Ritual creates new realities
How to manage a society, according to an anthropologist.
“One of the big mistakes people make is that they think about rituals as simply a mirror to society, reflecting back at us what already is. Rituals aren’t simply reflections of what already is. They are there to create new realities.”
Maya Mayblin
An anthropologist at Edinburgh University.
“Rituals are also things powerful people invent for us. Ruling classes use them to manage our moods, to encourage us to accept social hierarchies. Elites rearrange the jigsaw of humanity into beautiful images of the world, with them at the centre.”
Journalist.
Concur. Agile engineering relies on rituals to actualize a self-organized culture. It is not even a matter of dictating anything... just bringing people together on a consistent schedule, repeating the same series of activities and sharing the same cognitive models, creates cohesion and this improves efficiency, reducing the need for ongoing communication and making those intervening interaction stronger due to the shared context.
The more notably successful modern nations also share a high degree of internal consistency v.a.v. religious habits, stable population centers with established cadences, and the like. Not necessarily homogeneity - but predictability.