For years I failed to understand that these are actually talents that I possess and the baseline of other people in these attributes is different than my own. It took me a long time to connect the dots and now I'll connect them again explicitly for sake of clarity.
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I was cynical because I naively believed that other people saw things from my perspective and decided to believe wrong/bad things anyway. From that mistaken point of view it seemed like everyone must have had ulterior motives for all of their expressed "wrong" beliefs.
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Like, why would you persist in falsity if you knew it was false except that you had some angle you were working? It made the whole world appear to be full of grifters and bad actors. That there really are a decent number of grifters and bad actors compounded the confusion.
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I grew out of it I suppose. My "theory of mind" matured and I began to model other people more holistically and more charitably. I think my years at CCNY were incredibly valuable for this too. Spending time outside of my culture bubble helped a lot.
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(That deserves a thread of its own. Briefly, I really believe its valuable to go OUT of your bubble rather than to bring outsiders IN to your bubble. A lot of progressive diversity policies are kinda backwards and ineffectual and also patronizing.)
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With a more mature theory of mind it became obvious what my error had been. When I noticed that other people had got something wrong it wasn't born from duplicity or ulterior motives. There are lots of good reasons why people might be wrong.
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They might not have seen something that I have. They might have got the analysis wrong where I got it right. Or, of course, maybe I was wrong. One of the benefits of gaining a few years is that you fuck up enough to not egoistically grasp on to _never_ being wrong.
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Well, that ought to be a benefit. A lot of people never get there. Too sheltered. Never held to account for their mistakes. Or they're embedded in systems of inequity where the consequences of their errors are born by others.
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Learning to accept that when people are wrong they are usually wrong for reasons that are benign, correctable, and understandable has been the real cure for my cynicism. Learning to view my own errors in that light has really chilled out some of my neuroticism too.
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Still, there is a certain sense in not disposing of _all_ cynical thoughts. They can sometimes to protective. There really are shitty people out there who you ought to be able to protect yourself from by sensing their shittiness ahead of time. Just don't over-feed it.
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despite the never-ending flood of people redefining "cynicism" as "whatever i don't like", i stick to my somewhat shaky originalist definition of "distrust of people's nominal motives for their actions". just, y'know, it's usually that they *don't know*, not that they're lying.
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