It goes back much further than that.

Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The formative experience for Judaism had been the forty years isolated in the desert. Rome adopted and co-opted Christianity as a state religion in order to validate the Empire and shed reminders of the Republic.

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. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.

An entire culture founded on presuming ideals as absolute only encourages the most fanatic and obsessed. Many of the ideologies arising in the shadow of God tend to assume their ideals to be universal and absolute, as well.

Given societies tend toward being tribal anyway, the combination with monotheism is toxic to any broader network.

To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, while in nature, it is the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. That's because the function of culture is getting everyone working as a larger organism.

Power tends to accumulate, because it creates a positive feedback loop, until it reaches the reality check moment. That's why there should be some sort of circuit breaker, like debt jubilees, but we have to periodically learn the same lessons over again.