Making Up Our Minds: Mind Your Language!

One of the things that every citizen needs to remember is that there are a lot of very smart people in this world who want to trick you into supporting some action that isn't in your own best interest. One way that they often do this is by manipulating language to confuse you. I thought I'd devote this weekend's editorial to some of the more common tactics that political weasels employ.

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Loaded Language

This is when a politician uses words that have a specific assumption that supports them is "baked into" their meaning. For example, conservative politicians have gone to great lengths to get Canadians to call refugees who cross the border outside of the customs entry points "illegal immigrants". In actual fact, what these people are doing is perfectly legal and in keeping with the United Nations refugee rules. The problem is that Canada has an agreement with the USA that suggests that since America is such a mellow, immigrant-friendly place, that there's no need for anyone to come from there to claim refugee status in Canada. (And then came Trump---. Maybe this "Safe Third Party Agreement" wasn't such a good idea after all.) This rule doesn't invalidate international law, however, so these people are not "illegal" in any way, shape, or, form.

Unfortunately, the lazy-ass, mainstream media haven't "pushed back" against this blatant attempt to confuse voters, and most of it has adopted the phrase themselves. This has allowed the Conservatives to pretty much take over the debate and force the other parties onto their back legs. This has damaged political discourse in Canada and allowed the alt-right a way of making immigration---which has historically been seen very positively by most Canadians---into a political football. 

False Dichotomies

People will sometimes manipulate a conversation to strongly imply that there are only two possible options and then force you to answer "yes" or "no". Sometimes this is done to create phony statistics in favour of a given point of view. This is called a "push poll". I remember a pollster explaining the concept to Peter Gzowski (an ancient CBC radio host) by polling the general public about whether or not Knowlton Nash (an equally ancient CBC tv news reader) wore skirts that were too short for decency. (Of course, Nash never wore a skirt in his life.) 

My personal favourite example is the basis of a Gary Larson cartoon.  

Gary Larson cartoon from the Far Side,
used under the fair use provision of the Copy Right law.

 

One recent example of a false dichotomy is the idea that the only two choices that Canadians face is to either destroy the Albertan economy by limiting oil production, or, avoid doing our bit to prevent out-of-control climate change. The assumption seems to be that there is something wrong with Albertans in that they are genetically incapable of doing anything else than work in the tar sands. (Poor souls---is it the result of some sort of in-breeding?) The idea that they might want to fund their government by putting in place a sales tax (like all the other ox-like,  dull, subhuman provinces) or diversify their economy (again, like the other ox-like, dull, subhuman provinces) seems to be impossible to contemplate. (There's no sense wondering what the poor, feckless souls did with the royalties they charged on all their conventional oil. Conservatives are notoriously bad with money. They just don't seem to be able to help themselves, poor dears. Just witness what Doug Ford is now doing with the Ontario budget.)   

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Last Thursday I heard a talk by Patti Broughton about the Guelph Arts Council. Afterwards I had a brief talk with her, we exchanged business cards, and, I decided to join the organization. I told her about the Back-Grounder and she said that I should join, even though this is a journalism project rather than fiction. The membership is $30/year, so there's one more expense that I've taken on with this publication. Unfortunately, she'd never heard of it before. What that tells me is that I should be putting more effort into letting people know about it. So, I'm asking readers to consider sharing the link to my blog with the other people on social media. I need to take advantage of "word-of-mouth" advertising just as much as I need subscribers. So while I like it when people click on the "like" button, I also would like you to click on the "share" one too.  

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Plastic Words

One last thing I'd like readers to consider happens when politicians use "plastic words". These are phrases or descriptors that seem to mean something, but when you ask people to define what exactly they think that they mean, you get very different explanations. One of the best use of these comes from an environmental debate that goes back decades. 

In 1972 an international think tank called "The Club of Rome" published a report titled Limits to Growth that put forward the totally obvious (if your head isn't stuffed firmly up your butt) observation that economic growth cannot continue forever on a planet that is not also growing. The idea was that there is always a "limiting factor" in any population that stops it from growing beyond a certain size. These could be a specific essential nutrient, or, it could be that beyond a certain point the ability of the ecosystem to recycle waste becomes overwhelmed and the organism poisons itself.

