What is an ideology?

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Domenico Fetti

What is an ideology? Here is my definition:

An ideology is a system of beliefs common to a group of people

In my personal beliefs, I try to avoid ideologies. Sometimes this can be hard especially when everyone around you strongly believes something that might be false. I believe these strong opinions leave little room for serious reasoning. Even if they're correct, it often seems as though ideologies are lead by emotion rather than reason.

I believe its better to maintain independence of thought and question commonly held beliefs. Usually the most revolutionary discoveries are hidden in the exact place nobody else is looking. Physicist Max Planck once said,

"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and united all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." (Address on the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, 1936)

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