Actually thought control is as old as the hills. We call it "religion."

Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as they exemplified multiculturalism, while to the Ancients monotheism was analogous to monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The formative experience for Judaism was the forty years isolated in the desert, requiring that inward focus.

Rome adopted Christianity as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic were being erased. Consequently the default political system for the next 1500 years was monarchy. The Big Guy on top.

When the West went back to more broad based political systems, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.

Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.

Treating ideals as absolute tends to empower the most control oriented and fanatic.

Also good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience.

It is just that culture is about bringing everyone into one larger social organism and the immune response tends to attack deviants from the herd.

https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/the-cliffs-edge-2b382ae2a73