Idealism cannot tolerate reality. Nor can it allow you to do so. It cannot stand it, nor can it permit you to endure it. It is incompatible with reality and incompatible with you—unless you obey it blindly. Fanatically.
Idealism is intolerant of reality, far more crudely than a pollen allergy is to pollen, because every idealist lives with their back to reality and declares themselves its enemy. For that very reason, they demand its censorship. Its extermination, which, etymologically, means stripping it of its seed.
It is no coincidence that idealists are the primary human resources of totalitarianism—throughout all times. From the followers of the political idealism of The Republic by Plato, that chilling and aberrant book, to the blinded and obsessed devotees of Hitlerian Nazism, whose Lutheran, Kantian, and Darwinian genealogy proved decisive. Philosophy—the most sycophantic of courtesans and the most readily available concubine of moralists—always stands in the court of tyrants, always lies in the bed of religions, seducing and enlightening all with its ideals.
Today, in the 21st century, idealists have taken over democracy. They have claimed it exclusively and oppressively. So, if you are not an idealist, you are not a democrat. Thus, idealism safeguards democracy—a fearsome safeguard. But what about the reality of democracy? In whose hands does it lie, and who will preserve it?
Likewise, idealists have also seized the ideals of democracy’s enemies. Both sides—idealists all—have taken control of everything: the control of reality and its possible interpretations, whether institutional, political, or even scientific. They lead us—both de facto and de jure—into a world that declares itself incompatible with reality.
Global commerce, with absolute virtuosity and professionalism, manages the trade of extreme idealisms, even those incompatible with our biological survival and that of any species or ecosystem. The sale of indulgences during the Christian Renaissance of 16th-century Europe is a mere joke compared to the trade of idealisms in the postmodernity of the 21st century.
Non-idealist human rationalism has no political or advertising power. It sleeps in life, entirely silenced and powerless, the sleep of the righteous—or perhaps it sleeps in the morbid and complicit pleasure of cowardice. Only the dreams of idealists cause insomnia.
I do not even want to imagine what—without doubt and without reservation—the reality’s response to such excessive irrationalism will be. Reality never remains idle, is insensitive to everything, like the fiercest of animals, and has always destroyed, both individually and collectively, those who act in ways incompatible with it.
This is not the apocalypse; it is reality. A reality that is immortal because it is imperishable, inextinguishable, and intolerant—that is, eternal or *eviternal*, if you prefer. It is capable of violence always unprecedented and unexpected, for it is invisible and unpredictable. We mortals are the ones who perish. It is surprising that it is necessary to point out such an evident truth.
Reality always wins and survives, despite the aberrations of all idealisms. And it survives at the cost of your own survival. Reality always collects its debts. It is no coincidence that failure is the distance separating idealists from reality.
And the ultimate failure is nihilism—the greatest of all idealisms: the denial of the meaning of reality, a reality and a meaning with which the idealist human being is utterly incompatible.
Let us not forget: reality is either material, or it does not exist. To speak of spirits, souls, and hidden meanings is already to invoke ghosts, to fall, once more in history, into moral ideals and seductive utopias, into supremacist discourses and emotional and intellectual tyrannies, and, in short, into philosophical practices—that is, into the conjuring of infinite specters, the choreography wielded by religions, ideologies, and idealisms of all stripes and dangers.
Jesús G. Maestro
