The first cynic was Diogenes Laertius, whom, as you may recall, was the philosopher with the lantern, perpetually looking for an honest man and never finding any. A cynic is neither a selfish person nor a realist; a cynic simply sees and believes the worst in people. Diogenes was exiled from Athens because his father, who had been in charge of the currency used his position to debase it. In exile, Diogenes made his way to Delphi, where he met all manner of men puffed up with wealth and pride seeking favor from the gods. And, it was there, it is believed, that he be became an apt pupil of human nature, especially hypocrisy and pretension.
Later, he lived on the outskirts of Athens under an old wash tub. He was reduced to begging and would fawn over those who gave to him, and he would hurl biting insults at the character of those who did not. His contemporaries (notably Plato) thought that he led a dog’s life, and called him a Cynic, after Cynos, the Greek word for dog. Once somebody threw him some bones as though he were a dog, and he promptly urinated on the man’s leg. When reproached for his habit of masturbating in the town market, he would say, “If only my belly were as easily satisfied.”
Later he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery, and managed to convince the slave seller to sell him to a wealthy but insecure and not too bright man of Corinth. Even though he was nominally a slave, he was able through, cunning, flattery and sheer ability to gain complete control over the man’s household, where he lived until he died at the age of 90. Always the shrewd judge of character and pretension, he once stood next to Alexander the Great, who asked him “Do you not fear me?” Diogenes asked him “Are you not a good man?” To which, Alexander replied “Yes.” “Then I have nothing to fear from a good man.”
The reason a cynic is not realistic is not because people put up a front of being good but are “really” driven by baser motives, such as pride and an eagerness to be thought well of, it is because the reality of goodness depends on the face of goodness not being called into question. Had Diogenes grievously insulted Alexander and caused him to kill him, he might have proven that Alexander was not so great, that he was in fact a small petty man ruled by his passions. Being thought good may have been a pretension of Alexander’s but it was also what saved Diogenes’s skin from whatever insolence prompted Alexander’s question. Thus, being a “realist’ entails knowing when not to question the goodness of other people’s motives.
