It is a banal point to say that gold has no intrinsic value. I made the same realization at 14. Gold’s value is completely arbitrary, and there’s no reason why any similarly precious metal couldn’t be just as valueable.
Therefore, gold’s value is something external to it. That external value is the value placed on it by the agreement that it has value. Society at large believes that gold has some kind of value, and because of that, it does!
Although believing that gold has value is not necessarily an [[ideological]] thing to say, ideology very much behaves in the same way: it requires mass participation. You cannot escape ideology simply by not believing in it. It may not be worth believing in, but if everyone else around you believes it (in the same way that everyone believes that gold has value) your opinion on the matter is useless.