Reflected Cynicism

I believe that it was Jean-Paul Sartre himself who originally observed that "hell is other people" - and it was in his play "No Exit" that he created a situation with a group of people who thought they were together in an anti-room to hell, not realising that they were actually in hell and that the behaviour of the others was their torment.

with thanks to the "Farside" ..

I had heard of JPS, but never bothered getting into his work before, but now I realise I must have a better look at him.

In a potted bio, I ran across another of his ideas, along the lines of something upon which I had been musing only recently. That was the concept that if you were able to free yourself of the "self" as one of the key concepts of liberation, what then actually drove this "self" you "left behind"?

Sartre seemed to posit that the self was actually a reflection of what you believed other people saw in you.

Hmm. Bad news (or not, depending on whether you give a tinkers cuss on what other´s think).

I like to believe I am past caring, but know that in reality I probably do.

Thus (huge leap), we are all actually a product of what we believe other people´s opinions (about us) are - and thus endorse those opinions with every action.

This of course means I am not responsible for being whatever people think of me (and everyone else is tarred with my mental brush.

As my brother once said of me "you seem to have a bad word for everybody".

Possibly true, but I regard it as classical cynicism - as outlined by Antisthenes, then developed by Diogenes - but not quite to the extreme of living in a jar and giving away all my worldly possessions (let´s just call it reflected-cynicism and blame it on other people´s opinions)