21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.
T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S
18. Beware Ideals
‘This word is a hidden word and comes in the darkness of the night. To enter this darkness put away all voices and sounds all images and likenesses. For an image has never reached into the soul’s foundation where God herself with her own being is effective.'
Meister Eckhart
’All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.’
Guy Debord — Society of the Spectacle
Compassion, freedom, equality, justice and love are all ideals. However, it needs to be remembered that these ideals are only realised in particulars. Treating ideals as aspirational risks them becoming ideology rather than a living reality. This thought is well expressed by Erich Fromm in his book, The Art of Being:
‘It is striving that is rooted in the ambiguity of man’s existence and that has the aim of finding an answer to the uncertainty of life by transforming a person, an institution, an idea into an absolute, i.e., into an idol by the submission to which the illusion of certainty is
161