An easy list to keep in mind each time you come across an ideology, be it political, religious or philosophical.
- A faulty ideology always present itself as the solution to everything, it's like the swiss army knife of ideologies.
- It always present ready made "solutions" for everything, never presents guidelines or principles.
- It would be paradise under that ideology, but... there's always an evil counter-part on which they blame for their ideology's poor performance.
- It requires a set of fanaticism, including death threats, violence or coercion to anyone leaving or attempting to leave the ideology
- It states people has to be compelled, often by force, to accept such ideology
This last two points are the brightest red flag on how faulty the ideology actually is. If you have a good and working ideology people will join it on their own will, you won't need to compel anyone.
A fair example of a faulty ideology is Communism.
Furthermore you get a worsen subset of faulty ideologies, let's call them "Scamlogies". Scamlogies are all of the above but are presented as the an ideology that agrees 100% with you. Obviously nobody agrees 100% even with their own father and mother, leave alone an ideology.
Currently we see that a lot in Islam, just browse some interviews of Imams speaking of Islam and thing goes like this:
Person: "I don't like slavery"
Imam: "Islam is all against slavery"
Person: "I want peace"
Imam: "Islam is all about peace"...
As result if you listen to "converts" you will see they embraced something miles away from Islam, yet call it Islam.
Basically in a scamlogy you are lured by big fat lies from someone already in it to accept such ideology.
I'm yet to understand why people does support these scams, as their members are also losing, my best guess would be like an investor who bought in some crap investment, he needs people to join his investment portfolio to add some value to it. But in this case nobody will cut the loss...
Bottom line: Beware with "one-size fits all" ideologies, they cause more trouble than fix anything! And always READ the actual doctrines and philosophical grounds of the ideology, DON'T EVER think that listen to someone is enough, it may take you a couple of hours to read a book, but save you from a lifetime hooked to bullshit.