Regarding ideals
What is it that we view as the centre of our world? Family? Friends? Community? Country? Power? Wealth? Or even perhaps, Justice?
In all truth, all that we view, we perceive as the centre (or even purpose) of our existence are a set of well-said, well-intended, ideas. What we believe in; what and who we trust; right and wrong, good and bad; matters that are normative or categorical in nature. The truth, or whatever we perceive as the truth. The ‘right’ set of ideals, or, more correctly, what we perceive as the ‘right’ set of ideals.
Some may say that ideas and principles shape who we are, to identify ourselves, to perhaps become different (or the same with someone we would like to identify with), to label ourselves, tag ourselves, to make us into what we perceive as a good, morally correct, human being. To form an idea into how we perceive ourselves, and, most importantly, how other people perceive us. To answer one of the most fundamental questions in life: who am I? – a question which will never be as simple as giving the name of your birth, your age, and the number of your ID card.
To give us a set of rules, a set of guidelines, in which we would adhere and live by. These ideas, these thoughts – as if a cloak in which we take up, wear, and assume as our own identity – change the way we view things, and, at many times, give us what we perceive as right, true, just and correct; while at the same time, tells us how to perceive things categorized as wrong, bad, unjust, immoral – as those we think as incorrect.
Ideas. Ideals. Ideology. Dogma. Doctrine. All ideals, as it is used and translated, along with the use of the word ‘ideally’ as a concept of ‘correctness’, ‘perfection’, ‘das sollen’, in the face of realistic situations and conditions, is a reflection of the good-natured human at its best. However, surrealistic approaches to real problems have always become an issue for humanity in general. Marx never intended his utopian view of a socialist, communistic state to be a horde of mass murders, genocide, and terror, nor did the founding fathers of the United States of America ever envisioned that their country, their views of the world manifested into one of the grandest, pioneering, and richest state of ideals the world has ever seen, into a global monopolic, neo-imperialist state.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions – no matter how well-meant, well-wrapped, well-written, and well-formed an ideal or ideology may be, in the end, due to its capability to turn heads and curve, bias, and curb perception of reality, is at its best, very dangerous and highly volatile. Ideals shape not only men, but also whole societies. Culture, tradition, norms, and values are all formed from simple ideals, and within that capacity, ideas, ideals, and ideologies – whichever we would like to assume – form the crudest, most basic, but most dangerous of all the brilliant instruments Man has created. Ideas and ideals are the easiest, most effective, political tool a ruler would ever aspire to have; or would most negligently fear.
There will never be good or bad ideals and ideologies, because in the impractical eyes of the simple human being, who most likely had those ideals internalized and taught to believe so, the ideals and ideology they adhere to are the most stable, most perfect element one could ever think of; and our discussion is not limited to those ideals that are oriented in a political manner, no. In fact, the most dangerous, most volatile, most flammable set of ideals are those adhered by religion. The closer a man is to his ideals, to his principles, to his perceived view of perfection, the easier that man would lose the ability to use what mankind as a species has used to progress thus far – common sense. Religion is meant, and has always meant to become, something good – the relationship between Man and its creator, and his connection to the universe around him, or what he perceives it to be – but once again, attachment to a set of ideals would eventually make us perceive things the way that ‘idea’, or most importantly, who gave us those set of ideas, rules, and doctrines, desires us to.
The explanation of why so many conflicts throughout history were caused by religion (namely, the Crusades, the Islamic Conquest, and the lengthy compilation of wars that followed the Protestant Reformation) was never because religion in its very core as something bad, rotten, and corrupt (although each party viewed the other to be having a belief which is categorized to be such). Instead, it is the biasing of ideas and their implementation by those with vested interests, and the utilization of those ideas to raise sympathy, and to an extent empathy and anger, along with the intimate and abstract nature of religion itself as a set of interalised, coercive values set upon by a mysterious hand (the idea of God) onto well-meaning, well-natured humans, has proven over and over that the source of evil (‘the Devil’) is not and never will be a particular belief… but by people who utilized those set of intimate and internalised set of rules to deceive, control, and direct people where they would want them to go.
In the words of the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, I may quote: ‘Religion is true for the common people, false for the wise, and useful for those in power’. Religion, as a stark example of ideals that are so easily broken, bended, and rebuilt to mislead, continue to exist not due to the existence of a miraculous intervention by unseen, almighty, omnipotent, and omnipresent pair of hands – but the existence of a set of rules and ideals people believe in intimately, make humans become ignorant, blind, irrealistic, impragmatic, and therefore, as controllable as dogs on a leash or horses on a carriage, by a master that might be weaker if those leashes, harnesses, and blinders were taken off and the animal (the human in this context) be set free.
Ideals are always meant to create a better world not only for individuals, but also for humankind as a collective. However, at the same time, the same things we trust and believe in often misguide and deceive us into following the agenda of a few powerful indiciduals, or in fact, those very ideals as social institutions are maintained to mislead, to misperceive us; to blind ourselves to what actual problems we face, especially today in a world so hectic, so confusing, with more than plenty a mix of variations, excitement, and distraught. To open our eyes and have a degree of pragmatism is never too difficult, but it is those very same ideals that distract us, that pull us away, that force us, whether we realize it or not, to refuse to accept and to deny, the truth; to deny what is in front of us, something we call ‘reality’ – das sein.
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