The real, the ideal and the actual

Please do not make the mistake of considering me an idealist, as this is not true. I am a realist, in the most profound sense. The actuality in which we live, this horrible city full of exploitation, ignorance and greed, is full of idealists pursuing their ideas of the ideal, which are merely  negative images of the real invented by the reflective self, which is itself only an image, in the imagination. Thus the much vaunted idea, bequeathed to Western civilization by the Greeks, from whom also we inherit our competitive spirit, leads us away from the real into a world of shadows and fantasies. There is an escape, but since it involves the renunciation of the idea, especially the idea of the self, only the individual on an existential search for redemption can make use of it.