CYNICISM AS METHOD

Method does not happen once, it is not content to rest, but can be applied recursively, reflectively, repetitively, ridiculously. As a method, cynicism reveals wisdom and knowledge we did not know we had by drawing it out with statements we will come to recognize as false.

Confronted with a question, I take a first reaction, usually one that’s snarky. Snarkiness, without reason, is irritating and indefensible. In responding to a thing, it assumes that thing is wrong. The brilliance of cynicism (and snarkiness) is that it suggests a new reason that it might not have known before. This reason appears, and is the place where work and creativity begin.

Thing One: Cars are important to people and the way we get to the places that we’re going.
Thing Two: Cars are really fantastic and everyone just loves them! They’re important to places that need people to get to them, and cars place people in important goings.

Like an algorithm that needs random numbers, a first response must appear. Here, instincts in the face of uncertainty improvise a creative response. There are many tactics and they share with comedy the originality of language that disappears in written texts. Off the cuff remarks. Becoming overly excited about an idea, taking it too far. That is one tactic. Another is wordplay, turning verbs into nouns, swapping subjects and predicates. There are others. They can be silly, they are often trendy (adding the word embodiment), they are sometimes well-respected (etymology).

Thing two (above) suggest a line of argument: Cars let places command people while giving those people the impression that they’re very important because they are the ones who are mobile (an idea they like). Cars are probably not a good experience for many people and are very poorly understood as “useful,” perhaps because their function tends to be given rather than chosen. (It would also be misleading to say that a heart or ID card is useful; they are most useful to those who steal them, and simply necessary to most of us.)

Apply the method again: Are you so ready to accept that we’re dominated by an invisible and unidentified force that you would deny our palpable, if inconsistent, enthusiasm for automobiles? How can a place “command” anything?

This method is, like deconstruction, always concerned about being too naïve. This method is, like dialectics, obsessively involuting theses. This method is, like improv comedy, always ready to throw everything out the window and take the next step. This method does not guarantee full coverage; not once in this discussion of cars did it come up that they are deadly.