Pushing back against authority is human nature. But like many aspects of “human nature,” what separates us from the beasts is our ability to master it.

“Don’t kick against the pricks” was a Greek proverb, quoted in plays by Euripides and mentioned in the King James Bible. It references a device for steering oxen, a stick with a spike on its end, that goads or “pricks” the animal when it deviates from the desired path. Fighting the prick only hurts the animal more.

But for nearly as long as the proverb has existed, the human instinct to kick against pricks has co-existed. The historian Herodotus shared this story of Aristides the Just, ruler of Athens.

An unlettered man of Athens came to vote. His clay tile (ostraca) in hand, he approached Aristides and asked him to mark on it, “Please write ‘Aristides’ on my ostraca as I must vote against him.” (In the world’s first democracy, you didn’t vote “for” a candidate; you voted against or to “ostracize” an undesirable leader.)

“Why? What has this man done to you?” Aristides inquired.

“Nothing,” the illiterate man explained. “I’ve never met him, but anyone known far and wide as ‘the Just’ must be hiding something sinister and cannot be allowed to rule.”

The “ostracization of Aristides” has been told and retold for nearly 2,500 years as a way to poke fun at “objecting just for the sake of objection.” But modern philosophy has developed this human fault and twisted it into a virtue. And then modern technology makes it mandatory.

“God said it, I believe it, that settles it” was the prevailing view for thousands of years. But in the early 1800s, a failed seminary student in Germany, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, advanced a new theory: “God isn’t a person. God is the process by which we take our prevailing views (our spirit or “geist”) and challenge it with a contrary or opposing view.”

Hegel asserted such conflicts (he called them “dialectics” just to be confusing) force the untrue things we believe to get peeled away, discarded when we reconcile them against opposing views. What we cannot defend, he reasoned, must be false, and the resulting “synthesis,” which pulls the “surviving” ideas from both sides of the conflict, is “better” or more “real.”

And so, with Hegel, was born the idea of “progressive thought.” Modern-day “progressives” owe their standing to his theories. While he didn’t coin the term, the modern word “zeitgeist” was popularized by his description of “our way of thinking at a particular point in time.”

Hegel was consequential enough. But his impact on the world, our current world, was magnified many times over by his followers, those who liked and expanded on his ideas. Among them was a “Young Hegelian” (the actual name of a left-wing student group at the University of Berlin) by the name of Karl Marx.

In true Hegelian form, Marx clashed with Hegel over the goodness of “God” and the benign nature of progressive thought. His “synthesis” was to replace God with “wealth,” and make the only working dialectic (or conflict worth pursuing) the fight over stuff — material wealth.

Hegel might have been eclipsed by Marx, but technology has rescued his theories. As it turns out, with the invention of the World Wide Web, a new popular “zeitgeist” was born. Today’s conventional thought in art, literature, journalism and politics is “create controversy … or die.”

For centuries our values were summed up as “that’s as American as God, mom and apple pie.” Now, if you want “views,” “likes” or a monetizable following on YouTube, you must espouse that “religion is dead,” “mothers should kill their children” or “apple pie is just cruelly murdered fruit.”

Marx once commented that Hegel was “over-simplistic and needed to be turned upside down.” He then discarded the only “truth” Hegel clung to, and inverted Hegel’s over-simplistic model to become the world’s fastest pathway to destruction.

Hegel and Marx were idiots. There is not today, nor ever was, a flaw in the philosophy (advanced by a first-century Judean carpenter): “Cling to that which is true and do so with humility and love for those with whom you disagree.”