The western world is currently very divided by opposing ideologies.
The conflicts range from economy and gender politics to immigration and the environment.
All issues are represented by idealists who strongly advocate for a certain direction.
WHAT IS AN IDEALIST
This has made me think about what an idealist is.
Some people will call the idealist naive or impractical. In any regard the idealist is a person who wishes the world to be different from what it is.
In my opinion idealists are aesthetes.
An idealist is very much like an architect or a designer, people who are drawn to achieving perfection in the world.
THE FACE OF IDEALISM
For instance, look at an architectural drawing. Look at the clean lines or better yet, look at the architectural illustrations meant for presentation purposes. These illustrations display the highest aesthetic vision for the project which is as close to flawless as possible. The vision is pure and appealing as a facilitator for inspiration and human interaction. It is not raining, unless it enhances the appeal and purpose of the architecture. There are no shady figures dealing crack in a dim lit corner of the architectural structure. You will not see a family with the parents arguing while the kids are crying.
Another essential aspect of a display of aesthetics is that it is frozen in time.
That is the essence of idealism as far as I am concerned. Idealism is a still image of a desired state of society and human being. Like the murals in North Korea, Castro’s Cuba or the Soviet Union which praise the ideal of happiness through collectivism.
Now, you might say “Well, these are all images of communism. We don’t have that in our western culture.”
Yes we do, they are called ads and they are praising the idea of happiness through consumption everywhere.
Communism or capitalism, it does not matter. Idealism is the mortal human being dreaming of being perfect, living a perfect life in a perfect world.
Perfection.
So, idealists are dreamers and the real world is the nightmare which the idealist is trying to wake up from. How many clean lines do you see in the real physical world around you?
As a consequence I suspect that the idealist is not really a member of society like everyone else around him. The idealist is committed to a place that is somewhere else, a place which only exists in his own head.
The idealist can be said to have dual citizenship. He will most likely be more adamant in defending the “country” in his mind, than the country which he physically lives in, since he considers the physical world to be a lesser state of his mental vision.
As a result the idealist will be detached from his surroundings and often feel lonely, since he lives in the idealistic inner world in his mind where few people are able to follow him.
Only in the company of like-minded idealists will he feel a connection through a shared vision.
I think that idealism fundamentally comes in two forms.
- Raw idealism
- Diluted idealism.
RAW IDEALISM
Idealism, in its raw form, will potentially kill you.
If exercised on a national or international level concentrated idealism will suffocate people and societies. History has shown this to be true several times.
I think it is primarily due to the idealist forcing the physical world to obey an idea conceived in a non-physical dimension.
It is easy to see that the mind is more flexible than the physical world. It does not have to obey physical laws or respect the limited extent of human endurance. You can travel faster in your mind than you can in reality. Have you ever thought that you could walk to a destination faster than you could in reality?
That is why idealists who are working from their mind rather than the laws of physics should be warned that humans may not be able to survive their aesthetic vision,
Two persistent idealistic models for society which lie in each end of the spectrum are Communism and Capitalism.
Communism
Communism in its pure form is common ownership of means of production, abolishing of social hierarchies, money and even the state.
Capitalism
Capitalism in its pure form is the notion that private ownership of means of production, a free market and little to no governmental regulation will provide the necessary solutions to meet the demands of society.
Capitalism creates a social hierarchy in society, rewarding those who facilitate the process. Communism wants to make everybody equal by dissolving the institutions which create the hierarchy.
I say that there are 2 things in life; wants and needs.
As I see it the nature of capitalism is to cater more to the majority’s wants than its fundamental needs while the nature of communism is to cater more to the majority’s fundamental needs than its wants.
In reality both ideologies contains aspects of failure (corruption), which is why they will not work without being diluted with pragmatism.
The question is; Does failure happen due to human error or is the ideology flawed because it does not either respect or take into account human nature?
This question seems to be an inconvenience to the raw idealist and it will often be written of by stating that humans are able to adapt to the ideology and overcome. The notion is that the raw ideology is meant to develop the individual and mankind as a whole.
DILUTED IDEALISM
Like juice concentrate has to be diluted with water so that the kids won’t choke drinking it, idealism has to be diluted with reality (pragmatism) for human beings to breathe in it.
What idealists do not understand is that idealism is like a Petri Dish – it is static with a fixed wall – and life is destined to evolve and spread, climb the wall and grow out of that Petri Dish.
In turn, idealism diluted with pragmatism is among the strongest composites in creating the future for mankind on this planet.
Nothing comes closer to perfection than nature itself. Which means that an idealist is practically competing with nature.
Since nature is constantly perfecting life in itself through evolution, some of the greatest aesthetic achievements are those imitating the function or physical characteristics of elements in nature.
Other aesthetic achievements are done when the qualities of used materials almost seem to defy laws of physics, such as gravity.
When an aesthete is too idealistic that person may refuse to acknowledge limitations set by reality which compromises the aesthetic vision of form or function. This may be witnessed most prominently in the public display of architecture.
This is what diluted idealism does; it takes the best of both worlds; human vision and the building blocks of nature. Diluted idealism does not succumb to nature but it also does not violate the laws of nature.
IN THE END
Trying to characterize idealism you have to look at its origin.
Idealism belongs to the so-called metaphysical philosophies which advocate that reality is a mental construct.
This sounds similar to the leftist progressive notion that everything from gender to societal institutions are nothing but social constructs.
I will advocate that idealism is feminine in its nature.
- It is emotional
- It is never satisfied
- It is driven by unproven ideas
- It sees the world as a mental construct
- It is always trying to change the surrounding world
- It does not care much about the consequences (does not take responsibility)
Considering that the idealist is a person who believes that perfection will make the world a better place, the idealist can essentially be described as a woman browsing through the latest IKEA catalog.
It is something to think about.