While happy endings make good bedtime stories, unless we come to terms with the basic realities, they are not only delusional, but can cause their own forms of harm.

Consider that in cultures, good and bad are that cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in reality they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

That is because it is the function of cultures to synchronize communities into social super organisms.

Yet too much good can be trouble and the evolution of intelligence is largely a function of dealing with the problems, than enjoying the good times.

Consider you pose this question because of suffering.

You are quite right about these top down cultural structures being the source of many of humanity's problems.

Consider that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures.

Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.

To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.

Constantine adopted Christianity for the monotheism as the Empire was coming together, while the pantheistic aspects were shrouded in the Trinity. The Big Guy Rules.

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

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

The fallacy of monotheism, the Catholic "all-knowing absolute," is that ideals are not absolutes.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the center of every culture are ideals.

The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So 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.

Morality is not absolute, as it couldn't be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero.

Morals are the codes, habits, relationships, etc. that enable a healthy society. Traditionally that one's status is a function of what one adds, not what one can extract.

I could go on and do, in various Medium essays, but the reality is that people want solutions to immediate problems, not underlaying abstractions. Yet after several thousand years of sticking patches over the tears in the previous patches, civilization truly is reaching a breaking point and we will have to sit back and figure out how this reality actually works, not how we want it to work.

The anarchies of desire versus the tyrannies of judgement. Motor and steering.