ISSUE99 实用vs理想 【求拍，有拍必回】

爱上千年的猫UID: 2476232

TOPIC: ISSUE99 - "In any realm of life-whether academic, social, business, or political-the only way to succeed is to take a practical, rather than an idealistic, point of view. Pragmatic behavior guarantees survival, whereas idealistic views tend to be superceded by simpler, more immediate options."
WORDS: 611
TIME: 00:40:00
DATE: 2010-3-20 20:12:29

Whether pragmatic behavior or idealistic view dominate in the process of achieving success has long been an unresolved issue. People holding different attitudes may act differently in their lives. In my opinion, we call for a balance between pragmatic and idealistic since they serve different goals under different situations. It is better to follow a case-to-case study to look into the issue.

Generally speaking, pragmatic behavior is the best solution for current needs. We are living in a world where some urgent problems require immediate settlement to avoid further loss. Consider the political leaders in Haiti where a terrible earthquake just happened and caused serious damages and injuries. Compared to idealistic views such as booming economy or improving education, pragmatic actions including saving the injured and searching for the missing ones make more sense. Some may argue that a simpler option is to build better earth-preventing houses but it seems to be a later solution. Any way, the lives of people are the most precious. Unless the people can live through this tragedy, there is no chance to improve the quality of houses and implement other actions in the future.

The similar situation can be met in the world of business. For any corporate firms, the first tough task is to survive in the competitive market thus making profit is the most practical purpose to obtain. Many people would like to impose other social responsibilities, for example, protecting environment and propel the employment, to the firm. However, if a firm cannot avoid financial deficit and guarantee survival, how can we expect it to accomplish other responsibilities? In fact, firms which practically set making profits as their foremost task can benefit the society as a whole. They produce more commodities that the price would go down to benefit the consumers. They do researches to develop new products that offer more job vacancies to the society. And they create more value for the country to improve the power of the nation in the world. Pragmatic behavior of earning more money in turn realizes the idealistic views mentioned above.

However, we should not emphasize too much on pragmatic behavior aiming at satisfying current needs. Short-term revenues should in line with long-term goals. For instance, in the academic area, the short-term pragmatic goal for students may be gaining better grades while the long-term prosperity of the academic fields relies on the knowledge in depth. Students who wish to get higher scores perhaps will focus on the content related to the exams, which is far from the deep understanding of theories. Nevertheless, exams are not the final goals. In order to maintain the advancement in science and technology, we should also pay enough attention to inform the students about the idealistic point of view, that is, deeper understanding and further investigation are required in their study. Without keeping such idealistic view in mind, we can hardly continuously making progress in the fields of science and technology.

Moreover, idealistic views give us clear direction of where we should go. Just as mentioned before, short-term goals which can be achieved by pragmatic behaviors should in line with the long-term destination--idealistic options. Politician should remember the responsibility of serving their people rather than maintaining power. Merchants should account for the environment protection and the externality to society. Academic pursuers should try their best to enrich human knowledge. These idealistic points of views enable us correct principles when meeting short-term needs.

In sum, pragmatic behavior and idealistic view should be uniformed to satisfy our short-term goals as well as long-term goals. Under specific situations, there may be different requirements for pragmatic and idealistic that we should follow case-to-case study.