Ideals (SumBlog4)

Ideals. How often do we take a situation, daydream about it, make a perfect outcome in our heads and wait for that outcome that will never happen? I know I’m guilty of that. It's easy to get caught up in thinking how something should go or how it should have ended. Unfortunately, situations rarely ever turn out the way we imagine them, whether the result is better than what we expected, or worse. Most ideas in our society turn out that way or are born because of these ideals, as Max Weber claims. We idealize a concept and try to apply it, but it never quite works out the way we plan. A common example of this would be democracy. Democracy isn’t a tangible concept, but off it many countries have based their whole government. However, everything in reality doesn’t work out as smoothly as the idea of democracy does on paper. No perfect version of democracy can be found in real life, but it’s a model to which we can strive and try to implement. Each that has a democracy implements it in a different way. Democracy in America does not look the same as democracies in other parts of the world, but they are based off the same fundamental ideals. Ideals are just a concept. No two things can be exactly the same, and ideals just prove that.

We often have high expectations for ideals, what something is, and what something should be.  Is this harmful? Maybe. It is good to set goals and to strive for them, however, it can be hard to face reality if these goals are not met.

   

Most of the time, I tend to idealize situations with a more favorable outcome than should be expected. This can lead to disappointment. Most of the time, when something doesn’t live up to what we’re expecting, disappointment follows. While this isn't exactly the same as what Weber wrote about, it still applies in a sense. The subject of ideals and high expectations brought one particular picture to mind:

And if we did, we might just all be a little happier.