It's not like we haven't always been herded. Consider that 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. It's just that father figure lawgiver is a useful social control device. Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The many, rather than one.

If we want to predict the future, either we do it inductively and try to see patterns in all the events, or we can do it deductively and try to figure out the processes generating those patterns.

Seeing the future first requires a good understanding of what time is in the first place.

We are mobile organisms, which necessitates our sentience coalesce into a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate an environment from which we are somewhat separated.

This creates the conscious effect of the present preceeding from past to future events, but the overall reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is being consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

So while we think of time as linear, the reality is much more thermodynamic feedback loops. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Energy is "conserved," because it is present, creating time as a measure of change, just like temperature is a measure of activity.

So the energy, as present and process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Energy drives the wave, as the fluctuations rise and fall.

So if we want to know the past, we study the information, but if we want to consider the future, we need to know where the energy will go.

Information/form coalesces, while energy expands. Ergo, thermodynamics.

Yet both are only present. The energy manifests, while the information defines. Motor and steering.

Though it's our digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts the information. So there is a logical reason to listen to emotion and instinct when they are telling us things our minds don't want to hear.

Society, culture and civics is all about the forms we are supposed to adher to, but when they press down too hard on the underlaying social and organic energies, these energies create pressures in other ways. which the social order then tries to further corral, setting up one of those feedback loops, that either propels the whole process off in some direction, or, if the organization is not well adapted, cause it to break down.

This provides historical explanations and current possibilities, but too much to go into detail.