I made a comment recently about how the guady prom phenomenon among many Black Americans harkens back to ancient rituals and fetishization, where various power objects are used to imbue the user with the power that the object represents.
Thus, waving around wads of cash, dressing ostentatiously or in quasi ceremonial garb, and renting expensive cars are an invocation to invoke elemental forces to work on your behalf through sympathetic magic. This is what cargo culting is about as well.
During my time as an atheist, I read lots of good books that gave a purely evolutionary account for the emergence of spirituality and religion as a kind of technology that satisfies psycho-social needs.
And while I now see things differently, I think it’s still a valuable perspective to have because it does have explanatory power.
Consider the epidemic of “teen” takeovers of public spaces. What is this about? Isn’t it reminiscent of tribal warfare, or initiatory experiences into manhood, when young men would go and kill a lion, armed with nothing besides spears and a leather shield?
So tribal warfare becomes racial warfare, and instead of a lion, it's being hooligans in public spaces. Instead of the voodoo doll, it’s prom tomfoolery. It’s a different manifestation, but the same inner urge.
And to be sure, the way they are going about satiating these urges is out of control and bereft of any grounding in tradition or respect for authority. Talk about Mouse Utopia.
I believe we are spiritual beings in animal bodies, and that traditional cultures understood both realities and had ways and means to handle them safely.
The tragedy of what is happening now is that the minds of many are being poisoned, and there are no real elders to guide the youth into a complete way of life.
So instead, they operate on instinct, reproducing the forms of earlier rituals with absolutely no understanding of what they are doing or what they are unleashing.
But somebody did know, and that’s a topic for another time :)
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