Ritual Control // illusion //
All civilizations share the same script: the belief that it has reached the summit of human achievement. The Sumerians sang hymns proclaiming their city as the center of the world. Egyptian pharaohs carved their souls into stone. They called rome the eternal city. The Maya, the Inca, the Chinese dynasties... each in their own way declared: this is the apex, we are the pinnacle of human progress.
But the illusion of permanence always broke at some point. Crops failed. Borders grew brittle. Structures decayed faster than they could be rebuilt. Instead of admitting decline, civilizations built new layers of ritual to preserve the illusion, just to make it last a little longer.
• [reset]: Pain. When things went wrong, rulers demanded offerings of blood, flesh, or suffering. Sacrifices among the Maya, bloodletting among the Aztecs, ordeals in medieval Europe; all carried the logic that pain could realign the world.
• [Power] interpretation: Priests, kings, and elites positioned themselves as interpreters of suffering. Famine was not a failure of soil, but of ritual. Obedience to the ritual order, not adaptation, became the solution.
• [control] Memory: Monumental architecture and ritualized texts were less about gods than about legacy. “We are eternal” was carved into stone even as weeds reclaimed the streets. Collapse was rewritten as glory.
In this way, ritual became less a conversation with gods and more a mechanism for managing despair. People bled, obeyed, and remembered; while the tower they stood in started to slowly sank.
the digital age has its own rituals. Algorithms as oracles, Corporations staging theater through slogans and metrics, Celebrity worship and INFLUENCE sacrifice as symbolic bloodletting. when cracks appear in the system, ritual intensity increases; More spectacle, More control, More insistence that this is the peak.
Perhaps collapse is not denied but ritualized; translated into symbols that convince us we are still ascending, even as the foundation erodes beneath our feet. Humans have always struggled with acceptance.