Unfortunately, the world dominant religion---capitalism---is based on the idea that economic growth can continue forever. And as we all know, for many people whenever facts conflict with ideology, facts always have to go out the window. That means that the "punk and plain" words of the Club of Rome report had to be sabotaged and safely removed from public discussion.

An innocuous title, but yet one of
the most effective pieces of anti-environmental
propaganda ever produced! 
Image from the Wiki Commons. 

Enter the Bruntland Commission, which came up with an alternative to Limits to Growth, known as Our Common Future. The genius of the slime-bags behind this was that they came up with a plastic phrase---sustainable development---which then drove the phrase "limits to growth" completely out of public discourse.  

The "great thing" about this term, is that it allows people who want to save the world (ie:  who want to have sustainability) to use the same words as those who want to sustain the existing status quo (ie: who want to have sustained economic growth.) At that point, the discussion about whether or not the human race should still be growing like crazy, cutting down forests, polluting the oceans, etc, stopped being honestly discussed because everyone agreed on the same thing. Wow! Plastic words are like magic. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

Leading by Example

Years ago I was doing some banking with some volunteers in the local Green Party riding association. Basically I had to cosign one volunteer Chief Financial Officer off the bank account and put another one on. This resulted in my standing on the sidewalk with a woman while we waited for another guy to show up. One of the woman's co-workers happened by and they had a bit of a conversation. He asked what she was doing and when she explained, he started up with the usual "yeah, this is all idealistic but no one actually walks the talk---people are all hypocrites" blather.

It was a bitterly cold winter's day. The roads were clear but a blizzard was coming in and there was a howling wind with snow flurries. In the midst of this guy's rant our fellow rolled up on his old Dutch bicycle. The cynic's mouth literally dropped and his eyes bugged out. He simply couldn't believe that someone was so concerned about climate change that he would ride a bicycle in that sort of weather. It rendered him actually speechless to see someone "lead by example".

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In the struggle for Indian independence there was a campaign titled "Swadeshi" that used "leading by example" to encourage Indians to think about how their day-to-day decisions impacted their country's economic independence from the British Empire.

Basically, the idea was that India's rural poor had been grotesquely exploited by an economic system that forced peasants to grow cotton, ship it to England, where it was turned into cloth, which was then shipped to India where it sold for less than that created by domestic production. This kept the peasants poor and stopped local Indian industry from developing as a competitor with Britain. 

The Congress Party of India sought to raise people's consciousness by encouraging people to buy cotton and spin thread which they then sold to artisanal weavers to make a special type of cloth known as "khadi", which they could buy and make their own clothes from.  Indeed, this was such an important campaign that people staged protests where they burnt English cloth to show that they would no longer buy or wear it. People bought their membership in the Congress Party with homespun thread. At one convention, Mohandas Gandhi (then President of the party) devoted a 40 minute talk to quietly sitting on a stage with a spinning wheel making thread for the weavers. 

Khadi is still sold in India.
This image from the Womenweave
organic co-op. Used under the "Fair Use" provision.

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When I first started working on this blog I wanted to make it an "open book" project. That is, I thought that I'd keep track of my hours and thereby tell readers how much time I put into researching and writing these missives. I quickly decided keeping track of my time would be a waste of effort. To a certain extent most of my life is now devoted to the project---I go to events and talk to people and that helps with stories. Even when I'm at home by myself I am often reading or listening to podcasts. Even when I'm not doing much of anything at all, at least part of me is always thinking about a story.

What I can do, however, is mention in this blue type whenever I spend some money for the blog. To that end, this week I sent $100 to the Linux Mint project because I upgraded the operating system on my computer. I did this because they had stopped sending security upgrades for the version I'd been using for about five years.

If you'd like to help me with these and other costs---plus give me some money to offset all those hours spent researching and obsessing---why not subscribe through Patreon or toss something in the Tip Jar? If nothing else, share the stories you like on social media.

