CYNICISM NEVER SOUNDED SO GOOD:

The Virtue of Engineering Cynicism: By any definition, a cynic is what you want in an engineer (David Weinberger, September 25, 2002, Darwin Mag)

There are two key components to cynicism. First, a cynic is a disappointed optimist, as someone said. (Google failed me! As did www.xrefer.com.) Cynics believe there is an ideal that humans choose not to live up to. [...]

Second, a cynic is abstracted from her surroundings. Like a punster waiting for a chance to pounce, a cynic hears a stream of words and assumes that they are not to be taken at face value. The cynic lives in a split-level world.

Oddly enough, when explained that way, a cynic sounds an awful lot like a Judeo-Christian believer. The believer too understands Man not to be living up to the possibility latent within us--as creatures formed in God's image. Likewise, the believer too inhabits a bifurcated world, living in the imperfect here and now but imagining a Heaven to come. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 18, 2002 8:20 PM