Point taken on the redundancy. I'm not sure I totally understood the crayon analogy. I tend to think of ideology as an organizing mechanism of humanity. It could also be called belief or dogma. Everyone lives under these sort of cultural conditions. There are benefits as well as drawbacks depending on the ideological alignment. As a possible positive example, if the free market ideology of Austrian economics was more ubiquitous we might not have allowed much of the developed world to fall into socialism. In a complete absence of ideological alignment any system of belief can fill the gap. At the moment the gap seems to be filled by materialism and mass media trends.