Hope for Cynics: Review

Jamil Azaki's book is a valuable guide for overcoming despair, passivity, and cynicism in polarized environment

Hope for Cynics explores the pervasiveness of cynicism, how to resist the temptation to embrace it, and how to pull people out of it.

While Classical Cynicism is about self-sufficiency, it also has values and minimizes group differences. Routine cynicism is about rejecting society to an extreme. While cynicism might be understandable in some circumstances, it’s counterproductive, closing you off from possibilities and sources of help and making you more susceptible to misinformation,

The opposite of cynicism isn’t gullibility or naivete but rather healthy skepticism. Skeptics, we learn, question, but rather than reject new ideas, they are open to learning. While Cynics can call out problems, they mostly see them as inevitable consequences of the lack of trustworthiness of people. Skeptics start with trust, find a path to change in the large, and acknowledge that individual people can (sometimes) change.

I found this book easy to read and hard to put down. It’s also structured in a way where there are enough logical breaking points that busy people can read in short segments. The book also has many actionable insights, ranging from identifying and correcting cynicism in yourself to engaging with others with whom you disagree and who have a cynical perspective. In addition to facts and actions, the author weaves in the story of a friend and colleague who embodied an optimistic skepticism despite many challenges that might lead you to forgive him for giving in and becoming cynical. That story and the author’s explanation about how this friend’s memory inspired him to continue to try to overcome hopelessness and cynical tendencies made the book more relatable.

If you are looking for a guide to help you turn (perhaps paralyzing) anxiety and fear into something that can energize you to help change things, Hope for Cynics is a good place to start. While social issues are a recurring theme in the book, the lessons here can also apply to work and home situations where people’s obstacles to change come less from real constraints than a belief that people can’t be trusted.