Bringing arguments in a discussion about "protection of the feeble", rationalizing the thing,
is already a sort of lack of heartfelt warmth towards the marginalized, the weak, the victims - for which anything possible should be done immediately, come what may.

Only a rightwing person would be capable of saying that "we cannot receive all the people of the third world" as immigrants, because we simply lack the ressources. A true leftwinger will never say this, it's about compassion, a matter of the heart.


Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)

Ideology is a set of beliefs and ideas that pretend the reality is a certain way.
...

I try to see the reality without using a pre-established way of looking at it. My deepest concern is objectivity.

An objective examination of the word "ideology" would show that it is used in a variety of ways (cf. In Wales' quotation from Wikipedia). In some of these uses it is critical or pejorative and is related to politics, in others, k to p below, it is quite neutral and much wider in scope.

    Here is a list of ways the concept of ideology has been treated in recent decades, according to Terry Eagleton. Note that this is more up-to-date than most lists... this one more readily identifies a variety of more refined and elaborated positions by various thinkers.

a) the process of production of meanings, signs and value in social life;
b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
e) systematically distorted communication;
f) that which offers a position for a subject;
g) forms of thought motivated by social interests;
h) identity thinking;
i) socially necessary illusion;
j) the conjuncture of discourse and power;
k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
l) action-oriented sets of beliefs;
m) the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
n) semiotic closure;
o) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relation to a social structure;
p) the process whereby said life is converted to a natural reality.

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ideo4.html

This broader sense (k to p) is not just a late development, the word began in this wider, non-pejorative sense:

Ideology first appeared in English in 1796, as a direct translation of the new French word ideologie which had been proposed in that year by the rationalist philosopher Destutt de Tracy. Taylor (1796): `Tracy read a paper and proposed to call the philosophy of mind, ideology'. Taylor (1797): `... ideology, or the science of ideas, in order to distinguish it from the ancient metaphysics'. In this scientific sense, ideology was used in epistemology and linguistic theory until lC19.

A different sense, initiating the main modern meaning, was popularized by Napoleon Bonaparte. In an attack on the proponents of democracy -- `who misled the people by elevating them to a sovereignty which they were incapable of exercising' -- he attacked the principles of the Enlightenment as `ideology'.

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ideo8.html

In the wider sense there there is no escaping ideology; what's important is to try to become aware of it and that means not just condemning obviously biased political arguments, while naively assuming that one remains untainted by ideology and that one can think about the world "without using a pre-established way of looking at it". This is true only of the most crude and obvious "pre-established ways". Of course none of us can escape all pre-existing ways of thinking; we exist at a specific time in history and we draw on our culture's general ways of thinking about the world, much of which remains pretty unconscious. Also those general ways of thinking will in some cases have been influenced by the narrower sense of ideology.

We are not totally determined by our culture, but nor can we just step outside it to some pure vantage point. Part of the value of philosophy is to try to critically examine very fundamental concepts and sociologists of knowledge try to examine the relations between society and ideas. Both Williams and Barthes are sarcastic about those claiming to be free of ideology and able to think about the world in some pure, non-ideological way, independent of history and its "pre-established ways of looking at" the world:

Meanwhile, in popular argument, ideology is still mainly used in the sense given by Napoleon. Sensible people rely on EXPERIENCE (q.v.), or have a philosophy; silly people rely on ideology. In this sense ideology, now as in Napoleon, is mainly a term of abuse.

Raymond Williams

ibid.

...just as bourgeois ideology is defined by the abandonment of the name 'bourgeois', myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made [including concepts, like ideology].
...
Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. [....] In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.

Roland Barthes

http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/barthes1.html