Conversation

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.
26
621
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.
1
132
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.
2
184
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.
8
161
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.
3
80
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
3
76
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
3
44
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.
Quote Tweet
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.
4
57
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.
Quote Tweet
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.
3
26
Replying to
I’m familiar with the pomo ideas too… I just think think they’re empirically valid in this case for the vast majority of rituals. I just find it disingenuous when people who like the minority non-power rituals act like the power ones don’t exist or define them out of scope.
1
2
Show replies