Spirit and Story
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The Consolations of Cynicism
By
Tsvi Blanchard
We did not need
the horror of September 11 to teach us that life is not ideal. Human beings are radically
vulnerable. We get sick, we suffer and we die. We hurt those we love and are wounded by
them as well. No matter how gifted we are or how hard we work, most of us will fail to
achieve our deepest dreams and most worthwhile aspirations. Coping with the limitations of
our humanity is a lifelong task.
Does American
culture recognize and respond to the limitations and vulnerability of the human condition?
I think not. As a culture, we in the United States demand a “can do” approach,
especially when it comes to making a living. America is an upbeat country replete with
motivational meetings and self-help programs that aim to improve our attitude and
performance. As General George Patton said, “Americans love a winner and cannot abide
a loser.” The truth, however, is that nobody wins all the time. Sooner or later each
of us will lose something or somebody important.
Not everyone
has bought into this exaggeratedly positive orientation to life. For many of us, it just
doesn’t ring true. We can’t pretend that everything is fine and makes perfect
sense when it isn’t and doesn’t. Acknowledging our physical and moral
limitations seems to us more authentic than wearing a mask of can-do optimism. We think
that all of us would be better off if we faced the facts of human limitation and
corruption---whether we are talking about corruption of the flesh or of the social and
political institutions that we have built.
What consoles
us as we feel the pain of the miscarriage of our personal and public ideals? How do
we maintain the spirit that we need to sustain our serious commitment to our family,
friends and community? For many of us, it is the humor provided by satire and ironic
distance that helps us continue to love what and whom we do love, even as we see their
warts. We adopt a gentle and patient cynicism as we accede to the often comic, half-baked
solutions that are available to the problems we have caused ourselves by our very human
frailty and failure. In this way, we accept the truth about our lives without losing the
will to live them as fully as we can.
In this spirit,
I offer the following analyses of the deeper meanings at work in the dark genre of anti-motivational posters. These posters
deliberately mock the false and mindless can-do optimism that characterizes the more
familiar variety of rosy-hued motivational posters. But I also discern beneath the cynical
surface another dimension of meaning that offers (paradoxically perhaps) consolation if
not hope.
Consider the
following examples:
Poster One
Set on a black
background that suggests a progressively darkening sky, the poster proclaims, DESPAIR: It’s Always Darkest Just Before It Goes
Pitch Black. This is, of course, quite true of the onset of night. But, in
addition, in our personal lives, we experience the truth of this phrase far more often
than we would like—as things all too often go not from bad to good, but from bad to
worse: Our business is flat and goes bankrupt or we lose our job. Our marriage is rocky
and ends in divorce. Aging presages not a new dawn, but further decline, chronic illness
and death. The cavalry fails to arrive in the nick of time.
The same holds
true in our public life. If politics
regularly presents a rather dismal face, when it becomes more dismal than usual, this is
hardly a sign that things are about to improve. Deception,
deal-making and corruption are more typically harbingers of more of the same, or worse,
than they are of imminent improvement.
And yet,
despite the poster’s proclamation of despair, we do not. In some strange way it
comforts us, settles us down, prepares us for the hard journey ahead more effectively than
any power-of-positive-thinking bromide could ever do. How is this effect to be explained?
First, the ironic distance created by the line allows us to laugh at the painful reality
it depicts and, at least in this way, to feel somewhat in control of it. We find that it
does not destroy us, that it makes us laugh. As Freud noted, laughter is the most
sophisticated form of defense against our anxiety over the vicissitudes of human life.
Second, its
ironic distance and playful cynicism gently remind us that we should not sit passively in
a worsening situation, waiting for the dawn to come that will miraculously save us. We
need to live in the world as it really is, not as we might wish it to be. This means
that we must act to keep things from getting still worse.
But what of the
fact that whatever we do – as compared with what we would do ideally – will most
often be “not good enough”? Our consolation must come from the recognition
that while this is true, this does not deprive us of the opportunity to bring about some
small improvement in the world. Accepting these facts, we must lay aside the grandiose
fantasy that by our own efforts we shall be able to save the world, a grandiosity that is
the surest harbinger of despair and truly paralyzing cynicism. For us, it is enough
that—like the French lieutenant in Conrad’s Lord Jim--we “do what we can”. In this
way, we can avoid the world- weary bitterness that threatens to sideline us when we see
how far from ideal our personal and public reality actually is.
