I have often argued that "being realist" is a failure in and of itself. If people said "well, there's a king and that's what it is", we'd never have got to where we are now.
Ideologies (and ideas) are, in my view, stronger than facts, which often only represent the past, while ideas shape the future.
(these days the word "fact" is a bit of a trigger, but I thought about that well before all that jazz, and the current phenomenom seemed to prove my point to many of my friends)
It's actually an ideal. Ideals also don't exist in reality. The difference is that ideals are generally held to be worth striving for in spite of that.
You cannot even say one interpretation is idealism and the other is realism because it is US pop culture bullshit. You notice because your remark has an added indignation.
Not being realistic can also mean that you are creative on false premises, and that the result might fail because of it. By being realistic about the world and the environment surrounding you be it work-, political-, economical- or otherwise you can see actual problems plaguing others, and _maybe_ you can generate something that solves a tiny part of what people struggle with.
Searching for historical examples, JFK was both?
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