In the philosophical definition, materialism is a thought system oppositional to dualism; where in dualism, all things abstract and of high emotional polarity exist in a space separate from the physical world, in a materialist view all things originate in the same physical space. Thus our "minds" are part of our brains in a materialist view, as are our "souls" and "personalities," where in a dualistic view these things might have been inherited from another dimension or a mystical level of reality.

Most Western sources point to Plato as the beginning of dualism, where he posited that human life was like watching shadows cast on the wall of a cave by pure forms illuminated by a light from behind. While this was a tempting view from the perspective of those wishing an alternative to mortality, it failed to explain many aspects of reality including those revealed by nascent science and medicine of the human experiment. The side effect of massive religious delusion had such a brutally degenerate effect that within 2,000 years people like F.W. Nietzsche were working to discredit it.

Currently, religious forces in the media have made it popular for youth to rail against "materialism," by which they mean the rampant search for wealth occupying most of our population. What is interesting is that possibly they are being trained to fight a nonexistent demon where if they looked more closely, they might see that the false spirituality infesting our cultures is what by collapsing establishes a void normal people attempt to fill with money.