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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And the ~really~ silly thing is that it worked, at least for long enough to put Europe ahead on exploration and outward-facing aggression, rather than the more typical internecine aggression everyone else was doing. Didn't last forever, but while it lasted . . . whooboy.
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