Is there a word or concept like "derationalization"? Where a process/practice/ritual/ceremony once had a meaningful rationale that has since been forgotten and no longer applies and is now sustained by random other bullshit rationalizations or sheer inertia?
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Conversation
I think the general term is “mania” — most commonly associated with collective financial irrationalities, e.g. amazon.com/Manias-Panics-
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Hmm that seems off, manias are chaotic, I'm thinking of the ordered end of that spectrum
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I don’t know what empirical case you’re considering, but things are looking pretty chaotic these days!
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Mostly small-scale domestic or corporate context steady-state behaviors, not mass crowd transient spike phenomena. Unpleasant rituals that continue though nobody gets anything out of them anymore for example.
Alexei Yurchak has hilarious examples of this phenomenon in the late days of the Soviet Union in his brilliant (and brilliantly named) book, “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More.” But I don’t think he has a label for this phenomenon.
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internal cargo culting.
or temporal cargo culting.
Cargo culting across time-like rather than space-like social boundaries.



