Before there was modern politics, there existed only traditions of various forms in conflict. Then the Christian plague arrived and soon people were talking in the dualistic tradition of the "good and right" in contrast to the unruly and natural. Sounds like the speeches during the last presidential election, eh? The two are related.

While Christianity soon passed on for the intellectuals in Europe during the Renaissance, it had injected its horrifying virus: egalitarianism, or the belief that all people have equal souls and therefore must be treated equally to acknowledge that similarity. This got run through the wringer with democracy, which facilitated technological expansion by convincing individuals it was in their best interests to work harder for the industrial system.

Soon it was considered almost blasphemous against "humanity" to not esteem all human lives as equal, and/or to find a reason that not everyone should share the same material comforts at an equal level. This instituted a materialist dualism, where the subjective perception of emotion (and of self as benevolent) was the "pure," while the external world was the inherently "evil," and thus needed to be tamed.

From this came the roots of modern liberalism. Modern liberalism is a materialist dualism, in that no dualistic structure is assumed to be inherent in reality, but in terms of values, a dualism is imposed between the "humanitarian" and the "evil" or natural system in which predation and elitism prevail. While this is not visible to most, its presence has caused Western society to behave in a religious manner without the assumption of religion, allowing government to adopt morality as a form of incentive to absolute control.

Because of the subjective nature of morality, it strikes the individual quickly as a thought virus, creating an insular sense of "feeling" in which "right" generates a release of self-congratulatory estimation. Because of the objective nature of its object, morality creates an absolute which can quickly be distributed between individuals for the sake of enforcing a uniformity. This is of course evocative of the "equality" which the moralists claim is their objective: a self-fulfilling ideology, and a brutal form of control without being as visible as totalitarian systems.