The point is that an ideal is some goal/perfect state, while an absolute is essence. The vacuum that fluctuates. Zero. Equilibrium, where everything cancels out. So it’s something at the core of everything. In biological terms, the source of sentience, not an ideal toward which a complex organism is drawn. The fact of desire, rather than the objects of desire.

So it’s not something that can be withheld from people, if they don’t conform, but the essence of life.

As we grow up, we naturally look to those who come before for knowledge. Yet they did the same thing and those before them. So there is this natural tendency to conform to what came before and look to the past for guidance. The problem being that as knowledge is cumulative, prior generations were working with less information and knowledge. Which is why religion is so powerful, yet really is just institutionalized superstition. So then we have these cultural ideals, of knowledge and wisdom, yet the ideals are not the source of knowledge and wisdom. Rather it is the desire within, that accumulates this store of knowledge. So we end up worshiping some abstract of an abstraction. God as the ideal of idealism. Rather than the sentience powering its creation.

The absolute is a universal. Something pure. So the only real universal isn’t some ideal of knowledge, morality, culture, priesthood, whatever, but the most basic element of reality, from which everything else is emergent, evolutionary. For life, that would be the source of sentience, whatever it might be.

As I point out, one way to isolate this element is that it is always present, while the forms of which it is aware and give it shape and focus come and go. So consciousness being only present, goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings rise and fall, future to past.

So when we assume ideals as absolute, we are assuming the forms our culture hands us are universal, rather than particular adaptations our ancestors developed to survive and grow. Since they are the structure of the reality we are raised in, even the language our thoughts are expressed by, this can be a very natural assumption. We can’t very well be terribly objective about them, so assuming they must be universal, thus absolute, is fairly logical.

Though as these cultural models harden and become rigid, this tendency only exacerbates the problem, rather than understanding that further growth and expanding the view might be advisable.

So the ideal is not a return to equilibrium, but a perfect expression or object of our desire. Remember platonic ideals are presumably static forms, not an appreciation of the process creating them.

Hopefully this clarifies why an absolute is foundational, while an ideal is aspirational and mixing them up, as a cultural phenomena, leads to hubris.