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Gandhi was a real master of the concept of "leading by example". Unfortunately, a lot of this is lost on people who don't understand the issues he was dealing with. For example, he started out trying to be a "proper English gentleman" during his legal career. This involved wearing a suit and tie. But eventually, he stopped trying to "ape" the British and instead decided that he would live and look like an ordinary, poor Indian. This helped immensely in his attempt to connect with the Indian masses---who were alienated from the tiny Anglophile elite who tended to lead the independence movement.

Gandhi, seated in the middle. The early elite, Anglophile.
Original image from Life magazine archive.
Public Domain image, copyright expired, c/o Wiki Commons.

A later Gandhi who was actively trying to court the vast majority of Indians.
Another public domain image. From the The New Indian Express website.

This process also extended to attempts to change the attitudes of Indians with regard to what Gandhi considered their own particular prejudices. For example, at the first Congress Party of India convention he attended he volunteered to be in charge of providing and cleaning the latrines. As an upper cast Hindu (Gandhi's father had been a prime minister in one of the "princely states"), it would have been seen by most people as absolutely bizarre for him to take on a task that should only be done by a Dalit (the horribly exploited class of "untouchables" created by India's caste system.) But this was just another case of his trying to build bridges between the different groups. The existing divisions between the different religions and castes of India had been exploited by the British for centuries. Gandhi not only saw a moral imperative in breaking down these barriers, he also saw that many people would not support independence if it meant that majority Indians would be free to horribly exploit their particular minority group.  

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The reason why I'm going on about this issue is because I think that it's time the environmental movement started to exploit the tactic of "leading by example". I say this because this is one of the few ways that it is possible to change the minds of the 30% or so of the population who are fighting absolutely tooth and nail against doing something to stop the human race from committing mass suicide.

There's a retired University of Manitoba psychology professor by the name of Bob Altemeyer who devoted his career to studying what motivates right wing people---both leaders and voters. The conclusion he came to was that these people are pretty much impervious to evidence and logic. But the one way that they do tend to change their worldview is through personal and vicarious experience. That is to say they build their worldview around people, not ideas.  

Let me illustrate with a couple examples. 

Altemeyer did some research on worldview changes among people who go to university. What he found was evidence that the old adage of "the fellow lost his faith when he went to college" is actually true. A lot of people do go through profound worldview changes. But what he found was that it wasn't because their course work enlightened them. Instead, it was because they were exposed to a lot of different people with different life experiences. It was the informal social interaction that destroyed their preconceptions about the world. 

Let me illustrate with one of these "worldview changes" that people have gone through in our lifetimes. At first the idea that gays could marry was opposed by a majority of Americans. But now a majority are in favour of it. What changed? Because of court rulings and a concerted campaign for gays to "get out of the closet", a lot of people who were opposed to gays in principle found out that some of the people in their lives who they really liked or respected were, in fact, gay. This forced them onto the horns of dilemma. They either had to drop kick these people out of their lives or change one of the basic building blocks of the way they viewed the world around them. In many cases, they chose the latter instead of the former. 

Chart from the Pew Forum webpage, presumably used with
their permission, as they have it set up to easily download.
Click on the image for a clearer image. 

This isn't a question of demographic shift (ie: "civilization progresses one funeral at a time"), because if you break the survey sample into different age cohorts you see the same change in attitudes.

Pew Forum et al. As you can see, lots of people---regardless of age---changed their minds about gay marriage at
roughly the same time. Altemeyer says this didn't happen because of evidence or logic.
Instead it was learning that uncle Fred was gay and Aunt Muriel is a lesbian.

(If you are interested in learning more about Altemeyer's work, he published a free to download Ebook that on the subject. If you are interested in learning more on the subject covered in this post, you might want to read my first book Walking the Talk. At the top right side of this site there is an advert for it with links to where you can buy it either as an Ebook or paperback. The paperback is also on sale at the Bookshelf downtown. And the public and university libraries each also has a copy.) 

