Jill Konrath [00:44:26]: We have a question now from Norb who says, “Cynicism feeds on itself. How do you cure cynicism?”
Tom Morris [00:44:32]: Well, in the first few pages of the book, I tell a story from C. S. Lewis's great little, short novel, The Great Divorce. It's a little story about heaven and hell. And the silly little trope in the story is that there's going to be a bus trip from hell to heaven.
So, the people who are in hell, they get to visit heaven. And, yeah, they're really curious. It's not really good where they've been, so they want to see what this heaven place is like.
So, everybody gets on the bus, they go to heaven, and they look around and say, “Man, this is great. I wish I could stay here.”
And then somebody says, “Oh, you can.”
“What do you mean, I can?”
“You can stay here if you're willing to give up whatever it was that got you to the other place.”
“Really? It's that easy? Yeah. If it was bitterness, if it was resentment, if it was cynicism, if it was hatred—all you got to do is give it up. That's all it's going to take. And then you can stay.”
The interesting thing about the story is that C. S. Lewis portrays people who are living the words of, I think it was Dante who represents somebody as saying, “evil be thou my good.”
There's a character who has learned to relish bitterness. There's a character for whom bitterness or resentment or cynicism has become their god.
At first it was just complaining because I don't like this, and I don't like you. And then it was complaining because I like complaining. And then it was complaining because I love complaining. And then it was complaining because I'm a complainer, I'm a cynic, I'm a bitter, resentful person, and it feels great.
Turns out that all they have to do is let it go, give it up. They can stay in heaven. But guess what? It's not as easy as it sounds.
That's our country right now. We got people clinging to bitterness, resentment, cynicism, hatred, anger, and tribalism. “Evil be thou my good.”
But if we can point them to folks like C. S. Lewis in this short little novel, sometimes it's a mirror and they say, “Oh, that's me. That's terrible. I need to give that up.”
And that's how we get beyond and if we can show some positive movement, as the Habitat for Humanity organization shows, as maybe your local soup kitchen is showing bringing diverse people together to do for common purpose.
When you get a close look at some of this good stuff going on in the country right now that doesn't make the headlines in the nightly news—there's more of that than we might suspect—or the country wouldn't be still together as a country.
If we can get that in our faces, it'll give us hope to let go whatever it is that's holding us back. And maybe it's not going to be heaven, but it's going to be sure better than what we've been through for quite a while now.
Jill Konrath [00:47:40]: So, I have another question related to that. What if you're not the Cynic and you're looking at someone else who is? What can you do? They say, “There's no use. Why vote? I mean, it's all rigged, blah, blah, blah.”
And you're going, “Yeah, that's how so many people feel right now in terms of why even bother? My work doesn't make a difference, right?”
Tom Morris [00:48:08]: I sort of survey most of the reasons people have for not voting and show how they're bad reasons. And I developed this concept in the book called Voting Every Day because I like to do word studies.
Whenever I'm going to tackle a new topic like success or happiness or change or anything, I take the main words involved with that topic and I do an etymological study. I go back in word history. Where did the word come from?
Indo European or Greek or Latin or some other nation. And what did it mean then and what does it meant through history? Because sometimes the history of our words, there's a lot of wisdom built into what the word means.
And sometimes words get corrupted over time, and we need to return to the original wisdom of that word. So, to vote, when you look up vote … voting and you look up election, they come from word roots that mean to choose, just to choose.
We choose every day. We choose our attitudes, our actions. We can even choose our emotions to cultivate them or to hold them back.
What are we choosing every day? The concept in the book is voting every day. When you vote every day with your time, your attention, your action to try to make the world a little bit better.
I bought a book a few years ago, just based on the title, called Perfecting a Piece of the World. The world's never going to get perfect. Neither is the country, but maybe I can perfect a piece of it, right?
And if we're all working on that, it's almost like the ancient art of quilting. I want to contribute my best square to the quilt. I'm not going to do the whole quilt, but I'm going to do the best square I possibly can and offer to sew that into the quilt.
So, the cynics out there, the people who are negative about our process and all this? Well, sometimes if they come across ideas like those in C. S. Lewis's book The Great Divorce, or they come across ideas like those in my book, it kind of reignites the tiny, tiny, tiny little flicker of hope that's still hidden away in their hearts, and then that, once given, some air can grow.
Now, while I was doing this, my wife (who was a little bit cynical about the project herself because she’s a realist) said, “There's an awful lot of people you're not going to convince with your book.”
I said, “Yeah, I know. Absolutely. I won't even try. All I want is to give hope to the people who will listen, who have a little bit of an open mind. I don't ask for a lot.”