Fortifying the present is preventing growth of Prosperity in the future. We go back to our village after twenty or twenty-five years and meet our neighbours who remain as they exactly were before. Some of them will be proud not to have changed anything in their lifestyle. There is an opinion that not changing is of value. It is a kind of mental conservatism. Psychologically, it is a good definition of misfortune of conception.
It is the idealism of the inept that has no avenues of external growth and no energies to seek it inwardly. It may or may not be all right for incapable persons. Sometimes capable men learn to espouse such an ideal and miserably stagnate at the level of career they entered. An idealist in 1943 was employed as a university lecturer after ten years of no employment. His idealism was not to seek money or status in matrimony, but he sought a graduate bride.
As he was determined, his parents gave way and they found a graduate girl in the house of a manual training teacher. She quickly disabused his mind of any idealism, proclaiming her infinite superiority in every respect. Many young men sought various kinds of advice from him, as he was an idealist. Several came for advice about marriage. He changed his tune and advised young men to marry into advantage, as his own idealism had led to a matrimony of disadvantage. His own brother took an engineering degree soon after. The idealist brother arranged for an unidealist wedding into advantage. The wife who had unsuccessfully pleaded the cause of her own sister to wed her husband's brother, lamented loudly that foolish young men were gathering around her husband who was really not an idealist, as he had prevented her sister's wedding. Self-justification is not idealism. It is the impertinence of inept ignorance or inexperience.