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One of the first things that I saw after Steve Dyck announced that he was running for the local Green Party of Canada nomination was a snide remark about the fact that he was currently in Central America. The idea was that if he really believed in climate change as an issue, he wouldn't have blasted off a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere for a frivolous winter vacation. This isn't a "one off". The web is awash with memes talking about the disconnect between what leading environmentalists say about the environment and how they live their lives. Here's a small sample that I'm sharing with you under the "fair use" provision of the copyright law. 

From the "Bookworm Room" 

From "The Top 12 Celebrity Climate Hypocrites"

From "Leading Malaysian Neocon"

From garyvarvel.com.

     

I could post a lot more of these. The point I'm trying to make is that there are a lot of folks out there who think that if you really do think that climate change is an existential threat, then you should live your life in a way that looks like you really believe it. I think that they have a point. 

If an environmentalist says that the world is reaching a crisis point over carbon dioxide, then they shouldn't be jetting around the world to go to on vacations, conventions, to visit family, etc. This isn't to say that your particular trip is going to tip the balance, but learning to do without this is something that shows that you really mean what you say. Otherwise, it looks like you want other people to give up their "goodies" while you keep yours. And that stinks. Even worse, it is sabotaging the environmental movement when we need to bring as many people "on board" as we possibly can. 

This isn't to say that many environmentalists haven't already made big changes in the way that they live their lives. But some high-profile environmentalists still seem to live excessively "large lives". But the point is that there needs to be a conscious campaign to harness the symbolic value inherent in "living the like you already live in the world you want to inhabit". Gandhi knew how to do that, I don't see why modern environmentalists cannot do the same thing. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

Making Up Our Minds: The Importance of "Fiddles"

I was involved in various forms of activism for many years. Amongst other things, I've sat on the board of directors of OPIRG, was Communications Chair for the Green Party of Canada, had a lot of influence in the development of the constitutions of the Green Party of Ontario and Canada, had a hand in organizing the Grand River Watershed Congress and the Municipal Democracy Movement, ran an activist school titled the Public Interest College, helped organize and negotiate with MacDonald's Canada to get rid of extruded polystyrene clam shells, started and built the Guelph Green Party Constituency Association into one of the strongest ones in Canada, started and ran a local currency system that had 23 downtown stores accepting my "LETS Bucks", sued Walmart on behalf of a coalition of religious faiths to help preserve the Saint Ignatius property, and, probably other things I've forgotten about.

As a result of this ludicrous life I've been exposed to several different ways that organizations make collective decisions. I absolutely loathe most of them. Several groups used something called "formal consensus decision-making". Basically, this is a system where each member of the group is allowed to "block" a decision that they don't agree with. In effect, each person present gets a veto over the majority. The theory of consensus suggests that the way to stop this from becoming a complete exercise in frustration is to "build consensus" through meaningful, gentle, conversation.

The problem with this is that even if there were no totally intransigent individuals totally uninterested in listening to other people's opinion---these groups seemed to be filled with them---this "consensus building" ate up enormous amounts of time at meetings. And because every decision was such a labour of Heracles, there were two results that I---and it seemed almost no one else---noticed.

First, because so many issues ended-up "falling off the clock", the paid staff and directors of these groups ended up making most of the decisions---simply because the democratic processes never did it for them. Funny thing, but most of these folks weren't too upset about this.

And second, many people were functionally excluded from taking part in decision-making. If you are a busy person---with young children, your own business, or, a demanding job---you just don't have the time to waste hours and hours of it in discussions that end up coming to nothing anyway. This meant that organizations I was involved with often ended up being controlled by people who---for one reason or another---had lots of time on their hands and no responsibilities. (I'll let the reader "fill in the blanks" on that.) As a general rule, these are not people with a great deal of experience in the practical realities of the world or much of an ability to "put themselves in other people's shoes".

Jo Freeman, photo by Carolmooredc.
Public Domain, c/o Wiki Commons

I'm not the only person who has recognized these problems. There was a paper written in 1970 by a woman named Jo Freeman who called this thing The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Her basic thesis was that if a group doesn't create practical decision-making structures that deal with the limitations that people's lives put on democracy, it invariably creates a vacuum that will be filled by an unaccountable elite.

