This is an extremely interesting and in depth historical analysis. I suspect much of it is fairly close to the actual events.

I would point out that, logically, a spiritual absolute would necessarily be that essence of sentience, from which we rise, rather than an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.

Obviously conferring absolute status to one's perferred ideals has significant political appeal, but it has certainly been an epic fail on the part of the philosophers, not to have teased apart ideals/aspirational and absolutes/elemental.

This long shadow of God permeates much of culture, up to and including the sciences and math.

I would point out though, a logical reason for why people naturally fall into these ruts.

The larger the context, the more elemental denominators required to understand it, so when you are talking millions and billions of people, it isn't really politics, culture or morality, so much as it's biology and physics.

It has occurred to me the two most basic dynamics are synchronization and harmonization, but what seems to be overlooked is that synchronization is centripetal, while harmonization is centrifugal. So we have organisms and ecosystems, nodes and networks, particles and fields.

The success of humanity isn't really the individual, but the group, so we tend to become one with the hive mind. As your essay implies, promotion of the individual serves to atomize organic society, making it more easily controlled by institutional forces and mediated by parasitic financial systems.

As the executive and regulatory function of society, government is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking are similar to blood and the circulation system.

The first is inherently centripetal, while the other is inherently centrifugal, so there is that inherent tension running through the dynamic and feeding back in innumerable ways.

If you are interested, here is an earlier essay I wrote a couple of years ago, laying out some of the groundwork to these observations;

https://medium.com/predict/peeling-the-paradigm-1ceab7e774b0

It has contitued to evolve, but hasn't reached a point where I can yet re-encapsulate it.