This is an observation about the origins of ideological alignment and the mechanisms that drive it. It highlights two distinct pathways:
In this case, the individual directly interacts with a system, social structure, or doctrine that affects them personally. For example, a woman raised in a strict religious environment may experience firsthand the pressures, constraints, and moral impositions of the system. If she attempts to critique or navigate the doctrine, she may face shaming or dismissal. Through this process, she adopts an ideology that reflects her lived experience—such as feminism—that is grounded in actual engagement and a nuanced understanding of how social mechanisms operate. Her ideological adoption is a reflection of real, contextualized knowledge, a synthesis of experience and reflection.
Another example: a man who approaches the dating scene or the quest for love according to the surface narrative of culture—i.e., “I will be just, noble, and true, and it has nothing to do with money, only the higher ideal”—might test this cultural narrative with naive hope, encounter biological mating strategies, and ultimately go MGTOW, since this idea aligns exactly with the prompt of his felt sense and experience.
Or, a man who is repeatedly rejected from youth onward due to a physical asymmetry, which is constantly cited as the reason for rejection by women and/or becomes the subject of regular teasing, might discover social Darwinism in the form of the “black pill” and adopt it not just as an idea, but as an identity. These responses are understandable, as they involve ideologies that align with the prompt of felt sense and direct experience. I have covered this in detail in the article "The Training Grounds of Glans." There I discuss ideology as function of process.
All of these ideologies portray a piece of the truth: female mating instinct is restrained through pressures designed to stabilize social systems; female nature does not naturally conform to romantic or religious ideals; and genetics do play a significant role in one’s ability to select mates or access sex at will.
Many others adopt ideological positions without direct experience, influenced instead by the rhetorical and performative displays of others. Proselytizers, moralizers, or ideological enthusiasts harness tribal instincts—desire for belonging, alignment with social norms, or signaling moral virtue. Observers internalize these performances as if they were first-hand experience, even though their understanding is derived entirely from external narratives and social signaling, not direct engagement.
The motivations and depth of understanding differ between these groups. One is experiential, reflective, and often critical; the other is performative, reactive, and socially mediated. Recognizing this distinction clarifies why ideological discussions can feel so polarized: some participants speak from personal insight, while others operate entirely within a network of expectations, signaling, and borrowed convictions. Both of these positions are ultimately subject to the limitation of "identity hijacked by ideological format," but one of them is more of an honest initiation than the other. Those in the first category are at risk of being stuck because the ideology confirms their immediate felt-sense experience. So, initiation can be much more difficult for them.
The cruelest trap is this: the ideology that saved the scar-tissue person is the one built from their own broken pieces. It perfectly explains the original wound, gives them voice, community, and a sense of justice. Because it fits the injury so exactly, it feels like truth itself, not a temporary tool. Leaving it behind means deliberately re-opening the very wound the ideology once closed. That’s why they cling longest and leave hardest: freedom requires them to feel the original pain again, this time with no story to hide behind. The splint that let them walk has become the cage they can’t escape without breaking the bone a second time.
These ideologies keep circling the same terrain because they’re each describing one facet of a bigger biological-social tension. None of them are “the full story,” but each one catches a real contour of how primate mating systems actually work. Female mating instinct is shaped and constrained by the need to keep groups stable; if it is allowed to run wild without restraint it will naturally destabilize the social architecture. At the same time, female nature doesn’t line up neatly with romantic scripts, religious ideals, or the sentimental stories cultures prefer to tell about loyalty and purity. And genetics really do determine how freely a man can access casual mating—some men can simply move through the selection filters with ease, while others can’t, and no ideology fully neutralizes that.
-->So each worldview grabs one of these truths, magnifies it, turns it into a total explanation, and then insists the rest of reality must fit inside it. But what’s actually happening is that they’re all groping at different edges of the same biological engine.