Diogenes the dog...
or 'cynic,' used to go about the Agora in daylight with a lit lantern. When people asked him what he was up to there he answered, 'Looking for an honest man.' (Most people wouldn't get the joke in that, I assume.)
Dogs have a cynical outlook (well, what else would you expect, really?). Fine words don't do it for them, they just look at the reality of things. So from that we get 'cynical.' Too many people think that to be cynical is to be negative but that is not necessarily so.
Companies that come up with ISO 9001 certification or perhaps a program with a catchy name like 'Syphilis,' htings that are going to cause quantum change, whatever that means... the cynics just hunker down around the bar, looking down into their free pints (!) waiting for the BS storm to subside before they say something that might get them in trouble when the neddies come around to explain how everything is going to be transformed.
I was once caught standing there on the ramp at Tan Son Nhut after having just inspected what was left of our tool store after a 122 mm. rocket had made free with it. There were bits and pieces of building all over the place and what was left mostly came up to my ankles.
A little jeep pulled up with the CO being chauffeured by the XO. A quick glance at the situation and the CO said, 'Your boots are dirty, Trooper,' before signalling the XO that this concluded his situational assessment so that they went whizzing off to the next crisis spot.
'I think we are f*cked,' was my cynical reaction to this. That was way back at the beginning of my career (?) in aviation and not much has happened to change my own assessment of management since then.
A lot of what is going on in the Niger Delta looks like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But then I am a cynic!