8. Abstraction and Reality

But how does reality compare to the whole tissue of reasons put together by those clever economists? Well, you can see what is happening in reality! What is the point, ask you, when such a situation arises? The point is that we must draw the right conclusions from such a situation, so that the war actually teaches us something. What is the only possible conclusion from what I have given as a symbol? You see, I have merely given one glaringly obvious instance; I could tell you of many other and similar views which have also fallen foul—to put it mildly—of the real events which have occurred in the last three years. What, then, is the only real conclusion? It is that everything from which the wrong conclusions were drawn must be thrown overboard and we must say to ourselves: Our thinking has been divorced from reality; we have developed a system of ideas and then applied this abstract, unrealistic system to reality, which made reality become untrue. We must therefore break with the premises on which our apparent conclusion was based, for this conclusion destroys the real world!