Well tbh the only way I see the ritual as useful is for manipulation—the manipulation of kids, the conformance to the society which is exclusively tolerant of weird repetitive rituals than of equally weird spontaneous actions (the same kind of action, if repeatedly done by multiple people, is protected by constitution and allows to avoid taxation, and if done by one person spontaneously gets that person sectioned into mental hospital)
With regards to the utility, the rituals really annoy people who are not into ritualized actions. When your relative is into some ritual, and you have to conform to it, move your schedule around, miss things, and so on—you feel you are being manipulated, pushed around, and screwed over. You are being manipulated by the manipulator who’s adjusting their own happiness function to force you to do nonsensical stuff to avoid making them unhappy. Arbitrarily adjusting own happiness function when there are other people around who care about your happiness, is in some important way deeply dishonest and abuses their care.
Read this chapter of Secular Wholeness for an engineer’s take on the purpose and usefulness of rituals in non-religious life.
Summary:
They give time-structure to our lives on the daily, weekly, and annual levels.
They assist and encourage the formation of trust and community between people.
They give shape to public expressions of powerful emotions: expressions of grief, as at funerals; and of joy, as at weddings, graduations, birthdays and anniversaries.
They help to reorient and stabilize our own feelings when we need to comprehend and cope with crucial life passages.
Well tbh the only way I see the ritual as useful is for manipulation—the manipulation of kids, the conformance to the society which is exclusively tolerant of weird repetitive rituals than of equally weird spontaneous actions (the same kind of action, if repeatedly done by multiple people, is protected by constitution and allows to avoid taxation, and if done by one person spontaneously gets that person sectioned into mental hospital)
With regards to the utility, the rituals really annoy people who are not into ritualized actions. When your relative is into some ritual, and you have to conform to it, move your schedule around, miss things, and so on—you feel you are being manipulated, pushed around, and screwed over. You are being manipulated by the manipulator who’s adjusting their own happiness function to force you to do nonsensical stuff to avoid making them unhappy. Arbitrarily adjusting own happiness function when there are other people around who care about your happiness, is in some important way deeply dishonest and abuses their care.
Read this chapter of Secular Wholeness for an engineer’s take on the purpose and usefulness of rituals in non-religious life.
Summary:
They give time-structure to our lives on the daily, weekly, and annual levels.
They assist and encourage the formation of trust and community between people.
They give shape to public expressions of powerful emotions: expressions of grief, as at funerals; and of joy, as at weddings, graduations, birthdays and anniversaries.
They help to reorient and stabilize our own feelings when we need to comprehend and cope with crucial life passages.
That’s an excellent article. Thanks Rain.
Among other things, gave me a definition of ritual that was actually useful.