I am an idealist, and as such, I have no place in this time and world. In a political sense, this means that in my ideal world, everybody understands themselves and thus, the world, and in such a way that it is clear for everybody where to go and who can walk in front. I don’t claim to know what all fits in my ideal world, but I do know that many people in the past had an ideal and tried to force the world to follow that ideal. I think, for example, of the Khmer Rouge 40 years ago in Cambodia. Pol Pot had an idea of how people could live together. He studied in France and probably had some lofty ideas and ideals but never realized that the lessons from history are that you cannot force a society in a certain direction. He persuaded his fellow believers to kill millions of people in the name of progress, an idealistic world. 

The list of dictators that moved whole societies into destruction is long, and even our democracies breed ideas and ideals that come with destruction; look at the waste we make and the hatred many people have for each other. People are, for the most part, good, but as soon as they become part of a statistic, they show another color, and in modern democracies statistics rule.  

So, I am a revolutionary who doesn’t believe in revolutions. Someone told me once that if you want to catch a butterfly, you can run around and try to grab it, or you can look for the best place to sit, hold your hand up, and wait. The goal is not to catch a butterfly but to be there when it lands and enjoy the place where you sit in the meantime.  

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe – well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, ‘who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,’ but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.”
H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old