Feedback.

It's his religion. The lodestar at the center of his soul.

Structure is centripetal. There is that center of gravity, like the eye of a storm, or the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

The grain of sand at the center of the pearl.

Traditional religions are like the childhood memories and lessons of the culture. Around which each generation builds on the previous, like rings of a tree.

The signals our minds pick out of the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with our prior knowledge, going back to earliest childhood, when we were most emotional and least informed.

It's just that Western culture is suffering a monumental breakdown.

To the Ancients, gods were metaphors. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. Monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.

Constantine adopted Christianity for the monotheism, burying the pantheistic aspects in the Trinity, as the Empire came together and any remnants of the Republic were shed.

So the Catholic Church was the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed.

The logical flaw in Catholic monotheism, the "all-knowing absolute," is that ideals are not absolutes. A spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.

When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.

Leaving this cultural void, where might makes right.

So wealth and power are the only denominators.

To cut a long story short, the feedback loops need circuit breakers, to keep the nodes connected to the network. It has all become a scab over a festering wound.