It’s not uncommon for idealists to be seen us impractical people living outside the real world. They are viewed as incurable romantics, lacking common sense on how things work and many people would suspect idealism to be a reaction to a world they have little control. A reaction to the ever-changing motion of a chaotic environment. This kind of escapism of course does exists as a shadow form of being, but under the right conditions idealism is nothing but a vehicle for empowerment.
The Origins of Idealism
Idealism is a level of abstraction above the realistic and pragmatic view that disregards any excessive details and holds only what is important for controlling something of value. It is an attempt to keep a hold on any outcomes that are affected by far fetching conditions. Imagine a point that instead of getting fed different pieces of information you look for ways to understand how they came to be, why are they true and what you can defer in allowing you to keep producing this kind of results. This way of thinking allows you to jump above any particular knowledge or artifact and abstract into the bigger picture.
Idealism, seen as an overt focus in abstractions, has its origins in the ability of humans to fantasize. It takes a particular kind of imagination to be able to see a world shaped by different powers, outside of what lies in front of you. As was spotted very accurately by the historians, it was at a specific moment in our history that men made the transition to burry the tribe’s dead. This act came from the fact that people managed to imagine a world outside the reality they were living in and even outside their bodies. As de facto it may seem today this event was a transcendence of the human spiece and came as a revolution to the up to that point living standard. From the evolutionary perspective there was simply no immediate value from taking care of the soul of a diseased one. To worry for something like that you need to imagine an outer world, you need to see a before and a beyond in your time frame and depict your current situation as a standpoint in a journey that continues to exist after death. You need to transcend to the word of ideas.
It’s the same transition that men need to make to reach warrior spirit. To be a warrior, you don’t need to be aggressive as many modern theorists believe, or wear an armor and fight a real war. Warrior is anybody that follows his values more than his personal interest. It’s the person who walk through life with integrity and would prefer to accept a setback as a price for his idea to win.
It’s for these reasons that the origin of idealism, is the supreme energy levels of a healthy body and mind that allows for the expenditure to try the far-reaching plans and glance at the long term. It’s the same conditions that nurture excessive optimism, under the trace of an unfailed experience for long periods of time where the spirit knows nothing of fear and allows for the immersion into the bigger plans. It’s only at untroubled and peaceful times that someone can gather up the spirit to look for bigger truths. Coming from a position of scarcity you can only gather up your pieces for the short-term results neglecting any future thoughtfulness and consideration.
It’s quite obvious why it takes someone to be an idealist first to be a warrior. One can only operate in such a mode by being under the spell of ideas. It’s for those rare few that ask the bigger questions and look for the why behind. But who can do that if not the one with the surplus energy to take on such pursuits.
How Modern Times Obliterate The Warrior Spirit
We all remember the famous quote in the movie fight club.
“We’re the middle children of the history, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives.” — Tyler Durden
By living in a world that bigger issues have been mostly taken care of, we‘ve lost the vehicle through which we expressed our warrior spirit. We stopped looking for the bigger picture and closed off into our microworld, losing the potential of any higher meaning or path. Technological advancement seems to have amputate men from the masculine side, disempowering them and leaving them with unexpressed potential of their true nature. We covered our basic needs but somehow damaged our soul.
Not expressing the warrior within us by working for something external and bigger than us can be detrimental in men’s psyche and can find its way to transform and eventually manifest in much uglier ways. Aggression, depression and other mental hurdles are expressions of unfulfilment and pointers that something essential is missing from someone’s life.
Warrior and Lover
It’s strange to realise that the warrior and lover archetypes can work together and not cancel out each other but not only they strongly inter-connect but one is prerequisite for the other.
Warrior is nothing but a Lover that is not afraid to take action and fight for his ideals. You can only be a warrior if you are a lover armed with a minor dose of Romanticism same way that Don Quixote’s strived for his ideals. It would be a big mistake to see a warrior as a destroyer because to him detriment is nothing but a necessary stage for something better to emerge.
Why Sadists Have No Relation To The Warrior
In his book on archetypes, Robert Moore depicted a Sadist as the extreme case of a warrior that immerse in his craft to such a degree that he completely neglects his emotional side. He is seen as a person who got swayed by his strong desire to achieve his goals into behaving apathetically to the world around him. But looking at it more carefully, we can see how a Sadist is coming from a different and unrelated place to a warrior.
A sadist has a fully individualistic view of the world, accompanied with a mindset that everybody is fighting each other and everyone is for himself. He has ideals that circle only around himself and lives mostly in the pragmatic and materialistic world without any hint on the idealistic view. Most of the time sadism is a reaction to a compulsive life of being forced into something you do not fully believe or enjoy. As discussed above, aggression propagates out of the shadow forms of living.
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