Tracing the Origin of Morality/"Morality"

Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Genealogy of Morals" and Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents," have similar goals. Both men want to expose what they see as the impediments of society on the freedom of the individual. Both attack and condemn organized religion as a disguise for the helplessness that individuals feel in the face of society, and as an historically destructive force that has divorced men from their knowledge of their true selves and renders them …

…we all seek, he does not seem to be able to find a search for happiness that discovers its treasure. If we can never make up for the original sin of our primordial fathers then we can never be free of guilt or pain. And if the past is simply a direct line from the origin of morality to the present, we cannot possibly use history to better the present or strive for the future.