Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Idealism is a failure

 

I was meandering around in my brain and that thought came up. And I thought that already has to be a book. I internet searched the phrase on three different search engines and nothing that matched it exactly appeared or found.

There are quite a few references discussing the failure of idealism yet not the exact phrase. Here are some interesting references I found:      

               The phrase “your idealism is a epic failure” (which appeared in the text box as I typed idealism is a failure.) coughed up this:

How does your idealism make you suffer? : r/infj

Reddit · r/infj

70+ comments · 8 years ago

 

I am the opposite. For many many years now, I've practiced the "Fail Fast. Fast Forward" approach; which means I learn quickly from my mistakes ...

Idealism is Just Sophistry: The Fatal Flaw of External Reality ...

Jan 14, 2024

What does Nietzsche mean by "All idealism is falseness in the ...

Mar 6, 2023

Clarification for idealism : r/askphilosophy - Reddit

Sep 14, 2024

Why reject idealism? : r/askphilosophy - Reddit

May 11, 2014

More results from www.reddit.com

 

(“a epic” is what the phrase contained, not an epic. Don’t know why)

Or I found:


Dave Pollard

https://howtosavetheworld.ca › 2009/05/06 › the-curse-...

 

May 6, 2009 — I have always been an idealist. Even as a young child I imagined worlds that were, in every way, perfect and simple.

 

 

Global web icon

Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com

 

What's Wrong With Idealism? - Newsweek

Published: Jan 15, 1995

Author: Newswee…

Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins

What remains is idealism without ideas. It offers no guide to political action and creates the illusion that important decisions can be taken without conflict. The result is a failure of...

 

 

Global web icon

Essentia Foundation

https://www.essentiafoundation.org › idealism-may-not...

 

Idealism may not be what you think | Essentia Foundation

 

1.     

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Florida Atlantic University

https://www.fau.edu › spa › pdf

 

[PDF]

The Failure of Idealism: Mental Models and the Inability to …

The Failure of Idealism: Mental Models and the Inability to Change Public administrators are attracted to ideals. American public administration has been intimately involved with the …

 

So you can go down many rabbit holes with this one phrase, yet as I was thinking I could not see how any idealism worked. And I think many of you with just a quick thought may come to the same conclusion. We have many “ism”s yet we do not have many utopian societies. Yet the phrase that caught my attention the most is driving me mad because as I contemplated about the failure of idealism I realized idealism fails because it has no path of action. The phrase I found that came closest to my internalized meanderings is:
               What remains is idealism without ideas. It offers no guide to political action and creates the illusion that important decisions can be taken without conflict. The result is a failure of leadership. In the Clinton administration, principles enshrined in high rhetoric, such as America's commitment to Bosnia's national survival, are frequently abandoned when their cost becomes apparent.

 

This is from the Newsweek article” What’s wrong with idealism”  listed above.

 

The article pretty much describes where my thoughts devolved into to a point yet I also think that it is much more. I guess you have to look at how broad of a definition of idealism you want to use. Are we talking large scale idealism such as communism or democracy? Are we going to say the ideal has to be all encompassing for mankind? And is that where the failure lies? Or can you as the Newsweek article discusses relate it to a specific idealism that tries to solve one problem in society?

 

The article also discusses the people behind idealism or people trying to create an ideal solution to a problem. They have specific groups in mind and there is also much more, yet their example does highlight problems with trying to come up with an ideal for any situation.

Idealism in any shape form or fashion according to my brain offers no guide to political action. The authors of any ideal have to back out of the ideal and create a path to achieve the goal. In it’s most generic sense communism needed socialism to arrive at communism. Somewhere someone had to centralize all planning so all wealth could be distributed equally. Could it still be achieved? I doubt it since there are too many humans involved. And is it because of humanity or human nature that idealism will always fail? Probably, yet we still create ideals all the time. There is something ingrained in the human spirit that wants a perfect world, some kind of equality amongst men.

 

Philosophers spent millennia developing idea after idea to no avail. No one has turned the table on the foibles of mankind and figured out what we need to do to all be equal.

 

And this is not my original point, yet it must be said at this moment. This is why I believe our Constitutional Republic is the best idea so far. The key behind it is the concept of equal opportunity with protections stated for those not in power or not as “equal” as others. The failure of course is humans still want to control other humans and in our case is it the economic hierarchy  that so many of us foolishly believe will support the masses also. No wonder socialism looks so good to so many. Socialism will fail, yet capitalism only succeeds for the one percent, the rest of us are serfs. We did come close by the 1950’s. Yet it is not this time that Trump refers to when he says make America great again. No he has a different America he wants to make great. Unfortunately too many of his supporters think it is the 1950’s and (white) American workers are going to be treated well. At one point our parents and grandparents worked hard and started creating equal opportunity in practice, yet the one percent said “holy shit, this doesn’t work for us” and began the process of buying off our government for their benefit.  No revolution, no bodies lying in the street, just plain old economic power plays because they could. So most Americans do not realize how bad they were screwed. You look at the wealth gap from the 70’s to now and it is obvious, but no one  wants to do that because then you have to admit how much of a patsy you became.

 

Anyway the above paragraph was not my original intent in thinking about why idealism is a failure. Or

maybe I was thinking the above because that leaves us with one successful idealism and that is the idealism that since I am richer than you I am better than you and you must follow me or you are a bad person. It seems like that is where our society is headed unless some philosopher can create a new idealism that replaces all the failed ones that we can rally behind and watch fizzle out once we try to put it in practice without a true path for implementing it.

 

Idealisms are failures for many reasons yet I will cling to our idea of a constitutional republic until someone comes up with something better. I just hope others realize it is up to us to fight for it before it is too late.

 

Or maybe just maybe the ideal world is not of this world and we need to focus not on things on this earth. It seems when we lose our moral compass and our faith is when our societies decline. To what truth do we follow? Ours? Or? Right now it seems our society has no moral compass and more and more the lack of morals much less the casting aside of our Republic’s ideals show we are in a great heap of fecal matter.

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