Ideas have fluidity; they can change and be added to, and they can be wrong, and that's fine. It's just an idea; we have thousands of them.

But ideologies become rigid very quickly, and they tend to become hierarchical (they claim to be the best, such that other ideologies are not worthy), which means that the people who have signed up for them may have a very hard time taking off-ramps from them.

Ideologies can also lean very cultic, because they often become transcendent belief systems, which is one of the four aspects of cultic control that make up Janja Lalich's Bounded Choice model (see episodes 3 through 6 in season 1 of this podcast).

Understanding the difference between ideas and ideologies is essential if you need to take an off-ramp, or create an off-ramp for someone else. Do you have the freedom to change, to thin ...