Freeman's point of view is really unpopular with the people who already benefit from the existing system. I saw this starkly in a group (which will remain nameless) that I cajoled into bringing in some facilitators to talk about class issues. The person who led the workshop raised the idea that a group that holds meetings over the late afternoon, and which has very long meetings, will practically exclude participation by anyone who has a nine-to-five job or a young family. That was it. At that point (only 15 minutes into the presentation) the young, "hip", activist-types who ran the organization (and had the time to attend the marathon meetings) started screaming, hooting and hollering, and, shut down the workshop. The consultant we'd brought in was blase about the reaction and seemed resigned to this sort of response to the concerns he raised.

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I'm not raising this issue because I want to slag activist organizations. Please remember that for all my carping, I spend decades of my life working with these groups. But they were useful to me because they allowed me to understand the absolutely huge importance that process has for democracy. The point I learned was that a flawed process can result in an organization being fundamentally incapable of representing the best intentions of the membership.

This is a lesson that I've taken and used to look at the world around me. For example, people routinely forget that the way we count the votes in elections has a huge impact on the results. But consider this. Doug Ford's Conservatives won 76 seats with 40.5% of the popular vote in 2018, whereas under Tim Hudak they only won 28 seats with 31.3% in 2014. That means that a 29% increase in the popular vote translated into a 270% increase in seats and a majority government. The same sort of math holds for all the parties----Kathleen Wynn's Liberals won 58 seats with only 38.7% of the vote in 2014.

This fact is well known, if difficult to find out. One of the things that's always intrigued me about the percentage of votes cast is how difficult it used to be to find this anywhere. It is difficult---perhaps impossible---to find on the Elections Ontario website (I tried to find it when writing this editorial, but gave up.) Journalists used to almost never report it, although I did find a reference in the CBC. Where you usually can find it is Wikipedia, which is "the exception that proves the rule". My unsupported hypothesis is that Elections Ontario doesn't want to high-light how undemocratic "first-past-the-post" is, and, the mainstream media doesn't want to detract from the "horse-race" coverage that dominates most coverage. "Small change in voter support leads to overwhelming majority" headlines just don't work in that frame. The Wikipedia is written by independent volunteers without any sort of hidden agenda---which is why it is usually the source to find percentages.

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Years ago I had my portrait taken by a local artist as part of a commission he'd got to paint downtown Guelph's "characters". It was fascinating to watch him create a full oil painting in one short hour. As he said "Yes, one hour of work---and a lifetime of practice". That's what writing these stories is like for me. I've put in more than 40 years at various projects. The result is what you get. If you think that they are worth reading, why not subscribe through Patreon or put something in the Tip Jar? (Thanks Oxanna and Warren for being so awesome!) If you can't afford that, why not share through social media? 

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I have a term for these subtle little games that people use to manipulate the process. I call them "fiddles". It's hard to blame any particular individual when it comes to the creation of our absurd "first-past-the-post" system, but I certainly can lay blame on anyone who continues to support it. They know damn well that it is undemocratic, but they simply like things the way they are and to Hell with the idea that everyone should be represented in Parliament. I came across a more obviously constructed fiddle when I was involved with the Green Party of Canada.

There was a law that said that there had to be a publicly-accessible record of everyone who'd made a donation to a political party. The idea was that you could look this up and see who gave what to your local MP. The problem was that these were paper records and the listings were random. They weren't alphabetical, they weren't by size of donation, they were just tossed together like a salad. As you might imagine, this meant that it was a LOT harder to figure out cui bono (Latin for "who benefits") from a piece of legislation. This was so outrageous that a Green Party member took Elections Canada to court and a judge forced it to issue a electronic version of this list, so people could use a search engine to find the specific information that the paper version hid. (Unfortunately, I am working from memory here as I couldn't find any reference to this obscure piece of history that happened before the emergence of the World Wide Web.)

