#cheekiness

There were times when Dallen’s cheekiness didn’t just border on impudence, it jumped right into the middle of impudence and splashed it all around.

"kynicism has made speaking the truth dependent on the factors of courage, cheekiness, and risk, and the process of truth gets caught in a previously unknown moral tension; I call it the dialectic of disinhibition. Those who take the liberty of confronting prevailing lies provoke a climate of satirical loosening up in which the powerful, together with their ideologies of domination, let go affectively—precisely under the onslaught of the critical affront by kynics. But while the kynics support their 'cheekiness' with a life of ascetic integrity, they are answered, from the side of the attacked, by an idealism with a disinhibition that is disguised as outrage and that, in the most extreme case, can go as far as extermination. An essential aspect of power is that it only likes to laugh at its own jokes."