< Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism

Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism/Literature

  • The Chronicles of Narnia are all the way on the idealistic side... yet, like the Lord of the Rings example below, puts the characters through a lot of trouble first.
  • Harry Potter ends up firmly on the idealist side, with The Power of Friendship as its chief overarching theme. The books do go through Cerebus Syndrome, though, with more and more characters dying in the later books.
  • The Lord of the Rings is overall a fairly idealistic series, despite its ability to put its characters through hell first.
    • Tolkien's Christian beliefs inform the series very strongly; making it highly idealistic despite the turns that the story takes. In his view, cynicism and despair were inherently self-destructive, self-fulfilling prophesies; and therefore inherently sinful. Characters that fall into cynicism end up dying miserably, or at best, losing everything; while those who retain their idealism and persevere, regardless of how bad things get, are eventually rewarded, even in death.
      • The story even sets up a number of clear contrasts to illustrate this: Gandalf vs. Saruman, Frodo vs. Gollum, Theoden vs. Denethor, Faramir vs. Boromir. The most interesting contrast is between Theoden and Denethor. While both end up dying during the Battle of Pelennor Fields, Theoden's death is noble and heroic, and is accepted as the fulfillment of his life and purpose. By contrast, Denethor's despair-driven suicide is ultimately empty and meaningless; and, without Gandalf and Pippin's intervention, would have resulted in the death of Faramir and the complete destruction of Gondor.
    • In contrast, The Silmarillion is pretty far on the cynical end of the scale. The Noldor know they can't win against Morgoth, but they fight anyways and end up being picked off one city at a time. Most of the endings are extremely depressing, and the handful of stories that aren't complete downers are bittersweet.
  • On the other hand, H.P. Lovecraft's stories defined an entire genre: Cosmic Horror Story, the nethermost reach of Sucks-To-Be-You literature. It's a lot like real life, except all human accomplishment is meaningless and deluded, with Eldritch Abominations as the only beings that really matter in the universe at large, and there's many a Fate Worse Than Death for humans who stumble on these truths.
  • George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy taken to the extreme cynical end.
  • Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels are an example of literature that falls in the middle of the scale. The good guys do win in the end, and evil is punished, but 'in the end' can operate on a scale of centuries. "King Javan's Year" appears to be as cynical as anything in "A Song of Ice and Fire" what with the protagonist and all his friends being killed messily at the end of the novel, but it sets up the good guys to win in the next book. This makes it cynical by the standards of high fantasy series, which tend, as a genre, to be idealistic.
    • The later books are even more cynical, with protagonists employing everything from mind control to adultery to accomplish their goals.
  • It is interesting to compare the works of Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt, two British comic-fantasy authors who are often compared with each other. On the surface both are similarly full of wry, rather cynical deconstructions of Fantasy, but a closer look reveals the differences. Pratchett's novels are quite heavily idealistic under the makeup, full of Karmic Deaths for the villains and Happy Endings for the heroes. Holt, on the other hand, seems to delight in running his heroes through the wringer, especially when it comes to love.
    • Quite often in Pratchett's books there will be a cynic and an idealist paired together. Who is actually right about the situation also varies: in the first two books, cynic Rincewind is almost always right and idealist Twoflower is almost always wrong. In the City Watch books, Carrot is an idealist while Vimes is a cynic, but Carrot's charisma tends to make the world around him (a deeply cynical one) essentially become more idealistic, because people don't want to disappoint him. It also bears noting that Carrot has been getting considerably less idealistic while still not being cynical, whereas Vimes has been growing slightly more hopeful in human nature (although he still thinks everyone's a selfish greedy bastard). In the books he's featured in, Moist von Lipwig is a cynic who is amazed and disturbed at how idealistic those around him can get. Death and Vetinari are both functionally cynics (they do what they do because they have to do it) with highly idealistic beliefs (specifically justice and freedom - two concepts which both also believe do not actually exist except to the degree that they are invented and believed in by people). In general, the Discworld appears to be an idealistic world populated by cynics. In a telling exchange from Guards! Guards! (the first book to prominently feature Vetinari and the Watch):

Lord Vetinari: There are not good and bad people... There are always and only the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.
Captain Vimes: Did you really mean all that, sir? About the darkness in the human soul and everything?
Lord Vetinari: Indeed. It is the only logical conclusion.
Captain Vimes: But you get out of bed every morning?
Lord Vetinari: Hmm? Yes? What is your point?
Captain Vimes: I'd just like to know why, sir.
Lord Vetinari: Oh, do go away, Vimes. There's a good fellow.

