The Way of the Raccoon

From Here

"Bodybuilding" is a great example of idealism run amok; it shows ideal concepts are often, maybe always, arbitrary and bizarre. The bodybuilder emulates a beef cow and 'roid maxxes and eats a lot to pack on muscle mass. In a surprisingly large number of cases, the 'roid doses can lead to the body's systems failing so even the most basic functions like breathing and immune response can be severely compromised--not exactly "ideal".

I remember a handful of backyard football games when I was around 17 or 18 years old where guys who were in the "bodybuilder" hobby would show up. They were uniformly ineffectual as athletes in spite of "looking" muscular. Lifting weights and gaining muscle mass is a very specific activity that doesn't lead to all round athleticism. Looking back on those days, I'd say in general, it was difficult to guess how effective someone would be at a sport by their physique.

Many examples of idealism have a similar flavor. They're "image" dominated and dumb: devoid of real world information. Weirdly, adults tend to encourage idealistic views of the world among children and actively shield kids from real world information. Jobs and careers are idealized, politicians are idealized, the military is idealized, romance and sex are idealized, etc... As a consequence, teenage boys and girls often have an idealized image of love and romance that actually torments them as their relationships fail to compare to a thing they haven't thought through at all, nor experienced first hand.

The notion there's a "perfection" dominates countless obsessive behaviors of men and women: makeup, hairstyle, dentistry, eyesight, eye color, skin color and complexion, and on and on. People get plastic surgery because their nose doesn't conform to some notion of an abstract perfect shape or size, or think their head is the wrong shape and get wildly invasive plastic surgery to match some completely phony image of a celebrity who's all made-up and only photographed from specific angles with specific lighting.

Quite weirdly, the "ideals" dominate the reals. Those who pursue and "believe" in the ideals are thought of as the good ones. Those who are realistic are cynics at best or the archetypal "losers". The loser archetype is the ultimate bogeyman, especially for the middle class people who work their whole life mainly to avoid falling into that category.

An antidote to this trap is "the way of the raccoon". A raccoon is an omnivore, is curious and adaptable, and is a survivor and doesn't participate in fruitless activities and goes into a torpor over the winter. Adaptability goes hand in hand with a realistic appraisal of the world, while "idealism" exists in an world of perpetual psychosis.