Collective historical trauma, and the paradox it feeds.
Ritual Studies and Confucianism. How rituals carry what a collective has lived through, and what happens when the carrying fails.
Read the thesis →A famine ends. Fifty years on, the grandmothers who survived it still hoard rice. What a people survives passes down. Ritual is how the passing is done on purpose: mourning rites, harvest rites, rites of apology and repair. Confucius defended three years of mourning so a loss had somewhere to live. While the rites hold, each generation receives the past in a form it can carry.
Break the rites and the past still arrives, unsorted. People reach for whatever is for sale: therapy by the minute, belonging as brand membership, safety as a product. Each purchase is reasonable. A person in pain takes the help on offer.
Each purchase weakens the shared form it replaces. Metered care is worth less as care. A club sold as a brand stops holding the memory. A bought safety study spends the trust it borrows. The buyer gains, the collective loses, and no single sale looks like the culprit. That is the Collective Devaluation Paradox: private gains, collective losses. Every sold substitute pours into the same sink, and the sink never empties.
Trauma keeps the demand high. A people carrying an unsorted past reaches for substitutes faster, defends them harder, and calls it progress. The trauma causes no single sellout. It guarantees the buyers. The thesis names the carrying. The paradox names what happens when the carrying is sold off piece by piece.
Larry David chats with his therapist for three minutes at a baseball card show and gets a bill. The therapist defends the invoice with a story about a director who paid prostitutes for the full hour, then confesses the work sits somewhere between a hobby and a profession, just as it does for them. Once care is metered, a chat is a billable event, and each fair transaction makes the relation worth less. Everyone behaves reasonably and the result is grotesque.
The herbicide is everywhere: the wheat, the honey, the rain, the body. The studies that clear it come from the entities that sell it. Each study is narrowly justified; the checking mechanism as a whole is captured. Trust in food, science, and the institutions meant to check power drains into the sink while every actor follows procedure.
A football club is collective memory wearing a jersey. The European Super League tried to convert that memory into brand equity: closed league, no relegation, supporters reclassified as consumers. Fans burned it down, proof a collective can refuse a substitution it recognizes. The essay extends the diagnosis to mercenaries, strike-breaking, and the pop-psychology idioms that moralize each sellout as self-care, and names shame, solidarity, Arendt’s private space of self-reflection, and Spivak’s affirmative sabotage as countermeasures.
The invoice, the safety study, and the Super League are one move in three costumes: take a relation that lived in common, price it per person, call the pricing progress. The relations were carrying historical weight, and the carrying was ritual. Sell the ritual and the weight remains, held by individuals who can only buy relief one transaction at a time. The framework calls the selling operation gorgonification. The way out runs the other direction: rebuild forms of carrying no invoice can reach. A free seminar, an open text, a room of readers.
The full set of essays: neoliberal subjectivity, ritual studies, hive-mind idioms, the cyberpunk dystopia read as diagnosis. By playlist.
Browse the playlists →