    • Holt started out as comparatively idealistic -- Flying Dutchman ended with a full-on literal Happily Ever After and didn't have anyone more overtly villainous than a jackass boss. They've been sliding down the scale ever since.
  • The Dresden Files is definitely a mix, as is the protagonist. Good and Evil, is fairly pure forms, are at war in the Dresden Files world, in many forms, and also in Dresden's own soul. When Harry is good, he's very good, but sometimes he's very dark, to the point of murdering an (admittedly nasty) person to gain power to save his daughter from being killed, and pondering worse. His heart is with the Light, though, to a degree he himself fails to recognize.
    • On the other hand, he's becoming uncomfortably aware, from painful experience, that some of the harder-boiled cynics around him that he disdained when he was younger are actually right in their views. He managed to restore some faith and hope in the deeply embittered Warden Donald Morgan, but he's also finding out the hard way that Morgan was tired and bitter for a reason.
  • The Age of Misrule plays around at both ends of the scale. On the one hand, the re-emergence of magic renders tech useless, leading to widespread famine when food deliveries stop to the cities, and the government are conniving bastards, and the Higher Beings have their fair share of Kick the Dog moments - but on the other hand, the heroes, who fall squarely on the idealist end of the scale, manage to overcome the baddies at every turn (and the heroes who don't count as "idealist" get their faith restored by the end of the arc). It's probably magic, or something.
  • Author C. J. Cherryh presents an interesting extreme. Her work is a study in the extremes of the scale; every character either a heartless "burn the village to save it" cynic or a omni-endangering foolish idealist... or both.
    • There are few fanatics so ruthless as the idealist ready to subordinate real people and real things to abstractions.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov seems to be a study of the Sliding Scale, as it is at heart a book about faith versus faithlessness in the face of the rampant cruelties of the modern age. Moreover, in personal outlook, the cast varies on the scale: Alyosha is the youngest brother and the idealistic messiah, Ivan is the middle brother and The Spock, falling on the cynical side, and Dmitri the oldest brother is caught inside the spectrum at an unstable equilibrium.
  • Andrzej Sapkowski's novels (The Witcher Saga and the Hussite Trilogy) are both set in a quasi-fantasy setting and are both taken far to the Cynical side. It's mostly compensated by (dark) humor, although there are some genuinely bright moments in there as well.
  • Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series is set in a "fantasy RPG" world on the far cynical end of the scale. The protagonists - all college-student gamers - share this tendency.
  • Mortal Engines leans very heavily towards the cynical end, which is something in a setting involving undead cyborgs and mobile cities. The very, very few optimistic characters (Tom, Wren, possibly Oenone Zero) are shown again and again to be completely out of their depth, while the pessimists, nihilists, slave-dealers, compulsive liars, juvenile delinquents, mechanical horrors and violently depraved psychopaths are in their element.
  • Military sci-fi is not the place to be an idealist, as a diplomat found out in John Scalzi's Old Man's War. The one attempt at diplomacy ended with the diplomat reduced to a fine paste about 30 seconds into his "negotiations". The series stays near the cynical end most of the time, but by the end of the last book, The Lost Colony, things finally seem to be looking up.
    • Basically the dismantling of the (well-intentioned but extremely cynical) Colonial Defense Forces' military junta means humanity can try other approaches in dealing with aliens other than a constantly-paranoid siege mentality.
  • Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet seems to be dedicated to the proposition that the total war mindset makes you stupid. His hero, who is Always Right, runs rings around more ruthless military commanders with no concern for collateral damage, proper prisoner treatment and casualties on their own side.
  • The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant vary in tone from "Grumpy Bear in a land of sunshine and fluffy bunnies (threatened by Ultimate Evil)" to "Crapsack World". In the first trilogy, the "real world" is heavily on the cynical side while the Land is idealistic. However, Thomas Covenant, the Designated Hero from the "real world", has a habit of making everything he touches slide towards the cynical end of the scale... In these books both the Grumpy Bear and the Wide-Eyed Idealist will have to learn to adjust their attitude.
