Feels like all the youngish people who are in love with the idea of rituals have never actually experienced real ones. Your morning meditative pour-over coffee ain’t it. The real kind is having to memorize lots of arbitrary bs and suffer long, boring performances without yawning.
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If you yawn, or are sloppy in your ceremonial performance, some powerful authority figure will probably take you aside and give you a stern sermon about the Meaning and Significance of the ritual and consequences of continued lack of gravitas.
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The typical traditional ritual is not opt-in. It is coercive and compulsory within a context, with strong penalties for opting out. This is a key feature, possibly *the* key feature, that modern ritual-and-ceremony fetishists miss, in bith analysis and design.
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Ritual and ceremony are primarily about power reassuring itself of its own continued potency through the regular extraction of coerced arbitrary performances out of subjects.
It is only secondarily about pleasure or anything positive for those who have to endure it.
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Opt-in ritual and ceremony without coercion are about power larps.
We should probably use a different word for personal soft rituals like morning pour-over coffee.
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Traditional ritual and ceremony look very similar to functional behavioral protocols that accomplish useful things but in many ways they are anti-protocols, designed to *stop* useful and functional behaviors. One of my favorite papers gets at this jstor.org/stable/2778293
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Often though, ritual-and-ceremony theaters emerge from once-useful protocols after they’ve a) outlived their utility for most b) been captured by a powerful few c) deliberately perpetuated/grown through force for the few instead of allowed to shrink to asymptotic value level
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In opt-in modern pseudo-rituals, perhaps. In trad ones, maybe a core 20% are enjoying the collective ritual trance. 80% are in varying degrees of misery depending on coercion levels.
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Replying to @vgr
There is something very powerful about synchronized group behavior like this. For the participant, there's some potent magic in it. Group hypnosis or something.
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Unless you can demonstrate that control/relevance are equally distributed, this is actually a definition of power. And I suspect it can’t be equal because that would require actually creating meaning and stability, not just a “sense” (aka illusion) of it that’s stronger for some.
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Replying to @vgr
This is…a subset of rituals, but by no means all of them. Many are about control, yes, but more in terms of asserting human control and relevance in an uncertain universe and creating a sense of meaning and stability.
Like funerals. Or (non-coercive) prayer.
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Eg. The emperor’s new clothes fable gets at the fact the emperor gets to sustain his illusion that he’s wearing clothes (or knows he’s not wearing any and enjoys watching others lie out of fear). Others have to pretend he’s wearing clothes or suffer the consequences.
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I like Zizek’s idea of cynicism as a form of ideology. In this sense, conforming to ritual cultures is about pragmatically navigating power landscapes from a position of weakness. autodidactproject.org/other/cynzizek
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I’d guess in a trad ritual culture — the dominant prototypical kind, distribution is:
5% powerful, enjoying either illusions or validation of power
20% clueless enjoying a trance of belonging
50% cynical-pragmatic insincere performance
25% fearful/terrorized performance
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Yeah, monastic life is generally opt-in. But notably in most trad cultures is adjacent to, and sustained by, a 10x larger priestly culture of coercive ritual. In Hinduism for eg, I’d guess working ritual-performing temple and household priests outnumber sanyasi sects 10x
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Replying to @vgr
i propose monastic life as the one general exception to the coercive trend, although in that case it's more like individuals signed up to a pattern of coercion
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I’m in an ornery mood, but it does feel like most of the pushback is “real ritual and ceremony have never been tried” variety. I *get* what (metamodern?) new-ritual subcultures try to do. There’s just very few examples if it actually working, especially at scale. Eg. Burning Man.
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Burning Man is kinda like the Wikipedia of ritual design. The only good example supporting far too many strong claims.
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I’d challenge even this. For example Holi is a festival I absolutely hated but many love. Was coerced into participating year after year.
Christmas is followed by an spike in suicides iirc. It’s not cute hallmark movies for all. Can be dreaded time in dysfunctional families.
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Replying to @vgr
Not All Rituals! Sitting around the Christmas tree w coffee opening presents; singing happy birthday; watching The Man burn; setting off fireworks at the 4th of July BBQ; rainbow parades on pride. The good ones don’t require enforcement.
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Okay, this seems like a legit interesting counter-example to my thesis.
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Replying to @polyparadigm and @vgr
I see someone else mentioned monasticism: Shakers were very odd in not having a laity associated with their religion: people leaving the community weren’t seen as apostates or anything, but they weren’t members anymore either.
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Sometimes the calculus of incentives is interesting carrots and sticks. As a kid I loved the fireworks part of Diwali, but hated the part where you had to get up pre-dawn and take a ritual bath with some foul body scrub (shikakai and oil).
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I think rituals are actually on my mind because the Web3 world is highly ritual-curious (eg naming various cryptographic protocol initialization actions “rituals”, NFTs used to create ritual design languages etc). Potential slippery slope there towards the real thing.
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Oh yeah, and then the non-inheriting sons made up increasingly onerous religious laws to get revenge on eldest sons… 🤣
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Replying to @vgr
Western monasticism may be opt-in today, but it certainly did not start that way. It was a place to stash non-inheriting sons and ill-behaved daughters.
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