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These sorts of fiddles exist everywhere. A friend of mine once told me how the representatives of the unions representing autoworkers raised a lot of procedural quibbles in order to "wait out the clock" at an NDP convention when it looked like a resolution committing the party to moving towards an "car-free Ontario" might pass. (She was so disgusted by the experience that she tore up her membership and joined the Liberals.) I certainly saw lots in the Green Party. With a little research I'm sure I could find some for both the Liberals and Conservatives.

This sort of thing absolutely dominates our democracy, but most folks are totally oblivious to it. Indeed, if you rub many people's noses in this stuff, they will often say that they just don't understand what the fuss is all about. And yet I'm convinced that it is tremendously important in a wide variety of ways. In Ontario we currently have a party bent and determined to rip to pieces a wide variety of infrastructure to deal with a myriad of problems---most notably anything to deal with climate change. And yet, if you look at the polling numbers, a majority of the citizenry are really concerned about it.

Image from Abacus Data, used under "Fair Use" Copyright Provision

If it weren't for the first-past-the-post fiddle, we would probably have a NDP/Liberal coalition government that would never have ripped up the cap-and-trade agreement and wouldn't have cut funding for forest fires, flood prevention, and, Dao-only-knows-what other important infrastructure.

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It's not really all that surprising that people don't know about all this stuff. Almost no one who knows a lot about how political parties actually function bothers to try to explain it to them. It's a downer to learn this sort of thing, and you don't get people involved in your group by pointing out to them how they are getting manipulated by the folks "hidden behind the curtain". The people who do know have to decide whether or not they want to use these fiddles themselves, and thereby get ahead in the organization; or make a fuss about them and end up being vilified by the rank-and-file for "being negative" and the elites for exposing how they manage the democratic system to their ends. Most of this sort of thing just goes over the heads of the membership. That's a pity, as it is something that anyone who really wants to build a true democracy should spend some time thinking about. So as Jesus says in the Gospels: "He who has ears, let him hear".

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

Cynicism

I was having a conversation the other day and I mentioned to the other guy that I was beginning to succumb to one of the pathologies of journalism: "cynicism". This came up as I explained to him the facts that I came across in my articles about solid waste---specifically with regard to the Keurig coffee pod. Basically, I was referring to the "disinformation campaigns" that were waged to convince the public that these pods were either recyclable or compostable. Indeed, as I pointed out in the series, solid waste policy is absolutely rife with business people---and their willing minions---sabotaging the public good simply to make money. Thinking back about this the next day, it occurred to me that it would useful for my readers to take a look at that word: "cynic". It's not used today the way it was originally. And a lot of people might be really surprised about where it comes from. And the distinction between the old and new meanings is tremendously important to human society---even today.

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If you asked the average citizen to define "cynic", they'd probably offer some variant of this definition: "a person who believes that all or at least the vast majority of people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons". But the word itself comes from ancient Greek philosophy and originally meant something superficially similar but functionally very different.

Antisthenes, bust from the Villa of Cassius at Tivoli
Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen, c/o Wiki Commons

"Cynicism" was a school founded by a student of Socrates named Antisthenes. The word itself is based on the Greek word for dog. Dogs are generally thought of today in terms of loyalty, as in "the dog is man's best friend". But with regard to the Cynics, the reference came to refer to a complete lack of concern for the conventions of "polite society". Cynics didn't care about fancy clothes, social convention, etc.

What they did care about was virtue or "doing the right thing". This is a very important thing to remember. Modern definitions of cynicism imply that people don't give a damn about anything except their personal self interest. Ancient cynicism implied that a person didn't give a damn about social conventions or their own material comfort and instead cared only about virtue. In effect, modern cynicism is in some sense the direct opposite of ancient cynicism.