    • Most of Stephen R. Donaldson's books peg the scale firmly at the "cynical" end of the scale, mostly because Donaldson loves seeing his characters suffer.
      • And don't forget the whining. His characters don't suffer silently.
  • Victor Hugo originally wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame as a very cynical story. Most adaptations are considerably less so.
  • Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince is über-cynical, believing that it is safer to be feared than to be loved and advocating stopping at nothing to gain or retain power. Then again, from Machiavelli's point of view, the end justifies the means: a strong ruler means order and peace for the common people.
    • Yes, but taken in the context of the politics of Renaissance Europe, it can be seen as an attempt to impose rationality and order on a chaotic borderline-Ax Crazy situation.
    • The Prince is an exception to the rest of Machiavelli's writings, which generally argue for a republican government (he was trying to get the De Medicis to hire him as an advisor). Arguably, Machiavelli gets called cynical for just calling things as he saw them.
      • There is, of course, the now tossed around theory that "The Prince" was the most sarcastic piece Machiavelli ever wrote. The evidence for this is pretty strong, considering, as was previously stated, all of his other pieces say exactly the opposite of what he says in The Prince, and, when you look at it, the way the damn book was written makes it sound like it is dripping in sarcasm. Imagine the most famous passages read aloud, by an incredibly sarcastic, angry man who has been flat-out told that his visions of government will not ever happen in his life time, and you are, as close as is possible, to the tone that "The Prince" was actually written in and intended to be read in.
      • His Discourses, of course, are on the same side of the scale as The Prince. Even though it's on the republican side, it certainly isn't idealistic by any standard. The longest chapter is about organizing coups, and several chapters of the first book describe how to use religion for political purposes.
  • War and Peace is right smack-dab in the middle. Idealistic characters end up cynical, cynical characters end up idealistic, then some now-cynical characters decide they want to be idealistic again and so on ad infinitum. Depressing situations and settings always have a silver lining, happy occasions always have darkening moments of worry. To say the novel is overly idealistic or cynical is to ignore roughly half of it, which would be a lot.
  • Crime and Punishment is about the growth of Raskolnikov from a cynical to idealistic person, in what's essentially a Deconstruction of the Nietzsche Wannabe mindset (and reconstruction of the Christian one).
  • The two extremes are pretty much perfectly contrasted in William Blake's poem cycle Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Innocence falling on the idealistic end and Experience on the cynical one.
  • Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is quite far to the cynical side, even though Karma Houdinis are usually avoided. One might argue, though, that the characters' endless self-pity makes things seem worse than they really are.
  • Lady Suzette Whitehall of The General series is at the cynic end of the scale motivated by wealth and power and the need to protect her beloved husband. She will do 'Anything, anything at all.' for him - including murder, torture, bribery and even adultery. Raj Whitehall on the other hand is intensely idealistic, selflessly dedicated to the cause of Man and civilization on Bellevue - and hates the brutal means he must employ to further it. The other characters are closer to Suzette's end of the scale then Raj's but his influence definitely nudges them closer to idealism.
  • Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, despite following a highly cynical protagonist who is treated horribly by everyone he meets and openly states that he thinks the world would be better off if half of mankind was killed in a plague, ends on an idealistic note. This is starkly contrasted with Lewis's previous novel Babbitt, which follows an optimistic lead character, but is ultimately cynical in tone.
  • Cormac McCarthy's The Road: A dark, dreary novel set in a post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity has degenerated into cannibalistic monsters. Those who haven't are starving to death or freezing to death under a gray sky, the sun having been long since blotted out by ash. It's idealistic.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four. Quite cynical.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

