Reflecting on Ideology

My friend Jose recently asked me to reflect on my own ideology, and we sat down to go through a presentation deck to guide our discussion. The deck, titled "What's Stopping You?", provided a framework showing how our identity is actively shaped by three main internal forces: ideology, injury, and influence.

It prompted us to dig into our core beliefs about the world and ourselves, questioning exactly where those beliefs originated. As I thought about it, I realized that while our ideologies change over time, those past frameworks are not necessarily completely gone. There was a quote in the presentation from Carl Jung that resonated with me: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate". That perfectly captures the reality that leftovers in our subconscious constantly influence our behavior without us realizing it.

These lingering subconscious beliefs can be entirely conflicting with our current mindset. When old, deeply rooted ideologies mix with the new ones we've intentionally adopted, the result makes us much more complicated and less interpretable. The deck ultimately asks what we will do with these beliefs now that we are aware of them. Bringing these conflicting layers out of the subconscious and putting them on the table feels like the necessary first step to answering that.