Nihilism VS cynicism
What is nihilism & what is cynicism?
Like nihilism and pessimism people seem to think anything meaning to have a negative mindset is the same as nihilism when in fact most nihilists aren’t one bit negative but quite positive.
It’s true that a lot of people don’t know what a cynic is, they would just assume they’re the same as a pessimist, but what is the true meaning of a cynic? A cynic is someone who looks down on society and sees it as fake, though not because they see society as unnatural but because the cynic sees the people who make up society as fake, some may argue that a cynic sees the world for what it really is. To be cynical is to assume the worst of people, cynics only believe in their own self interest so to others a cynic appears to believe in nothing, which is why people think nihilism and cynicism are the same, but they are not.
Like pessimism, cynicism is about negativity, its more about distain than despair, a cynic wouldn’t say that life is pointless but would say that what people claim about life is pointless, cynics are not nihilists because cynics embrace rather than evade mendacity. To a cynic such a willingness to believe is a willingness to be naive, to be gullible and to be manipulated which completely goes against a cynics outlook of life so because they don’t believe in our society’s values they don’t succumb themselves to control.
The cynic is able to reveal the nihilism of others by challenging people to defend their lack of cynicism, much like how the pessimist reveals the nihilism of others by challenging people to defend their lack of pessimism. Nihilism is actually much more closely related to idealism than cynicism, this is because the cynic presents themselves as someone who cares about actions not intentions, who focuses on what people do rather than on what people hope to achieve, who remembers the failed promises of the past in order to avoid being swept up in the not yet failed promises about the future. The idealist however, rejects cynicism as hopelessly negative, as the idealist focuses more and more on how reality ought to be, the idealist becomes less and less concerned with how reality really is, some may call this delusion. It is for this reason that to use other worldly idealism to refute this worldly cynicism is to engage in nihilism.
This was my take on nihilism and cynicism, hopefully it has informed you on the differences and opened your eyes to peoples different views on society and the world. In my next blog I will be finishing my nihilism topic with a last blog about nihilism and apathy. Then I will be moving on to a different ideology.