  • Many people consider the works of Chuck Palahniuk to be overly cynical and nihilistic, but Palahniuk strongly disagrees with that statement and considers himself a Romantic.
  • Stationery Voyagers tries its hardest to be neutral, but leans slightly cynical. Most of the Gambit Pileups are the result of some characters being too Genre Blind to realize that Hanlon's Razor applies to them just as much as it does to everyone else. Then again, they do have soul-crushing evil and malice to deal with as well.
  • Lord of the Flies took this concept to the absolute extreme end of cynicism—it was pretty much a rebuttal of a book on the extreme idealist side of the spectrum.
    • There are those who believe that the experience of The Great War shaped the mindset here.
  • In the world of realistic Children's Literature, Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume are on opposite sides of this spectrum. Cleary's books tend to be about the lighter side of childhood, even while they portray all the ups and downs that go with it. Almost like Yotsuba&! in book form, but not as wacky. Blume's books are a much harsher, unflinching look at the unhappy side of childhood, and have been banned in many places.
  • The Sundering is difficult to peg on a two-dimensional scale of idealism. It uses White and Grey Morality, with the "white" side winning and committing genocide against the grey side. That is depicted as a very bad thing that's nonetheless perfectly in character for the "pure" heroes. This sounds cynical, but the funny thing is that it might actually be idealistic, since the bad guys could have been redeemed if anyone had been willing to negotiate.
  • Mark Twain, in his later works, became an incredibly cynical author.
    • In his defense, however, he had good reason. Multiple deaths of loved ones combined with financial disaster tends to do that.
  • Most of Jane Austen's novels are idealistic and romantic in the fullest sense of the terms. Then there's Mansfield Park...
  • The world of P. G. Wodehouse is eternally sunny, but laced with enough cynicism to keep you laughing.
  • Andrew Vachss' Burke books are definitely cynical. Beneath the veneer of civilisation that "citizens" see is a festering underworld with all kinds of scum. The government is at best ineffectual, at worst either wilfully looking away or abetting evil. While Burke does do heroic things like saving people and bringing down criminals, he himself skims the edge of the law and is unafraid to be brutal or work with people who use violence.
  • Despite some of the horrific aspects, the Green-Sky Trilogy bleeds idealism. Raamo is the most powerful psychic in generations, and goes through an entire year of being feted as above and apart. However, he never believes it. His restraint attracts Neric, the closest thing the Kindar have to a cynic...but even Neric is on the side of angels. He just sees trouble, and wants to solve it. Together, they discover the society's dirty secret the first Ol-Zhaan exile dissenters beneath the Root and made up the story of the Pash-San to cover for the disappearances. The exiles could have easily succumbed to dispair and violence, as the Ol-Zhaan feared... turns out they're healthier, and only marginally less peaceful, than the Kindar. Every time one of the "old guard" steps in and tries to stop the Rejoyners from integrating the societies, they're shown up in some spectacular fashion. And in what is possibly the first canonical video game sequel to a book, Snyder undoes Raamo's Heroic Sacrifice by having one of his friends rescue him.
  • Where Jules Verne goes on this scale depends on whether the book was overseen by his far more idealistic editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Most of the works he's still known for were published under Hetzel, with the notable exception of Paris in The Twentieth Century (a proto-Cyberpunk book written in the early Hetzel years, but not published until 1994), so he's typically known as an idealist. When Hetzel died, later editors gave him more free rein, and his works got steadily more cynical.
  • In Diane Duane's Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, one universe discovers another and quickly realizes that the new universe is much lower on the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism... and now that the bridge is open, the cynicism is getting out. Here's the interesting part: The new universe is ours.
  • Another interesting comparison is between Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, two of Australia's greatest poets. They lived around the same time, they were both city-born men who wrote about the country, but whereas Patterson was very idealistic, romanticising the bush and its inhabitants, Lawson frequently wrote about how the bush sends you crazy after a while. They would frequently write responses to each others poems and stories.
  • Ningen Shikkaku, or No Longer Human, chronicling the extreme woobie Osamu Dazai's life of disappointment and hatred toward the society right before his final suicide, lies firmly on the cynical end of the scale.
  • The amount of misanthropic and nihilist venom that drips from the pages of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's "Journey to the End of the Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan" puts them so far on the cynical end of the scale that they fall off of it. That doesn't stop those books from being among the most hilarious novels out there.
  • The self-help book The Secret goes far, far off the deep end of the "Idealism" side of the scale, to the point that it has been subject to mockery.

"You are destined to have an amazing life!"

  • In Death: The series seems to be located roughly in the middle of idealistic and cynical. Eve is definitely cynical, but she will put everything on the line for murder victims anyway. The books make it clear that the world is both wonderful and terrible at the same time.
  • Dinotopia falls firmly on the idealist side, showing that humans on the island (except for Lee Crabb) have been taught to dump their warlike ways by peaceful and wise dinosaurs.
  • Peter Watts' Blindsight is highly cynical. Even the protagonists are bizarre and inhuman, to say nothing about the aliens
  • Orphan of Asia, a novel that details a lone protagonist's failing struggle against the colonial Japanese regime in Taiwan before and during World War II before going completely insane, lies firmly on the cynical end of the scale.
  • The detective novels of Raymond Chandler are so unrelentingly cynical about their subjects (mostly related to LA and the USA in general) that author Paul Aster said "Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since."
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