What you say brings out the issue with Ideals that I was attempting to bring out in this thread. Many people are actually scared of ideals and about living up to them.....which shows a certain fear of being inadequate and not matching up. This really is unfortunate....and is precisely why I started this thread in the first place.
Self improvement and development is a normal human trait and comes with our nature. So...most people should not have a problem with ideals. They would be enthused by them in fact.
So far in this thread the word ‘ideals’ has been used to cover a very wide range of things, such as values, beliefs, views, ideologies – pretty much everything that could be bundled together as ‘ways of taking the world’, and you haven’t objected to this broad use of the word so I assume you are happy with people using it in this way. However, going back to the OP you clearly take a particular slant on ideals. For you they are ‘how things should be, how we should live and what goals we should pursue.’ You also say ‘ideals are goals and objectives that people fix…’ So for you ideals are not a general descriptor of how people, in their diversity, take the world in multifarious ways. They are prescriptive and fixed. You lament the cynics for whom nothing is right or wrong
in itself and who disapprove of those who prescribe certain lifestyles. This suggests that ideals for you provide a kind of standard model of what a human
should think and believe, how they
should understand and take the world, and how they
should live and behave. For this to be the case, everyone would have to agree on what constituted the ideal human. We would also have to agree that everyone should strive to emulate this ideal.
There appears to be no room in your worldview for difference of opinion. In later posts you talk about people in the ‘mature’ phase of life coming to ‘clear and considered views’ but there is no acknowledgement that different or contradictory views might have equal validity. Rather, your argument would seem to be that with sufficient experience and consideration everyone will come to share the same views, namely yours. Otherwise, why would you be making the case for ideals, if ideals lead people in different and opposing directions, as they very clearly already do in the real world? It is, in fact, precisely this difference in ideals that leads humans to come into conflict with each other and why we as a species spend so much time fighting each other. One might more understandably make the case that ideals are at the root of human strife - that they are in fact a kind of disease. No doubt if everyone was exactly the same then we wouldn’t squabble about what constituted right and wrong. However, this isn’t how things are. But then for you ideals ‘are not just about explaining things as they are’, they ‘are about how things should be’, which we must assume means how you think they should be.
If ideals are to represent a fixed and prescriptive set of beliefs about how people should be then they must come from outside of us. If we generate our own ideals then they will be different and for most individuals they will change over time; they will not be fixed and there could be no standard prescription. In other words, your kind of ideals will necessarily be
someone else’s ideals (apparently yours) and we will be obliged to embrace them. Those who do so will be considered to have come to a clear, considered and mature conclusion on the matter and made the correct choice. Those who do not will have fallen short. This sounds awfully Orwellian to me and presumably a society in which such an ideology held sway would necessarily have its thought crimes and their corresponding punishments, here and/or in the next life, for those who fail to comply. History provides plenty of examples of such societies, both religious and secular, and we might do well to heed the lessons that can be learned from them. Unfortunately, humans do seem remarkably unwilling to learn anything from their own mistakes.
The world is already full of ideals. Advocating ideals is hardly a solution, since ideals would appear to be a substantial part of the problem. Ideals imply that there is a right and a wrong way to live and most of us would be happy to go along with this, but only up to a point. We have laws to deal with the most generally agreed standards of behaviour (although these vary from culture to culture: personally I wouldn’t want to live in Saudi Arabia) but you don’t appear to be talking about that level of moral prescription. You write, ‘In present times many people have moved beyond the child stage but not yet reached the Mature stage… Its only about police, courts and criminal offences. Otherwise anything is ok for them.’ Your ideals would seem to be those that go beyond what the law and general opinion prescribes. This is presumably why you specifically refer to ‘spirituality, religions and certain philosophies’ as the home of your ideals. In other words, you are treading familiar ground here. This is about your own religious/spiritual views. Not only do these views indicate how we should all live, it seems, you go on to insist that ‘most people should not have a problem with ideals. They would be enthused by them in fact.’
That word ‘should’ again.
The fact is that everyone already has ideals (in the broadest sense of the word) because everyone has values and views. Your problem isn't really that people don't have ideals, it is that they don’t necessarily share your ideals and your enthusiasm for them. It seems that this is an issue for you and your response is to lecture them on their shortcomings. Have you found this works for you?
