Ideals can be dangerous. The worlds of media and sport often encourage the cult of celebrity, where a successful person's image is carefully crafted and enhanced, presenting an ideal to which the humbler majority might aspire but know they will never achieve. The fact that not everyone can achieve the ideal, or that some will cause themselves harm in the attempt, or end up being exposed as a fraud when they pose as something they are not, does not mean that having an ideal is harmful in itself. We need to have ideals and set goals in order to give our lives direction. The problem is knowing how to relate the ideal to the actual. In this chapter, I shall argue that, for most people most of the time, life is something of a compromise, and pretending it to be otherwise is one of the most common delusions and hazards in the way of developing a realistic and positive sense of “me”. Groucho Marx's famous line “I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” is a classic expression of the mismatch between what one aspires to and what one is.

Of all the ideals to which the developing self can aspire, the one that commands the most universal respect is integrity. People of integrity are invulnerable to criticism, do not have to try to hide parts of their private lives from the public gaze, know exactly what they believe in and stick to it.