For whatever combination of reasons; The West has become a society of consumers - and this is most damaging when it comes to our of ideas about things in general: our 'ideology'.
Because we are so mentally-passive, we are in effect radically and ultimately un-free - our minds are colonised from without.
People passively absorb not just fashions and advertisements, but their ideas about everything - their way of perceiving and interpreting the world, their ideas of good and bad, their motivations and aims.
This happens pretty much everywhere.
In spirituality and religion, people have a belief that their convictions ought passively to be absorbed - New Agers believe that the universe will tell us everything if we just open our minds and let it; all too many of the religious passively absorb... whether from the hierarchy, tradition, a holy book...
(People confuse sponge-like passivity with humility and obedience; confuse passivity with altruism and social concern...)
And having passively allowed their own minds to be colonised, their imperative is to ensure everybody else does the same - differences and similarities derived merely from differences between and similarities of that which is absorbed.
In professions; careerism and bureaucracy rule everywhere - and what counts as true and what leads to success are alike externally defined and passively absorbed. He who absorbs fastest and most accurately wins the status game.
Rebellious teens and youth absorb their rebellion and their opinions and their acts from outside sources... He who rebels most vigorously in closest conformity with the dominant ideology is a revolutionary hero.
No surprise that all these people and pretty much everybody else has - more or less - the same materialist, secular Leftist ideology - this is yet another things they just passively absorb.
(What is - instead - needed is the opposite to passive absorption and the craving for yet more passive absorption (the only choice being the choice of what passively to absorb) - what is needed is to think, consciously and actively, from our source of inner freedom, which is our unique (eternal and divine) self. This is the task. From here and starting now; of value is only that which is freely chosen and imaginatively appropriated, with the true self and by discernment of the heart. This applies to obvious, platitudinous and orthodox truths - as much as to everything else.)