The Return of Cynicism

Regarding Our New Herculean Temple

Perhaps the ancient Cynic school should have a representative today. With a million and one expositions on Stoicism floating around, it seems strange to me that Cynicism doesn’t have much modern serious representation.

The cynic school is mostly in modern discourses for two reasons today. Let’s start with the reason which isn’t Diogenes being a hilarious ancient meme: Cynicism is directly precursor to Stoicism. Zeno, the first stoic, was taught by the Cynics. The dismissal of society as containing enough semblance or simulation to warrant not an alignment or harmonizing, but a specific antithetical force, was the mode of cynicism. The Cynic school was the school which purged Athens of the political elites who prosecuted Socrates and thus were a candidate for the most important school at the time, even though they were contemporaries with Plato.

So, this is the first and most important feature of the capital C Cynic School. Secondly, Diogenes, who lived in a barrel, practiced public sex as well as humility through living without luxury, is the modern representative of Cynicism, and he isn’t taken very seriously, despite many having sympathy with his rhetorical flourishes against Plato or Alexander the Great. I won’t speak too much of Diogenes here because this is exactly not the reason nor vector that I think people should know about Cynicism, it is what people already know.

It has recently dawned on me that despite my efforts for philosophical collaborators, a strange thing has happened. The two people who seem to be taking me seriously are conservative or conservative-socialist leaning body building coaches. Firstly GLO, a body building world traveling life coach who started red pill blogs and a Donald Trump blog, and secondly, Benoit LaPierre, currently building his own mansion patch in Sierra Leone.

I am not a body builder, although I do workout three times a week! I don’t support Donald Trump, nor do I like redpill masculine pickup tactics. Nonetheless, if this is who is listening to me, there must be a reason. I believe the deeper reason is a sort of new cynicism, a rejection rather than harmonization of social norms, and a building of personal strength and understanding being central to the role of philosophy.

The projects of the current masculinity bodybuilder types, types which I am not, strikes me as remarkably similar to the ancient Cynic type who rejects society and builds personal strength. Nonetheless, a demand for a psychology and philosophy which inline with this tendency seems to be coming up, and the shape of that philosophy must not be a joke.

The Stoics taught from a Stoa, an ancient, sobering porch, painted colorfully, maybe as a reference to joy and harmony which Stoicism promises. The Cynics taught from a temple to Hercules. The internet is now the new temple to Hercules, and so this tendency of building personal strength and ascribing to society not just harmonizing principles, but the character of simulacra or semblance should be made explicit.

When I was called a “Zionist Misanthrope” I found it quite amusing, but I disagreed with it. Nonetheless, there was some power in the name that appealed to me. Who is rejecting my philosophy today? Those who appeal to empathy in order to facilitate the degradation of standards and personal reason seem to be my philosophical interlocutors. Very well then, the new school of Cynicism must arrive, informed by dialectics and psychoanalysis, we will ascribe what is semblance to be rejected, and what are the tendencies one should align with!

While I do not agree fully with anybody who I will be allied with in its adventure, I am ready for the return of the Cynic. Let us tend to our gardens outside of the Herculean temple and do our philosophy!