Here is my summary on how materialism is woven into the culture and economic system and human history in general...
Humanity originated as a tribal system where small communities shared everything and there was little if any private material property. Material possessions were limited to what one could carry. These tribal peoples had a form of spirituality that was often very connected with nature. This was the garden state. The mind was free but uninitiated into more complex realms of consciousness.
As farming and other technologies developed, cities formed which enabled improvements in efficiency, a stratification of labor, and trade. The small communal tribal system became untenable. The ability to accumulate material possessions led to inequalities which led to increasingly predatory behavior. Groups formed for protection and in doing so ceded some of their personal liberty to leaders for more forceful coordinated action. As cities expanded hierarchical systems of authority were formed such that progressively fewer people exerted progressively more control over larger and larger groups of humans. The desire of every human to be free and return to the garden state of his origin is in conflict with this hierarchical system of control making the pyramidal structure inherently unstable. A stable pyramid requires a delicate balance of top-down control and bottom up stigmergy. Every human has varying degrees of desire for comfort, control, freedom, as well as an empathetic capacity. The pyramidal structure naturally filters certain personality types to the top: those with low empathy and high desire for control. Every so often, the pyramid becomes unstable and a flip occurs where an empathetic self-sacrificial leader finds himself at the top. This empathetic leader allows those lower on the pyramid greater degrees of comfort and freedom which stabilize the pyramid. But time passes and the empathetic leader dies or is conquered by another and once again psychopathic types begin filtering their way to the top.
This pyramidal hierarchical system of control is maintained through violence and mind control. After several thousand years of history, many combinations, flavors, and variations of violence and mind control have been tried by various elites that have risen to the top of civilizations so that a science has been developed for the maintenance of the pyramid. Technology gave rise to the first miniature city-state pyramids and as new technologies arise and allow the expansion of the pyramid to potentially encompass the entire global population, the science of pyramidal control is being continually refined and expanded.
Materialism is a philosophy which stabilizes the pyramid. Materialism increases fear of loss. Fear of loss is what initially drove people to band together and cede their personal liberty to a guardian. Fear of loss limits risk-taking ventures to overturn the pyramid. Materialism increases fear of death which makes the threat of violence more effective. Materialism limits the ability to find greater meaning beyond a single incarnation so that pseudo-meaning is derived from one's place and function in the pyramid or one's ascension within the pyramid. Materialism reduces hope for a better system leaving the inhabitants of the base layers unmotivated or self-defeated and unable to overturn the system.
The less conscious the individual, the more easily that individual is controlled. The more conscious, open, knowledgeable, enlightened, empathetic, and hopeful the individual, the more difficult that individual is to control. The expansion of consciousness is a direct threat to the control structure. Therefore, those in control seek to maintain this control by keeping people in an unenlightened barely conscious state. Materialism is a great aid to their effort. Secret societies have served a dual purpose throughout history. In some cases, they have protected and preserved knowledge about the mental nature of reality from destruction. In some cases they have created roadblocks and hierarchies of their own to prevent the common man from breaking out of materialism and into an expanded understanding of reality. Since knowledge is power, the elites in control seek to monopolize this power and are often responsible for the destruction of knowledge, which ironically spurs the formation of new secret societies to protect that knowledge.
As trade expanded, a medium of exchange was needed to increase efficiency in the economic system. As shipping technology advanced, it became feasible to transport luxury goods for trade from around the world. This expanded form of trade required new forms of technology to increase trade efficiency. Enter the merchant banker and paper currency. Merchant bankers improved trade efficiency by reducing the need to carry around the weight and liability of precious metals. They also began to engineer forms of credit expansion through the fractional reserve system. Eventually Merchants and Bankers parted ways and the merchants kept to the relatively honest side of the business in dealing with materials and the bankers took the more esoteric path of dealing in the SYMBOL of the materials: currency. Since the ultimate nature of reality is mental and symbol and not material, banking is inherently an occult business. The naturally powerful and occult business of banking attracted a certain personality type and so a few hundred years ago, the bankers rose to the top of the new hierarchical pyramid. The few at the top dominate the mass at the bottom through the monopolizing of symbol and knowledge about the mental nature of reality while steering the masses way to materialism.
The bankers' invention of the fractional reserve system enabled them to control currency, the symbol of material wealth and power. It also created a debt machine (a pyramid scheme) that would collapse unless continually fed by more credit. The requirement for exponential increase in credit led to the banker's need to create exponential demand for their credit so that their money continued to be valuable. To create this demand, the bankers developed their slave laborers' materialistic tendencies programming them to want more and more and more stuff. Eventually the exponentially expanding debt system collapses, but the bankers orchestrate these collapses and therefore still manage to consolidate wealth through them.
In short: materialism is a natural tendency of human nature that first became a force when technology made tribal living obsolete. Materialism creates and maintains hierarchical systems of control which filter psychopaths to the top. Psychopaths understand how materialism affects the human psyche and use it to maintain control. As technology increases, the potential size of the pyramid increases, and the science of maintaining control must expand to incorporate this new technology. There is a short window where this technology can spur the mass expansion of consciousness and overturn the pyramid before the elites figure out how to use this technology to further solidify control and prevent the expansion of consciousness. From a historical perspective it is certainly a very interesting time to be alive!