| Chapter Intro: | Introduction |
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routine or unreflective cynicism is an unceasingly negative, contemptuous, and general rejectionist worldview that is problematic in our current historical moment. “Our era of fragmented and defrocked narratives in which many people feel existentially displaced and unable to agree on what constitutes guiding public virtues turns the soil and makes ready for planting routine cynicism” (Arnett & Arneson, 1999, p. 19). Arnett and Arneson “deem the routine, banal, and unreflective use of cynical communication to be a significant problem for discourse between persons. A social problem for discourse emerges when routine cynicism is used as a communicative technique” (1999, p. 12). Unreflective cynicism as a communication technique divides people even further by “destroying the human connection—we cease to trust what has been said without evaluating or testing the statement for its public truth value” (Arnett & Arneson, 1999, p. 17). Routine cynicism invites and fosters existential mistrust.
The postmodern condition of skepticism or antifoundationalism leads to the communicative problem of unreflective cynicism and breeds existential mistrust, both of which represent conditions of a hermeneutic of suspicion between human agents. According to Arnett and Arneson (1999), “when cynicism becomes routine—an automatic response before one studies a situation—a philosophical loss of trust in existence and in the possibility of goodness is made manifest” (p. 13). As already mentioned, Buber (1965) lamented the demonic power of pervasive mistrust. Buber worried that man was losing his togetherness, his ability to see the other as a person due to existential mistrust. As Buber (1955) stated, the individual person was losing the ability to connect with the other, the ability to enter into genuine dialogue with the other. Existential mistrust undermines the possibility for dialogue between persons because it ultimately undermines the foundation of existence between persons: