It'd be great if I could leave behind my ideals without really attaching a face to it. Too many people undermine the ideal with the blemishes of the individual.
Call it cliche (my sympathy goes out to all the individuals who can't express their feelings in a way that hasn't been expressed a million times before; and thus their feelings are deemed disingenuous), but I wouldn't mind going to a far away place where no one knows my name. It'd be ideal. Sometimes, I wonder what my family and acquaintances would think of some of my opinions if they read it in some book. Not that I'm looking for a hug, when it comes to family, I'm too close for a hug in that sense anyways.
John Doe is pretty popular for an unknown person.
Anyways, people look for causes behind the ideal, justifications (if the ideal was made up to justify the behavior of an individual), morality of character, background and education. I've noticed it in my environment, not unlike the media, there's an unwritten rule (though maybe it's not so unwritten in the media lol) not to speak of any good deed done at the hands of "that family member". Nobody wants to hear it. He/she is a bad person and that's that, there's nothing more to be said.
It's also not like having an ideal that opposes the status quo of how something should be doesn't demand instant inspection of your character.
I've seen ideals turn into people's weaknesses (in the minds of the observers), because others thought a fear or insecurity was the reason said people created their philosophy, so the idea was thrown into the trash bin simply because it was derived from "a weak mind". Even if the mind is weak, there's a difference between a weak mind and a misinformed/inexperienced one (the latter is more likely to delve into false beliefs due to lack of knowledge and experience whereas a weak mind could be in its current state due to many battles or one long rigorous one). At least, hear of my battles as I lay weak, dying on the battle field of life and its romantics. After all, there may not be much of a difference in viewpoint between the loser on the battlefield, and the victorious one.
People tend to reject ideals on character alone, and not how accurate it aligns with the truth. Additionally, ideals may get accepted on character alone as well, when the person is of some prestige or generally perceived as intelligent. The con here is that the ideal could be complete nonsense.
Truthfully speaking, I don't care to be remembered at all (out of all the things I think about, this rarely crosses my mind), be it as an ideal or individual. But if I was to be remembered, I'd definitely liked to be remembered as an ideal rather than a person.
Even the positive comments may not accurately describe me, and some negative comments may describe me better than some positive ones, therefore the memory that would probably be most accurate is "He was imperfect."
That'd at least tell me that my loved ones didn't falsely believe I was something I wasn't, some ideas they conjured up in their mind from my self-conscious behavior when I'm around them, or that I don't end up as some fairy-tale whose purpose is to make themselves look good in the watchful eye of society. At the same time, it implies that I didn't meet the expectations of said individuals. Perhaps because I lived and died the way I wanted, perhaps because I was free.
