Cynicism & Sociopathy

As the antipode to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Sloterdijk, Pete wrote:

Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melancholies, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work. Indeed, this is the essential point in modern cynicism: the ability of its bearers to work—in spite of anything that might happen, and especially, after anything that might happen. The key social positions in boards, parliaments, commissions, executive councils, publishing companies, practices, faculties, and lawyers' and editors' offices have long since become a part of this diffuse cynicism. A certain chic bitterness provides an undertone to its activity. For cynics are not dumb, and every now and then they certainly see the nothingness to which everything leads. Their psychic (seelisch) apparatus has become elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so. Others would do it anyway, perhaps worse. Thus, the new, integrated cynicism even has the understandable feeling about itself of being a victim and of making sacrifices. Behind the capable, collaborative, hard facade, it covers up a mass of offensive un-happiness and the need to cry. In this, there is something of the mourning for a "lost innocence," of the mourning for better knowledge, against which all action and labor are directed.
Thus, we come to our first definition: Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.
[Critique of Cynical Reason]

Without a tangible fahter-figure a child grows up associating authority with absolute perfection, or an insurmontable, intangible force that can only be illusory.
Cynicism is sparked in the mind of those children to discover that their association of the authority has based on lies. the element of relatedness is missing, so authority for them is of something alien, intangible, entirely other than - anarchism taking root in their mind as it liberates itself from this association into the void it leaves.
Romantic idealism is also sparked in this void of experience with a tangible real representation - allowing the mind to adopt pop-cultual idols, or allow tis own fantasies to project an idealized version of themselves, in its absence.
For females such a void leaves them looking for a male that does not exist, because no real man can ever match their idealized fantasies of their absent father.
Cynicism starts as maturity leads to disappointments, deciding that no such authorities, father-figures can ever exist, mocking and laughing at all earthly representations attempting to play that role.

Sloterdijk, Pete wrote:

Nietzsche's decisive self-characterization, often overlooked, is that of a ‘cynic’ (Cyniker); with this he became, next to Marx, the most momentous thinker of the century. Nietzsche's ‘cynicism’ (Cynismus) offers a modified approach to ‘saying the truth’: It is one of strategy and tactics, suspicion and disinhibition, pragmatics and instrumentalism—all this in the hands of a political ego that thinks first and foremost about itself, an ego that is inwardly adroit and outwardly armored.
[Critique of Cynical Reason]  

Driven by his own absence of a fahter-figure, he dedicated his life works to overcoming his father's Christian convictions - in lieu of the natural rites of ascent from adolescence to adulthood.
He became the idol many modern-postmodern men-children were inspired by - idealizing a dead man who could never disappoint - finding ni cynicism a method of converting tragedy into comedy and tears into laughter - a Gay Science.
His Will to Power promising an overcoming they could not experience by transcending their earthly father-figure, so as to return, in maturity, back to him with understanding.
Trapped in adolescence they could only fantasize what they had never experienced - hypermasculinity was the outcome.

Peter Sloterdijk wrote:

Behind the capable, collaborative, hard facade, it covers up a mass of offensive un-happiness and the need to cry. In this, there is something of the mourning for a "lost innocence," of the mourning for better knowledge, against which all action and labor are directed

I ordered the book. Look forward to reading it.

I think you can find it for free on-line...but if you wish to support the author, then buy it.

I am currently reading it.
Lucy exposed me to it years ago when she made the distinction between cynic and kynic....
Haven't had time to get to it until now.

I prefer real books myself.

I'm familiar with Sloterdijk only from his analysis of Nietzsche; "Thinker on Stage" which i enjoyed.

His Critique of Cynical Reason and Rage and Time i know are his most notable works that i haven't had a chance to read yet.

God's Zeal - The Battle of the Three Monotheisms
Another of his books on my 'to read list'.