[Revery42]

I think you're spot-on here. Authoritarian-made realities seem to be the historical norm. Just look at the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its power. If anything, we were under a Dunning-Kruger effect before. We have more opportunity to realize now that truth is actually very difficult to pin down.

[Archelaos]

What is interesting about the Roman Catholic Church in this context is that its internal power was never as large as when its political power was at its lowest, and vice versa: the doctrin of papal infallibility was made official by the First Vatican Council that had to flee Rome when in 1870 the troops of Vittorio Emanuele II. concered the church state that had subsequently been dissolved (until the Vatican as a political entity was reinstituted by Mussolini in 1929). In contrast, during the Middle Ages, when the pope's political power was at its peak, papal power had always been challenged externally by secular powers and internally by antipopes, heretics, numerous reform movements and the majority belief that a general council is superior to the pope.