The True Believer was one of my touchstones growing up.
I think there is an intellectual premise, running through, particularly Western, civilization that should be considered. I call it the long shadow of God.
The logical fallacy of monotheism is the spiritual absolute would necessarily be that essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.
Yet primitive societies couldn't just revel in the fact of awareness, so they went through the lists of what they were aware of, as objects of devotion and focus and finally settled on this abstract ideal of knowledge.
Yet the ideal is aspirational, while the absolute is elemental. So all the movements which have sought to replace monotheism and its political expression, monarchy, have made the same assumption, that their ideal are absolute and unquestionable.
Another interesting classic is Gilbert Murray's; The Five Stages of Greek Religion. One of the many points he made is that the Ancients were not totally ignorant of monotheism, but as there was no division between culture and civics, it equated with authoritarianism, as in one god, one ruler.
Consider that more populist forms of government, democracy and republicanism, originated in pantheistic societies, as in many gods, many voices. Which was the Ancients interpretation of multiculturalism, as tribal societies gave way to city states.
Constantine adopted Christianity as the official Roman religion, as it was fully coalescing into an empire.
When the West went back to more populist forms of government, it required a separation of church and state, culture and civics.
The reality is more a yin and yang, between desire and judgement. The heart and the head. We all want our cake and eat it too, but have to learn to make decisions. Similarly, not every acorn can become an oak tree, so societies have to develop structures that do make some of the selection, or nature does it for us.
Liberalism and conservatism are the political expressions of this dichotomy. So the problem for expressly liberal movements is that they can't really set up a preferential system, or they become conservatives, while conservatives can't crush all the life out of society, or there is none.
So as these is this culture of monist idealism, both sides see themsleves as the one true path and those ging the other ways as fools, or evil.
Given we have this consumer culture, where every want and need is glorified, as a way to sell something, then that it has been fueled by debt, borrowed from a future that has now arrived, the situation is a forset fire, that will have to burn up, before any clarity arises.
By the Fall, we might have some idea of the eventual blowback.
