You do a good job of peeling back the layers of history, to get to the underlying dynamics, though it might be far more clarifiying to dig much deeper and consider the situation truly from the bottom up.

Think of reality as a dichotomy between energy and the forms it manifests. Galaxies are energy/light radiating out, as mass/form coalesces in. As organic beings, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the information/forms precipitating out and further coalescing them. Signal from the noise.

Society is made up of those social energies pushing out and driving it on, essentially associated with the various forms of liberalism, both economic and social. While these efforts naturally coalesce into civil and cultural forms, as those who seek to re-enforce them are the conservatives. You could go to any social group, human or otherwise and find members falling in these categories. The heart and the head. The anarchy of desire, versus the tyranny of judgement.

The problem is that we don't have a yin/yang cultural paradigm, where individuals can recognize where they might fit in this larger cycle and balance, but, especially in the West, we have this idealist monism, generally associated with monotheism, but actually much deeper than that.

As these linear, goal oriented creatures, with a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, we are schooled to the notion we are going somewhere. That it is about the pot of figurative, or literal gold, at the end of the narrative arc. Be it heaven, or wealth.

So each side of this dichotomy see themselves as on the road to nirvana and those going any other direction as either misbegotten fools, or actively evil.

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. More the light shining through the film, than the images and story on it. Though we are both the light and the image.

Now consider the political, emotional and moral consequences of seeing one's ideals as absolute, rather than unique expressions of our unique situation. Wouldn't that provide a very fertile soil for fanatics, of all stripes? And rocky soil for anyone opposing them.

It's safe to say the philosophers of the last few millennia have seriously failed, in allowing that misconception to go unquestioned.

The fact is that time is not even so much the point of the present, moving past to future, as it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. Is it any wonder history is so often whatever we want to make of it.

There is only the journey. No end, just the horizons of our knowledge.