This probably comes out most obviously in only ancient cynic most people have heard about:

Diogenes, painting by John William Waterhouse
Image c/o Wiki Commons

Diogenes. He was a student of Antisthenes who was extreme in his rejection of physical comfort and social convention---to the point where he became a street person who often slept in an abandoned, large tub. He was also famous for travelling the streets during the day with a lit lantern: vainly looking for an "honest man". There is a story that Alexander the Great once met him while he was sun bathing on the street and offered to grant him a favour. Diogenes only asked that Alexander move so he would stop blocking the light. Supposedly the conqueror opined that if he couldn't be Alexander "he'd rather be Diogenes". At that point Diogenes replied "if I wasn't Diogenes, I'd still want to be Diogenes".

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Cynic philosophers were remarkable in that they actively set out to educate ordinary citizens. To that end, they not only lived on the streets, they preached. All over the Roman Empire it was possible to meet a Cynic philosopher in a marketplace. He would be recognizable from the way he looked:  he had a beard, because all, and only, philosophers wore beards. (On Roman coins only the Emperor Marcus Aurelius has a beard. That's because he was also a philosopher, who wrote the Meditations.) He would also be wearing a cloak that doubled as blanket, was probably barefoot, have a leather bag that held all his possessions, and, a staff to lean on. And he would be preaching.

And what's really fascinating from a historical point of view is how much Cynic philosophy seems to have ended up in the Christian Gospels. For example, compare these quotations.

And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:27/Matthew 10:38)
If you want to be crucified, just wait. The cross will come. If it seems reasonable to comply, and the circumstances are right, then it's to be carried through, and your integrity maintained. (Epictetus) 

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke 6:20/Matthew 5:3)
Only the person who has despised wealth is worthy of God. (Seneca EM XVIII 13) 

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those that curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other as well... Love your enemies, and do good, and lend expecting nothing in return. (Luke 6:27-29/Matthew 5:39-44)
A rather nice part of being a Cynic comes when you have to be beaten like an ass, and throughout the beating you have to love those who are beating you as though you were father or brother to them. (Epictetus III xxii 54)

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. (Matthew 10:28/Luke 12:5
What tyrant or thief or court can frighten anyone who does not care about his body or his possessions? (Epictetus) 

I could go on and on with the quotes, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the people who wrote the "life and times of Jesus Christ" had met and listened to a lot of these Cynic street preachers.

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Pollyanna statue in front of the
public library in Littleton, New Hampshire.
Photo by Daveynin, c/o Wiki Commons

Some readers are probably thinking "well this is all quite interesting, but how is this important to me?" I want to point out a couple very subtle issues when we talk about cynicism. There's a very useful type of cynicism which stands in contrast to being "Pollyanna", or, the tendency to see good in every person and situation that one encounters. (The word comes from a character in an extremely popular series of children's books written in the early 20th Century.) It might seem to be a good quality to always see the best in people, but if you really do live your life that way you become oblivious to a lot of malfeasance and shenanigans. You take companies at their word when they tell you nonsense about their products---and the world suffers for it.

An ancient cynic would understand that this happens, but he wouldn't stop looking for honesty. He'd keep making a fuss, even if it resulted in him being sued into poverty, being beaten by thugs, or, thrown in jail. That's because he defines the value of life in doing the right thing.

I'm afraid that in contrast a lot of modern cynics use their disgust with what they know of the world around them to justify ceasing to even bother looking for the good. It's as if Diogenes decided that there were no honest men to be found, so he blew out the light in his lantern and put it away. I noticed this a lot during my futile attempts to run for public office. I'd meet people who who'd complain bitterly about how awful politics was and how the candidates were "all the same". I'd suggest that if they really felt that way, they should at least vote for a candidate who was honest---even if they had no chance of getting elected. But invariably these people wouldn't even do that and instead couldn't be bothered to put in even the minimal effort involved in voting. This is a very far cry from the ancient ideal of "If you want to be crucified, just wait. The cross will come". Modern cynicism is an excuse to refuse to engage with the world around you---the ancient form was a call to only engage with the very best parts of being human. 

I can understand people who take on this modern cynic persona. When you catch someone lying to you in order to manipulate you into doing something bad, it can seem like a kick in the guts. But the answer isn't to "play it cool by letting the world grow a little colder", but rather to be more discriminating in where you place your allegiance.

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