Just about every human being, from Plato to the television pundit, has a 50/50 chance of being right (or wrong if you’re the cynic). Communities, societies, civilizations, all have been perfectly capable, however good intentioned, of aggregating the most immoral, nonsensical, and absurd ideas known to history. Simply having a mass of people has never, alone, been able to protect against horrible philosophies or ideologies. A group of people is a group of people, our strengths and faults are not muted in larger quantities, but multiplied.
Thus enter our three critics, each as necessary as a president or a secretary, each ones importance rising or falling in relation to the amount of bullshit in what they are criticising, each usually completely dismissed and disregarded as a skeptic, a contrarian, or a cynic. We tend to often use these as synonyms, but having been accused of being all three, though still not sure which one I truly am, I feel I say that each is entirely it’s own occupation and school or philosophy.
The Skeptic - Obviously the skeptic’s first and foremost concern is doubt. They doubt everything, regardless of whose idea it is or what authority does or does not support it. Skepticism, though quite necessary, has lately produced ‘doubt’ as a weapon, injecting it indiscriminately into science, politics, and every other aspect of life. This would okay if some things weren’t just true: The world is billions of years old, Torture is immoral, Steroids are ruining sports. Because of these contemporary problems, I tend to have the least respect for the skeptic because, as it turns out, when nothing is true, everything is true.
The Contrarian - The contrarian’s dissent is not per se based on the argument or idea itself, but based solely on the authority behind it. Where the skeptic will doubt the concepts of one man or a group of men, the contrarian is only concerned with the group. This could his country, his town, or his dinner party, either way their goal is to be the constant minority view. They accept that they may be wrong, but since their opinons are only shared by a few, they say ‘If I’m wrong, my idea didn’t change anything for the worse, if your wrong I can still sleep at night having not contributed to a bad idea’. I like the contrarian much more than the skeptic, though he can get tiring.
The Cynic - Whereas the first two were judging ‘right or wrong’, the cynic doesn’t care about either. Nothing is ever right. He finds the skeptic and the contraries as ridiculous as the demagogue and the idealist. My view on the skeptic should also make me dislike the cynic and yet I can’t help but appreciate his position. His disagreement is not with our idea, but with our sense of our own rightness. Just as anyone can fall victim to being wrong, anyone can also encounter a cynic; whether or not we choose to grow from this experience is up to us, but that doesn’t make him any less valuable.
Which one are you? Or, which one would you kill first?
Have you considered Subscribing to all of this madness?
I’d have to say I’m something of a chimera of the three - I doubt claims which go against life experience, I oppose authority in general unless it is earned and I generally raise an eyebrow of rebellion/consternation whenever anyone claims to know the right way to go about with anything at all.
@steven Obviously, such a view is the healthiest of all–perhaps after adding a sprinkling of ‘the optimist’, but nowadays: fuck that guy!
Optimists are a bit of an aberration, never quite learning from their mistakes; they continually raise their expectations to unrealistic levels and disappointment naturally follows. Every time.