At the end of the classical age we realized that our commitments and norms are not written into nature or the mind of God but just our way of doing things, and we can change them if we want to. This led to the absolute freedom and terror of the French revolution and Enlightenment as human-kind attempted to redesign itself from the ground up, trying to use "reason" to structure society. But then it was found that reason was just as ungrouded and arbitrary as anything else and only contained the basic idea of self-legislation without any direction for that self-legislation to take. Thus we got stuck in our current era, half of the people don't believe in anything but the rule of self-legislation, the rule of not accepting any rule beyond themselves, and half the people believe in unrelenting dogmatism and inner conviction in an attempt to stave off the reality of freedom, that no one can hold us to our commitments but us. Thus, the two political persuasions currently in existence.