Cynics fear no sin no hubris

Paul taught the fear to do, suffer or tolerate evil. This fear is still the basis of all rulership today. Without this fear there would be no racism, no states, no patriarchy. Cynics fear no sin no hubris.

Embrace every opportunity of power that comes your way

The student of cynism will often act very gently and cautiously. This is understandable. After all, we are leaving the prevailing morality, often taking positions, doing things that are considered evil. Diogenes masturbated in public, and he proclaimed that he would also eat human flesh if given the opportunity.

We, as cynics, always face as individuals a mainstream that meets us with hatred. The mainstream rabble, on the other hand, meets full of conviction to be in the right. The smallest deviations from the respective standard evoke enormous hatred. In my youth, it was enough to have long hair, and the old Germans wished Hitler back, that you come in the concentration camp, preferably gassed immediately. Just because you wore long hair.

Today, it is met with concentrated hatred if, for example, you express reservations about gay marriage or use terms like Negro and Gypsy. In the 80s in Germany eroticism between adults and children was massively propagated, today someone who carefully even mentions only the possibility that between an adult and a child a mutual erotic attraction could exist, is called a child fucker who must be slaughtered or in any case life in prison, the key thrown away.

Read on: Beeing a Dissident

So it’s no wonder that we tend to be more hesitant and not as convinced as the rabble. But precisely because we stand alone against a dull hate-spewing army of mobs, our unconditional will to might is crucial. So being cautiously hesitant is understandable. We don’t want people to think we are evil. But if we speak parrhesia, our truth, which is evil according to prevailing morality, hesitantly in a trembling voice, the mob does not think we are good. It only thinks us powerless, weak and evil. And we are weak when we doubt ourselves. Cynics fear no sin no hubris. Das zu lernen, gehört zur Tugend der Parrhesia.

Are you a beggar? Or are you a messenger! This is the all-important question. So do you want to live as a coward? Or die as a warrior?

God desires gods.

Novalis. London 1903, p 70

The radical cynic does not need only a few things, he needs nothing at all, no bread, no water, not even air to breathe. He needs no offspring, no wife, no friends, and even less his naked life¹Naked life is a term coined by Agamben and refers to the victim of the currently rampant biopolitics. I estimate that we have a maximum of 100 years left to avert the total enslavement of almost all human beings. Perhaps in one of the next texts I will deal with this immediate danger and how cynism can counter it. . Because he has God. And he doesn’t need to kneel down before any god. Because the God is everywhere in his soul, infinite, like the universe and identical with the universe.

So do “we” have no sin, no hubris to fear?

So is everything allowed? Can everyone just do whatever they feel like? No! Of course there is sin. And of course there is hubris:

Hubris is today our whole position to nature, our rape of nature with the help of the machine and the so thoughtless technician and engineer inventiveness: Hubris is our position to God. […] What do we still care about the “salvation” of the soul!

Nietzsche, GM-III-9 § III—9

So what is sin? Acting ungodly is sin. What is hubris? Selflessness is hubris; thinking you can play with your self like an avatar in a computer game.

Radical cynism is radical freedom

Whoever holds on to his life will lose it. But he who lets go of his life in this world will gain it for all eternity.

Jesus in John, 12 25

Jesus was a cynic. And like all Cynics or Stoics, he was often misunderstood, even and especially by those who wrote down afterwards what he taught. What Jesus teaches here is the secret of living a beautiful life. Often this passage of the Bible is translated in such a way that the one who hates his life would be rewarded with eternal life. This is nonsense.

What kind of reward is it if I am to suffer something eternally, I already hate in its limitedness?

Jesus wants to convey that in the moment death has lost its sting, I have already attained eternal life. Because death loses its sting through love. If I love God, then I will gladly die for Him.

And Novalis realized: we humans need a representative for the One God. He says, if God can fill a human being, namely Jesus, with divine omnipotence, why should he not be able to do it with a stone? It does not matter to which representative we kneel down, a woman with whom we are immortally in love, a king, a child, a tree or even a stone. What matters is that we always see only the representative in this, not the One God.

Therefore, if we are ready, willingly already, full of love, to die for this representative, we immediately attain eternal life. An “eternal” life after death cannot exist already logically. It would have a beginning, namely the moment of death. It would therefore not be eternal. But the eternal life has no beginning, it is infinite. And the secret of this infinite life is devoted love. So we like to kneel down. Not out of fear, but out of a love that gives us infinite power. And we also love that people kneel down before us. Not out of fear, but out of love. We then enjoy the feeling of power of being loved. Cynics fear no hubris.

Keep reading: Get rid of shame

Parrhesia: Have no hidden agenda

Any rhetoric, any hesitation, any fear, is recognized as a sign of a hidden agenda. Your audience will then experience you not as a messenger but as a beggar and immediately distrust you.

That is why it is so important, first of all, that you know about yourself that the truth about you contains nothing sinful and no hubris and nothing to be ashamed of.

Don’t throw your pearls before the pigs

That one should not throw pearls before swine, nowadays regularly means that one should not go to great lengths to present something great to some idiots, since they won’t appreciate it anyway. But in the Bible, where this phrase comes from, it is not meant as a humorous tip, but as an explicit warning:

Don’t throw your pearls before the pigs, lest perhaps they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

Mt. 7:6

So instead of using rhetoric to carefully make the truth about us palatable to people who are already hostile, Jesus here recommends leaving it alone altogether.

And if you do get into danger with your parrhesia, then perhaps the best recommendation is to flee. This again is what Jesus did when he noticed in his homeland, where he was not popular anyway, that people were already starting to pick up stones because of his speeches. So he quickly ran away from the temple.

However, never adopt the values of the mob as your own while exercising such caution, which is entirely advisable. Trust that you are not an inherently evil person.

But — just like the rabble — you can of course be wrong sometimes and an action is not as great as you first thought. But in most cases it is not you who is wrong, but the prevailing opinion.

Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. — “Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.” — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? […] To be great is to be misunderstood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-Reliance, p. 13

And take yourself as important as you are as an messenger of God. Also in addition still another story freely after Jesus:

The superstar lets a bitch massage his legs and feet with an expensive perfume for hours backstage and the bitch, who sits half-naked at his feet, just wanted to start full of erotic humility to dry his feet with her beautiful long hair; then someone comes in and scolds whether it would not have been more sensible to sell the 1000 $ – perfume and then distribute the money to the poor. And what does the superstar answer?

— Come on, the poor people you’re so worried about will still be here tomorrow. But today I’m here and tomorrow I’ll be gone again.

Would Jesus, if he lived today, like Steve Jobs, use handicapped parking spaces, since they are usually conveniently free? Of course he would.

And you? — Be like Jesus: Fear neither sin nor hubris!

Keep reading: Cynicism is Authoritarian Anarchy

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  Naked life is a term coined by Agamben and refers to the victim of the currently rampant biopolitics. I estimate that we have a maximum of 100 years left to avert the total enslavement of almost all human beings. Perhaps in one of the next texts I will deal with this immediate danger and how cynism can counter it.