i read a tribute to david graeber saying he's the opposite of a cynic. the cynical reality is that money determines everything. the cynical thing is money means power and control over natural life. the cynical thing is that we're governed by money, contrary to nature, contrary to human nature. the cynical thing is we've been captured by the false and unnatural power of money. 
i remember being called cynical, and i remember arguing that i was a realist. honestly i don't know what a realist is in the made up world. maybe a cynic. i'm not going to claim to be anything now, i'm just here. i just want to understand something. 
but this is what i thought first when i read that david graeber was an anti-cynic this morning: that the word has been co-opted, or corrupted, in the modern lexicon.

the name cynic derives from ancient greek meaning dog-like. one would not think of dogs as cynics in the modern sense, though they are indubitably dog-like, unlike humans it occurs to me. we say we are only human, or we lose our humanity, we incessantly question what it means to be human, and we question the whole as a construct of the human, whatever that may be, apart from nature, over nature. we could be more dog-like, if we could unmake the world we're continuously we might say wrongly, doggedly making. we could be less cynical in the modern sense, less burdened by our manufactured consent to an unsustainable outcome, we could by more dog-like, maybe we could be more or less human as dogs are dogs. maybe curiosity is key. maybe we could make a different reality, one more dog-like, more adaptive, to the world as it is probably still despite our unaccountable humanity. 

diogenes lived with stray dogs and studied philosophy under antisthenes with the other philosophers who were also called stray dogs, literally or figuratively. they believed virtue was the only good.