There really is nothing wrong with having a cyncal worldview.

A lot of times you will hear people say that cynicism is wrong, and, that it's wrong to suggest that people are inherently motivated by evil concerns. These people don't like to think that the world is different from anything that it actually is. They don't like to think of the world as illusory.

There is a group of people in the world that say that you should just accept reality as it is and work it with that. I say that when you accept reality for the way it is- you are accepting the status-quo. There are many things in reality that aren't illusory- for instance- natural rights aren't really illusory in my opinion and should be acknowledged by our federal government through the 9th amendment, and, even if they aren't acknowledged through the government- they should be acknowledged by business- that is supposed to serve the public.

But what people are doing- by when they are saying that you should accept reality as it is- is that they don't want you questioning everything. People think that if you keep questioning things that you HAVE TO BE CRAZY. This is not an absolute thing. There is no reason to assume that just because you go on questioning why things are the way they are- that you will be crazy.

You've heard it all... curiosity killed the cat. All of these stories about how people have gone insane just because they've been questioning the universe and they've been questioning society have made people less willing to actually question society. Anyone who questions society- to the minds of most people is a conspiracy theorist because they're questioning official points of view. That's what I was told in my communication theory class I took last semester- my professor said to the class that conspiracy theories are stories that are contrary to the official view. That's right- anything that is different from what the majority thinks is a conspiracy theory.

But people throughout history have questioned civilization and made a difference. A lot of people like to think that people who ask a lot of questions are wasting their time. Martin Luther went to the church and put his attack on the church- telling about all the practices that he didn't like. He said that people shouldn't have to pay to go to heaven and that many of the practices of the church should be reformed, and, that the church was corrupt. Henry the 8th made it legally acceptable for someone to divorce someone else (if I'm not mistaken if that's the ruler who did it- although maybe for questionable reasons).

Enlightenment writers in the 17th and 18th century have written about how they thought they could make the world a better place. They questioned if having a government that was completely out of touch with the people was a good thing or if people really had natural rights or not. Martin Luther King JR and the NAACP before him pushed for the advancement of colored people- questioning the social norm that it was okay for people to lynch and discriminate against black people. The woman suffrage movement furthered rights for woman. And even in ancient times- people like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle questioned the way the world really was, and, Greek philosophers created the birth of science as we know it today.

My point is that there is nothing wrong with questioning the world. The people that don't like it when someone criticizes something else as evil- is that they're pretty much as a part of the status-quo as these other groups were. The people in the South didn't like it when the other people in the North or elsewhere were questioning whether slavery was a good thing or not. They wanted slaves to be treated as property. And there are still people out there that are against woman rights and woman advancement. Using these real world examples- we can see that people who are against those that are questioning social norms- while not the same examples- are against them because they are against the current way of society, and, they're questioning whether something has to be the way it is, or if it doesn't.

Having a cynical worldview just means that you think people have differing motivations than what they really are. People don't like that because they think that having a cynical worldview means that you think of things in too much of a conspiratorial fashion. But it's one thing to have a paranoid belief system- where you think that everyone is out to get you, and the government will send CIA people to your house- and it's entirely another to be wary about what people may really believe, and, how they will act.

Again- it's entirely another thing to think that the government controls everything about our lives. Because it's not just the government that controls our lives. There are several kinds of manipulators in the public eyes- propaganda is everywhere. All corporations do propaganda about their products and many of them misuse it all to make their company seem more appealing in the eyes of others. A lot of news stations propagate lies rather than real reporting. It's absolutely essential to be aware of the mechanisms of propaganda in our lives... I've recently read Propaganda by Edward Bernays and it's lead me to believe that a lot of my cynicism of propaganda was not unfounded.

I don't think you should bring your cynicism into your personal life... or you'll of course drive yourself crazy if you think that all your friends are agents of the government that want to put you in a straight-jacket. But there is nothing wrong with keeping a little bit of cynicism... and you can be a cynic and an optimist at the same time. There is nothing wrong with hoping that people break out of the illusory world, and, then hoping that the world will be a better place for it.

Anyhow, I thought I'd create a topic about it since I know there are plenty of people here who have heard some of these objections to questioning the norms of society. I wanted to illustrate how these people were on the status-quo for the most part- and most people who question the status-quo are agents of change. And the people who are on the status-quo are usually against these agents of change. There is nothing wrong with questioning society and wanting to change it.