Do Not Speak of Ideals

When looking at viral social media posts or business articles, you often see claims like "True top-tier professionals don't do X" or "Doing Y is the true form of kindness." They might say true top-tier people are surprisingly humble and honest, or conversely, that they are fearless in everything. As I just mentioned, the content varies quite a bit depending on the speaker.

Honestly, I personally think this kind of talk about "the real deal versus the rest" is largely meaningless. It's just a narrator talking about their ideal worldview or view of humanity, and listeners who like the same things agreeing with them—that's all it is.

The problem is that this contains no work toward "understanding the complex and difficult-to-grasp real world." The term "the real deal" is merely a definition of words, a fictional concept set up to explain "my ideal world." And ideals like "I want it to be this way" or "it should be this way" have nothing to do with the reality of our world as it "actually is." The content being discussed there has nothing to do with the reality of you, me, or other people who actually exist in this world (and who are not yet accurately understood).

No matter how novel or impressive the "my own interpretation" proposed by someone might seem as a worldview, that explanation does not provide you or me with any new understanding or ideas for solutions regarding the world we are actually living in. Since it is talking about something other than reality from the start, no matter how grand the ideal, it will not improve your daily work troubles, resolve interpersonal conflicts, or alleviate the suffering of living as a whole.

This is because when facts are not understood as facts, it is impossible for those problems to be solved.

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If "bad prejudices" like "People of X nationality are a violent race" are meaningless, then "good prejudices" like "X is the ideal human" are equally meaningless. This "good" is just a matter of the prejudice being phrased as an affirmative sentence rather than a negative one; in the sense that they do not look at "what actually exists," they are both the same.

At the beginning of this talk, I mentioned that the images often presented in society as "the real X" or "the true X" are all over the place. To be precise, this just means that sometimes completely opposite things are said, but in reality, all the right-leaning patterns are similar, and the left-leaning patterns are also similar.

Posts that go viral in business or relationship contexts are all similar. Since there is no diversity in prejudice, there is also no diversity in the ideal images that constitute "good prejudice." If those posts were actually talking about reality, reality is always complex and diverse, so it should not converge into one or two stereotypical claims.

Therefore, my point this time is this: It is meaningless to talk about ideal images, which are "good prejudices." Let's stop. It is also meaningless to read or listen to the ideals of others, hoping that their explanations will solve your problems. Let's stop. It is impossible for new understanding of reality to be born from the process of reconfirming prejudices. It is the same if you repeat it a hundred times, and it is the same if you repeat it a thousand times.

Of course, it is natural and necessary for people to feel something unbearable about social inequality or misery and to harbor the impulse that "I don't want the world to be like this." A person who does not feel that way is a dead person. It is likely a fact that this world is painful for the majority of people, so I am not saying that we should do nothing about it. We must feel something about it, think about it, and do what we can.

Even so, please do not replace the reality in front of you with talk of imaginary good and evil, imaginary superiority and inferiority, or imaginary right and wrong. There is no meaning in debating imaginary correct answers, and there is no meaning in praising, worshiping, or following the correct answers put forward by others. Conversely, there is no meaning in criticizing or attacking them either.

If the problem of your own reality has not yet been solved, there is no meaning in "imagining a correct answer and believing in it." This is because no matter how simple the addition or subtraction, you will never get the correct answer by strongly imagining a wonderful ideal in your head.

What is necessary is to solve the problem yourself, and the only way to solve a problem is to understand the content of that problem on your own. The problem is the reality of your own unfulfilled daily life.

Related Books

In the book I published just the other day, "A Book for Getting By Even If You Are Bad at Human Relationships," I pointed out the harm of the habit of making assumptions about other people's hearts, and went beyond mere superficial communication know-how to consider the significance of "facing others you don't understand." If you felt something from this talk, it should definitely resonate with you!

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