becomes the reality that you're living in. The point is that if it were just people who didn't know what was really going on that were impacting the world, then the big problem would be to try to find a way to educate them. But in this new world, where people are well aware of what they're doing and still cynically go along with it anyway, in this new world, an ideology can be completely ridiculous and still be politically devastating at the exact same time, even when many of the people see through it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Patreon Substack thank you for everything. And that includes thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.