Well, now you see how many rituals came about. Something worked before (or seemed to work because of coincidence), but for some reason, it doesn't any more, but that doesn't matter, because the people forgot the real reason behind WHY they were doing that ritual many generations ago, anyway.
The nature of rituals is that they're a way for smart people to encode their wisdom in such a way as to be useful for not smart people. But the problem is that the smart people don't themselves always understand why the ritual works.
Or as a former engineer boss told me many years ago when I was describing some problem I was working on where I didn't understand how the solution worked: "you're an engineer: you don't have to understand how it works as long as it does".
You may not like it, but a lot of machines in history were developed by people who didn't work the math out first.
And even if they wanted to, sometimes the vendor doesn't want to give you (or themselves doesn't have) the information you need to do so. "Just use another vendor who will" you say. Well unfortunately they're the only one whose product meets all these other non-negotiable requirements.
It is truly a miracle that civilization doesn't collapse daily.
Imagine your tribe lives in a place where your water is seasonally bad.
Once or few times a year a lot of people get sick and start shiting and puking themselves to death. So you bang some drums and waft some smoke over them to drive the bad spirits out.
Maybe half of them have a good enough immune system to weather it, so they recover. And just like the drum banging and smoke cure dysentery/cholera/typhoid, at least some times.
Well, now you see how many rituals came about. Something worked before (or seemed to work because of coincidence), but for some reason, it doesn't any more, but that doesn't matter, because the people forgot the real reason behind WHY they were doing that ritual many generations ago, anyway.
The nature of rituals is that they're a way for smart people to encode their wisdom in such a way as to be useful for not smart people. But the problem is that the smart people don't themselves always understand why the ritual works.
Or as a former engineer boss told me many years ago when I was describing some problem I was working on where I didn't understand how the solution worked: "you're an engineer: you don't have to understand how it works as long as it does".
Holy fuck, that sounds like a really dangerous attitude for engineers.
That just further degraded my trust in .. a lot of things.
You may not like it, but a lot of machines in history were developed by people who didn't work the math out first.
And even if they wanted to, sometimes the vendor doesn't want to give you (or themselves doesn't have) the information you need to do so. "Just use another vendor who will" you say. Well unfortunately they're the only one whose product meets all these other non-negotiable requirements.
It is truly a miracle that civilization doesn't collapse daily.
Life's a Skinner Box, and we all bob our heads and press button when the lights flicker.
Imagine your tribe lives in a place where your water is seasonally bad.
Once or few times a year a lot of people get sick and start shiting and puking themselves to death. So you bang some drums and waft some smoke over them to drive the bad spirits out.
Maybe half of them have a good enough immune system to weather it, so they recover. And just like the drum banging and smoke cure dysentery/cholera/typhoid, at least some times.