For how many atrocities we commit in their name, it is strange, is it not, how our society views idealism in such positive light. Of course we only recognize it as such because we each have our own ideal, or at least for those less imaginative, have borrowed one from another. When I say idealism, I simply mean someone who has envisioned or been shown an ideal state and has decided to attempt to bring it into being. I have recently decided that such ideals are ultimately a detriment to us as a species, a source of collective hurt for all those involved.

But you may ask me ,“Why are ideals so terrible? They show the course the future should take; they better our thoughts and actions.” I am afraid this is unfortunately not the case. In some people this may happen but in the vast majority of us they ultimately blind us to alternatives. Instead of us guiding a situation based on its circumstance, we attempt to overlay something that may not be possible over the top. We give ourselves names like capitalist, communist or anarchist and think we are being logical or morally superior. These all fail because humans aren’t particularly good at identifying our own condition or how to better it. We don’t bother to take into account all of the nuances of a particular situation and just dismiss where our ideologies fail as superfluous, statistically irrelevant phenomena that may be safely ignored by those true followers of an ideological dogma.

Why do we seek to overlay our reality with one that comes from our misguided thoughts? Should these notions of how life should be lived (which often change from day to day) constantly inform how we think everyone else should live? This is the folly of idealism, a person who disregards reality and believes his or her reality should exist oblivious to circumstance. It is sheer delusion in most cases. We create a world that cannot exist within ourselves and try to bring it into being. Whatever we wish to accomplish with our idealism can only be accomplished through viewing our reality as clear and as unhindered by delusion as it can be.

This human occupation of idealism is very similar to the idea of a plan. We create plans hoping to bring about a certain state of affairs. Ultimately the reason planning fails is because we have failed to take something into account.

Idealism is just planning on a grander scale, a scale to which no single human or collective human group could hope to know all of the nuances involved. Idealism also fails because it relies on people thinking the same thing about something and not encouraging to explore as many solutions as possible.

Of course now the question I must be asked is “what do you propose instead O’ bequether of all knowledge?” I simply suggest being content with guiding our lives rather than planning them as our idealogies would have. We cannot know what the future holds nor often what we would even like it to hold. Only a fool decides he or she will become a doctor and then finds out halfway through that they are ill suited to it. You may certainly explore the possibility of becoming one or anything for that matter. But to decide what the future will hold is ultimately an unsatisfying and futile effort. Guiding does not offer us knowledge of the future such as ideals may seem to. But what is a future that cannot and will not be?

What kind of comfort does this give us, to believe in a promised land that cannot be delivered.