Poster Two
There is
another poster that shows a crowd of men running a race with the line, DEFEAT: For Every Winner, There Are Dozens Of Losers.
Odds Are You’re One Of Them. In truth, if life is a game, few of us are
winners. This is even more obvious if you are one of those people who win one competition,
only to enter another, more difficult one. Motivational pep talks may keep pushing us back
into the game, but all the pep talks in the world will not protect us on the day that we
finally realize that we just aren’t going to be “the big winner.”
But, as before, we are far better able to stand this reality if we can at least laugh at
it. There is a pleasure that comes from feeling that we have not been fooled or foolish.
This cynical
stance can, however, provide us with a far more radical consolation. It may drive us to
ask: What if life isn’t a game at all? What if life is not really, after all, a race
to get ahead of others? Indeed, it may occur to us that it is enough for us that we
are here, that we are alive. And if we are able to jettison the internalized metaphor
which tells us that life is a competitive struggle, we just might try working together instead of trying to prevail in life by
besting the other guy. Of course, we would also need to overcome the grandiose fantasy of
being able to do this always and everywhere, but we would try to do it whenever we could.
Poster Three
The scene is of
mountaintops, set high in the clouds. The caption reads, DOUBT: In The Battle Between You And The World, Bet On
The World. This line punctures unrealistic dreams of personal achievement in an
even more painful way than the previous two did. It asks us to own that we are far
too often fighting a world that doesn’t seem to care at all about us or about what we
want to accomplish. There is a competition—us against the world—and we are
most likely to lose.
Admittedly, it
is hard to find any consolation in this message. Reflecting on the previous message, we
were perhaps prepared to set aside the notion that life is a head-to-head competition, but
doing so would free us to work together. We were also ready to accept that we will never
have everything that we dreamt of having. But, in return, we received the consolation of
knowing that in doing what we can, we are in fact doing “well enough.” But what do we gain by recognizing that our
opponent will typically have the upper hand?
The caption on
this poster asks us to surrender our most cherished illusion—that the world somehow must care about us or, at the very least, must be responsive to us. But
letting go of this fantasy can – perhaps paradoxically -- be powerfully liberating. Indeed, every day we learn that the world is not
all that responsive to us, neither individually nor collectively. The world often follows
a course that transcends our ability to affect or understand.
What then can
we say about the world? First, we must accept that there is no decisive evidence one way
or the other as to whether or not the world is moving toward what we think of as good.
Second, we must accept that while we ought to endeavor on behalf of our ideals, we cannot
expect that the course of events is going to break our way.
So long as we
imagined that the fate of the world was in our hands, we were naturally afraid that we
would bungle the job. Now we know that we were fools to bet on ourselves. But this does
not mean that we now need to give up all hope or sit quietly awaiting what the world will
serve up next. Indeed, while we now know better than to bet on ourselves, we can still bet
on the world without this being equivalent to our betting against ourselves. For it may
well be that the world in which we live is a world in which improvement is possible. Instead of trying to beat the world,
we should resolve to do our best to improve it (tikkun
olam) while accepting that the outcome is not ultimately in our hands.
At the
beginning of this essay, I suggested that we would feel like fools if we buy into the
false and empty can-do optimism that is all too commonplace in America. We would be truer
to our world and to ourselves if we honestly acknowledged the real limitations under which
we labor and live. Posters like those we have been considering, that poke fun at
America’s propensity for positive thinking, can console us by insinuating an ironic
distance between us and such popular bromides. They also give us the ability to
laugh at our culturally induced fantasies and at our failure to realize them. We have also found lurking just below the veneer
of the hip cynicism of these posters a more powerful message, a message of endurance and
commitment that may be just enough to keep us from succumbing to the counsel of despair.
To view other articles by Tsvi Blanchard, click here.
